Word: calabrian
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Salerno? When Lieut. General Mark Wayne Clark's troops landed at Salerno, the troops of the Eighth Army had been in Italy for six days. They held about 750 sq. mi, of Italy's Calabrian peninsula and they were moving steadily northward and eastward. The British V Corps was about to take the port of Taranto, secure the lower Adriatic coast. German mines and booby traps delayed these troops, but the delays were not serious. Holding southern Calabria and moving into Apulia, the British held very little of Italy. But that little was secure, it was open...
Endurance at Salerno. This point was the area of Naples. To the south, in the Calabrian peninsula, where the British Eighth army had begun the landings, the Germans' chief effort was to extract what troops and planes they could. When, on the seventh day, the British arrived to take the great port of Taranto, the Germans had deserted it to confused, volubly embarrassed Italians. As the British marched eastward to Brindisi on the Adriatic, they met only the rear guard of a retreating German Panzer division...
...docks and beaches to their landing boats. The boats, group by group, turned toward the near shore of Italy. The night was clear and starry. Across the Straight of Messina, only two to twelve miles wide, the men in the boats could see the rocky outline of the Calabrian peninsula. Dawn was touching the sky and the shore when the first invaders landed on the chosen beachhead, a ten-mile strip of destiny around the port of Reggio Calabria...
There were problems of routes and communications through Italy's foot. The middle of the Calabrian peninsula was a high and rugged hump, with narrow plains running around its coasts. The hump, the end of the Apennines, continued straight up Italy like a backbone. Main trunk lines, perforce, trailed along the two coasts of the Italian boot and were vulnerable to air attack. For days Allied bombers had pounded Italian railways south of Naples, had blasted freightcars in clogged yards as far north as Pisa. This was strategic bombing designed to hamstring Axis troops in the south...
...bombing of Rome] make it look as if Catholics thought there must be one justice for Rome and another for all other cities. ... To precisely the extent his faith is strong and informed [the Catholic] will make no distinction between the bombing of Rome and that of a miserable Calabrian village, an industrial city of the Ruhr and an English town. ... He will not say that if the church is a basement church in a modern suburb it is all right . . . but that if it is a cathedral church it is a sacrilege...