Word: taranto
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...brink, the Italians were now definitely on the run. For while it was forming new political alliances (TIME, Dec. 2), the Axis had run into its first big military reverses. These were serious indeed. Its sea power disgraced when half its battleship force was crippled at anchor in Taranto harbor, its armies now definitely stalemated in Egypt, its Greek offensive in reverse, Italy showed herself in her true aspect-Germany's supply-starved, dangerously inept southern flank. Crippled, Italy invited even more vicious blows from the British, and the British could be expected to deliver them full measure...
...supply ships bound for Malta through what Italy still calls Mare Nostrum ("Our Sea") but which cartoonists now label Nightmare Nostrum. It was known that what was left of the Italian Navy after Admiral Sir Andrew Browne Cunningham's brilliant aerial-torpedo stab into its main base at Taranto (TIME, Nov. 25) had scuttled for a more remote hideaway, probably Cagliari on Sardinia's south coast or Naples on the mainland. Perhaps the British keepers of the western gate of Italy's prison, under Vice Admiral Sir James Somerville, would get a glimpse of and a crack...
Elimination of Air Marshal Boyd probably meant little or no delay in Britain's follow-up of her great naval coup at Taranto last fortnight, when Fleet Air Arm fliers knocked holes in half of Italy's battle line, or in new British pressure on Marshal Graziani's time-marking expeditionary force in the western desert. Knowing that Graziani had completed an advance camp 15 miles east of Sidi Bārrani, had drilled new water wells and about finished a hard-surface supply road along the coast, British naval units last week hove up and shelled...
With Italy's oversea supply line to Africa more vulnerable than ever after Taranto, all these actions suggested the beginning of a British effort to smother Italy before Germany can help her out in Greece or anywhere else...
...toured gun emplacements. One of the huge guns was fired, and Cretans who stood around cheered and clapped as if an Italian ship had been sunk before their eyes. They talked exultingly of Suda Bay as "an eastern Gibraltar." Sir Archibald heard with satisfaction of the raid on Taranto (see p. 20), of R. A. F. cooperation in Greece, of the wonderful work of the Greeks themselves...