The Pope at War, page 15
* * *
—
Soon after Ribbentrop left Rome, Sumner Welles, the American undersecretary of state, returned to the Italian capital. Since his previous visit earlier in the month, he had traveled to London, Paris, and Berlin, where he had met with Hitler. “Hitler is taller than I had judged from his photographs,” Welles observed. “He has, in real life, none of the somewhat effeminate appearance of which he has been accused…. He was dignified both in speech and movement, and there was not the slightest impression of the comic effect from moustache and hair which one sees in his caricatures.” But Welles found the Führer uninterested in discussing the kind of peace the American had in mind, one involving the withdrawal of German forces from the lands it had conquered. “I did not want this war,” Hitler told him. “It has been forced upon me against my will.” His aim, said the dictator, was simply to attain “a just peace.”[13]
In his second visit to Rome, the American diplomat again shuttled between the Italian leadership and the pope and his secretary of state, with all eager to hear what he had discovered in his travels.[14] In going to see Pius XII on March 18, he brought Myron Taylor, Roosevelt’s personal envoy to the pope, with him. Welles spoke to the pope in French, but Taylor was limited to English, and while the pope could read English easily and spoke it fairly well, he was not always able to follow what Taylor said.[15] One thing became clear to both Americans: Pius XII had excellent sources on Europe’s unfolding drama. Indeed, it was the pope who explained to them the course the war was about to take. The Germans were planning an offensive on the western front, he said, but it would not begin for at least another month.
Taylor asked the pope if he thought the Italians would revolt if Mussolini led the country into war on Germany’s side. The pope looked startled by the question and remained silent a long time before responding. Speaking slowly in English, he said that it was true Italian public opinion opposed the war, but he very much doubted there would be any revolt against Mussolini should he decide to join it.
“The Pope was exceedingly cordial,” the undersecretary of state observed in concluding his report to Washington. “He impressed me as having a very well-informed and analytic intelligence, but as lacking the force of character which I had previously attributed to him. I found Cardinal Maglione far more direct and unevasive in his discussion of present conditions.”
The American diplomat’s contrast between the pope and Maglione found an echo in observations the French ambassador to the Vatican would record later that year. The Frenchman sensed a certain rivalry between Pius XII and his secretary of state. The two men had never enjoyed good personal chemistry. The French ambassador thought Maglione more intelligent than the pope, more decisive, and a better judge of people. “Because he is endowed with great perspicacity, people call him crafty.” But the cardinal also had a very human quality that, the ambassador observed, could be appealed to, but only on condition that one never pressed him too hard, for that would immediately put him on the defensive. The ambassador thought part of the reason Maglione was hesitant to speak his mind was that he did not think his own position was entirely solid. He sensed he was not a “persona grata” to the Pope, “nor to the fascist milieu that has influence at the Vatican.”[16]
* * *
—
The day before Undersecretary Welles’s March 18, 1940, audience with the pope, Mussolini and his son-in-law, Ciano, accompanied by an assortment of top Fascist officials, had boarded a special train in Rome. They were bound for Mussolini’s first meeting with Hitler since the historic September 1938 Munich encounter in which Britain and France had agreed to Hitler’s demand to seize the Sudetenland in exchange for a promise of peace. It was late at night when they arrived at the German-speaking town of Bressanone, ceded to Italy only two decades earlier from what was left of the Austrian empire. In the wake of the incorporation of Austria into the Reich, it was now the last Italian town before the German border. The next morning, in the midst of a snowstorm, their train pulled into the small station at the Brenner Pass, at an altitude of 4,500 feet, in the shadow of the Alps. A half hour later Hitler’s train approached the station, which was decorated with both Italian tricolor and red-and-black swastika flags.
