Giddy Year

"Comrades this is a memorable, solemn day. It is just a year since our entrance into the war. A year filled with events, giddy, historical developments." So last week said the loudest noise in Italy.

Historical indeed has been Italy's first year of World War II: the year in which it lost its East African Empire, the reputation of its Armies, even the illusion of being a first-class power. It remained for II Duce himself to bring out the definitive adjective, "giddy."

Last week, as Benito Mussolini addressed his obediently enthusiastic Chamber of Fasces and Corporations in Rome, the people of Italy herded around their radios had every reason to be slightly giddy. For Italy's most ruinous year had become, in dizzy oratorical retrospect, a vista of conquest.

In his familiar hell-roaring vein, the Premier slid over defeats, bellowed the might of the Axis. "It is absolutely mathematical that in April, even if nothing had happened to change the Balkan situation, the Italian Army would have overcome and annihilated the Greek Army." Almost all of Greece would be occupied by Italian troops. Italian Albania would be extended. Italy's dead in Africa ("I cannot tell you today when or how") would be avenged.

Choicest rhetoric was reserved for U.S. intervention and President Roosevelt. En try of the U.S. into the war, said Mussolini, would only postpone Britain's defeat, would bring on a dictatorship in the U.S.

"When one wants to remember a dictator in the pure classical meaning of the term," spouted Dictator Mussolini, "one cites Sulla. Well, Sulla seems to us a modest amateur compared to Delano Roosevelt."

Accented as it was, "del ano" in Italian means "of the anus." Benito Mussolini has always found that the best defense is to be offensive.

The second loudest noise in Italy was tuned to the same wave length. In the Giornale d'ltalia, Fascist Loudspeaker Virginio Gayda wishfully declared that Government intervention in the North American Aviation Inc. strike forecast "civil war" in the U.S.

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