Word: balkans
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Cover) Since World War II began 14 months ago the Balkan Peninsula has run a temperature. Periodic scares have sent it to fever pitch, then dropped it as, one way or another, neighboring powers got their way without bloodshed. Rumania is partitioned and overrun by the German Army. Bulgaria takes orders from the Axis. Even Yugoslavia, which has a relatively large, well-trained Army, has taken the path of appeasement. This week war came at last to the Balkans, to the weakest country, but to the one country determined enough to stand up to Axis threats - to Greece...
Reports in Balkan capitals indicated that the Axis meant business, that three divisions of crack Nazi troops had arrived in Bari on Italy's heel and were being ferried across to Albania...
...Yugoslavia, where tough, pepper-eating Serbs breathed defiance and garlic even at the Axis. But surrounded by seven nations, five of which want a slice of her territory, and stranded without a single guarantee, Yugoslavia was already on the griddle. Even if the South Slavs would fight, a brief Balkan war on the way south to Egypt and the Suez would do no more than relieve boredom in the Nazi ranks...
...immediate gain for 70,000,000 Nazi gullets, fine for a short war. But Europe has never been able to feed herself, let alone secure a balanced diet, without importing great quantities of foodstuffs, fodder, fertilizers. France made up most of her deficit with imports from Morocco. The Balkan States have long been selling their small exportable food surplus to Germany. If there is surplus food in Russia with all her great grain fields, it is a State secret. As a whole the territory that Hitler took merely added to his domains more territory that cannot feed itself...
Arrow Cross v. Double Cross. The strategy might be a purely Balkan one. Just as Napoleon turned back from the English Channel to Ulm and Austerlitz because he feared treachery at his rear, Adolf Hitler was perhaps just consolidating the ructious minor countries of the southeast. There was certainly plenty of consolidating to be done...