Mussolini, waiting with Ciano under the protection of a small shelter by the side of the track, was wearing the uniform of commander general of the Fascist militia. As Hitler descended from the train, an Italian military guard offered its honors while the Führer greeted the Duce. After Ribbentrop stepped out of the train, he and Hitler greeted Ciano as well. Fighting off the snow, the military band played the two nations’ anthems as the men climbed into the dark wood-paneled salon compartment of the Duce’s train for their meeting. Hitler sat at one end of the long table there, Mussolini and Ciano across from each other on either side of him.[17]
Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini at train station, Brenner Pass, March 18, 1940 (Galeazzo Ciano looking on with chin thrust out)
It did not take long before the Führer launched into one of his familiar messianic monologues. Recalling the meeting later, Hitler observed he had found Mussolini “visibly embarrassed, like a pupil who hadn’t done his homework.” It did not help that Hitler knew only German and Mussolini was too proud of his own linguistic ability to allow a translator. Between his own difficulties with the language and the sonorous quality of the Führer’s endless harangue, the Duce missed much of what the German dictator said, but his main message was clear enough. The decisive battle was about to begin. Soon Paris would fall, and London would as well unless it wisely agreed to peace terms. Italy was bound to Germany by a solemn pact. “If Germany were to lose—”
Here Mussolini interrupted him. “Then Italy has lost too!”
The Führer continued: “If Italy is content with a second-rate position in the Mediterranean, then she need do nothing more.”
Increasingly under Hitler’s spell, and ever more impressed with Germany’s military might, Mussolini told the Führer he needed only a little more time to make final military preparations, and then Italy would march proudly at Germany’s side. Hitler promised that once France was conquered and England forced to sue for peace, Italy would become master of the Mediterranean.
After two and a half hours, following a quick lunch, the men left the Duce’s compartment and walked the short distance back to Hitler’s awaiting train. The snow had stopped. Back inside his own compartment, the Führer spent a few minutes chatting amiably with Mussolini through his pulled-down window before, as the train pulled out, the two dictators raised their right arms in final salute.[18]
* * *
—
The U.S. undersecretary of state had delayed his departure from Rome, hoping to learn from Ciano about the Brenner Pass encounter. Preferring not to call public attention to his meeting with the American, Ciano arranged to see Welles at his golf club on the southeastern outskirts of the city. Ciano often spent afternoons at the club, which had been founded earlier in the century by British expats. It boasted scenic views of the Appian Way, the ancient Roman road connecting Rome to the southern tip of Italy’s heel. Ciano told the American undersecretary that Hitler had done practically all the talking at their meeting, telling them that the western offensive would come soon but was not imminent. It was Hitler’s intention, said Ciano, to send his warplanes to bomb British ports and cities, including London.
In Welles’s final report on his mission, he wrote that Mussolini’s decision to throw Italy into the war would depend on whether Germany won rapid victories in its drive westward. Opposing the decision would be virtually all those who counted in Italy, beginning with Ciano, who, wrote the undersecretary, is “violently against it,” as was the king. “The entire Church is openly against it,” he added, and “so are the financial and commercial interests, and every ordinary man and woman.” But if Germany seemed to be heading to certain victory, little could prevent Mussolini from joining. As for the pope, “I fear [he] is discouraged and, in a sense, confused.”[19]
Two weeks after Mussolini’s meeting with Hitler, the Duce sent a top secret memo to the king, Ciano, and the heads of the military. If the war continues, he told them, “believing that Italy can remain out of it to its end is absurd and impossible. Italy is not off in a corner of Europe like Spain…. Italy is in the middle of the belligerents.” Two days later he sounded a similar note in a meeting of his cabinet. To remain neutral “would reduce Italy from being a great Power for a century and from being a true Fascist Regime for eternity.” It was time for Rome to regain its Mediterranean empire.[20]
The Duce’s impatience only increased when, on April 9, he received a letter from Hitler announcing his plans to send German troops into Norway that same day. Thanking Mussolini for all he had done so far, Hitler concluded the letter, “I am deeply moved, Duce, by the belief that Providence has chosen us two for the same mission.” Late the following night Mussolini received another message from Hitler: German troops had completely occupied Denmark and seized Oslo.[21]
“I hate this Italian rabble!” Mussolini told Clara the next day. While the Germans were fighting bravely, Italians cared only for their peace and quiet. “I’ve had the chance to measure the temperature of this people for eight months now,” said the Duce, referring to the time since the war erupted. “They’re cowards, weak, full of fear.” Warming to this, one of his favorite themes, he added, “Ah, you know, certainly it’s all useless: one doesn’t undo three centuries of slavery in eighteen years of regime!” He had done his best to turn Italians into a courageous, martial force but had accomplished little. “We’ll have the enemy on our doorstep, and they will still just keep babbling.”
