Army of the Po

"You are badly fed and all but naked. . . . Before you are great cities and rich provinces; there we shall find honor, glory and riches." Thus spoke young General Bonaparte to 30,000 miserable French troops at Nice one day in March 1796. The shoeless Army with half-starved horses drawing the scant artillery marched past the Alps, through Piedmont, and onto the lush plains of Lombardy. An unbroken series of victories--Lodi, Arcola, Rivoli--and Northern Italy was Napoleon's first conquest.

Napoleon was not the first invader to come that way. Hannibal struck from the northwest and many times in the Middle Ages and Renaissance raiders poured through the funnel-like passes that widen and slope downward into Italy. In modern times no Army has invaded France from Italy, but although the Po and its tributaries form a series of defensive positions at which Italians could check invaders who penetrate the mountain barrier, at the western end of the valley lie Turin and, further east, Milan, Italy's chief industrial centres. If they should fall, Italy's war days might be numbered. Italy's problem is to check a military invasion at its outset --west of these cities.

Dictator Benito Mussolini has given this task to the "Army of the Po" under General Ettore Bastico. Its 50,000 men are divided into three corps; "armored" divisions equipped with heavy tanks and mobile artillery; four "swift" divisions of fast tanks and light guns; "motorized" troops which can travel at high speed over open roads. Theoretically, after the armored corps has made a breakthrough, the other divisions will keep the enemy rolling back without an opportunity of reforming its lines.

Last week the Army of the Po went through its paces before Il Duce, King Vittorio Emmanuele, and German, Hungarian, Spanish and Japanese military missions. The troops first concentrated near Padua (see map). Their task was to dash 230 miles across North Italy to repulse "Red" (French) invaders who had supposedly overwhelmed the frontier and were descending on Turin from the Alpine passes.

The exercises ended, as all maneuvers do, in a heartening rout of the invaders. But there were some "nervous" moments. The Army was temporarily cut in two at the Ticino River when Red bombers "destroyed" a strategically important bridge. Toiling engineers threw a temporary bridge across the Ticino in 16 hours--"a fine page in their glorious tradition," crowed Virginio Gayda's Giornale d'ltalia. New York Times Correspondent Herbert L. Matthews sourly commented that it was "evidently a very solid and complicated bridge," for he had seen Spanish Loyalists in a fraction of that time build structures strong enough to carry tanks across the wider Ebro.

When the bridge was finished, the armored divisions rumbled across to catch up with the troops converging east of Turin. Il Duce, who had flown his own plane from Rimini, watched the maneuvers from the air. He swooped low over the columns crossing the Ticino and was reported to be "pleased at the way they hid themselves from aerial observers."

The Army of the Po completed the dash across North Italy in 60 hours and went into action against the Reds. It had proved that in peacetime it could move quickly into positions to counter a "French" invasion, but from there on what would happen is guesswork. In last week's maneuvers it disposed of the imaginary enemy after several days of "fighting" and pressed on toward Mt. Thabor, an Italian bastion jutting deep into France. Corriere della Sera chestily observed: "If it were possible to carry out the experiment beyond the frontier realism would be perfect. . . ."

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