Word: peninsula
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...extent of that retreat became apparent this week: the Germans had given up their best positions for the defense of Naples. Fifth Army troops turned westward from Salerno, occupied the lower coast and the heights of the Sorrento peninsula overlooking the port and its bay. Twelve miles off, midway between the troops and Naples, Vesuvius loomed. Other troops already held Capri, the storied island just off the peninsula, the islands of Ischia and Procida in the Bay of Naples, Ponza and Ventotene northwest...
...history of foreign oppression and domestic tyranny. Before Magna Charta and King John, Italy's northern cities had won self-rule from the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. Florence and Venice had once borne the title of republic. But the trend had been beaten down through the centuries when the peninsula served as the cockpit of Guelph and Ghibelline, despot and noble, rival Spaniard, Frenchman and German. In Milan, in 1805, Napoleon Bonaparte had crowned himself with the iron crown of Lombardy. In Milan, in 1848, the Habsburg General Count Joseph Radetzky had smashed the people's barricades...
...best they could in a confused and disorganized hour, the people of Italy declared war on the Germans. In Milan they mounted machine guns on rooftops, sniped from windows. In Turin they held out after the rest of northern Italy had fallen to the Germans. Up & down the peninsula they heeded the Allied calls to sabotage Nazi movements. Along the coast they turned on lights at night to beckon British and U.S. landing parties. But by week's end the occupying Germans seemed to hold a firm upper hand over wide areas. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel proclaimed himself master...
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...
...Germans were in Sofia to bolster the Festung's uncertain Balkan battlement. Once the Allied invasion armies overran the Italian heel, they would stand 50 miles from the Balkans' Adriatic flank. Chafing Allied forces waited to spring from eastern Mediterranean shores into the Aegean. Inside the Balkan Peninsula 50,000,000 people, hopeful or frightened, stirred...