The Fall of Mussolini: His Own Story

by Benito Mussolini, Frances Frenaye (Translator), Max Ascoli (Editor)

Preface: The Mussolini Story--Ascoli
Editor's Note
Table of Events
The Fall of Mussolini
Foreword
From El Alamein to Mareth
From Pantelleria to Sicily
The Landing in Sicily
Invasion & Crisis
From the Meeting w/Hitler at Feltre to the Night Session
of the Fascist Grand Council
The Grand Council Meeting
From Villa Savoia to Ponza
From Ponza to La Maddalena to the Gran Sasso
The Dynasty Sounds a 1st Call of Alarm
Toward Surrender
September on the Gran Sasso D'Italia
The Crown Council & Surrender
Eclipse or Decline?
A Stork on the Gran Sasso
One of the Many: The Count of Mordano
The Drama of Dual Rule: From the March on Rome to the
Speech of January 3rd
The Drama of Dual Rule: From the Establishment of the
Grand Council to the Conspiracy of 7/43
One of the Many: The Executioner
The Meeting of 10/15/40 at Palazzo Venezia
Appendix
Key to Names & Places

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Biography, Italy, Memoir, World War II

212 pages, Hardcover

First published July 18, 1944

About the author

Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was an Italian dictator who founded and led the National Fascist Party (PNF). He was Prime Minister of Italy from the March on Rome in 1922 until his deposition in 1943, as well as Duce of Italian fascism from the establishment of the Italian Fasces of Combat in 1919 until his summary execution in 1945 by Italian partisans. As dictator of Italy and principal founder of fascism, Mussolini inspired and supported the international spread of fascist movements during the inter-war period.

Reviews

[Benjamin Stahl · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one took a while to grow on me, and for a good chunk of it - at least a third of its length - I was fixing for an easy two stars, and a review something like: "An exercise in flagrant self-apologia that is as misleading as it is tedious". However, slowly, very slowly, I came to feel the groove of the unevenly written memoirs by this, one of history's more recent, and yet overshadowed, villains.

As the attractively-named other guy in Hitler's triumvirate of aggressive Axis powers, I have long been drawn to learn about the ill-regarded, and ill-fated, personage of Benito Mussolini. After a few stumbles, I have finally found a book that, while far from great, finally allowed me to get my head around who exactly he was, what he did, why he did it, and what the hell was going through his head when he chose to partner up with one of the most evil men in history and drive his beloved country nearly to destruction.

Mussolini seems to have been a lot of things, and many of them were not good. Yet, he also seems to offer a much more accessible and even personable case study than Adolf Hitler into how passion and a zealous love of country can become corrupted by greed, delusion, pettiness and stupidity. It would be highly inappropriate to say the man was anything less than what history has condemned him as: a Fascist dictator, a suppressive totalitarian, an incompetent tactician, a committed ally to the Nazi regime ...

Yet - and God help me, I worry the admission could one day come back to bite to me - I can't help feeling sorry for the guy. My sympathy is not related to what he stood for and facilitated, but rather its root lies in a deeper feeling that, in his earnest delusions about resurrecting the glory of Rome, and his being the Italian sequel to Napoleon Bonaparte (another highly polarising figure), his is really a tragic story of a man whose zeal and ambition led him blindly into making one of the gravest Faustian bargains of all time.

And it all fell down upon him in the end. Even though the communist partisans who thwarted his eventual escape into Switzerland were merciful enough to simply shoot him (and his poor devoted mistress), his corpse was given to a savage mob of civilians who famously desecrated his body, mutilating it beyond recognition, so that his battered head looked more like a comically pathetic paper-mache representation of a human being by the end, as it dangled upside from the metal bars of a petrol station.

The memoirs themselves are frustrating. They are exasperating in their stubborn refusal to accept any personal blame or responsibility. Just like the best of all inept rulers who inevitably see their house of cards scattered to the winds, just about every misstep, after careful analysis, can be, according to Mussolini, attributed to this or that traitor, the lack of moral courage in Italians generally speaking, the advice of appointed experts, anyone and anything beyond their own sphere of culpability. It sounds like a lot of other people who have led their country since, some of them right now.

