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Scapegoat elected for Mussolini's Albanian fiasco was white-haired, crinkle-eyed Marshal Pietro Badoglio, Chief of the General Staff, universally recognized as Italy's sagest soldier. He had opposed the Greek venture. Germany's Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel is also said to have opposed the Pindus push, recommended instead a sudden naval encirclement with multiple landing parties, such as Germany sprang on Norway. Being obliged to cons jit Keitel last month, to be told how to retrieve his subordinates' botch of a campaign which he never approved, must have made the 68-year-old Marshal swallow hard. Last week he retired "at his own request" from the service of a Duce whom he once offered to crush as an upstart.
Shoved in to replace Badoglio was Genera Ugo Cavallero, 60, a seasoned soldier, now double-chinned and pince-nezed, whom Mussolini trusted in 1925-28 as Under Secretary of War (Benito was Minister) and builder-upper of the modern Italian Army; again in 1938-39 as Army chief (under the Duke of Aosta) in Ethiopia. General Cavallero's acceptability to the Germans is high. He has had time out from his military career to make a success of running war industries (rubber, planes, steel). Lately he has been chief liaison man with the German General Staff. His promotion and the official fanfare that went with it did not, however, drown out much angry comment by well-beloved old Badoglio's adherents.
Next to go was General ("of the Army for War Merit") Cesare Maria de' Vecchi, Conte di Val Cismon, 56, mighty-mustached Governor of the Dodecanese Islands. One of the original Fascist quad-rumvir— of the 1922 March on Rome, De' Vecchi has even been mentioned as successor to II Duce, but he rated as an administrator rather than a soldier. In his stead, Mussolini appointed lean, hard-boiled General Ettore Bastico, 64, a veteran of the 1911 war with Turkey in which the islands were acquired, veteran also of World War I, Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War, in which his "volunteers" captured Santander. Cut off from home by the British blockade out of Crete, General Bastico's new berth will not be cushy.
Third to the chopping block was Admiral Domenico Cavagnari, Chief of Staff and Under Secretary of the Navy. If Albania was bad, what has happened to the Italian Fleet is horrible — whittled down in each & every encounter it has had with the British. To replace Cavagnari, Mussolini chose Admiral Arturo Riccardi, with Admiral Angelo Jacchino taking the new post of Commander of the Fleet at Sea.
Meanwhile, not only had Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Turkey been emboldened (with sardonic Russia's encouragement, too) to stand off the Axis, but the war itself, the Germans' war, was increasingly unpopular in Italy. Last week's war budget of 14,000,000,000 lire with 700,000,000 additional for home relief, is not an immense sum in real money (total: $735,000,000). But it is a lot to a poor country where a soldier's wife gets only 1.20 lire (five cents) per day allowance and bread costs 1.50 lire a pound. General Papagos and the Greeks had not yet won a war, but they had put Mussolini in a difficult spot.