Word: messina
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British and U.S. bombers coursing over the Mediterranean last week outlined the next Allied objective. If the pattern of the bombings meant anything, it was to be a two-part objective: the island of Sicily and, just across the Strait of Messina, the southern toe of Italy...
...invasion. They left their bomb-pocks on the hilly but approachable southern coast. They crossed the central plateau, which looks mountainous on the map but is a region of high wheat fields. They roared above the lemon and orange groves of the precipitous northern coast. On the port of Messina, the chief point of entry for supplies from the mainland, they dumped the biggest Sicilian bomb loads. (But none down the volcanic throat of nearby Mt. Etna- On both island and mainland the targets were carefully chosen: airdromes with their repair shops and grounded aircraft, railway junctions, gun emplacements, munitions...
Sicily is really formidable. It has a naval base at Messina which can take vessels up to heavy cruisers, and submarine bases at Palermo, Augusta, Syracuse. It has been a Stuka base since 1941, with great dive-bomber fields at Catania on the east and Comiso on the southeast. It now has between 15 and 20 well dispersed air establishments, all good, all heavily fortified...
Mare Nostrum is nobody's sea. Italy's ports of Naples, Messina, Taranto and Palermo and Italy's Navy serve the Germans, conveying war stuffs across the Mediterranean to North Africa (see map). German troops and fortifications guard Crete, the strongly defended shores of Greece and Yugoslavia on the Adriatic. The Germans have another strong point at Rhodes, lesser forces in the other Italian Dodecanese and the Greek islands just off Turkey. But the Mediterranean is not yet an Axis sea. The British and the Maltese still hold Malta (see cover); they still have Cyprus, Syria, Palestine...
...Orient Express or the Simplon Orient. The Orient goes through Germany and the Simplon through Italy. Zog first arranged to travel by Soviet steamer from Istanbul direct to Marseille, stopping only at Peiraeus, Greece, and Alexandria, Egypt. Normal route of such a journey, however, is through the Strait of Messina, on one side of which is the toe of the Italian boot, on the other Sicily. Both are uncomfortably close...