But, throughout the convoluted process of Mussolini's captivity following his overthrow, the tone of the book shifts into something else, and whatever its contradictions and inconsistencies, the reader is given a fascinating glimpse into the soon-to-be-brutally-pulverised head, where they can witness the depths to which a superficially benevolent mind can find refuge within the paralysing mentality of victimhood, clinging to a curtain of delusion only just able to mask the carnage of the stage behind.

Even better are the appendices, which offer something of a corrective to Mussolini's colossal attempts to rewrite and obfuscate his own history. I feel kind of conflicted about whether I should give this three or four stars. I have a feeling it will grow in my esteem after a while. But, at least for now, let's just give it three stars, since a reasonable portion of it is not all that good, and I also would hate to give the impression that I am, in any way, a Fascist sympathiser. I guess it is just my empathy which prevents me from being the type to gleefully cry: "He got what he deserved, and I hope he rots in Hell, the Fascist pig" ...

[Steven Godin · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Churchill's speech of September 22nd proves that already by the last ten days of August the principal clauses at least of the unconditional surrender has been fixed at Lisbon. Among them was one proposing the handing over of my person to the enemy. This is without precedent in the history of mankind!"

"By early summer of 1943 the relationship between the two forces of the dyarchy has profoundly altered. The whole Fascist structure—Government, Party, syndicates and administration—seemed to be suffering from the toll of war. Tens of thousands of Fascists had fallen on the field of battle, among them no fewer than 2.000 Party officials. That is a fact which it would be criminal to forget."

"All Italy in successive stages has become a battlefield. The tragic truth is this: Italy has been largely destroyed. First, it was the cities which underwent the still continuing savage and ferocious raids by the Anglo-Saxon liberators, then it was the turn of the smaller towns, villages and hamlets. More than once in her changing and troubled but none the less glorious history Italy has been overrun by invaders; but all—except for the Arabs—were of European extraction. Today what may well, without rhetorical platitude, be called the sacred soil of out nation is being overrun by every race in the world."

[Miles Watson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Insights into the minds of tyrants are relatively rare. Insights into the minds of modern tyrants are rarer yet and often paint only crude or partial pictures of the man in question. For example, Hitler wrote "Mein Kampf" long before he took power in Germany, so the volumes he dictated to Hess in Landsberg Prison are merely the semi-coherent outpourings of a jailed revolutionist far removed from power, not the conquerer of Europe who came along later. "The Fall of Mussolini: His Own Story" is a strange book and quite limited in scope, and while it does give us some interesting clues as to what Mussolini was thinking and feeling toward the end of his life and career, it is hardly a comprehensive look into his mind.

That having been said, I found this ramble interesting on several levels, so I'll start with what works: having been deposed in 1943 following a slew of humiliating defeats and disasters on every front, the man some Italians dubbed "Sawdust Caesar" was rescued from his captivity via a daring commando raid personally ordered by Hitler. Mussolini was then installed at Salo as the figurehead ruler of a puppet Fascist republic which consisted of about half of Italy, and remained in that diminished and emasculated position until he was caught and executed by his own people in 1945. It was from this half-gilded cage that he wrote this book. In it, he tries to explain how he arrived at this nadir and who was responsible for it. In doing so he reveals quite a bit about himself. First and foremost is the fact that he was quite a skilled writer. This comes as little surprise because he was in effect a journalist for most of his life even as he was also a solider and revolutionary, but as a wordsmith he's far superior to Hitler: "Mein Kampf" is tolerable only in its last act, when Hitler describes the salad days of the Nazi Party. That part reads like a political thriller of sorts and is fascinating and engrossing. The rest is a muddy dreck of half-baked ideas slewed out in complete disorder. Mussolini, in contrast, is better read, better educated, and more imaginative, not to mention more concise. He is an intelligent man capable of making historical, philosophical, and even humorous observations in the same paragraph: his awesome life experience is present in much of his wordplay. Second, intentionally or unintentionally the Duce lets us see him as a man deeply wounded by his mortification, but equally wounded and humiliated by the fall of Italy from a Great Power (in 1939) to a broken battleground, half-conquered by the Allies, half-conquered by the Germans. It is said that if a politician lives long enough, he will live to see all of his accomplishments in ruins, and Mussolini fit this bill times ten. He is aware of this, and does not entirely play the victim...not entirely.

