POND TAKEN OVER

One dawn last week cold enough to make a man's nostrils stick together, the Albanian coast appeared as a thin line over the sea in the east to a silent row of British battleships approaching Valona. Not far inland, the Greeks were slogging slowly ahead with their mountain warfare through deep snowdrifts. The sea was cold, grey and unusually calm for the Adriatic. Just before sunrise Admiral Sir Andrew Browne Cunningham ordered: "Open fire." The big ships belched thunderously and shook.

About 100 tons of shells flew into Valona, the Italians' best debarkation place in Albania. They smashed into what the R. A. F. had left of the docks, barracks, supply piles, truck parks, oil dumps.

A cruiser and destroyer screen that had led the British battlewagons to Valona kept going northward. Some of them swept the Italian coast as far as Bari, a harbor right on the Achilles' tendon above 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.

Four nights before, long-range R. A. F. bombers, their course beaconed by a convenient eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, had swooped on Naples and inflicted yet more damage on the remaining Italian cruisers and battleships. Report was that the Italian Fleet had fled once more, to hole up somewhere else.

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