“Yes, my dear,” concluded the Duce, “I am upset, upset and disgusted.”[22]
His mood had not been helped by his meeting with the king that morning. Mussolini needed the king’s support to fulfill his promise to Hitler, for the king was the ultimate commander of the military, and the army had a long tradition of allegiance to the Savoyard monarchy. But Victor Emmanuel, always a cynic, and no lover of the Germans, had shown no eagerness to send Italy’s troops into battle.
“It’s humiliating,” remarked the Duce later that day, “to stand with your hands in your pockets while others are writing history.”[23]
Mussolini’s son-in-law was leaving the German embassy’s dinner party after midnight when Hans Georg von Mackensen, Hitler’s ambassador to Rome, took him aside at the door. It’s likely, Mackensen said, that he would have to disturb him early in the morning. At home, Ciano found it difficult to sleep. At four a.m. his phone rang. Mackensen said he would be at his door in forty-five minutes. When the German arrived, he informed Ciano that Hitler wanted him to deliver a message to Mussolini at five a.m. exactly. Asked why all this could not have been done the previous day at a more reasonable hour, Mackensen fumbled through an excuse about a diplomatic courier who had been delayed. The two men then made their way through Rome’s deserted streets to Villa Torlonia, the dictator’s residence. It was May 10, 1940.
“Duce,” Hitler’s message began, “when you receive this letter, I shall already have crossed the Rubicon.” He had ordered German troops to launch their attack on Belgium and the Netherlands at 5:35 a.m. After carefully reading the letter and the enclosures, all in German, Mussolini looked up and said he fully approved of the decision. He cabled Hitler to thank him for his message. “I feel that time is pressing for Italy too,” he told the Führer. “As for the Italian armed forces, the navy is ready, and by the end of May two army groups in the east and west as well as the air force and the antiaircraft formations will be ready.”
The Duce’s eagerness to join his forces with Hitler’s would only grow over the next days as German troops advanced with startling speed through the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg and on toward Paris. His daughter Edda, unlike her husband, shared his enthusiasm. If the country was to uphold its honor, Mussolini’s headstrong daughter told her father, Italian intervention in the war could not come soon enough.[1]
* * *
—
Alarmed by signs that Mussolini was preparing to plunge Italy into war, Pius XII had written him a letter two weeks earlier. “Beloved Son,” it began. “We know…the noble efforts you have made from the beginning to avoid and then to localize the war.” The pope went on to express his hope that “thanks to your initiatives, to your steadfastness, and to Your Italian soul, Europe is saved from greater ruin and more numerous sorrows; and in particular that Our and Your beloved country is spared such a great calamity.” At the same time, the pope reaffirmed instructions to the Vatican newspaper to avoid publishing anything that might offend the Duce.[2]
Mussolini’s reply to the pope was anything but comforting: “Your recognition, Most Blessed Father, of the fact that I have tried every avenue to avoid a European conflagration has given me legitimate satisfaction.” While he had kept Italy out of the war so far, he told the pontiff, he could not guarantee he could continue to do so. Then with a large dose of hubris, he cited the pope’s own words as justification: “The history of the Church, as You have taught me, Blessed Father, has never accepted the formula of peace for peace’s sake, for peace ‘at any cost,’ for ‘peace without justice.’ ” “It is a consolation to me,” he added in a final burst of insincerity, “that, in either eventuality, God will want to protect the fate of a population of believers like the Italian people.”[3]
The pope had coordinated his letter to the Italian dictator with the American president, who sent a similar appeal. Roosevelt cabled his plea to his ambassador in Rome with instructions to deliver it personally to the Duce. On May 1 Mussolini received Ambassador Phillips at his office in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Although the Duce was initially alone, Ciano joined them midway through the half-hour meeting. Conscious of the limits of Mussolini’s English, the ambassador read Roosevelt’s message slowly to him. Mussolini voiced his Italian translation of each sentence as Phillips proceeded. When Phillips finished, he handed the text to Mussolini, who then read it again.
