Ciano's Diaries

CIANO became Italian Foreign Minister in June, 1936, and left office in February, 1943. An American journalist who was on friendly terms with him made it known in an article contributed to the Saturday Evening Post of December 23, 1939, that Ciano was in the habit of keeping diaries. They already filled three small books, “one bound in red and two in blue,” were written in Ciano’s “small, smooth Italian hand,” and also showed “notations in another hand, the extravagant jotting of Il Duce.”

The Ciano Diaries: 1949—1943 (Doubleday, $4.00), published “complete and unabridged,” start with January 1, 1939, and a single book contained the entries of that year. What about the other two books which, according to the American journalist, existed at the end of 1939? They obviously covered the second half of 1936 and the years 1937 and 1938. They would throw’ a good deal of light on the immediate diplomatic aftermath of the Ethiopian War, the beginnings of the German-Italian “Axis,”the Spanish War, the rape of Austria, the massacre of Czechoslovakia, and Mr. Eden’s and Lord Halifax’s dealings with the Italian dictator. Are those books lost forever? Where are they? Will they be published some day?

We are today given half a loaf. Half a loaf is better than none. But have we before us Ciano’s diaries as they were written day by day, or were they reworked afterwards?

The more one peruses Ciano’s pages, the more one asks oneself why he kept the diaries. As an aid to his memory when the need for refreshing it arose? As a closet in which to vent and bury his conceit, his hopes, his fears, his haired? For posterity?

There are no traces of Mussolini’s “extravagant jottings” in the diaries as they are now put before us. Were those jottings in 1939 dreamed up by the American journalist? The Duce knew that Ciano was keeping a diary. Would Ciano have dared to couch in writing his not always flattering opinions about the Duce when the latter might take the fancy of going through his Minister’s records?

To be sure, the diaries are the personal work of Ciano and of no one else. Yet, while their authenticity is above suspicion, there is in them an abundance of foresight that is rather suspicious.

In December, 1943, while in prison, Ciano drew up a statement (obviously intended to be smuggled out by some guard ) in which he took care to say that, his notes had not been written to be released to the press. “Not a single word of what I have written in my diaries is false or exaggerated or dictated by selfish resentment; it is all just what I have seen or heard”; “events are photographed without retouching, and the impressions reported are the first, the most genuine, uninfluenced by the criticism or wisdom of last years.” Did he surmise that doubts about his veracity might pop up in some mind? In December, 1943, he maintained that he had been opposed to the German alliance in May, 1939. But this version clashes with the entries made in May, 1939. When are we to believe him:

If all the entries had been made on the very days to which they are attributed, we should radically revise our opinions about their author. The man would not have been what everybody thought him to be — a playboy who had married the boss’s daughter and who was more expert in pushing out his jaw and in caressing the legs of blondes and brunettes than in working his brains, Ciano, in his diaries, appears as a man endowed with a large amount of common sense and a comparatively independent mind, who never liked the German-Italian alliance, who longed for better relations with England oxen in the moments of Germany’s most striking military triumphs, and who always tried to tell Mussolini the truth, as far as Mussolini permitted anyone to tell him the truth. Is this wisdom authentic?

Since examination of the manuscript arouses suspicion about the chronological authenticity of many entries, the document should be used with as much caution as in dealing with personal recollections put into writing for self-defense after a lapse of time, and not as if dealing with notes taken day by day with the sole purpose of helping the authors memory if need should arise.

But even if Ciano’s diaries cannot claim that credit of immediate sincerity which is due to notes taken in the thick of the fray with no thought to their publication, they are still valuable as firsthand evidence on what the ruling clique of the dictatorship was during its last years. Reading them is not a waste of time.

I have never felt any respect for Il Duce and the men and women who formed his entourage. But I have been astounded by the evidences of brainlessness, egotism, cowardice, corruption, or utter insanity and criminality with which Mussolini s son-inlaw’s recollections overflow.

At the center of the Fascist sewer, towering above all other rats, stands the Great Rat. In June, 1940, he may still abstain from joining Hitler in his adventure. When the German-ltalian treaty of alliance was signed in May, 1939, Hitler was informed that Italy would be unable to go to war for three years. But he says that “honor compels him to march with Germany.”He repeats that “States, like individuals, must have a moral standard on which no compromise can be made; the course of honor cannot be disregarded.”

