Word: salonika
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Germans had put on a brilliant performance in the battle of supply. They ceased to threaten the port of Antwerp last week (see below), but for two months they had stood off the British and Canadians on its approaches. They had ruined Le Havre, Marseille, Salonika. Hundreds of miles behind the main battle line, they still had no less than 100,000 troops in Dunkirk, Saint-Nazaire, La Rochelle, Lorient, the Channel Islands, and Royan (covering Bordeaux). Where German soil was threatened, they fought like wildcats...
Beacon of the German exit was smoking, demolished Salonika (Thessalonike), chief port of Macedonia. It was through Salonika that the Germans had supplied the Aegean islands, through Salonika that they moved back out of the Mediterranean. The "coveted city" that "crouches on the edge of the hill and touches the sea with her feet" is a major Balkan port, served as an Allied base in World War I. Destroyed by a famous two-day fire in 1917, it was rebuilt as a modern city. Last week it was a shambles again; more than 50 ships had been sunk...
...resilient population (230,000), Greeks, Turks, Sephardic Jews, Bulgars, Serbs, Italians and Frenchmen, are old hands at war and disaster and occupations. Soon Salonika would be back in business, perhaps in time to aid the final attack on Germany, certainly in time to help Greece back on its feet...
Newly liberated Salonika was almost entirely in the hands of EAM's combat group, the ELAS, and the EAM was almost entirely in the hands of Greek Communists. In the Peloponnesus, the Horofylaki (national constabulary) had ceased to exist. It had been ousted by ELAS members. At Kalamai, when the lights were turned on for the first time in three-and-a-half years, Greeks flocked joyously to the town square, found seven, men hanging, a dozen more stabbed to death. Among the dead: Kalamai's mayor...
There were still an estimated five Nazi divisions in Greece, and the Nazis needed them. A British force of baby carriers and warships was blockading Crete. Allied planes bombed Salonika, port of entry for German refugees from the south, port of exit to the north. The Allied Italy-based Balkan Air Force helped Greek guerrillas, who claimed to have won most of the Peloponnesus and were even reported marching on Athens...