Word: mussolini
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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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...
...final Godkin lecture, the Chicago professor cried that "the ideals of freedom steal into the dreams of conquerors, and they wing their way above the battlefields, deadening the victors' shout." He avowed that "I am not terrified by the shoutings of Hitler or the boasts of Mussolini. They speak for a mood, but not for the heart of their peoples...
...Albania, to improve the shattered discipline of the routed, retreating Blackshirts, hurried fierce, sporting Achille Starace, former Secretary of the Fascist Party, now chief of the Fascist Militia. Mussolini's mouthpiece, Giovanni Ansaldo, took pains to announce over the radio: "We must win the war in the Mediterranean with our own Army, quite alone." Crown Prince Umberto himself condoned with the families of the first victims of the Greeks...
Died. Senator Arturo Bocchini, 60, fat, unpublicized chief of Italy's police since 1926, "the man with a million eyes and a million ears," director of OVRA (Italy's Gestapo); in Rome. Cop Bocchini called on Mussolini at noon daily to report on public opinion; on such a call in 1935 was said to have given the answer which decided the Duce to send his troops into Ethiopia...
...then on to Turkey, Syria, Palestine. With the British forces in Egypt he covered the Italian drive on Sidi Bârrani. Later he flew with the R. A. F. on bombing missions, toured the Mediterranean on a British cruiser. (Respectful tars christened him "Barnacle Barnes, the Sailor.") When Mussolini's invincible troops invaded Greece, Ralph Barnes boarded a British warship, sailed for Athens...