LITMIR.BIZ

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friend. He had even offered to send five German divisions to Italy, but in early May Mussolini had declined the offer; perhaps he had thought it would make too much of a dent in his prestige, or that it was too dangerous to have too many German troops in Italy should the tide turn against him at home.

      At any rate, less than a week later, on 20 May 1943 at the Wolfschanze, Hitler’s field headquarters in East Prussia, a conference was held to discuss the deteriorating situation with Italy. Those present included Feldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the OKW and Hitler’s number one lackey, as well as Warlimont and also Rommel, who had recently been appointed commander of Army Group B, formed to defend northern Italy should the worst come to the worst. Also attending was Sonderführer Konstantin Freiherr von Neurath of the SS, the Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, who had just returned from a diplomatic mission to Rome. While there, von Neurath had had a number of conversations with Generale Mario Roatta, who had been commander of the Italian Second Army in Yugoslavia before taking over on Sicily. He had recently returned to Rome as he was due to take over from Generale Vittorio Ambrosio as chief of staff of the Italian armed forces.

      It was Sicily that had been of particular interest to von Neurath, and Roatta had told him he had little faith in the Italians’ ability to hold the island, should it ever be attacked. Already the Allied air forces were shooting up railways and other lines of communication. There was, he reported, just one ferry operating across the Straits of Messina. The others were being saved for ‘more important purposes’.6 What were these? Hitler asked.

      ‘Well, my Führer,’ von Neurath replied, ‘at one moment the Italians say, “When the war is over” – that’s a very frequent expression – at another moment they say, “You never know what’s going to happen.”7 ’ German troops von Neurath spoke to told him the ferries over the straits were there and in working order but that the Italians were holding them back. German troops already in Sicily were deeply unpopular. ‘Once the English arrive, that’s the end of the war,’ von Neurath continued. ‘That’s the general opinion in Southern Italy – that once the English come the thing will be over quicker than if the Germans are still there making life unpleasant.’

      As the discussion continued, Hitler and the rest of those attending increasingly began to work themselves into a lather about Italian treachery. The Allies were flattening Palermo but not Cagliari in Sardinia, another sign they were intending to land on the latter and use its port facilities. Generale Roatta was known to have a number of pro-English staff officers under him; some were even married to English wives! ‘Personally, in so far as I know him,’ added von Neurath about Roatta, ‘I wouldn’t trust him further than I could kick him.’8 He had always been rather a fox. Hitler agreed; Roatta was a spy! A completely spineless spy! That Roatta had come to be known as the ‘Black Beast of Yugoslavia’ for the brutality with which he dealt with Communists and partisans, a ruthless approach earlier much admired by the Germans, was forgotten. That was then; now the filthy weasel was clearly up to something and planning to stab them in the back. The Italian leadership, too, was feckless, spoiled and corrupt – they were always bleating to the Germans they never had enough supplies, and yet continued to party hard in Rome like overindulged playboys.

      ‘I am quite clear in my mind,’ Hitler then announced. ‘A certain section in that country has consistently sabotaged this war from the beginning. From the beginning!’ Back in 1939, if Italy had declared war on Poland at the same time as Germany had, then France and Britain would never have entered the conflict. ‘Every memorandum I sent to the Duce’, he continued, ‘was immediately transmitted to England.’ Treachery was clearly lurking at every turn. They now wondered whether they shouldn’t get the Hermann Göring Panzer Division out of southern Italy. Rommel suggested perhaps they should demand the Italians send more troops to Sicily instead. The last thing anyone wanted was for their own troops to be isolated, surrounded and betrayed. Rommel had so little faith in the Italians he even questioned whether they should be sending any German troops into Italy at all.

      ‘The great question for me is what’s the Duce’s state of health?’ Hitler said, returning to a now familiar theme. ‘That’s the decisive factor with a man who has to take such important decisions. What does he reckon the odds are, if for instance, the Fascist revolution goes under?’

