Another naval exploit of the month worthy of record was the sinking in the Austrian Harbor of Pola of a dreadnought of the Viribus Unitis class (20,000 tons) by Italian naval forces, in the morning of May 15. The achievement was similar to that performed by the President of the Anaconda Copper Company, who has been appointed Director of Aircraft Production for the United States Army] Italians on the night of Dec. 9-10, when a destroyer sawed her way through the steel net protecting the Harbor of Trieste and torpedoed the predreadnoughts Wien and Monarch, (5,000 tons each,) sinking the former. The Harbor of Pola, however, is much more difficult to penetrate. It is three miles deep and entered by a two-mile channel, at certain places less than half a mile wide, and protected along its entire course by strong defenses. A mole covers its mouth, making the channel here less than 1,000 yards wide. Forts Cristo and Musil guard the entrance. [Illustration: CHARLES M. SCHWAB Head of the Bethlehem Steel Works, who has been appointed Director General of the Emergency Fleet Corporation to carry out the Government's shipbuilding program (© _Harris & Ewing_)] [Illustration: JOHN D. RYAN TEUTONIZING THE BLACK SEA] Save for the reports which have come to hand denoting the steady progress of the British forces in Palestine and Mesopotamia, little of importance has occurred in the Near East. Still the Teutonizing of the Black Sea goes steadily on. On May 2 it was announced that a German force had occupied the great Russian fortress of Sebastopol, famous for its protracted siege by the British and French in 1855, and until then considered impregnable. On May 12 part of the Russian Black Sea fleet was taken possession of by the Germans at that place, while the remainder escaped to Novorossysk. Among the captured vessels only the battleship Volga and the protected cruiser Pamiat Merkuria were in serviceable condition. At Odessa a new dreadnought and two protected cruisers had already been seized by the Germans as they lay in their slips. In Macedonia the huge allied forces under the French General, Guillaumat, are still waiting on events. The Greek Army is still in process of reconstruction under the Venizelos Administration. The month, however, has not been barren of engagements on this battleline. On April 28 the Serbians beat back attempts of the Bulgars to capture fortified positions in the Vetrenik region; the French and British did the same in regard to German attacks aimed at points west of Makovo and south of Lake Doiran. So it has been all the month, the monotony only varied on April 27, when there was intense artillery fire by the allied guns in the neighborhood of Monastir, on the Cerna, and, in the Vetrenik region, a Serbian assault annihilated a Bulgar section. [Illustration: MAP OF PALESTINE AND MESOPOTAMIA, WHERE TWO BRITISH ARMIES ARE AIMING AT BAGDAD RAILWAY] IN THE NEAR EAST