Having finished his reading, Mussolini asked Phillips why the Americans would want to get involved in the war. In his cable, the president had called himself a realist. He too was a realist, said the dictator. For better or worse, the reality was that Germany had conquered Poland and Czechoslovakia, and the new map of Europe would have to reflect those facts. As for Italy, said the Duce, it was no longer the agricultural country it had long been, but a heavily industrialized one dependent on international trade. It could not remain a “prisoner within the Mediterranean” forever. It needed an outlet to the Atlantic. Italy, he told Roosevelt, had never interfered in American affairs. It had a right to expect the Americans to stay out of Europe’s.[4]
* * *
—
The pope learned of Germany’s offensive from his nuncio in Brussels, who cabled the news that day that the Belgian capital was under air attack. Urged by the French and British governments to condemn the invasion, the pope felt he had to do something. Sitting at his small American typewriter late on the evening of May 10, he drafted telegrams in French to be sent to the sovereigns of each of the three countries under attack. He worked for several hours, correcting the typed pages by hand and crafting an individualized message to each.
“For the second time,” the pope wrote King Leopold, “the Belgian people, against their will and their rights, see their land exposed to the cruelties of war.” “Profoundly moved,” he wanted to send the king and the entire Belgian nation assurance of his paternal affection, along with his prayers that Belgium soon regain its freedom and independence. To Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, he wrote, “Learning with deep emotion that Your Majesty’s efforts for peace were unable to prevent your noble people from becoming, against their desire and their right, the scene of a war, We beg God, supreme arbiter of the destiny of nations, to hasten through his all-powerful help the reestablishment of justice and freedom.” He sent Grand Duchess Charlotte of Luxembourg a similar message.
The pope had the text of the three telegrams published, albeit only in their original French, on the front page of L’Osservatore Romano. When the issue hit the Italian newsstands, angry local Fascist Party officials and their minions seized copies, roughed up the vendors, and made a great show of burning piles of the newspaper in the streets.[5]
“If we continue with our neutrality, as many would like,” remarked the Duce on learning of the pope’s messages to the European sovereigns, “we too will one day get a fine telegram of outrage from the pope to wave in front of the occupying German troops!” Mussolini, Ciano noted in his diary that night, “often repeats that the papacy is a cancer that eats away at our national life, and that he intends—if necessary—to liquidate this problem once and for all.” As was often the case, it fell to Ciano to calm him down.[6]
While the pope’s three telegrams angered the Duce, they did not satisfy the Nazis’ victims or their allies. On the morning of the German invasion, the French ambassador urgently requested an audience with the pontiff. The entire world, he told the pope, was waiting for him to pronounce his “solemn condemnation” of the “odious attack of which two Catholic nations are victim.” British foreign secretary Lord Halifax sent a similar plea, hoping that a papal denunciation of the Nazis would make it more difficult for Mussolini to join the war.[7]
Three days later François Charles-Roux, the French ambassador, returned to the Vatican to press for a stronger papal response. “All the Catholics in France, England, Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg are waiting for the Holy Father to condemn the crime the Germans committed with their invasion of three neutral countries.” The pope’s own prestige, he argued, was at stake.[8] The pope, aware that he had already angered Mussolini with his three telegrams, would do no more.
