Word: britain
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...strong as these sorry reasons were, two splendid ways of looking at his neutrality remained to Il Duce. In the military situation created by the West Wall-Maginot Line stalemate, a neutral Italy, blocking access to Germany via the Tyrolean passes, had tremendous nuisance value. It would force Britain & France to go clear around through the Dardanelles, Black Sea and Rumania to assist Poland and establish the Salonika front (see p. 22). It was nuisance so great that it might bring B. Mussolini a fancy price if he chose to sell...
That he would ever desert the Axis, as Italy deserted the Kaiser in 1915, B. Mussolini has many times emphatically, indignantly denied. Nevertheless, last week's pressures by Britain and France were in precisely that direction, and they were truly great pressures. Count Ciano's Foreign Office became almost the full-time habitat of British Ambassador Sir Percy Loraine and French Ambassador André François-Poncet...
...Toulon and Villefranche, guarding French communications with Africa, threatening Italian coastal cities; Italy, with her 105 submarines, Europe's biggest fleet; the Dalmatian coast of Yugoslavia, long wanted by Germany, source of friction in the Axis when it ran at its best; Greece, guaranteed by France and Great Britain, threatened from Albania; Turkey, also guaranteed, courted by Germany, allied with Greece. Beyond these northern shores the Balkans simmered, politically and militarily fluid, but likely, to go with the strongest current that swept the Mediterranean...
...German border was not reopened except to pedestrians. Exports stopped moving into Hitlerland from Mussoliniland, because the neutrality which B. Mussolini announced for himself was a status which Britain and France, preoccupied though they were with other business, watched with stern, forbidding eyes. The only good Indian used to be a dead Indian. The only safe Mussolini from now on is a Mussolini whose hand performs as his tongue has avowed...
...until Admiral Nelson won it for Great Britain 134 years ago, no power ruled over the Mediterranean unchallenged. The Romans and the Carthaginians, Genoa and Naples, the pirates of Tripoli, the Crusaders and the Turks, again and again the East fought the West in its waters, the North fought the South, the powers of Africa and Asia fought the powers of Europe, societies, civilizations, monarchs, rose or fell with the fate of their fleets on the tumultuous...