Word: bardia
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...Italy's heel. Another detachment swept northeast as far as Durazzo, Albania's second-best landing spot. Sir Andrew was on his flagship, had brought his fleet up on a quick run from the African coast, pausing to contact supply ships, after pounding the daylights out of Bardia and points west. While he was busy at Valona his light forces made it clear to all the world that the Adriatic was no longer Benito Mussolini's "pond." At no point did the British encounter any Italian resistance...
...another shocking Roman rout, a fierce continuation of last fortnight's Battle of the Marmarica in which, after slicing through Capuzzo (in the line of forts guarding Libya's eastern border), savage little squadrons of fast British tanks and Bren gun-carriers whipped around the port of Bardia, outflanking it as they had outflanked Sidi Barrani and Salum...
...rout was terrible. While British mechanized columns pruned and hacked, the R. A. F. poured bombs and machine-gun lead on motor transport, camps, supply depots, airdromes, and on the soldierly runners. The fleet moved along, throwing everything but the gun turrets at the coastal road. At Bardia some vessels edged in just a half mile from shore and pumped their biggest shells into the town. The fleeing Italians abandoned everything, leaving large supplies of tinned food, oil, water, Chianti, mules, lorries, truckloads of documents, new tanks, guns...
This week Italian communiques admitted that the British had crossed the border, and that there was fierce fighting in the Salum-Bardia-Fort Capuzzo triangle. Italians tried to break up British naval bombardment of the area by sending in the submarine Naiade. Destroyers screening bigger vessels closed in on the Naiade and sank her at once. The R. A. F. carried on tirelessly, and the bag of Italian planes grew into the dozens...
British warships from Alexandria took another point-blank crack at Marshal Graziani's expeditionary base at Bardia. During the week, the Italians claimed extension of their drive into Kenya Colony to include Fort Polignac on Lake Rudolf in the north and Buna, a British air base 60 miles south of Moyale, one of the preliminary keys to the capture of Nairobi. The British retorted with a satisfying raid by the South African Air Force, which swooped on Mogadiscio, main port of Italian Somaliland, and blasted "hundreds" of military trucks assembled there for the Kenya push...