Word: vardar
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...forces. French sources reported that the underground had called a general strike, unleashed a new wave of sabotage. From London came word that Allied staff officers had returned to Cairo from three audacious days of conference with underground leaders. But around the Aegean port of Salonika, key to the Vardar Valley route to Central Europe, the Germans were strongly entrenched...
...Yugoslavia, through which the Vardar courses, was still a major German worry in the Balkans. Puppet Croatia was in turmoil: desertions mounted in her puppet army, and her politicians sought a safe way from the German camp. Russian sources reported that the Partisans had seized a stretch of the Dalmatian coast below Fiume. Hungarian sources reported that Adolf Hitler, apparently dissatisfied with the puppet Serb Government of General Milan Nedich, had also summoned to Berchtesgaden ex-Premier Dragisha Cvetkovich. Swarthy, ambitious Dragisha Cvetkovich had visited Adolf Hitler and Joachim von Ribbentrop in 1941, then had allied Yugoslavia with the Axis...
...eastern Mediterranean, at bases in Syria and Cyprus. One approach for these forces is through neutral Turkey to Bulgaria. Another, the only one open unless Turkey permits passage, is by sea and air to Crete, into the Aegean, and thence into Greece. In Greece begins the historic Vardar Valley route of invasion into inner Europe...
April 8. When the Yugoslavs let the Germans break through to the Vardar Valley, the three divisions of northern Greeks were cut off from Salonika. But the break-through in Yugoslavia had another, far more serious effect. It allowed the Germans to rush at full speed for the Monastir Gap-approximately at the juncture of Yugoslavia, Albania and Greece, and at dead center of the whole Anglo-Greek defenses. Monastir Gap was not only a geological phenomenon: it was also a gap in the Anglo-Greek defense, left because the Allies thought the Yugoslavs would hold the Germans...
...British and Greeks were beaten on the third day of fighting-with the Yugoslav collapse in the Vardar Valley. From the information so far available, it appears that from then on less than three full divisions of British-Anzacs troops and perhaps five divisions of Greeks (perhaps ten Greek divisions were facing the Italians on the Albanian front) bore the brunt of the best attack that could be mounted by 40 divisions of Germans. Under these conditions the Allies had virtually no reserves except a British tank division which backstopped the line wherever it weakened. The British and Anzacs held...