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While Mussolini stalled, Franklin Roosevelt, no amateur at political warfare, had his say. Roosevelt had blistered Mussolini three years ago: "The hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor." Now he invited the Italian people to toss out the betrayer, the Fascist Party, and the Germans. In return, the President promised that Allied victory will mean that Italians can have a non-Fascist government of their own choosing and will be restored to real nationhood as respected (the President emphasized the word respected) members of the European family.
For the Italian underground and Italian anti-Fascists—thousands of whom had been forced to work on Pantelleria's defenses—the President's words were heartening. These groups had been worried over the policy of expedience in North Africa, fearful of the U.S. State Department's occult conservatism. Winston Churchill's chesty truculence.* The President gave the most forthright statement yet of Allied aims toward postwar Italy.
"Learn to Hate." Anticipating just such political warfare, Mussolini has wrapped a toga of self-righteousness about his sub-Napoleonic figure. More than two decades as the father of 20th-century Fascism have taught him how to play upon the childlike sentiment of millions of his people. While the Allies paused in Tunisia he cunningly launched a hate-the-U.S. campaign which was ridiculous but effective.
Into minds dulled by years of propaganda and on to nerves chewed raw by this winter's bombings, Mussolini rubbed wholly fabricated atrocity stores: U.S. airmen, "bloodthirsty flying gangsters," have been bombing only churches, hospitals and nurseries; fiendish pilots have been dropping lipsticks, ladies' purses, flashlights, pens, pencils, cough drops and candy which explode in innocent and eager Italian hands. There have been broadcasts, press stories and faked newspictures of those supposedly maimed or killed.
There is no doubt that U.S. and British bombings have created panic and terror in Italian cities ; that in their desperation the Italians have cursed the men who bring the bombs, forgetting that Italian bomb ers were active in Ethiopia and Spain and that Mussolini insisted on sending a token bombing force over Britain during the blitz. This made little difference to Mussolini. He fobbed off the British as "at least civilized, because they are Europeans," knowing that his people already have a well of resentment against the British to draw on. The vigor of his campaigns against the U.S. was in direct ratio to his fears that U.S. troops might be welcomed with flowers, that his people as a whole might display the same Latin logic as that of the Italian soldier in Tunisia who said to his captors: "All right, laugh, but we're going to America. You're only going to Italy."