POWERS’ AIMS IN ITALY

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25309, 8 October 1947, Page 7

POWERS’ AIMS IN ITALY

RUSSIAN-AMERICAN RIVALRY

“NEW BATTLE IS ON” (Special Correspondent N.ZP.A.)

(Rec. 9 p.m.) LONDON, October 7. “The new battle Tor Italy is on,” says a “Daily Express” correspondent who was recently in Rome. “It has now opened in earnest between the Russians and Americans. “The Russians want to win Italy for Communism and make her one of their satellite states. The Americans want to prevent this and to keep Italy a member of the Western world. “The Americans believe that if a proSoviet Government is established in Italy and if in the commission now meeting in London the Russians manage to capture Tripoli and Cyrenaica either for themselves or a satellite Italy, then the millions of dollars the United States is now spending in Greece and Turkey will have been wasted. “Soviet domination of Italy and the North African shore opposite Italy woulu. cut the Mediterranean and outflank America’s newly-established oil empire in the Middle East. “The Communists are trying to do all they can to exploit the present situation in /Italy. There the cost of living has shot up 20 per cent, in the last six months, but wages have not kept pace and there are nearly 2,000,000 unemployed. “The Italian Government has told America that its foreign exchange and dollar resources will be exhausted by the end of October.

“The Communists have been organising strikes in the industrial north and raids by labourers and small farmers on the property of big landowners and settling them there in 'squatting gangs.’ “The main danger, now that the Italian Government has defeated the Communist vote of no-confidence, is that the Communists will try the tough way of getting into the Government. They may want to convince the Government by a series of strikes that it has no authority over the workers without them.

“Only Weapons are Dollars” “The Americans’ only weapons to fight the forces of Communist-organ-ised labour in Italy are dollars.” The Rome correspondent of the “New York Herald Tribune” says: “If America abandons Italy to the Communists, democracy will be weakened everywhere. Success of the Communists in the very source-place of Western culture would have an electric effect all over the rest of western Europe. Democrats and Socialists everywhere, and especially in France, would lose heart.

“If western Europe holds firm now and returns again to healthy life, American foreign policy can be continued without risk of war. If Italy and western Europe fail before the Soviet, however, the United States will have suffered a political, strategic, and diplomatic defeat of such magnitude that the very independence of the Western Hemisphere will hardly be maintained except by the most terrible of all wars.”