May 14, 2013

Finest Hour 149, Winter 2010-11

Page 52

Leading Churchill Myths #20 : “Churchill Offered Peace and Security to Mussolini”

Il carteggio Churchill-Mussolini alla luce del processo Guareschi (The Churchill-Mussolini File in light of the Guareschi trial), by Ubaldo Giuliani-Balestrino. Edizioni Settimo Sigillo, Rome, 224 pp., € 20 from Unilibro, http://xrl.us/bh5vs6.

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By Patrizio Romano Giangreco

Mr. Giangreco is a Naples engineer whose assistance to FH dates back to issue #100, when he obtained in translation Luigi Barzini’s marvelous article on Churchill in the 1910 Dundee election. The author thanks Professor Andrew Martin Garvey of the Italian Army Officers’ College and the University of Turin, for his helpful suggestions and advice in preparing this review.

For years conspiracy theorists have cited letters between Churchill and Benito Mussolini, in which Churchill makes various proposals for peace, and even offers to safeguard the “Duce of Fascism” from reprisals in the last days of World War II. They date from just before Italy joined the war to just before Mussolini, who had become head of Hitler’s puppet Italian Social Republic, and his mistress Clara Petacci, were captured and executed by partisans in April 1945.

A Petacci nephew in Arizona has added to the stew by publishing what he says are her diaries. His introduction offers yet another twist: Petacci, it claims, was actually a British spy whose mission was to steal the Churchill letters to protect the Prime Minister.

Il carteggio Churchill-Mussolini doesn’t even bother to illustrate the subject letters, and is so poorly written and documented that it is scarcely credible. But it does present an opportunity to recap the whole sordid story.

The title refers to the first appearance of the “letters” in 1954, when editor Giovanni Guareschi published them in his magazine Candido. Mr. Guareschi also published alleged 1944 letters by Alcide De Gasperi (postwar head of the Italian government), asking the Allies to bomb Rome in order to accelerate German withdrawal from Italy. After a great outcry, they were declared forgeries by an Italian court, which sentenced Guareschi to prison for defamation of a head of government.

The Churchill-Mussolini “letters” played only a minor part in the Guareschi trial, but that hasn’t stopped them from being “revealed” by several books since. Giuliani-Balestrino maintains that they are as genuine as the supposed De Gasperi letters. He is not alone. Renzo De Felice, official historian of Fascism and biographer of Mussolini, also claimed that he had firm proof of validity; unfortunately De Felice died in 1996, his evidence unpublished.

According to Il carteggio Churchill-Mussolini, Il Duce was captured with a cache of documents including Churchill’s “letters.” The plot thickens with a certain “Captain John” (no surname given) whom Churchill allegedly sent to recover the file, who supposedly ordered Mussolini’s execution. Italian historians have labelled this version of Mussolini’s execution la pista inglese (the English trail).

In September 1945, Giuliani-Balestrino tells us, Churchill himself got involved: He traveled to Villa Aprexin on Lake Como, in an area once con-trolled by Mussolini’s rump republic. A photograph of Churchill during his stay was published, we are told, on page 210 of R.G. Grant’s Churchill: An Illustrated Biography.

Churchill’s visit was ostensibly a painting holiday, but its real purpose, Giuliani-Balestrino states, was to retrieve the incriminating Mussolini file containing his embarrassing overtures to the Duce. (With so many people deter-mined to steal the file, it’s a wonder that none of them succeeded.)

The only problem with all this is that Churchill’s villa, where he stayed as a guest of Field Marshal Alexander from 2 to 19 September, was La Rosa, and the photograph of him painting nearby is the one in Grant’s book.

WSC left La Rosa on the 19th for the Villa Pirelli near Genoa, where he was met by Col. Wathen, commander of the Genoa Sub-Area (Giuliani-Balestrino says WSC was traveling incognito under the name of Col. “Waltham.”). A few days later, Churchill went to Monte Carlo, and then to a villa at Antibes on the French Riviera, lent to him by Eisenhower. Martin Gilbert’s Volume VIII describes WSC’s travels in detail on pages 134-51.

Giuliani-Balestrino doesn’t bother to show us the alleged letters, so let us turn to the most persuasive of the conspiracy theorists, Arrigo Petacco, who illustrates them in his Dear Benito— Caro Winston (Milan 1985): salutations not found in the “letters” themselves.

Ignore the stilted English, and that nobody knows the provenance, and that no technical analysis of paper or signatures was conducted. Just reading them destroys their credibility.

22 April 1940: This letter is from Chartwell, which was shut during the war—not that a home address would be used in a State communication. Also, Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty on 22 April, was unlikely to be responding to propositions from a foreign head of government. The “proposals” it says the Privy Council (not War Cabinet?) “broadly accepted” are unstated. The signature looks blotchy and uneven, as if reproduced and pasted in place; two words are misspelled; two paragraphs begin with lower-case letters; and the type is not the large font used in Churchill’s official letters.

15 May 1940: Some of the words (but not WSC’s words of determination) are actually those Churchill did write (on May 16th according to his memoirs). But Prime Ministers wrote on Downing Street not OHMS stationery, and would not likely have used the grandiose title “Duce of Fascism.”

31 March 1945: The third letter finally gets the notepaper right, but one can hardly imagine Churchill writing in such sugary and soothing tones to a man he had repeatedly vilified since 1940— even assuming Mussolini was in a position to make “suggestions.” Again, the signature is suspect, another word is misspelled, and the large type font is absent. And why, on a letterhead reading “Whitehall,” would the sender add the word “London”?

Petacco’s only published Mussolini letter, 18 May 1940, is a handwritten draft of the words in his official letter to Churchill, who dated it the 16th, possibly in error, in Their Finest Hour.

Serious Italian historians and courts concluded long ago that the Churchill “letters” to Mussolini are transparent frauds. Churchill admitted in Their Finest Hour that he had once expressed admiration for the Duce, whom he first considered a bulwark against Bolshevism. Obviously, however, the admiration came to an end when Mussolini allied Italy with Nazi Germany. The Prime Minister who would have “no truce or parley” with Hitler and his “grizzly gang” would never have parleyed with the man he referred to as Hitler’s “Italian jackal.”