Word: balkans
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Paris press, through espionage facilitated by France's leaders. M. Chéradame says the French leaders would not listen to him when he urged a knockout blow at Italy when World War II began. With Italy out, he thinks, the Allies could have established a Balkan front and kept Germany fighting on two fronts. Instead Weygand's Army sat in Syria, threatening not Germany but Russia. Thus the Fifth Column destroyed France and the Franco-British Alliance, lost the Balkans to Germany, which thereby extended its pincers around Russia for the next move...
...familiar hell-roaring vein, the Premier slid over defeats, bellowed the might of the Axis. "It is absolutely mathematical that in April, even if nothing had happened to change the Balkan situation, the Italian Army would have overcome and annihilated the Greek Army." Almost all of Greece would be occupied by Italian troops. Italian Albania would be extended. Italy's dead in Africa ("I cannot tell you today when or how") would be avenged...
Fortnight ago the Axis learned a lesson in the possible dangers of Balkan partitioning. On a tour of the Albanian battlefields went Italy's and Albania's little 71-year-old King Vittorio Emanuele III. While he was motoring toward the Tirana airport with Albanian Premier Shefket Verlaci, a 19-year-old Greek named Vasil Laci Mihailoff fired four wild pistol shots at the King's car. On Mihailoff's person the police later found "futuristic poems" dealing with "love and hatred among farm animals." The Italians promptly dubbed Mihailoff a "poetic maniac" and further claimed...
They know him, first, as a great soldier who fought in the Balkan and First World Wars, then helped Kamâl Atatürk to drive the Greeks out of Turkey in 1922. At the village of Inönü, near Eskisehir, Ismet Pasha broke the Greeks' resistance. When Kamâl Atatürk ordered all Turks to take family names he asked his great friend to call himself Inönü. Ismet means Chastity...
...April was the month of the evacuation from Greece. The British admitted that 187,054 tons had been sunk in recent "intensive operations" in the Mediterranean-i.e., the Balkan campaign. Losses elsewhere, therefore, were only 301,070 tons-lower than total losses for any of the past twelve months except May 1940. And included in this figure were losses in the South Atlantic, off Africa, in the Indian Ocean, in the Far East. Apparently the convoy system was beginning to tell; perhaps the urgency for U.S. assistance in protecting shipping might be elsewhere than in the narrow northern lanes...