Word: pantelleria
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Tooey Spaatz was probably kidding himself. He looks forward to action. After Tunisia is cleared out, Axis bases on Pantelleria and Lampedusa must be blasted off the face of the Mediterranean, the great Axis strongholds on Sicily and Sardinia reduced, Italy or the Balkans-whatever the route-pummeled and softened for the invading Allied armies. It will be a long time before Tooey Spaatz floats up & down on the tidewater of the Potomac...
...Germans took over the Italian air fleet of 3,000 bombers and fighters and demanded control of the island of Pantelleria, Italian naval base in the Mediterranean. Mussolini was either too ill (of ulcers or mental distress) or too busy to attend the reception for Pierre Laval in Germany (see p. 23). More likely he was too busy, for he still behaved like an aged errand,boy. He shook up his Party directorate and was reported to have fired General Vittorio Ambrosio, Army Chief of Staff, and General Ettore Bastico, Marshal of Italy and onetime Governor of Libya, for "unprincipled...
...edge. Hitler had poured in air strength. His African air chief, Air Field Marshal Erhard Milch, had the advantage of air bases close to the fighting front. Milch's fighters snarled out from Bizerte and Tunis; bombers roared from Sicily and Sardinia and from the little island of Pantelleria in the straits. The farther the First Army advanced, the more vulnerable it became to Milch's stings...
...Wippell, an expert on big ships, the battle force undertook daring raids into the Strait of Otranto and once far beyond Valona in the Adriatic. It also laid siege to the Italian Dodecanese Islands. Last week the fleet splashed into "bomb alley"-the narrow Sicilian channel dominated by Italian Pantelleria on the one hand and German Stuka forces based on the island of Sicily on the other. But the Axis did not show its double head...
...action began between the island of Sicily and the prong of Tunisia where the Mediterranean is squeezed into a 90-mile-wide channel, through which all east-&-westbound convoys must pass. Dead in the middle lies the island of Pantelleria, loaded with Italian shore batteries. One hundred and twenty miles to the east is the British stronghold of Malta. The waters of the strait make an ideal hunting ground for Axis submarines, torpedo boats and bombers...