Working, Breeding, Enduring

Italy had amassed all the necessary ingredients for a first-class revolution. The war effort continued apathetic, ineffectual and, to many Italians, completely senseless. Favored Fascist bigwigs prospered from wartime grafts. Benito Mussolini lost additional face as Nazi officials took over key posts in vital ministries. Inflation increased. The tightened food-rationing system reeled along under the weight of flagrant violations. Military morale, ever feeble, ebbed to a new low as the British Army pushed into Libya (see p. 19).

The ingredients were there, but the will to combine and ignite them was pathetically lacking last week. The people watched the country's slow disintegration, its gradual absorption by its Axis ally, and did not move. After 16 months in Rome for the New York Herald Tribune, Correspondent Allen Raymond, writing from "somewhere in Europe," thought he knew why:

"The Italian people have lost faith in Mussolini, faith in their King, and sometimes it seems ... as though they have lost faith in themselves, except in their capacity to work hard, to breed, to endure hard standards of living and to survive.

". . . Apathy and pessimism grip the people. . . . They pray for some miracle that may bring them peace early. Large sections of the people don't care what kind of a peace it is, and many are far more afraid of a German victory than a British. . . . The people seem now a people peculiarly devoid of a capacity for hatred of anyone.

"They are an individualistic people which a generation of Fascism has been unable to regiment. . . . They know they are in the grip of a tyranny. Some few like it and get fat on it. Most of them seem to accept it with a grumbling resignation, and the capacity for revolt does not appear to be, at present, in them."

Pungent facts and estimates documented Allen Raymond's sympathetic diagnosis of an ailing people he describes as "one of the kindest, warmest-hearted and most considerate" he ever encountered:

> Of Italy's vaunted military strength (Benito Mussolini boasted that 8,000,000 bayonets would prosecute Italian claims): at no time have there been more than 2,500,000 men in the armed forces, and more than that number could not be equipped.

> Of the Air Force: of 6,000 planes at the war's outbreak, "not many more than 2.000 still exist." New plane production is not likely to go over 400 units a month.

> Of the Navy: "Probably one-fourth of the famous submarine fleet has been sunk. Surface vessels hug the harbors because of lack of oil, disrepair and a healthy respect for British gun power."

Reporter Raymond found food in plenty in Italy--for those who could pay bootleg prices. A continuing stream of money-laden German "observers" bought everything in sight. In September alone 7,554 charges of bootlegging, hoarding and similar offenses resulted in 6,592 convictions. The Government's reaction was to broaden the food-rationing system to include all types of meats, including entrails.

The Fascist Party was disintegrating, and the leadership well knew it. Last week's news supported Correspondent Raymond on this point. To preserve the Party's "vigor and freshness and to insure its perpetuation," 17 additional "vice federal secretaries" were created. Young (averaging 30), veterans of Ethiopia, Spain and Greece, they were detailed to unspecified work in the north and south of Italy where, a censor-wise New York Times correspondent pointed out, "loyalty and enthusiasm are most appreciated these days." The press continued a steady drumbeat of Italy's military prowess and the glory to come.

On the diplomatic front Italian-U.S. relations strained to a new tension point. Secret police arrested brawny, young (35) Hiram Gruber Woolf, rector of St. Paul's American (Episcopal) Church and Rome's only Protestant minister. A protesting U.S. diplomat was told that the Rev. Mr. Woolf was being held incommunicado for investigation on suspicion of intelligence activities having nothing to do with his church work. Police surveillance of the depleted American colony was intensified.

Fuming parishioners sat grimly through a clergyless, "purely American" Thanksgiving service. A vestryman read Franklin Roosevelt's significant, Axis-slanted Thanksgiving Proclamation and a pointed, cryptic scripture lesson ending with Matthew, VI: 34: Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

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