Observers on the ground at a training field near Pisa gasped in horror, as a four-engined heavy bomber only a few hundred meters overhead seemed to hang in mid-air a moment before losing control in a precipitous stall. The thirty-three-ton aircraft nosed down to plummet in an explosive crash that killed every man on board. Among them was Bruno Mussolini. The accident may have similarly marked the beginning of the end of the young man’s father, who never fully recovered emotionally from the loss of his son. “There was a Mussolini before Bruno’s death,” Vittorio, the Duce’s son, remembered, “and a Mussolini after it. I’m not saying that prior to 7 August 1941, our father smiled often, but despair was not part of his emotional range. The tragedy turned him into a different man, whose lost stare, at times, provoked pity.”2
The many thousands of letters and telegrams expressing sympathy from surviving family members who lost their own children in the war may have created a new, personal bond between the Italian people and their Duce, but they were little compensation to him. In I Speak With Bruno published shortly after his son’s accident, he wrote with a sad mixture of guilt and pride, “My ‘live dangerously’ was fulfilled in your life.”3
Bruno’s death did not seem to impair Benito Mussolini’s decision-making powers, although it did mark the onset of gastric problems which grew more intense over the years to come. Recurring bouts of stomach pain were sometimes so severe, he occasionally removed himself from the direction of the war.
Close associates also noticed an air of fatalism bordering on resignation that infrequently clouded his spirits. But he invariably roused himself with renewed enthusiasm by delving into some new plan. During autumn 1942, his suffering seems to have become especially acute, but doctors were helpless to do much for him, because they understood that his condition resulted from the heavy burden of anxiety imposed on him by the war, a stress exacerbated by extended mourning for the premature death of his son.
On 11 October, he was visited by Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, widely regarded as among the most amiable of all the Nazi élite, even by British and American pre-war visitors to Germany, despite his horrendous reputation. The two men were old friends, and the Duce was always made to feel at ease in his presence. Himmler had ostensibly stopped by for an informal lunch, during which the conversation turned to their mutual health concerns. The Reichsführer had come to Rome, he said, in search of treatment for similar gastric ailments, and Mussolini was happy to oblige him with a few medical contacts. In reality, Himmler had been personally dispatched by Hitler to assess the condition of Fascism in Italy and, specifically, the Duce’s health.
Returning to Berlin, Himmler reported that so long as Mussolini lived, Fascism would remain the popular phenomenon it had become and continue to stand by the German alliance. True, there was evidence of growing discontent with the progress of the war in some major cities, but it appeared to be mostly aimed at the Duce’s underlings, not at the man himself. His health was not as vigorous as it should be, but he still seemed physically competent to withstand the rigors of office, at least for the next few years. Even so, Himmler emphasized, Mussolini would do well to find someone with whom he could partially share his heavy responsibilities. Unfortunately, no man approached the Duce’s leadership stature. If he died suddenly or were overthrown, Italy would almost certainly disintegrate into national chaos and withdraw from the war, possibly even turn against Germany.
Less than two weeks after the Reichsführer’s visit, Axis forces in North Africa were severely mauled in the Battle of El Alamein, and Mussolini began to lose faith in winning a two-front war. His suspicions were confirmed in early winter 1942, when a tidal-wave of Soviet troops and materiel overwhelmed Axis positions along the frozen Don River, setting the stage for the debacle at Stalingrad. On 16 December, his foreign minister, Count Ciano, met with Hitler to sound him out on the possibility of coming so some kind of terms with Stalin for an end of the fighting on the Eastern Front. Italo-German forces would then be free to concentrate their combined might on deciding the North African Campaign, where the war would be finally won.
The Führer would have none of it. Russia was at the end of her rope, he insisted. By spring, the Caucasus would fall, closing down the Soviets’ major manufacturing capabilities. Then support could be diverted from the East to Rommel’s conquest of Egypt. “All we need are a few more months to stabilize the situation on the Don,” he said, “before we can bring all our strength to bear in the Libyan Desert.”4
Ciano was unimpressed. He confided to Mussolini that Italy must extricate herself from the war before she was made to pay too high a penalty for her association with the Third Reich. “I do not see how that is possible,” the Duce confessed, “unless you are suggesting a separate peace with the Allies. If so, I hardly need remind you of the German consequences of such an act. Still, we must consider all options where the survival of our country is concerned. Let’s give Hitler a chance. He’s been right before, when everyone else thought he was wrong. We can certainly hang on in North Africa through early spring. Besides, a final decision on this matter is not demanded just now.”5
Ciano agreed, but put out feelers to certain members of the Fascist Grand Council who would be interested in deposing Mussolini as soon as possible. On 8 January 1943, he conspired with two of them–Giuseppe Bottai, a university professor, and Minister of State, Roberto Farinacci–to put forward the inept Field Marshal Ugo Cavallero or opportunistic Field Marshal Pietro Badoglio as candidates for the Duce’s replacement. At his retreat in La Rocca della Caminate, where Mussolini was recovering from a flare up of his gastric disorder, he learned of the covert meeting through OVRA, the Organizzazione Vigilanza Repressione Antifascismo, his secret police.