—
Soon after Ribbentrop left Rome, Sumner Welles, the American undersecretary of state, returned to the Italian capital. Since his previous visit earlier in the month, he had traveled to London, Paris, and Berlin, where he had met with Hitler. “Hitler is taller than I had judged from his photographs,” Welles observed. “He has, in real life, none of the somewhat effeminate appearance of which he has been accused…. He was dignified both in speech and movement, and there was not the slightest impression of the comic effect from moustache and hair which one sees in his caricatures.” But Welles found the Führer uninterested in discussing the kind of peace the American had in mind, one involving the withdrawal of German forces from the lands it had conquered. “I did not want this war,” Hitler told him. “It has been forced upon me against my will.” His aim, said the dictator, was simply to attain “a just peace.”[13]
In his second visit to Rome, the American diplomat again shuttled between the Italian leadership and the pope and his secretary of state, with all eager to hear what he had discovered in his travels.[14] In going to see Pius XII on March 18, he brought Myron Taylor, Roosevelt’s personal envoy to the pope, with him. Welles spoke to the pope in French, but Taylor was limited to English, and while the pope could read English easily and spoke it fairly well, he was not always able to follow what Taylor said.[15] One thing became clear to both Americans: Pius XII had excellent sources on Europe’s unfolding drama. Indeed, it was the pope who explained to them the course the war was about to take. The Germans were planning an offensive on the western front, he said, but it would not begin for at least another month.
Taylor asked the pope if he thought the Italians would revolt if Mussolini led the country into war on Germany’s side. The pope looked startled by the question and remained silent a long time before responding. Speaking slowly in English, he said that it was true Italian public opinion opposed the war, but he very much doubted there would be any revolt against Mussolini should he decide to join it.
“The Pope was exceedingly cordial,” the undersecretary of state observed in concluding his report to Washington. “He impressed me as having a very well-informed and analytic intelligence, but as lacking the force of character which I had previously attributed to him. I found Cardinal Maglione far more direct and unevasive in his discussion of present conditions.”
The American diplomat’s contrast between the pope and Maglione found an echo in observations the French ambassador to the Vatican would record later that year. The Frenchman sensed a certain rivalry between Pius XII and his secretary of state. The two men had never enjoyed good personal chemistry. The French ambassador thought Maglione more intelligent than the pope, more decisive, and a better judge of people. “Because he is endowed with great perspicacity, people call him crafty.” But the cardinal also had a very human quality that, the ambassador observed, could be appealed to, but only on condition that one never pressed him too hard, for that would immediately put him on the defensive. The ambassador thought part of the reason Maglione was hesitant to speak his mind was that he did not think his own position was entirely solid. He sensed he was not a “persona grata” to the Pope, “nor to the fascist milieu that has influence at the Vatican.”[16]
* * *
—
The day before Undersecretary Welles’s March 18, 1940, audience with the pope, Mussolini and his son-in-law, Ciano, accompanied by an assortment of top Fascist officials, had boarded a special train in Rome. They were bound for Mussolini’s first meeting with Hitler since the historic September 1938 Munich encounter in which Britain and France had agreed to Hitler’s demand to seize the Sudetenland in exchange for a promise of peace. It was late at night when they arrived at the German-speaking town of Bressanone, ceded to Italy only two decades earlier from what was left of the Austrian empire. In the wake of the incorporation of Austria into the Reich, it was now the last Italian town before the German border. The next morning, in the midst of a snowstorm, their train pulled into the small station at the Brenner Pass, at an altitude of 4,500 feet, in the shadow of the Alps. A half hour later Hitler’s train approached the station, which was decorated with both Italian tricolor and red-and-black swastika flags.
