Word: crete
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Last week's promissory explosions of bomb and shell were the development of and resistance to this strategy. First of all, the Greek airports, rear bases of the German strategy, and Crete, the forward base of the British counterstrategy, were mutually bombed. Next the way stations got it: Italian Rhodes and British Cyprus. Then as German planes hopped across Syria and Axis transports moved from the Black Sea into the Aegean, the R.A.F. bombed Syrian airports and the Fleet Air Arm sowed mines off Syrian ports...
...more crucial than the Gallipoli campaign. This sort of courage was the one weapon with which they were adequately stocked-and the man who courageously swam ashore that dark night 26 years ago was last week appointed Commander in Chief of the hottest British spot in the whole area: Crete...
Tiny Freyberg and his tiny force will have need of all the courage they can muster in Crete. The Germans seem to be committed to blasting and Blitzing the island. Suda Bay, a magnificent natural harbor, is the last important British operating base among the islands of the eastern Mediterranean, and the long island lies across the mouth of the Aegean. Last week, as expected, the Axis continued its process of occupying Aegean islands, definitely closed the Aegean to the British...
...Crete should fall, either by storming or by incapacitation due to bombing, the British position in the eastern Mediterranean would be pretty nearly untenable. The British would then have no practicable advance naval bases, and German bombers would have almost a semicircle of air bases within easy striking distance of the Suez Canal and of Alexandria, the last intact fleet base. General Sir Archibald Wavell's lines of communication from Egypt down to the Red Sea and westward along the Mediterranean would be subject to merciless attack from only 500 miles away...
Last week, even while Crete still functioned for the British, the Nazi noose seemed to be tightening: twice German bombers visited the Suez Canal area, damaging the railways by which both U.S. and British war materials had been moving up to Egypt. Nevertheless the British, with not much but courage of the Freyberg kind to go on, were still doing a valorous defensive job throughout the theater...