Word: catania
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...moved on to Syracuse, took it (with the help of naval and air bombardment), moved on to Augusta, took that, lost it, recaptured it, moved on again, past a difficult stretch of broken escarpment and many a toughly defended hill and mountain pass, to stand on the plain before Catania. By then half the eastern coast of Sicily was in their hands...
...Objective. The decisive objective in the east was the port and railway center of Catania. As Montgomery's troops stood at the threshold of Catania, a British battleship came up to shell the port. Planes bombed it. The Italians confessed that its fall was near. General Montgomery's eyes must have glinted as he remembered the interview he had given. Once Catania was his, the battle for Sicily could be little more than a battle for more coastland, then for Messina, if the Hermann Görings survived in enough strength to fight for that port. In Messina...
Sicily is really formidable. It has a naval base at Messina which can take vessels up to heavy cruisers, and submarine bases at Palermo, Augusta, Syracuse. It has been a Stuka base since 1941, with great dive-bomber fields at Catania on the east and Comiso on the southeast. It now has between 15 and 20 well dispersed air establishments, all good, all heavily fortified...
Last week General Hans Geisler, commander of the independent air unit of the Luftwaffe which has been based near Catania, Sicily, since December, wrote an extraordinary bread-&-butter letter to the Italian Prefect of Catania...
...harbor, Valetta, after the Battle of the Sicilian channel three weeks ago (TIME, Jan. 27). Day after day German dive bombers returned. At first they just attacked the crippled Illustrious. Then they began going after port installations and defenses in general. The British, hunting down the Stuka hive at Catania, Sicily, raided it many times to try to smoke the attackers...