INTERNATIONAL: Benito’s Week

It was a big week for Benito Mussolini. For months the world had been unmercifully kidding him and his folding armies. He looked very bald and worn and old. But now he had a chance to stand beside his good friend, the world’s most fearsome citizen, on the Russian Front. Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt had talked for three days. To outdo their enemies Benito listened to Adolf for five.

Just as Franklin Roosevelt had taken his sons Elliott and Franklin Jr.to his meeting, so Benito took his son Vittorio—the aviator who five years ago loved to watch the floral explosion of bombs among the Ethiopians. Reich Marshal Hermann Göring thoughtfully presented Benito with an album of photographs which his second son Bruno, who died in a crash last month, had taken while visiting Germany’s Atlantic air bases.

Hitler was willing to talk to Mussolini a long time alone in a tent. Escorted by armored cars and mobile anti-aircraft guns, they motored over vast stretches of the battle line, visited the intense German Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, encountered wrecked villages, Russian war debris, black mud where soldiers had to push their car. One day they flew down to the Ukraine to see Italian troops attacking Russia under the command of German Field Marshal von Rundstedt. For a while they shared the soldiers’ soup and black bread, allowed themselves to be photographed by respectful infantrymen. Flying back from the Ukraine, Mussolini was allowed to take the controls for a few minutes from Adolf’s personal pilot.

Perhaps professional jealousy sometimes led Benito to gloat somewhat over Adolf —for Benito well knew that in Russia the ghastly train of Nazi conquest was far behind schedule. But Benito could not have taken very much of this neurotic satisfaction—he also knew that his own fate was linked with Adolf’s, that the worries of the German High Command were, most pressingly, his own.

When the visit was all over Benito telegraphed Adolf an eloquent thank-you: “The fervid days which we passed together at your headquarters and the visits made to our troops engaged in the war against Bolshevism will remain . . . an uncancelable memory in my mind. . . .”

Wherever Hitler and Mussolini surveyed their cause last week there were signs that their enemies were beginning to swim against the tide of Axis success:

> Russian resistance looked better rather than worse (see p. 15).

> Britain grew steadily stronger.

> In conquered, collaborative France both political and material sabotage were rampant, and some of the best friends of the Axis were shot (see p. 15). > General Charles de Gaulle was rumored to have offered Free French bases in West Africa to the U.S. although, after the U.S. Government made no acknowledgment, he denied it.

> The Balkans were a stew of sedition against Nazi puppetry.

> The surrender of Iran to Britain and Russia (see p. 16) might throw cagily neutral Turkey into the Allied camp, if she were not taken by the Nazis first.

> In the Far East Japan’s protests against the shipping of U.S. arms to Vladivostok were rebuffed by both the U.S. and Soviet Governments. Japan’s spokesmen talked repeatedly of the threat of Allied “encirclement” of the Empire. As proof that the threat was not taken lightly Japan, instead of prosecuting the southern drive that the Axis hoped would divert U.S. attention from Europe, was actually inanxious negotiation with the U.S. (see p. 10).

All these factors Adolf Hitler unquestionably reviewed last week for Benito Mussolini’s benefit. Some sense of Adolf’s conclusions could be gathered from reports that he lengthily discussed winter plans and the question of the “duration” of the war.