Luckily For Mussolini The Gun Misfired

Winston Churchill’s Obsession.
Along with the Bismarck, the Tirpitz was the most revered and feared ship in Hitler’s navy.
It was longer, heavier, faster, better appointed and more handsome.
And it was so heavily armoured both above and below the waterline that it was all but unsinkable.
No wonder it became such an obsession of Winston Churchill’s.
During the course of the war, he launched no fewer than 24 missions to sink the Tirpitz, by everything from ancient carrier-borne Swordfish biplanes to naval fleets and miniature submarines.
In pure tactical and strategic terms, the Tirpitz was a bit of a red herring.
Its only combat mission was a gratuitous trip to the Arctic island of Spitsbergen, where it used its mighty guns to shell a meteorological station occupied by a few Norwegian soldiers and British sailors.
And the only reason this mission took place was to give the Tirpitz’s crew something to do.
For over a year, the ship had been lurking in the safety of various remote Norwegian anchorages, considered far too precious an asset by the German High Command to be risked in action.
That explains why, until the Tirpitz was eventually sunk by RAF bombers in November 1944, by far the ship’s biggest threat came from an aggrieved Adolf Hitler.
So unimpressed was the Fuhrer by Tirpitz’s lacklustre war record that in early 1943 he planned, in a fit of rage, to have it cut up for scrap.
The Tirpitz was saved only by the courageous intervention of the head of his navy, Admiral Donitz.
Donitz understood that besides its morale-boosting value as the pride of the German Navy, the Tirpitz was the ultimate deterrent.
Merely the threat of its presence in the Baltic meant the Royal Navy had to maintain a sizeable fleet there to protect its Arctic convoys.
The sheer terror that its presence inspired resulted in one of the biggest Allied blunders of the war.
The infamous order by Admiral Dudley Pound to disperse the PQ-17 Arctic convoy, resulting in the loss of 23 ships out of 32.
It was fear of the Tirpitz, too, that prompted another of the war’s legendary episodes.
The commando raid in 1942 to block the port of St Nazaire.
Almost everyone who took part was either killed or captured, but it was considered a price worth paying because now the Tirpitz had no dock big enough on France’s west coast in which to lay up and menace Atlantic shipping.
( James Delingpole )

Israel Accused Of Giving Contraceptive Jabs To Ethiopian Women Without Consent.
Thousands of Ethiopian women are said to be receiving shots of Depo-Provera every three months in Israeli clinics.
The contraceptive stops menstruation and has been linked to fertility problems and osteoporosis.
Yaakov Litzman, Israel’s deputy minister of health, has previously denied the practice.
The phenomenon was uncovered when social workers noticed the birth rate among Ethiopian immigrants halving in a decade.
An Israeli documentary investigating the scandal was aired in December 2012 and prompted a popular outcry.
It revealed that women were started on a course of contraceptive jabs while still in transit camps in Ethiopia, some without being told they were being given birth control and many having no idea of the side-effects.
When they eventually arrived in Israel, doctors continued the treatment unquestioningly.
But the critical question remains unanswered as to who instigated the policy, with neither Israel nor Ethiopia willing to claim responsibility.
( Phoebe Greenwood, 28.02.2013 )  ..  theguardian.com

Pacific War Land Battle.
In March 1944, the war in Burma entered its third year, and the Japanese attempted a knock-out blow against the British and Indian armies.
Operation U-Go was designed to destroy the British divisions on the plain at Imphal, near the Burma-India border, possibly as a prelude to a march on Delhi.
This bold undertaking was assigned to Lieutenant General Renya Mutaguchi, whose strategy was suitably ingenious and involved using 85,000 troops to surprise the British at four different locations around Imphal.
The entire plan hinged on securing the village of Kohima, about 60 miles away and 5,000ft up in the Naga Hills.
Mutaguchi lacked the resources for the task, but he gambled both that his men could live off the land, and that the British forces would panic in close combat with his veterans. Every one of Mutaguchi’s assumptions proved mistaken.
The Japanese never had the food, water, ammunition, artillery, air power or infantry reinforcements needed for the task.
At the same time, his men encountered an entirely new Anglo-Indian army, trained and disciplined by a new British military talent, General William Slim.
These men fought fiendishly, partly out of fear for their fate if they ended up in the hands of the Japanese, partly because they had just beaten another Japanese army in the Arakan peninsula, and partly because steady reinforcements and a massive Anglo-American airlift boosted morale and seemed to confirm Slim’s assurances of certain success.
Kohima-Imphal, the ‘Stalingrad of the East’, was fought non-stop for four months and was the greatest land battle of the entire Pacific war.
By the end, the Imperial Japanese Army had experienced the greatest defeat in its history.
Arguably the most ferocious hand-to-hand fighting in the whole campaign took place at Kohima.
On April 4, 1944, a Japanese force of 15,000 troops attacked 2,000 British and Indian soldiers at the village.
Outnumbered nearly ten-to-one, the defenders pulled off a triumph against impossible odds.
Every inch was fought over on a battleground just 900 yards by 1,100 yards square, and the disputed ridges and bluffs – Bunker Hill, Garrison Hill, FSD Hill, GPT Ridge – became legendary.
The Japanese threw everything they had at the enemy, but the defenders did not buckle.
After two weeks, the first of the British reinforcements arrived, soon followed by another four brigades, tilting the odds away from the Japanese.
Low on ammunition and water, with no tanks, air support or reinforcements, the Imperial Army survivors were driven back along the ‘Road Of Bones’, soon littered with Japanese who had died from starvation, disease and exhaustion.
( Frank McLynn )