The bad news is that "Fall," beneath some elaborate smokescreens laid down by Mussolini at the beginning, is really an attempt to shift blame from himself to one of his former henchmen, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, who he paints at once as Benedict Arnold, Judas, and Brutus all in one: a scheming, cowardly, shameless traitor consumed by unrelenting ambition. Mussolini begins the book by describing Italy's history prior to the war and to some extent, the history of the Fascist movement and how its decision (his decision) not to seize total control of the nation but rather share power with the King, weakened his grip from the start and sowed the seeds of later troubles. He then tries to argue that the major war he started in 1940, which led to his downfall, was neither more nor less unpopular than his earlier colonial conquests, which is a dubious position to take, but one he takes firmly. Failures on the battlefield are always the result of treachery or ineptitude and never the troops, nor himself, for equipping those troops with such miserable weapons nor believing, against all evidence, that his armies were powerful and could fight modern opponents when in fact they were ill-suited to anything but the slaughter of Albanians and Ethiopians. He constantly alludes to being lied to, and while I've no doubt he was, he was also self-deluded to a degree that would be laughable if so much blood hadn't run as a result. But the back half of the book is simply an attack on Badoglio and to a lesser extent, the King, and I believe I know why. The man closest to Mussolini who did in fact conspire to topple him from power was his son-in-law, Ciano, whose entire career came as a result of marrying Edda Mussolini, and this betrayal must have enraged the Duce. But Ciano was shot for his betrayal, thus satisfying the Duce's (and Hitler's) desire for vengeance and closing the chapter in Mussolini's mind. Badoglio, a critical politico-military figure in Italy for decades, and one who shamelessly rode Mussolini's coat-tails, turned that coat and handed Italy to the Allies in 1943 while promising eternal loyalty to Mussolini and Hitler out of the other side of his mouth. This act placed him outside Mussolini's power and lined up him for the role he eventually took, prime minister of postwar Italy. To be wronged and simultaneously without possibility of revenge is the definition of impotence, and in "Fall" Mussolini was an impotent ex-dictator turned puppet figurehead whose only means of attack was to try and ensure everyone knew that Badoglio was a rat. So he took it, and spent half his little book showing Badoglio was at the heart of every infamy that befell both Mussolini personally and the Italian state and people at large. I regard it thus as a historical curiosity rather than an important work. However, and this is a big however, the book is prefaced by a five-chapter essay by Max Ascoli that is excellent to the point of sublimity. Beautifully written and marvelously insightful, it fills the yawning gaps in Mussolini's narrative while supplying a history of Mussolini's life and career that doesn't read like history at all. His view of Fascism is especially interesting: he describes it as a "carnival" meant for show and to provide simplistic answers to complex problems, a lengthy yet temporary phenomenon that Italians implicity embraced and then so swiftly abandoned that it was as if it had never existed at all. And in some ways this describes Mussolini himself....

[Andrew John · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting account of an underrated individual from his own hand. More useful in seeing the mans character than deciphering his decisions or philosophy. Nevertheless worth a read if you are interested in going past the propaganda.

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

After reading Kirkpatrick's biography of Mussolini, I was reminded of a book which Linda had picked up, presumably for a class at Loyola University, years ago, then left behind when she moved out. It was Mussolini's own The Fall of Mussolini, originally published in Milan in 1944 and first translated into English in this edition in 1948. Written after the fall of Italy, Mussolini's imprisonment by the Allies and his "rescue" by the Germans, it detail his own view of the collapse of Italian fascism from the setbacks in Africa through the invasions of Sicily (in which Dad participated) and the mainland up until the time of publication. It is not a happy tale, Mussolini's "restoration" to "power" in the Salo Republic in the north of Italy being a sham masking effective Nazi control.

Some editions of Mussolini's autobiography include this work.

[Jorge · Rating 2 out of 5]

Más allá de ideologías, resulta un relato muy interesante sobre la «caída del fascismo» de 1943.