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in fact made a spider’s web and forgotten the spider. He tried to hold everything he had won. Enormous forces were squandered in the Balkans and in Italy which could play no part in the main decisions. A central reserve of thirty or forty divisions of the highest quality and mobility would have enabled him to strike at any one of his opponents advancing upon him and fight a major battle with good prospects of success. He could, for instance, have met the British and Americans at the fortieth or fiftieth day after their landing in Normandy a year later with fresh and greatly superior forces. He could perhaps have so disposed his forces as to lead to the decision of the war. There was no need to consume his strength in Italy and the Balkans, and the fact that he was induced to do so must be taken as the waste of his last opportunity.
    Knowing that these choices were open to him, I wished also to have the options of pressing right-handed in Italy or left-handed across the Channel, or both. The wrong dispositions which he made enabled us to undertake the main direct assault, under conditions which offered good prospects and achieved success.
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    Hitler had returned from the Feltre meeting convinced that Italy could only be kept in the war by purges in the FascistParty and increasing pressure by the Germans on the Fascist leaders. Mussolini’s sixtieth birthday fell on July 29, and Goering was chosen to pay him an official visit on this occasion. But during the course of July 25 alarming reports from Rome began to come in to Hitler’s Headquarters. By the evening it was clear that Mussolini had resigned or had been removed, and that Badoglio had been nominated by the King as his successor. It was finally decided that any major operation against the new Italian Government would require withdrawals of more divisions than could be spared from the Eastern Front in the event of the expected Russian offensive. Plans were made to rescue Mussolini, to occupy Rome, and to support Italian Fascism wherever possible. If Badoglio signed an armistice with the Allies, further plans were drawn up for seizing the Italian Fleet and occupying key positions throughout Italy, and for overawing Italian garrisons in the Balkans and in the Aegean.
    “We must act,” Hitler told his advisers on July 26. “Otherwise the Anglo-Saxons will steal a march on us by occupying the air ports. The Fascist Party is at present only stunned, and will recover behind our lines. The Fascist Party is the only one that has the will to fight on our side. We must therefore restore it. All reasons advocating further delays are wrong; thereby we run the danger of losing Italy to the Anglo-Saxons. These are matters which a soldier cannot comprehend. Only a man with political insight can see his way clear.”
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    We had long pondered over the consequences of an Italian collapse. Eight months before I had written:
    POSITION OF ITALY
N OTE BY THE P RIME M INISTER
     
    November 25, 1942
    It is in my opinion premature to assume that no internal convulsion in Italy could produce a Government which would make a separate peace. If we increase the severity of our pressure upon Italy … the desire, and indeed the imperative need, of getting out of the war will come home to all the Italians, including the rank and file of the Fascist Party. Should Italy feel unable to endure the continued attacks which will be made upon her from the air, and presently, I trust, by amphibious operations, the Italian people will have to choose between, on the one hand, setting up a Government under someone like Grandi to sue for a separate peace, or, on the other, submitting to a German occupation, which would merely aggravate the severity of the war.
    2. I do not share the view that it is in our interest that the Germans should occupy and take over Italy. We may not be able to prevent it. It is still my hope that the Italians themselves will prevent it and