Word: mussolini
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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Beside the Po. One day while these things were happening in Rumania, a trimotored bomber with a very determined-looking little Italian at its controls landed at San Nicolo airfield, on the Lido near Venice. Out jumped Benito Mussolini and into an automobile. He drove to ancient Padua, which Attila the Hun sacked and burned in 452 A.D., and there reviewed the motorized Turin division of the Army of the Po. He saw 10,000 soldiers, but 150,000 civilians were on hand to look at him. After reviewing the troops he stood up in a camouflaged armored...
...Mussolini's Problem. With Hitler already in a political and military position to dominate the plain of Hungary and Stalin in possession of the Ukraine, Benito Mussolini can hardly pretend to be one of the big three dictators unless he controls at least a part of Europe's granary. Furthermore, Italy has not adequate food supplies at home and has for years depended on maize from Hungary to help feed her people...
...dictators may be friends but their deals are of a kind the U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission would approve-at arm's length. Not only because of Hitler's stronger army did Mussolini have to yield dominance of the Hungarian Plain to Germany. The Dinaric Alps which cut off that plain from the Adriatic Sea and Mussolini are not the highest mountains in Europe but some of the most rugged and impassable. The Pindus Mountains in Albania and northern Greece are considerably higher (they include Mt. Olympus, 9,730 ft., with Ossa and Pelion handy for climbing...
...Mussolini's most practical route into the Balkans lies across the Strait of Otranto, on one side of which he has a base at Brindisi and at the other the fortified island of Saseno. In April 1939 he took Albania, which gave him a jumping-off place on the far side. Thence an Italian Army, unless it meets opposition from the forces of some real power, could make its way through Greece, or via Monastir in Yugoslavia to Salonika. From that point it could either ascend the Vardar River Valley towards Nish, or if that route is blocked...
Such a drive would cut Italy in on the game that the dictators are playing in this area. More important it would keep the other dictators out of the Mediterranean which the Italians like possessively to call Mare Nostrum. If Mussolini took Bulgaria he would also have to have the port of Dedeagach on the Aegean Sea to give him access to his conquest without going into the Black...