Word: corizza
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...Corizza is the crossroads through which Italy, unless she violates Yugoslav neutrality and goes around by the Monastir Gap (Bitolj), must pass to strike at Salonika. It is also a gateway to loannina (Yanina) and the long rough road to Athens. Pounding and pushing the Italians out of Corizza was a feat of which the strategic importance overshadowed even the valor of the men who did it. The town stands at an elevation of 2,500 ft. on the western scarp of the Morava heights. Its defense against assault from the west and north, whence Italy must try to come...
...Corizza possesses two of Albania's best military air bases (others are at Tirana, Valona, Durazzo, all near the coast). Not only by heroic uphill righting but even more by knowing from lifelong habit how to get around in the hills, the evzone ("well-girt") highland Greek regiments-Balkan counterparts of Scotland's kilted "Ladies from Hell"-took these commanding positions one by one from the Italians, clambering over the top of the mountains with bayonets and hand grenades, later laboriously hauling up mountain guns...
Involved in the fall of Corizza were six Italian divisions, about 72,000 men. Their mechanization was their undoing in the narrow, muddy mountain passes where they stuck out Italy's neck into Greece. Like the riflemen behind trees who played hob with the British regulars in 1776, the Greek mountaineers from their hilltops demoralized an army which had been told that the Greeks would be pushovers, in fact would probably welcome Fascism with open arms. When Mussolini spoke, promising that Greece's back would be broken (TIME, Nov. 25), the Greeks continued pressing, working with geography instead...
...great, but to the Greeks, accustomed to eating bean soup and black bread and carrying hand-me-down arms, it was immense. This plunder was, after the strategic factors and the enormous boost to Greek and British morale, the third most important thing about the fall of Corizza. It was said to comprise enough small arms and ammunition to outfit two Greek divisions, more heavy artillery than the entire Greek Army had when the war began. There were 80 field pieces, 55 anti-aircraft guns, numerous machine guns. There were 20 tanks, 250 trucks and other autos, 1,500 motorcycles...
...line from Elbasan on the Shkumin River, which cuts Albania in two roughly equal parts, down the Devoll River to Valona. The way things were going last week, the southern part of Albania would soon be mostly Greek, which in fact it is culturally and racially. At glad Corizza, Major Charissiades, heading the new town council, welcomed the Greeks as liberators. Greek flags were brought out of hiding and pictures of Italian King Vittorio Emanuele were burned in the public squares...