Mussolini, waiting with Ciano under the protection of a small shelter by the side of the track, was wearing the uniform of commander general of the Fascist militia. As Hitler descended from the train, an Italian military guard offered its honors while the Führer greeted the Duce. After Ribbentrop stepped out of the train, he and Hitler greeted Ciano as well. Fighting off the snow, the military band played the two nations’ anthems as the men climbed into the dark wood-paneled salon compartment of the Duce’s train for their meeting. Hitler sat at one end of the long table there, Mussolini and Ciano across from each other on either side of him.[17]
Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini at train station, Brenner Pass, March 18, 1940 (Galeazzo Ciano looking on with chin thrust out)
It did not take long before the Führer launched into one of his familiar messianic monologues. Recalling the meeting later, Hitler observed he had found Mussolini “visibly embarrassed, like a pupil who hadn’t done his homework.” It did not help that Hitler knew only German and Mussolini was too proud of his own linguistic ability to allow a translator. Between his own difficulties with the language and the sonorous quality of the Führer’s endless harangue, the Duce missed much of what the German dictator said, but his main message was clear enough. The decisive battle was about to begin. Soon Paris would fall, and London would as well unless it wisely agreed to peace terms. Italy was bound to Germany by a solemn pact. “If Germany were to lose—”
Here Mussolini interrupted him. “Then Italy has lost too!”
The Führer continued: “If Italy is content with a second-rate position in the Mediterranean, then she need do nothing more.”
Increasingly under Hitler’s spell, and ever more impressed with Germany’s military might, Mussolini told the Führer he needed only a little more time to make final military preparations, and then Italy would march proudly at Germany’s side. Hitler promised that once France was conquered and England forced to sue for peace, Italy would become master of the Mediterranean.
After two and a half hours, following a quick lunch, the men left the Duce’s compartment and walked the short distance back to Hitler’s awaiting train. The snow had stopped. Back inside his own compartment, the Führer spent a few minutes chatting amiably with Mussolini through his pulled-down window before, as the train pulled out, the two dictators raised their right arms in final salute.[18]
* * *
—
The U.S. undersecretary of state had delayed his departure from Rome, hoping to learn from Ciano about the Brenner Pass encounter. Preferring not to call public attention to his meeting with the American, Ciano arranged to see Welles at his golf club on the southeastern outskirts of the city. Ciano often spent afternoons at the club, which had been founded earlier in the century by British expats. It boasted scenic views of the Appian Way, the ancient Roman road connecting Rome to the southern tip of Italy’s heel. Ciano told the American undersecretary that Hitler had done practically all the talking at their meeting, telling them that the western offensive would come soon but was not imminent. It was Hitler’s intention, said Ciano, to send his warplanes to bomb British ports and cities, including London.
In Welles’s final report on his mission, he wrote that Mussolini’s decision to throw Italy into the war would depend on whether Germany won rapid victories in its drive westward. Opposing the decision would be virtually all those who counted in Italy, beginning with Ciano, who, wrote the undersecretary, is “violently against it,” as was the king. “The entire Church is openly against it,” he added, and “so are the financial and commercial interests, and every ordinary man and woman.” But if Germany seemed to be heading to certain victory, little could prevent Mussolini from joining. As for the pope, “I fear [he] is discouraged and, in a sense, confused.”[19]
Two weeks after Mussolini’s meeting with Hitler, the Duce sent a top secret memo to the king, Ciano, and the heads of the military. If the war continues, he told them, “believing that Italy can remain out of it to its end is absurd and impossible. Italy is not off in a corner of Europe like Spain…. Italy is in the middle of the belligerents.” Two days later he sounded a similar note in a meeting of his cabinet. To remain neutral “would reduce Italy from being a great Power for a century and from being a true Fascist Regime for eternity.” It was time for Rome to regain its Mediterranean empire.[20]
The Duce’s impatience only increased when, on April 9, he received a letter from Hitler announcing his plans to send German troops into Norway that same day. Thanking Mussolini for all he had done so far, Hitler concluded the letter, “I am deeply moved, Duce, by the belief that Providence has chosen us two for the same mission.” Late the following night Mussolini received another message from Hitler: German troops had completely occupied Denmark and seized Oslo.[21]
“I hate this Italian rabble!” Mussolini told Clara the next day. While the Germans were fighting bravely, Italians cared only for their peace and quiet. “I’ve had the chance to measure the temperature of this people for eight months now,” said the Duce, referring to the time since the war erupted. “They’re cowards, weak, full of fear.” Warming to this, one of his favorite themes, he added, “Ah, you know, certainly it’s all useless: one doesn’t undo three centuries of slavery in eighteen years of regime!” He had done his best to turn Italians into a courageous, martial force but had accomplished little. “We’ll have the enemy on our doorstep, and they will still just keep babbling.”
