Word: soddu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Three days after the fall of Klisura, the Italian Commander in Chief in Albania, General Ubaldo Soddu, also fell-because of ill health, the Italians said. It was another case of shake-up sickness. Benito Mussolini had to have a winning general. He decided to let General Ugo Cavallero, who replaced Marshal Pietro Badoglio as Chief of Staff on Dec. 6, see if he could pick up the pieces in Albania...
...High Command tried again to laugh off continued Greek advances. The enemy, it was said, was merely capitalizing on a "strategic retreat" by an expeditionary force that had had the bad luck to run into dirty weather. To prove that everything was going "according to prearranged plan," General Ubaldo Soddu, who was rushed out last month to replace Commanding General Sebastiano Visconti Prasca, was upped last week from corps commander to Army commander and confirmed in his post...
...Ninth Army in the north and the newly arrived but already disorganized Eleventh Army in the south. Meantime, Greek and British bombers hammered at the landing places, rendered Valona and Durazzo "almost useless" in the wake of the new arrivals, threatened to cut off their supplies and redouble General Soddu's problem. British ships came up and shelled Porto Edda. Daily Allied airmen, through fair weather and foul, bombed and strafed the crawling lines of Italian supply trucks, against which Albanians also sniped and sent down rock falls...
Straightway the exultant Greeks hopped into captured tanks to chase the retreating Italians up the road to Pogradec, where Italian General Ubaldo Soddu, after cashiering some 50 senior officers, tried to form a secondary defense line. Another Greek pursuit column harried the Italian retreat toward Moskopole ("Perfumed City"). Greek and British warplanes bombed and machine-gunned long columns of dejected Blackshirts and Alpini, whose welfare was further menaced by mutinous Albanian battalions in their very midst, by Albanian snipers, knife-men, rock-rollers and bridge-blasters in the gorges and ravines along...
...before Rome could get set for a new offensive. Fascist reinforcements moving up to Pogradec met their pell-melling comrades on the road out of there, turned and fled with them as Pogradec fell. The same thing happened at Moskopole and it looked as though the first stand General Soddu could make would be on a line from Elbasan on the Shkumin River, which cuts Albania in two roughly equal parts, down the Devoll River to Valona. The way things were going last week, the southern part of Albania would soon be mostly Greek, which in fact it is culturally...