THE FALL OF MUSSOLINI

William L. Shirer

Mussolini was tired and old though he was only close to sixty. He, who had walked so arrogantly across Europe's stage for two decades, was at the end of his rope. When he returned to Rome during the summer of 1943, he found things were even worse than what he had expected. Defeatism was widespread among his people and in the armed forces. There had been mass strikes in the industrial cities of Milan and Turin, where the hungry workers had demonstrated for bread, peace and freedom. Mussolini faced revolt from some of his closest henchmen in the Fascist Party organization, even from his son-in-law, Ciano. And behind it there was a plot among a wider circle that reached to the King to overthrow him.

The rebellious Fascist leaders demanded the convention of the Fascist Grand Council, which had not met since December 1939 and which had always been a rubberstamp body dominated by Mussolini, the Duce. It convened on the night of July 24-25, 1943, and Mussolini for the first time in his career as dictator found himself the target of violent criticism for the disaster into which he led the country. By a vote of 19 to 8, a resolution was carried demanding the restoration of a constitutional monarchy with a democratic Parliament. It also called for the full command of the armed forces to be restored to the King.

The Fascist rebels do not appear to have had any idea of going further than this. But there was a second and wider plot of certain generals and the King, which was now sprung. Mussolini himself apparently felt that he had weathered she storm and he was taken completely by surprise when on the evening of July 25 he was summoned to the royal palace by the King, immediately dismissed from office and carried off under arrest in an ambulance to a police station.

So fell, shamefully, the modern Roman Caesar, a warlike man of the twentieth century. As a person he was not unintelligent. He bad read widely in history and thought he understood its lessons. But as dictator he had made the fatal mistake of seeking to make a martial, imperial Great Power of a country which lacked the industrial resources to become one and whose people, unlike the Germans, were too civilized, too sophisticated, too down to earth to be attracted by such false ambitions.

The Italian people, at heart, had never, like the Germans, embraced fascism. They had merely suffered it, knowing that it was a passing phase, and Mussolini toward the end seems to have realized this. But like all dictators he was carried away by power, which, as it inevitably must, corrupted him, corroding his mind and poisoning his judgment. This led him to his second fatal mistake of tying his fortunes and those of Italy to the Third Reich. When the bell began to toll for Hitler's Germany it began to toll for Mussolini's Italy, and as the summer of 1943 came the Italian leader heard it. But there was nothing he could do to escape his fate.

Although he was soon restored to power by Hitler he had remained merely a pet of the Third Reich ever since.