Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [11]
If Britain and France were weak during the interwar period, it was partly because of the effects of World War I, but only partly. They had, after all, come out of the war better than the Germans or the Russians. Their basic weakness stemmed not from the war, but from the attitudes of their governments, and even more fundamentally, of their citizens. People eventually get the government they want, and the French and British taxpayer chose to support governments whose policies led to military weakness rather than strength. Of course, it was not the fault of the civilian politicians if the money they did allocate to their military advisors and experts was misspent, as it generally was. But the populace of both countries, on the whole, was neither inclined to vote much money for military force, nor to examine too closely the question of what ought to be done with it. At bottom, their basic problem was a lack of national will.
Among the dictatorships, there was no such problem.
3. The Revisionist States
ITALY WAS THE FIRST of the World War I victors to go. She had been the weakest of the great powers in 1914, and her democratic institutions had been the most fragile. Measured in terms of industrial potential and productive capacity, she was a great power only on sufferance.
In 1914, Italy had been allied with Germany and Austria-Hungary as a member of the Triple Alliance. This was a defensive alliance, and when war broke out the Italians stood on the letter of their treaty; as Germany was technically the aggressor, the deliverer of the ultimata that began the war, Italy was not obligated to enter it, and she announced her neutrality. Through the next year both sides angled for Italian support. Most of the territory Italy coveted belonged to the Central Powers—either Austria or Turkey—so in 1915 she entered the war on the side of the Allies.
Through the war, the Italians and the Austrians fought thirteen battles of the Isonzo River before the Germans intervened and beat Italy at Caporetto. Nevertheless, with belated help from France and Britain, Italy survived the war and emerged officially one of the victors in 1918, at cost of 1,180,000 war dead.
The Italians then appeared at Versailles and presented their bill. They could point not only to their one million war dead, but also to a disproportionately large number of blinded and assorted other head wounds, the price of fighting in the rocks and mountains where it was impossible to dig in properly. They found that many of the things that had been used as bait to lure Italy into the war had now been promised to other states as well, or simply outpaced by the tumble of events in the Balkans at the end of the war. Having fought the war not as an ideological crusade, but as a straight nineteenth-century territorial and diplomatic deal, the Italians now felt cheated and went home from the peace talks the least happy of all the winners.
As it did in every other country, the war caused great social and economic dislocation and distress in Italy. Through 1919 and 1920, there was a wave of strikes, lockouts, and riots. Communists and Socialists threatened to take over the country. Action, as usual, bred reaction. Out of the chaos there gradually emerged a dominant group, right wing and authoritarian. It started out as a veterans’ organization, the Fascio di combattimento, or Fascists for short, and its leader, a lantern-jawed orator and writer named Benito Mussolini, became the man of the hour in Italy.
In this terribly confused period it was a measure of the times that Mussolini was the type who could dominate events. Born in 1883, the son of a blacksmith, he had been a teacher in