NOTES ON THE WAR

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 100, 30 April 1945, Page 4

NOTES ON THE WAR

EXIT MUSSOLINI

END OF AN ERA

While the end of an era is at hand in Germany, it has actually arrived in Italy with the ignominious demise of Mussolini and his gang by the bullets of an Italian patriot firing squad in liberated Milan. The fate of Hitler is still uncertain, for rumours and reports of his death are as yet unconfirmed, but he also is not likely to survive the downfall of his country wrought by his own hand. To neither Mussolini nor Hitler is the world at this stage paying the attention it would have paid only a few years ago when ttiey were at the height of their power; today they are among the dying embers of the vast conflagration they wantonly kindled.

The progress of the Allies through the remaining battlefields of central Europe proceeds apace. The British 2nd Army has crossed the Lower Elbe at Lauenburg, upstream from Hamburg, while the Russians are advancing from Stettin into Mecklenburg only about 100 miles away from the British on the east bank of the Elbe. Munich has been entered, apparently without a fight, by the American 7th Army and French Ist Army. The American 3rd Army has passed into Austria and is threatening the Berchtesgaden redoubt. The German Army has collapsed in Northern Italy, where the Bth and sth Allied Armies are sweeping over the Plains of Lombardy towards the Alps and towards Venice, only a few miles away and likely to be entered any time now. Italian patriot forces have rendered great service in completing the debacle of the Germans and the remnants of the Fascists and Neo-Fascists. Mussolini and his principal associates were given short shrift in a quick trial and death sen^ tence carried out without delay. Graziani, "the Butcher of Libya," has been handed over to the Allies for appropriate treatment.

Mussolini was in his 62nd year, and had ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943, when, on July 25, he was deposed.,by the Fascist Grand Council, while the Allies were sweeping through Sicily. He was imprisoned on Monte Gran Sassd in the Abruzzi region of the Apennines, but was rescued by German parachutists and took up his residence in northern Italy held by the Germans for twenty more months. He signalised this period by revenge on some Of the associates who, he considered, had betrayed him, among them his son-in-law, Count Ciano, who fell to a firing squad. But in the main, so far as the outer world knew, Mussolini was a wreck of an old man during this period, maintained by the Germans as the symbol of Italian Fascism. Fascism—-Way to War. In the last analysis Fascism, like Nazism, is simply the moral prepara- j tion of a nation for war, the conditioning of a people by propaganda and regimentation to regard war as a means to an end, the aggrandisement of the nation and the acquisition of territory and wealth at the expense of neighbour nations. Mussolini and Hitler followed that course to the full. Italy, a naturally peaceful nation, was dragooned *to arms by the ambitious Mussolini, who looked oh himself as another Caesar destined to revive the Empire of the Ancient Romans. But Mussolini was no Caesar any more than the modern Italians are ancient Romans. Such, however, was the condition of the European world in the decades between the world wars that Mussolini at first succeeded with what now appears ridiculous ease. He glorified war, though •he was never as much a real soldier as even Hitler, and he preached the doctrine of war at every opportunity. Thus in an article on Fascismo in the Encyclopaedia Italiana he wrote: "War alone brings all human energies to their highest tension and imprints a seal of nobility on the peoples which have the virtue to face it. ... A doctrine which starts at the prejudicial postulate of peace is extraneous to Fascismo." There it is—Fascism, like Nazism, means war. ' A Fill of War. Weil, Italy and Mussolini must have I had their fill of war. At first it seemed !td pay. Abyssinia was conquered in 1935-36 by a vast army, after Mussolini had refused, it was said, to have Abyssinia "served up to him on a plate." Then there was the Spanish Civil War with the Italian legions taking part on the winning side. After that the Berlin-Rome Axis and Italy's entry into the European war on June 10, 1940, at the hour when Hitler seemed bound to win and France lay prostrate and Britain exposed to invasion. The "plaster Caesar" seemed likely to be coming into his Mediterranean empire. But -the. Italians were no ancient Romans; there was nothing of Caesar's 10th Legion about them. In war, on their own, they were beaten everywhere—in Greece,* in Abyssinia—ail army of a quarter of a million by a handful of British Empire troops a tenth of their numbers—'and in Libya when the odds were even higher in their favour. It was only when the Germans entered Greece and Africa that the tide for a time turned in favour of the Axis. When that tide ebbed again at Alamein Rommel abandoned his Italian allies to their fate in the desert, and commandeered their transport to evade pursuit in his headlong retreat to Tunisia. Hardly anywhere did the Italians fight well. It was not all their fault. They would have been prepared to fight for their own country as well as they fought for it against the Austrians in the nineteenth century wars of liberation, culminating in the campaigns of Garibaldi. But they had no heart for Mussolini's adventures and no love for their German accomplices. Some Elements of Greatness. Yet Mussolini must have possessed, like Hitler, some elements of greatness or else his earlier achievements and long tenure of power, his influence in the world in the late twenties and early thirties, are inexplicable. He had many visitors during that period and most of them went away impressed. Like Hitler, he had command of powerful elements of demagogic oratory, and his speeches from the balcony to the populace of Rome and Naples were always events, and made good reading as well as impressive items on the newsreels. And he did organise Italy on lines that were appreciated by the foreign visitor. The draining of the Pontine Marshes was a great engineering feat after ' the many failures in the past centuries of the Christian era. If Mussolini had concentrated on this side of his work and avoided war as alien to the spirit of the Italian race, his countrymen might have lived to bless him and the world counted him as something of a national hero. As it is he has brought Italy to the brink of ruin and it will take more than the 20 years of Fascism to restore it to anything like its former prosperity. " ,