Word: messina
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Cautiously, under a butter-colored moon, U.S. 3rd Division patrols reconnoitered the last eight miles to Messina. The stony Sicilian landscape flashed now & then with snipers' fire. The road was edged with the menace of mines, booby traps and demolition chasms. But clearly the stubborn, skillful, beaten enemy had pulled out. At 5:30 a.m., Aug. 17, Lieutenants Jeff McNeely and Ralph Yates led patrols into Messina. The Battle of Sicily, 38 days after it had begun, was over...
...stubbornly and well, strongly entrenched with machine guns and 88-mm. guns, sowing its path of retreat with mines and demolition charges. But the rearguard could not hold; it could only delay-in the north, the center and the east-the steady pressure of the British and Americans toward Messina...
...British, who had circled Etna from Catania, joined them soon afterward. From the twisting mountain roads they could see, far in the distance, the shimmering blue of the Messina Strait...
...fought tenaciously against the U.S. and British forces knifing up the shorelines. But at week's end the remnants were fleeing. On the north coast a second amphibious flanking movement of the Americans cracked their line at Capo d'Orlando and opened up a downhill road to Messina. On the east shore the British pushed up past Riposto, past Taormina, to within artillery range of Italy itself. On neither front was any major contact made with German forces-the speed of the Allied advance was hindered only by mines and demolitions...
...steady bombardment from sea & air rained on the small boats ferrying the Germans from Messina to the mainland. While Allied light and heavy warships steamed into the straits to shell the skittering small craft, Allied aircraft bombed and strafed them from above. The Germans had massed hundreds of ack-ack guns at the straits, as well as heavy batteries of coast artillery-but there was little opposition to the Allies from...