      The truth was, Mussolini would not have been able to give Hitler an answer to his question even if he had been standing before him. Mussolini had got himself into power back in 1922 as the world’s first fascist dictator through energy, drive and force of character. To a war-weary, poverty-stricken nation where democracy seemed to do little for the ordinary citizen, Mussolini had offered something brash and bold and exciting. He had restored some much-needed pride and yes, the trains had improved – as had employment, and as had Italy’s wider reach, with Libya, and then Abyssinia, drawn into a burgeoning empire. Many Italians, especially the young, had loved the marches, the militarism, the snappy uniforms. Vast crowds had cheered when Mussolini had stood on the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia in Rome on 10 June 1940 and announced that Italy had declared war on Britain and France. ‘Vinceremo!’ he had promised, his jaw set, chin jutting upwards with resolute bombast. ‘We will win!’

      Not quite three years later, his dreams of a new Rome with himself as its Caesar had long been punctured. Even the might of Nazi Germany and Hitler’s panzers and Messerschmitts had not been able to stave off disaster. And Hitler had been right about one thing: Mussolini was feeling ill. The previous July he’d gone to Libya expecting to lead the triumph into Cairo. He had returned with the Axis armies stuck at Alamein and with a stomach problem he couldn’t shift. Whether it was psychosomatic or not, it was eating away at his resolve. At the Council meeting in Rome the previous November, his appearance had shocked his ministers; he’d looked like a dying man about to collapse at any moment. ‘From October 1942,’ he wrote, which was when Montgomery had launched the Battle of Alamein, ‘I had a constant and growing presentiment of the crisis which was to overwhelm me.9 My illness greatly affected this.’ Or perhaps it was the other way around.

      At any rate, he was certainly aware the vultures were starting to circle. Most within the Italian establishment – those very same Roman elites that had prompted so much contempt from Hitler and von Neurath – had been wondering how Italy might extricate itself from the war ever since the disastrous defeat at Alamein. The loss of North Africa had merely brought the question into sharper focus. Perhaps, some wondered, Mussolini might ask for Hitler’s consent to conclude peace with the Allies? This was, of course, a vain hope, but conversations were had and meetings held, although nothing much seemed to come of them – not least because it was obvious that if Italy did somehow make peace with the Allies, the country would most likely be invaded by Germany. The payback, inevitably, would be appalling. Italy found itself between a rock and a hard place.

      Mussolini knew it too. He wrote a long letter to Hitler pleading with him to sue for terms with Stalin and turn his attention closer to home, in the south. The Führer simply ignored it; obsessed though he was with his southern flank, Hitler’s ideology and that of National Socialism was wedded to the struggle against Bolshevism and racial battle in the east. None the less, in Rome the plots continued to thicken, and although none of them seemed to get much beyond the conversational stage, conspiracy, as von Neurath had discerned so palpably, was in the air.

      In February, Mussolini had had a clear-out, sacking those he thought most likely to be plotting and the most outspokenly pessimistic. One of those to go was his son-in-law, Count Galeazzo Ciano, one of the playboys Hitler had scorned, but a clever man, who had far greater geopolitical awareness than his master and who had seen the writing on the wall a long time earlier. Ciano, a serial philanderer, was made Ambassador to the Vatican. ‘The ways which Providence chooses’, he wrote in one of his last diary entries, ‘are indeed sometimes mysterious.’10

      The change of team at the top made little difference. Mussolini had become isolated; he was sick and alone. He held no reciprocal affection for Hitler, who seemed to rant at him whenever they met. When more German troops were proposed to help shore up Italy and Sicily in May, Mussolini turned down the offer, fearing further humiliation and ulterior German motives. Hitler felt betrayed by Italy; Mussolini felt betrayed by Hitler, also dating back to 1939, for embroiling Italy in a war for which it had clearly not been ready. Neither man was prepared

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