Word: mussolini
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Infatuated Benito Mussolini often followed Claretta's counsel on foreign policy. During the Spanish Civil War General Francisco Franco petitioned Rome for two more divisions. "What shall I do?" the Duce asked his paramour. "Bimbo," she replied, "do send the divisions. General Franco is so simpatico." When the time came to attack Greece, Claretta approved because the Greek Ambassador had snubbed her at diplomatic receptions...
Epilogue. The Italian press reported that the carabinieri, pressing the Badoglio dictatorship's drive against blackshirts, had now arrested the sisters Petacci. Commented the Swiss Neue Zürcher Zeitung: the deliberate blackening of Benito Mussolini's grey reputation is a rebuff to the Nazis, who still pretend that the ex-Duce is a great man; it is also a shift in political attitude that "may point to coming events...
...expressed misgivings about the nation's mood. The people, he said, are complacent because they get only the rosier side of war. (Example: pictures from Sicily, where the Allies suffered 25,000 casualties, have been mostly fluff-Sicilians tossing posies at U.S. troops, throwing fruit at Mussolini posters.) Said Elmer Davis to the President, in effect: either give OWI a new deal, or kill it; it is not much good...
...probably abdicate in favor of his son, who will restore Italy's pre-Fascist constitution. He will also invite the President of the Chamber of Fasces and Corporations to act as the Premier. This is Dino Grandi, former Fascist Ambassador to London, who is rumored to have engineered Mussolini's downfall. "After [Archbishop] Spellman's visit to the Vatican," Salvemini notes darkly, "[Grandi] was made a 'cousin to the King...
...League had no will to use them. Those nations were Great Britain and France. European politicians came to believe that the League was no more than an alternate tool of the Franco-British balance of power-a belief that was ignobly confirmed when the Hoare-Laval pact, giving Mussolini a free fist in Ethiopia, put an effective end to the League's lone effort to apply not even military but economic force against an aggressor...