Il Duce's Volcano

BALCONY EMPIRE -- Reynolds and Eleanor Packard--Oxford ($3).

After seven years of scanning Fascist Italy and its wars, United Press Correspondents Reynolds & Eleanor Packard locked themselves in a Manhattan hotel room one day last summer, asked themselves a question: "Why not make our second front in Italy?" By the time they had answered it to their own satisfaction, they had written this book.

The advantages of an Italian front, the Packards believe, are many. On their list, compiled when the U.S. invasion of North Africa was still a military code word:

>-"The great mass of discontented Italians . . . would rise up. . . ."

> "Up to the summer of 1942 [the north west coast] had . . . only a few coastal batteries, pillboxes and a few outmoded fighting planes."

>-"The number of German divisions already in Italy would not be enough to stem a large invading force."

> "Once Italy was in Anglo-American hands, the French and Yugoslavs would probably facilitate our entrance into their countries. . . ."

Neo-Roman Roads. The Packards' second-front strategy, for which the rest of their book is sprawling, disorganized documentation, emanates less from the armchair than from the bouncing seats of cars on Mussolini's roads. To watch the Fascist empire at war, the Packards jolted over thousands of miles of Neo-Roman roads in Abyssinia, Spain, Albania, North Africa and Italy.

In Ethiopia the Packards saw lagging Marshal Badoglio drive like mad to reach Addis Ababa at the head of his army. They also watched Blackshirt politicians arrive by plane to snatch a share in the victory publicity. Count Ciano took a hotel room next to the Packards' and joined them one night for a drink. "He was bubbling over with enthusiasm. 'England is through,' he said, 'or she would have taken a stronger stand against us. . . . We are ready for the future. We have the only experienced army in Europe as a result of our Ethiopian training.' "

When the Italian Army went to Spain soon afterward, the Packards followed. They watched the wavering policies of the democracies alternately bolster the Nationalists and the Republicans. Even in the first winter of the war they heard how Franco's men abhorred their Italian allies and rejoiced when the Spanish Reds massacred them. When the war ended, Franco bargained well for leftover Axis materials. "Both Italy and Germany were charging merely second-hand prices for the [military] materiel, but the real payment was to be made on a politico-military basis in the future: Spain was to aid the Axis in the war to come."

Tunisian Maginot Line. When the Fascist Chamber of Deputies began to clamor for French territory, the Packards went to Tunis. Reynolds visited the Berthome (Tunisian Maginot) Line, which "was located between the Libyan frontier and Medenine and consisted mostly of elaborate underground works where whole battalions could hide. There were tank traps and miles of barbed wire, intended specifically to halt cavalry and camel corps. . . . Every oasis was a fortress in itself, complete with machine-gun nests, concrete redoubts, subterranean air-raid shelters, and still more barbed wire entanglements."

The French were reluctant to show Reynolds Packard all their secrets at Bizerte. But he discovered that the great base "had drydocks, machine and repair shops, underground cisterns for fuel, blown out of the rock and safe against naval or aerial bombardments, coaling facilities, arsenals, barracks and a hospital, all protected by vast fortifications."

Perfidious Italy. With a balance as delicate as a tightrope walker's, the Packards have picked out the slippery trails of Axis diplomacy. Just after Britain and France declared war on Germany, Mussolini, still neutral, outdid himself in diplomatic duplicity. "Reports were current in Rome . . . that Mussolini had even accepted orders for war supplies from the British, including 40,000 pairs of army boots. . . ."

But the Fascist press continued praising the Nazis and castigating the British. When the British Ambassador, Sir Percy Loraine, protested to Ciano, tears brimmed in the count's handsome eyes as he explained, "you must surely realize that these editorials are merely the cover under which it is possible for us to work out better and more friendly relations with England."

Next the German correspondents in Rome made a show of protest against Anglo-Italian friendliness, particularly against golf games between Ciano and the Counselor of the British Embassy. The two maneuvers were so convincing that the British and American diplomats began to believe there was a chance of splitting the Axis. Mussolini could relish the spectacle of the British Ambassador suggesting that correspondents suppress news of the new friendship, on the grounds that it might obstruct Anglo-Italian rapprochement.

Old & Disillusioned. Although he may deceive the world, Mussolini does not deceive the Italians. "The Italians are an extremely old and disillusioned race. . . . Fourteen hundred years of living under various conquerors of one race or another have rubbed away much of their idealism. ..." Passively his people oppose Mussolini for two reasons: "He crushed democracy in Italy; and second, he lined up Italy with Nazi Germany."

In the attack on Greece, Reynolds Packard (with a forged pass) heard a propaganda official instruct Italian journalists to write of the welcome, with flowers, bread and wine, of the Fascist Army by the Greeks. An Italian general confessed to Packard that he had pushed his troops so fast, in order to take a mountain bridgehead before the Germans reached it, that it had cost him 2,000 unnecessary casualties.

The Packards collected the cartoons making fun of privations, by which the Roman Propaganda Ministry attempted to lighten the people's disgust with food and clothes rationing and the flourishing black market. They saw that the Germans took advantage of the immunity from bombing accorded to Rome because of the Vatican, by using Rome's railroad stations as transfer points for Africabound German troops and munitions. With fists and Eleanor Packard's heels they battered a few Fascists who objected to their tearing down anti-American posters (including a cartoon of Mrs. Roosevelt wearing a toilet seat for a necklace).

Italians will not fight well in World War II, the Packards conclude, because: 1) they have had little fighting tradition since the fall of the Roman Empire; 2) they abhor regimentation; 3) the military services, particularly the air force, are rotten with party politics and inefficiency; 4) their equipment is uniformly poor.

If the Packards are right, the Duce's balcony empire now rests uneasily on a volcano, which, like Vesuvius, may erupt at the next earth tremor.

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