“Yes, my dear,” concluded the Duce, “I am upset, upset and disgusted.”[22]
His mood had not been helped by his meeting with the king that morning. Mussolini needed the king’s support to fulfill his promise to Hitler, for the king was the ultimate commander of the military, and the army had a long tradition of allegiance to the Savoyard monarchy. But Victor Emmanuel, always a cynic, and no lover of the Germans, had shown no eagerness to send Italy’s troops into battle.
“It’s humiliating,” remarked the Duce later that day, “to stand with your hands in your pockets while others are writing history.”[23]
Mussolini’s son-in-law was leaving the German embassy’s dinner party after midnight when Hans Georg von Mackensen, Hitler’s ambassador to Rome, took him aside at the door. It’s likely, Mackensen said, that he would have to disturb him early in the morning. At home, Ciano found it difficult to sleep. At four a.m. his phone rang. Mackensen said he would be at his door in forty-five minutes. When the German arrived, he informed Ciano that Hitler wanted him to deliver a message to Mussolini at five a.m. exactly. Asked why all this could not have been done the previous day at a more reasonable hour, Mackensen fumbled through an excuse about a diplomatic courier who had been delayed. The two men then made their way through Rome’s deserted streets to Villa Torlonia, the dictator’s residence. It was May 10, 1940.
“Duce,” Hitler’s message began, “when you receive this letter, I shall already have crossed the Rubicon.” He had ordered German troops to launch their attack on Belgium and the Netherlands at 5:35 a.m. After carefully reading the letter and the enclosures, all in German, Mussolini looked up and said he fully approved of the decision. He cabled Hitler to thank him for his message. “I feel that time is pressing for Italy too,” he told the Führer. “As for the Italian armed forces, the navy is ready, and by the end of May two army groups in the east and west as well as the air force and the antiaircraft formations will be ready.”
The Duce’s eagerness to join his forces with Hitler’s would only grow over the next days as German troops advanced with startling speed through the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg and on toward Paris. His daughter Edda, unlike her husband, shared his enthusiasm. If the country was to uphold its honor, Mussolini’s headstrong daughter told her father, Italian intervention in the war could not come soon enough.[1]
* * *
—
Alarmed by signs that Mussolini was preparing to plunge Italy into war, Pius XII had written him a letter two weeks earlier. “Beloved Son,” it began. “We know…the noble efforts you have made from the beginning to avoid and then to localize the war.” The pope went on to express his hope that “thanks to your initiatives, to your steadfastness, and to Your Italian soul, Europe is saved from greater ruin and more numerous sorrows; and in particular that Our and Your beloved country is spared such a great calamity.” At the same time, the pope reaffirmed instructions to the Vatican newspaper to avoid publishing anything that might offend the Duce.[2]
Mussolini’s reply to the pope was anything but comforting: “Your recognition, Most Blessed Father, of the fact that I have tried every avenue to avoid a European conflagration has given me legitimate satisfaction.” While he had kept Italy out of the war so far, he told the pontiff, he could not guarantee he could continue to do so. Then with a large dose of hubris, he cited the pope’s own words as justification: “The history of the Church, as You have taught me, Blessed Father, has never accepted the formula of peace for peace’s sake, for peace ‘at any cost,’ for ‘peace without justice.’ ” “It is a consolation to me,” he added in a final burst of insincerity, “that, in either eventuality, God will want to protect the fate of a population of believers like the Italian people.”[3]
The pope had coordinated his letter to the Italian dictator with the American president, who sent a similar appeal. Roosevelt cabled his plea to his ambassador in Rome with instructions to deliver it personally to the Duce. On May 1 Mussolini received Ambassador Phillips at his office in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Although the Duce was initially alone, Ciano joined them midway through the half-hour meeting. Conscious of the limits of Mussolini’s English, the ambassador read Roosevelt’s message slowly to him. Mussolini voiced his Italian translation of each sentence as Phillips proceeded. When Phillips finished, he handed the text to Mussolini, who then read it again.
