Word: pantelleria
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Franklin Roosevelt had a chipper, assured look. Speaking in short, clipped sentences, curt as a communique, the U.S. Commander in Chief* informed the press (two and a half hours after reporters heard the news by radio) that Pantelleria had fallen. Then he turned to his typed, pink-paper notes, suddenly abandoned war talk for a suave, new role: Chief of United Nations Propaganda...
...fewer when troops could smoke with out a bomb blast blowing the cigarets out of their fingers. This was the "prolonged, scientific and shattering" bombing which Winston Churchill had threatened six months before. It had come with a fury such as no spot on earth had experienced before. "Impregnable" Pantelleria, Benito Mussolini's Gibraltar in what he once called Mare Nostrum, was doomed...
Smallest of the island objectives is humpy, volcanic Pantelleria (see map). Its single harbor, its one known airfield, its coastal and interior fortifications were bombed around the clock last week. Five times in seven days British naval guns raked the island's shores. Apparently Pantelleria was to be the first objective, perhaps with simultaneous moves against the other islands...
...Allied planes over Italy, Sardinia, Sicily and Pantelleria last week were probably harbingers of invasion. But the tempo and concentration of the attacks were achievements in themselves. Unfolding in the Mediterranean was a carefully devised, fiercely executed pattern of strategic bombing...
...still 1,000 tons less than the weight the Luftwaffe dropped on Malta in the one month of April last year, but reconnaissance reports testified to the damaging effects on the ports, shipping, railways, air defenses, munitions dumps, oil stores of southern Italy and the islands. Photographs of Pantelleria's single airdrome, for instance, showed black smoke from oil fires, white bursts on the landing field near the entrance to underground hangars...