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Up the valley of the Po, through Italy's richest industrial area, swept in mid-August a proud Italian Army, bent on repulsing an imaginary "Red" (French) invasion. Suddenly, mysteriously, the maneuver ended. As suddenly, Hitler invaded Poland, the Allies declared war. Il Duce disappeared from public view. It was rumored that he had had a heart attack. Whether or not he was sick, his heart was certainly sore. After 17 years of martial preparation for the second World War, he had been forced by his generals to realize that whether or not Italy wanted to fight, Italy could not fight.
Having cried for years that Italy's might rested on 8,000,000 bayonets, he suddenly was told that the country could neither feed nor clothe 1,500,000 men. Boots were lacking, to say nothing of bayonets. The country had tankage capacity for only three months' normal consumption of oil. And the tanks were not more than two-thirds full. Weary from two wars, Italy had insufficient reserves of cotton, scrap iron, copper. Above all, there was no will to war among the people.
Niccolo Machiavelli once wrote that though the French might be greater fighters, the Italians were those who understood statecraft. Far from being completely crushed (as any French Premier would have been) by his military disappointment, heartsick Premier Mussolini set about trying to make his military lemon into diplomatic lemonade. To his and his Florentine precursor's credit, Mussolini has done a pretty good job of it. As of last week the most important single question in Europe's war had more than ever become: What will Italy do?
Benito Mussolini's extraordinary talent for mystification served him well in building up this question. "The Italian people." he said recently, "have realized that the pilot must not be disturbed, especially when he is engaged in stormy navigation. nor must he be asked questions about the course." Because he determined to explain nothing, to make no commitments, everyone wanted to ask questions of the laconic pilot whose course was puzzlingly zigzag—now pointing for one belligerent shore, now toward the other, back & forth.
Up Ciano. After the Po maneuver's fiasco, Il Duce cleaned house. As his first step, out went his Under Secretaries for War and Air, Alberto Pariani and Giuseppe Valle, because they had concealed the true state of Italy's war machine from their boss. Out went violently pro-German Fascist Party Secretary Achille Starace and Minister of Popular Culture (Propaganda) Oboardo Dino Alfieri. These dismissals had the effect of raising the prestige of Il Duce's son-in-law, Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano, who loathed Ribbentrop and Hitler for treating him like a naive youngster in politics, and who won an immense popular following by backing the policy of peace.
Count Ciano made his position unassailably strong when he got a rough-&-tumble pal of Ethiopian days, much-decorated Ettore Muti, appointed to Starace's job. Muti looks like a handsome U. S. gangster, and, not being too quick of brain or tongue, is the subject of merciless punning (muto = dumb). Last week Signor Muti had a gold medal pinned on his chest by Il Duce for having carried out 160 admirable bombing raids during the Spanish campaign.