Moral standards? Honor? What does Mussolini mean? He means that “the prospect of an imminent clash in which he might remain an outsider disturbs and humiliates him.” “The Italians, after having heard my warlike propaganda for eighteen years, cannot understand how I can become the herald of peace, now that Europe is in flames. There is no other explanation except the military unprepared ness of the country, and even for this I am made responsible — me, mind you, who have always proclaimed the power of our armed forces. “It is not possible that of all the people I should become the laughing-stock of Europe.” Honor is his personal prestige, meaning military prestige and territorial expansion. “He wants to create enough claims to be entitled to his share of the spoils,” writes his son-in-law. “ He wants his part of the booty.”

Lack of funds, lack of raw materials, lack of equipment, poor training of officers and men, make his air force, his army, and to a lesser extent his navy unfit to wage a war that is not a bluff. His more optimistic advisers think that any war lasting more than a few months would end in disaster. Yet ho is sure that “in the struggle between the forces of conservatism and those of revolution, it is always the latter that win.” He multiplies and sends to the fighting front divisions which exist only in his imagination. He gives orders for naval battles that do not take place because the enemy fleet cannot be located. He gloats about victories that never existed. He lives in an absurd world made of his prepossessions, delusions, and megalomania. He believes only what meets his own longings. Ho loathes and puts aside anyone who tells him the truth. His Chief of Police notices his restlessness and tells Ciano that the Duce should take an intensive anti-syphilitic cure. Perhaps syphilis is the deus ex machina in the play.

The men who surround him are no better than he, though nobody is worse. The King, “the little man who is seated on a great chair beside which stands a gigantic bronze statue of Mussolini.’ is Mussolini’s Saneho Panza; not at all stupid, but cowardly, he always starts by saving no and always ends by saving yes. Ciano’s judgment about some princes of the Royal House is as sharp as it is short: “Those two imbeciles, Bergamo and Pistoia, have commands: my son should have one, too, for he has a head as good as that of the Duke of Aosta.’

The Duke of Aosta surrendered his sixty-five battalions in Ethiopia to the English almost without fighting. The Count of Turin is hoarding soap “to help wash his thirty-five thousand whores.” The Duke of Spoleto, when they look for him to give him the news that he will be King of Croatia, is found in a Milan hotel, in the company of a young girl. When the delegates of his newborn kingdom see him and approve of him, Ciano comments: “ Let us hope that it will be the same when they hear him speak.

The army chiefs compete advantageously with the scions of the Royal House. If they are asked the number of available first-line planes, and one expert” thinks of 3006 while another says 982, the higher figure is adopted, and Il Duce is happy. Badoglio, opportunist and servile, mistrusted and hated by Mussolini, resigns from his position as chief of all armed forces as soon as disaster materializes in Greece, but when he sees that Mussolini would accept his resignation, he endeavors to withdraw it, too laic. His successor, Cavallero, is “a perfect peddler, ready to follow the path of lies, intrigue and imbroglio,”"a clown who would go so far as to bow to the public lavatories if this would be helpful to him"; “when it is a question of grabbing, he can cheat even the Germans.”

Graziani, endowed with “more ambition than brains,” “after having emptied Italy in order to supply Libya,” loses Cyrenaiea to the British in a few days. “He had a refuge built in a Roman tomb at Gyrene, sixty or seventy feet deep. Guzzoni, Undersecretary of War and Assistant Chief of the General Staff, “a small man with such a big paunch and with dyed hair,” is “untrustworthy” and good only to “stir up trouble.”

De Bono, the man who made such a mess of everything in Eritrea at the end of 1935, was always an idiot, but now he is old on top of it. Soddu, sent to Albania to save the situation, “maintains that the arrival of a few regiments of Alpine troops would definitely eliminate all danger,” but a few weeks later announces that “any military action has become impossible,”and while everything goes to wrack and ruin he devotes his evening hours to composing music for the films. And so on, and so on.

Civilians are as bad as professional soldiers, women no less than men. It would be a comic opera were it not a horrible tragedy.

The transit it ion from the Italian original seems very well done. But the volume has no index of personal names. The Failed Nations Organization should pass an international law according to which anyone who prints such a book without an index should be hanged.