Word: istria
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...like Hamlet's father's ghost, the Fiume issue had come back to walk Italy's night a certain term. It was the same old problem. But this time Istria was claimed by Marshal Tito. The ports of Trieste and Fiume and the big naval base at Pola would give Yugoslavia control of the Adriatic Sea, flanking Italy from Venice almost to Brindisi...
...sore straits, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring brought down from the north the once-famed Hermann Goring Division, which had been wiped out in Tunisia and since reconstituted. Another reinforcement was an infantry division which had been fighting Marshal Tito's Yugoslav Partisans at Istria. Prisoners from one regiment of reinforcements told Allied intelligence officers that half their motor transport and personnel had been destroyed on the way to the front by Allied air action, and that the remainder were decimated, as soon as they took up their line positions, by Allied tank attacks...
...next seven months he labored to arouse his indolent countrymen. It was not hard to do: 2,503 years of bloody history had engendered in them a hatred for foreigners, a natural bent for vendettas and guerrilla fighting in the blood-red rocks, the snow-capped peaks. D'Istria armed the Corsicans with 10,000 submachine guns (dropped by parachute, hauled in by submarine). He fired them with the memory and the zeal of the greatest Corsican of them all-Napoleon Bonaparte...
...last week D'Istria's efforts were paying off. When the Italian surrender became known, the patriots struck. The enemy: some 12,000 German troops, part of whom had fled from nearby Sardinia...
...Generals. Proud General Henri Honoré Giraud let the world know that the French Army was freeing "the birthplace of modern France." He flew to Ajaccio, stayed two days, pinned the Knights Cross of the Legion of Honor on Captain d'Istria; replaced Vichy's administrators with new men, sanctioned the re-establishment of elected town councils...