Word: pindus
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...After valiant fighting against overwhelming odds, the underarmed Greeks suffered dreadful decimation and almost ceased to exist as a fighting force. For the rest of the campaign the Imperial force had to stand virtually alone, since the main force of the Greeks was facing the Italians far across the Pindus Mountains to the west. The flank and rear of the Imperial force was therefore threatened again, and a withdrawal to Thermopylae was ordered...
Retreat from Glory. On the Western Front the defeat was hard for the Greeks to take. There for five months they had held in check the huge but inept Italian machine. But last week the Germans cut across and looped in behind the Greek force-through the Pindus Mountains, to Yanina. The Greeks, in a pocket, had no choice but to surrender...
From then on it was just a matter of steady advance in the face of stubborn and well-coordinated rear-guard actions. The British-Greek line, which held together well, fell back to shield Larissa and Yanina in the Pindus Mountains, then back to the narrowing of the peninsula between Lamia and Arta. Early this week the Germans had reached Thermopylae, 100 miles from Athens, and were still going strong; and the British and Greeks had not much left to be glad for except that they had killed a lot of Germans and some time...
...first Nazi blow was struck at about the same time as the main attacks were biting into southeastern Yugoslavia, in Rupel Pass. There the Greeks fought hard, using the same tactics of cross fire as had proved so deadly against the Italians in the Pindus Mountains. But the fight was vain: the Nazi break-through in the Vardar Valley, and the prong which had then turned eastward towards Salonika, threatened the troops' rear. It became necessary to abandon Salonika...
Scapegoat elected for Mussolini's Albanian fiasco was white-haired, crinkle-eyed Marshal Pietro Badoglio, Chief of the General Staff, universally recognized as Italy's sagest soldier. He had opposed the Greek venture. Germany's Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel is also said to have opposed the Pindus push, recommended instead a sudden naval encirclement with multiple landing parties, such as Germany sprang on Norway. Being obliged to cons jit Keitel last month, to be told how to retrieve his subordinates' botch of a campaign which he never approved, must have made the 68-year-old Marshal...