James Holland: commitment

Transcript context

…He completely emasculates Mussolini. And he likes him though. It’s really weird. Even when Mussolini is about to fall in July 1943, he has a meeting at Feltre just literally a few days before Mussolini tumbles. And he does that because he likes Mussolini. He likes him as a man and thinks he’s been his friend, and he respects him to a certain extent, even though he definitely views himself as top dog. Hitler does, that is. So it’s curious because I don’t think Hitler particularly likes anyone really, but he does seem to Mussolini. But anyway, the problem with Mussolini is Mussolini’s Italy is very impoverished from the First World War, and that, of course, leads to the rise of fascism and the overthrow of parliamentary democracy and why Mussolini takes place in the first place. Again, it’s that there’s been this terrible disruption. There’s been financial crisis. That leads to people looking at an alternative. What’s the alternative? Well, Mussolini is going, “We can be proud Italians again,” lots of chest thumping, wearing great uniforms, all the rest of it. And people think, “Well, I want a piece of that,” and it works, and proverbially the trains work on time under him, and so on and so forth. But he just gets ahead of himself. And actually the writings on the war in 1935 when he goes into Abyssinia, and again, what effectively are by first world European standards primitive tribesmen in Abyssinia, they have quite a tough fight there. They do prevail, but it’s not a complete walkover. And they get a bit of a bloody nose at times, and they shouldn’t have done. And they’re just not ready. They don’t have the industry. They’re tied up into the Mediterranean. They don’t have access to the world’s oceans. They do have some merchant shipping, but not a huge amount. They just don’t have what is required. They’re dependent on Britain for coal. Britain is the leading coal exporter in the world in the 1930s. So Britain’s approach to fascist Spain and approach to fascist Italy has been very much stick and carrot. It’s like, we’ll let you do what you do as long as you stay in your box, and we’ll continue to provide you with supplies and coal and whatever it is you need as long as you don’t go too far. d carrot. It’s like, we’ll let you do what you do as long as you stay in your box, and we’ll continue to provide you with supplies and coal and whatever it is you need as long as you don’t go too far. And so that’s why Mussolini is very anxious in 1938, and again in 1939, to be the power broker and not let Germany go to war. But Germany, they signed the Axis Pact of Steel in May 1939, where they become formal allies, this is Hitler and Mussolini, Italy and Germany. But it’s always a very, very unequal partnership right from the word go. And one of the reasons Mussolini signs it is because he fears that Germany has designs on Italy. It’s not because he thinks, oh, these guys are great, they’re our natural bedfellows. It’s a mutually convenient pact whereby Germany gets on with whatever it wants to do up in Northern Europe and Eastern Europe. Italy is given a free hand to do whatever it wants to do. They’ll just watch each other’s backs. They have borders, Austria and Italy border one another, and they’ll just do their own thing, and they’ll help each other out with supplies and stuff. But basically they’ll be their own … It’s a marriage of convenience. They’re never expecting to be fighting alongside each other on the battlefield. Not really. There is a kind of obligation to do so, but it’s an obligation with no expectation of it ever actually happening. And so from Mussolini’s point of view, the Pact of Steel is just sailing your flag to one particular mast and trying to cover your back. And so long as he plays his cards right, he can still get his coal supplies from Britain, and he doesn’t have to worry about that. And the Pact of Steel doesn’t make any difference to that. The problem for him is that in June 1940, he thinks that France is about to be defeated and that Britain will surely follow. And so he thinks, ah, I’ve got some rich pickings. I can take Malta, I can take British possessions, I can overrun Egypt and now is my time, but I also need to join the fight before France is completely out of the fight. Otherwise, it looks like I’m a Johnny-come-lately, and I won’t get those spoils because the Germans will go, “You can’t have all this stuff. You’ve turned up too late. You need to be in the fight.” So he does it in what he thinks is the perfect timing. And it turns out to be a catastrophic timing because of course, Britain doesn’t exit the fight. Britain is still there. And by February 1941, a very, very tiny British army in Egypt has overrun two entire Italian armies and taken 133,000 prisoners in North Africa. So you mentioned in the sea who were the dominant armies. Who was dominant in the air?…

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