"Formidable Juncture"

Fascism, in its 21st year, faced its most dreaded hour. In Sicily the Allied armies were overrunning not a colony, not an island outpost, but the second largest of Italy's regioni. In a sense, they were probing the accumulated rot under the Fascist house.

The Party's strong men had striven, ever since the swift collapse of the Axis in Tunisia (TIME, June 21), to sandbag and shore up their structure. On June 24, before an emergency meeting of the Fascist Party Directorate, the aging Duce had spoken privately. Now, almost on the eve of the Allied invasion, Mussolini's words were broadcast to his people.

The Duce promised over & over a cleanup of black marketeers, an increase in "fundamental rations--bread, alimentary paste and fats," a closing down of "luxury hotels where certain evacuees often behave scandalously."

But the biggest scapegoat was still the Anglo-Saxon enemy. To Allied promises to deal fairly with a non-Fascist Italy, the Duce replied: "Whoever believes in the enemy's suggestions is a criminal, a traitor and a bastard. . . . The enemy would disarm Italy down to her very sports guns. . . . Italy would become a geographical feature. . . . At this formidable juncture the Party must be the moving force of the nation's life. . . ."

In Sicily the Allies would find out how effectively, or ineffectively, the Duce had rallied one segment of his countrymen to Fascism's bedraggled banner. A fierce, choleric people, once given to brigandage and secret societies like the Maffia, the Sicilians did not readily take to Fascism. Italy's best haters, they have hated above all the Germans on their island soil.

In Sicily the Allies might uncover the true temper of Italy after three years of battle, privation and defeat; her will to resist further, her loyalty to Fascism.

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