Word: sardinia
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Last week Allied bombers continued to blast the way for invasion. The area they hit ranged from Sardinia 800 miles eastward to Greece. It was an area of destruction. Along its varied route lay shattered Axis planes, bomb-ripped airfields, flaming hangars; charred landing docks, twisted loading cranes and supply ships, fire-gutted and listing at anchor; splintered freight cars; black, billowing smoke that had been million-gallon oil dumps; and the smoking rubble of torpedo factories, iron foundries, steel works, chemical plants and supply depots...
...Sicily and Italy's heel & toe fall to air siege, to air and amphibious invasion or by early Italian surrender, the military benefits will be greater than has often been realized, and they must have been pondered by Winston Churchill and General Marshall when they visited North Africa. Sardinia and Corsica could not long hold out, might not even try to do so. From the southernmost tip of Italy, the Adriatic and the western entry to the Balkans would be open to Allied air domination. Allied air fleets could turn upon the rest of Italy, upon southern Germany...
From June 1, the U.S. and British cascaded 7,000,000 lb. of bombs on the island. On the 18th day of attack more bombs were dropped than had been loosed on Tunisia, Sicily, Sardinia and the Italian mainland during the entire month of April. On that day, while Allied fighters sent at least 37 Axis planes screaming into the sea, Allied bomber traffic was so heavy that pilots had to circle about, trying to keep out of each other's way while waiting their turn to sight their targets...
...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...
...weight dropped on Sicily had increased 15 times; that on Sardinia, 20 times. The total (5,500 tons on all targets in May) was 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...