Having finished his reading, Mussolini asked Phillips why the Americans would want to get involved in the war. In his cable, the president had called himself a realist. He too was a realist, said the dictator. For better or worse, the reality was that Germany had conquered Poland and Czechoslovakia, and the new map of Europe would have to reflect those facts. As for Italy, said the Duce, it was no longer the agricultural country it had long been, but a heavily industrialized one dependent on international trade. It could not remain a “prisoner within the Mediterranean” forever. It needed an outlet to the Atlantic. Italy, he told Roosevelt, had never interfered in American affairs. It had a right to expect the Americans to stay out of Europe’s.[4]
* * *
—
The pope learned of Germany’s offensive from his nuncio in Brussels, who cabled the news that day that the Belgian capital was under air attack. Urged by the French and British governments to condemn the invasion, the pope felt he had to do something. Sitting at his small American typewriter late on the evening of May 10, he drafted telegrams in French to be sent to the sovereigns of each of the three countries under attack. He worked for several hours, correcting the typed pages by hand and crafting an individualized message to each.
“For the second time,” the pope wrote King Leopold, “the Belgian people, against their will and their rights, see their land exposed to the cruelties of war.” “Profoundly moved,” he wanted to send the king and the entire Belgian nation assurance of his paternal affection, along with his prayers that Belgium soon regain its freedom and independence. To Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, he wrote, “Learning with deep emotion that Your Majesty’s efforts for peace were unable to prevent your noble people from becoming, against their desire and their right, the scene of a war, We beg God, supreme arbiter of the destiny of nations, to hasten through his all-powerful help the reestablishment of justice and freedom.” He sent Grand Duchess Charlotte of Luxembourg a similar message.
The pope had the text of the three telegrams published, albeit only in their original French, on the front page of L’Osservatore Romano. When the issue hit the Italian newsstands, angry local Fascist Party officials and their minions seized copies, roughed up the vendors, and made a great show of burning piles of the newspaper in the streets.[5]
“If we continue with our neutrality, as many would like,” remarked the Duce on learning of the pope’s messages to the European sovereigns, “we too will one day get a fine telegram of outrage from the pope to wave in front of the occupying German troops!” Mussolini, Ciano noted in his diary that night, “often repeats that the papacy is a cancer that eats away at our national life, and that he intends—if necessary—to liquidate this problem once and for all.” As was often the case, it fell to Ciano to calm him down.[6]
While the pope’s three telegrams angered the Duce, they did not satisfy the Nazis’ victims or their allies. On the morning of the German invasion, the French ambassador urgently requested an audience with the pontiff. The entire world, he told the pope, was waiting for him to pronounce his “solemn condemnation” of the “odious attack of which two Catholic nations are victim.” British foreign secretary Lord Halifax sent a similar plea, hoping that a papal denunciation of the Nazis would make it more difficult for Mussolini to join the war.[7]
Three days later François Charles-Roux, the French ambassador, returned to the Vatican to press for a stronger papal response. “All the Catholics in France, England, Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg are waiting for the Holy Father to condemn the crime the Germans committed with their invasion of three neutral countries.” The pope’s own prestige, he argued, was at stake.[8] The pope, aware that he had already angered Mussolini with his three telegrams, would do no more.