Realizing that the use of drastic measures in wartime would only undermine the nation’s already shaky morale, he drew up a list of loyal Fascists he intended to take the positions of unreliable government men. His first move came on 31 January, when he replaced the armed forces Chief-of-Staff, Cavallero, with the non-Fascist but apparently patriotic General Vittorio Ambrosio. A few days later, Ciano was relieved of his responsibilities but left unmolested, while OVRA agents watched his every move.
Although Mussolini seemed to have scotched mutiny in the ranks of his own government, he was powerless to suppress it elsewhere. On 5 March, the unthinkable happened when the Fiat Aviation plant in Turin went on strike, the first ever since the Duce took office in 1922. He was appalled and ordered the Fascist militia to put down the work stoppage by compulsion if necessary, stating that wartime necessity justified such action. More incredibly, the militia openly disobeyed him, refusing to force the workers back to the plant. The strike spread to neighboring northern cities, threatening to do serious damage to Italy’s military production. It was no coincidence that Turin, where the strikes originated, had been the center of Giustiziae e Liberta ten years before. Although the underground movement appeared to have been successfully crushed by the onset of the Ethiopian War, a few ‘sleeper cells’ waited in patient dormancy for the right moment to strike again.
Then, just as quickly as the labor unrest flared up, it died out. Before month’s end, the Fiat factory was operating again at full capacity, and the remainder of Mussolini’s reign was unplagued by work stoppages. He owed the quick solution of this potentially incendiary situation not to the rubber truncheons of strike-breaking police, but unknown workers still loyal to him. They convinced their fellow assembly-line laborers that shutting down Italy’s means of arms production would be a dishonorable betrayal of soldiers at the front. In countless, unofficial meetings and extempore speeches from factory benches, the strike leaders were shouted down, and order restored. The Duce was a lucky man, and he knew it.
With renewed confidence in the support of his people, he traveled by train to meet Hitler in Austria on 6 April. By now, the situation at the Don was supposed to have turned in favor of the Axis, with forces from the Eastern Front diverted to North Africa for the final victory there. Instead, 110,000 German, Rumanian and Croatian troops had fallen at Stalingrad and another 91,000 made prisoner the previous January. Meanwhile, Rommel’s situation in Tunisia was becoming daily less tenable. He could not be expected to hold out much longer.
With the imminent loss of North Africa, the Anglo-Americans would be in a position to assault Sicily and the Italian mainland. To save Europe from eventual invasion, Mussolini believed, a peace must be made with Stalin, who had already demonstrated his willingness to conclude a strictly Russian-Axis armistice behind the backs of his Western partners. That done, Germany and Italy could get on with winning the war against the British and Americans while there was still time.
Hitler had some fast talking to do if he did not want to lose his Italian ally. He flattered him by disclosing all his secret plans for Operation Citadel, an enormous counter-offensive set to regain the initiative in the East at Kursk in early July. True, the Allies might take North Africa by then, but winning the Russian Campaign would more than compensate such a loss, if only because the Axis could then devote all their energies to defeating the enemy in the Mediterranean. He spoke, too, of Germany’s secret weapons’ program based on technological advances far beyond anything envisaged by the Anglo-Americans with their propeller-driven warplanes and conventional explosives.
“In Germany,” Mussolini told his teenage son, Romano, “Hitler himself took me to the factories manufacturing the arms that will turn the war around. What’s important is not to lose faith. The rest will come on its own.”6 It was on this tour that he learned for the first time about the jet aircraft, cruise missiles, ballistic rockets, and, most secret of all, an atomic bomb under development in the Reich. The prospect of fielding this futuristic military technology caught fire in the Duce’s imagination. He now believed with the Führer that all the Axis forces needed do was to hold out, delay the Allies long enough–even at the expense of otherwise vital territories–for the inevitable deployment of these ‘wonder weapons’.