What I Watched: The tenth episode of Crusade in Europe, a documentary series adapted from Dwight Eisenhower’s book of the same name. The adaptation was done by Fred Feldkamp, and narrated by Westbrook van Voorhes. This episode aired at 9:00 PM on ABC on July 7, 1949, and is available on DVD and Amazon Prime.
What happened: Crusade skips back a bit to the invasion of Sicily, and the “disillusionment” of the Italian citizenry. Mussolini is unexpectedly removed from office, replaced by Bagdolio. Italians celebrate their release from the restraints of fascism and the onerous duty of war.
We then skip back even further to the post-WWI Italy, and Mussolini’s rise to power. After seeing the strength of the fascist movement, the “timid” Italian king makes him the head of the government. Mussolini begins to present himself as a general, and emphasize the role of the military. As part of this shift, he invades Ethiopia. As Crusade presents it, the war consists of brave but primitive Ethiopians being mowed down by the superior technology of the fascists. The League of Nation “objects ineffectually”, but Mussolini continues his aggression, contributing arms and men to Franco’s cause. After that, he conquers Albania.
Germany and Italy become allies, a friendship that will last for the rest of the dictators’ lives. After World War II breaks out, Mussolini maintains a status of official neutrality until France is almost beaten, at which point Italy joins in to claim glory, despite being unable to capture any French territory themselves. This would prove to be a mistake — perhaps if Mussolini had remained equal, he could reign for decades more like Franco.
Being now formally allied with Germany, Italy joins in on the defense of Africa. They also launch an invasion of Greece which doesn’t go particularly well. In North Africa, the Italian units also prove ineffectual, losing to British regiments despite numerical superiority. Mussolini begins meeting more frequently with Hitler, but it isn’t enough to save his job.
However, Nazi troops rescue Mussolini from his Italian imprisonment. With press freedom restored, Italians learn “the truth” about their German allies, including a friendly-fire incident in which the Nazis had killed hundreds of Italian. Near Milan, an Italian mob finally keeps up with Mussolini and kill him as he seeks to flees. As van Voorhes narrates, “the first of the major fascist dictators to seize power was the first to lose it.”
What happened: Like “America’s Unpreparedness”, this episode takes a break from the main narrative of Crusade in Europe in favour of a more essayistic look at one detail of the war. As such, it also departs from Eisenhower’s voice — there’s nothing in the episode to suggest that this material was in the Crusade book, and Ike’s narration is again limited to short clips. On a practical level, these are “filler” episodes, letting Crusade meet its twenty-six episode length without decompressing Eisenhower’s narrative too much.
Thematically, we can see “The Rise and Fall of a Dictator” as one of the early examples of what would become the dominant narrative of fascism. In this narrative, fascism arose because of the moral weakness of European society: ordinary civilians were fooled and temped for the boasts of fascism, while civil society and the leaders of other nations were too timid to oppose fascist leaders until it was too late. Europe is later punished for its weakness by the devastation of war.
(For what it’s worth, I find this account more convincing than one that posits fascism as some elemental evil, although obviously it’s far from the full story.)
This narrative provided a satisfying ideological justification for both America’s dominance of the postwar West and the rehabilitation of Axis countries into American allies — it turned out that the Germans, Italians and Japanese weren’t really evil after all, just foolish and in need of America’s guidance. “Rise and Fall of a Dictator” is actually fairly sympathetic to the Italians — they’re portrayed stereotypically as emotional and faintly ridiculous, but also as people who were victims of Mussolini just as much as the Ethiopians. At one point, they’re even described as being caught between “two enemies”, a very surprising way to describe the Allies. Then, as I’ve described before, there are the pro-war ideological uses the “appeasement” narrative has been put to in the decades since.
Additionally, portraying the fascist leaders as inept charlatans demystifies them and eradicates the appeal that anything described as a sinister evil has to oppositionally-minded people. In this episode, Mussolini is described as a “buffoon” and “a musical-comedy dictator”, and the narrative is peppered with continual reminders of the patheticness of Mussolini and his military. There is no room for strong adversaries here — only by humiliating the enemy can they truly be vanquished.
Even as Crusade speeds through two decades of Italian history, it stops to place an emphasis on Mussolini’s interest in land reform and technology. This is a rather curious interlude, if an informative one. It helps to explain why Mussolini had domestic support, a support that was rooted in material as well as ideological ones. There’s also a touch of Eisenhower’s attention to logistics and systems. The farming scene is also a way of throwing shade upon the agricultural policies favoured by communists both domestic and international, which were a more drastic version of what Mussolini attempted and Italy. By highlighting Mussolini’s fetishization of tractors and burly working men, an appeal also used by the Soviets, Crusade links America’s old enemy and its new one.
In all of this, Crusade is again easily able to recognize propaganda when the Axis does it, obscuring its own role as retrospective propaganda. Van Voorhes describes Mussolini as “playing the part” of a general and using military conquest to paper over domestic problems. What, then is Eisenhower doing? The part about exultation in victory over tiny powers will echo many of America’s military “triumphs” throughout the 80s and 90s. Crusade portrays Italian character as sympathetic but essentially weaker than that of Americans, allowing Italy to be deceived by a braggadocious showman. The following sixty-odd shows have showed how un-exceptional the American people really are.
Coming up next: Crusade takes another meander to ponder the character of the American GI. Spoiler: it’s better than Mussolini’s.
The Eternal Couch Potato 