Word: istria
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...chilly night last February a French submarine from Algiers sneaked through the Mediterranean, surfaced in Corsica's Ajaccio harbor long enough to let Captain Colonna d'Istria, young scion of an old Corsican family, slip ashore...
...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...
...Peninsula of Istria is on the east shore of the Adriatic. Istrians were Austrians from 1813 until 1919 and speak mostly Slavonic. Many are Croats and Slovenes...
They became Italians after the War when victorious Italy claimed Istria at the Peace Conference to help "make the Adriatic an Italian lake." Italy cared little about the grapes, cattle and lumber that grew on Istria's terraced plateau; Italy wanted a naval base. But when the Italian Government took a closer look at its new citizens it found that nine out of ten of them had symptoms of malaria. The plateau was full of semi-stagnant ponds where mosquitoes bred and rose in clouds...
...wigglers" they can hold. Italy bought 200,000 of them every year from U. S. fish dealers and dumped them into the Istrian ponds. They gobbled their weight in "wigglers." Fortnight ago the Italo-German Institute of Marine Biology announced that the gambusia had gobbled malaria clean out of Istria...