Mussolini Is Said To Have Slept With At Least 400 Women.
One of Mussolini’s first sexual encounters, while he was looking for work as a schoolmaster, seems to have been the rape of a woman in Varano.
Mussolini himself once described the incident. “One day. I led her up some stairs, pushed her into a corner behind a door and had her on the spot. When she got up she was distressed and crying and started to insult me. I had “stained her honour” she said”.
Later came virgins and married women, socialists and socialites, Muslims and Jews (until his racial laws marginalised them).
He liked to waste no time.
He told Clara Petacci, his final mistress, that she should be scared, for his lovemaking was “like a cyclone”.
In matters of the heart Mussolini appears to have been as brutal, vainglorious and controlling as in his public life.
Having married Rachele, whom he met when she was still at school, he left her at home in Forli to bring up their children while he prowled the newspaper offices of Milan, fashioning his own extremist brand of revolutionary socialism.
One of his first serious attachments was to Angelica Balabanoff, a Ukrainian member of the Soviet Communist Party.
She taught him the art of politics, and shaped his reading.
A more influential and lasting mistress was Margherita Sarfatti, one of the primary theorists in his circle and, like Balabanoff, Jewish, cultivated and wealthy.
Sarfatti applied herself to building up Mussolini’s image as leader.
Clara Petacci, who was executed with him in 1945 after his fall from power, was a compulsive note-taker, recording her telephone conversations with Mussolini the moment they had taken place – and they spoke at least ten times a day.
Her voluminous archive, although still not wholly available, seems to confirm Mussolini’s crassness and brutishness when it came to his conquests.
The violence and political mayhem that accompanied the birth of fascism, the assassination of the socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti and the gradual subjugation of Italy.
Mussolini was a man without friends, obsessed with fame, ruthless with mistresses and enemies alike, delegating nothing, spending his days obsessively reading newspapers and issuing communiques.
“I’ve got all Italy in my head,” he once told Sarfatti.
Not surprising, perhaps, that he did not always have time to take off his boots before making love.
With his shaven, bullet head, lantern jaw and stocky figure, Mussolini was not a good-looking man.
Even given the seductive lure of power, it’s difficult to explain just why so many women were prepared to be mistreated, humiliated and betrayed by him.

Luckily For Mussolini The Gun Misfired.
Posterity has not been kind to Benito Mussolini.
Reviled as the founder of fascism, the Italian Dictator is also scorned on a personal level as a puffed-up, almost comical figure.
But that wasn’t how he appeared in the twenties, when he was widely regarded as a vigorous and dynamic leader who had saved his country from Bolshevism.
He was often photographed stripped to the waist, his torso rippling with muscles.
Mussolini was particularly admired by upper-class English women – even Clementine Churchill fell under his spell.
But not everyone was a fan.
On April 7, 1926, Mussolini was striding through a crowd in Rome when a single shot rang out.
The dictator staggered back, blood pouring from his face.
The bullet had nicked his nose, but before his bodyguards could react, a second shot was aimed.
Luckily for Mussolini the gun misfired, and his assailant was wrestled to the ground.
Mussolini’s would-be assassin was a small, frail woman.
The police assumed she must be part of a communist plot, but the reality was a lot stranger.
She was Violet Gibson, a member of one of Ireland’s grandest families, who as a young woman had been presented as a debutante at the court of Queen Victoria.
Why did Violet do it?
The short answer is she was a religious fanatic, inspired by a blend of Catholicism and socialism.
Her original intention in going to Rome may have been to kill the Pope – Mussolini was her second choice.
If that second shot had gone off, the world might have been spared a great deal of suffering.
Mussolini, on the other hand, would have been mourned as Italy’s tragic lost leader.

William Stead’s Campaign.
Campaigning journalist William Thomas Stead (1849 – 1912) died on board the Titanic on April 15, 1912.
Stead lived at Wimbledon, South-West London, and was Britain’s leading campaigning and investigative journalist in the late 1800s.
He became renowned particularly for his work in exposing the white-slave trade and child sex abuse in London’s brothels by the nation’s upper classes.
The Titanic disaster ended a career that had made Stead a household name many years earlier.
Son of a Congregationalist minister, he wrote for the Northern Echo, Darlington, before coming south to the Pall Mall Gazette in 1880, becoming editor in 1883.
He turned it into a lively, amusing and newsy populist campaigning newspaper.
In 1885 he launched a campaign to oppose child prostitution in London and raise the age of consent at the time from 12.
Stead’s campaign went so far that he ended up in prison.
To publicise the plight of child prostitution, he arranged to buy a young virgin for £5 and then tell the tale in his newspaper.
Helped by Rebecca Jarrett, a former prostitute herself, he convinced the mother of 13-year-old Eliza Armstrong that the girl was simply to be taken into domestic service.
Eliza was taken to a house in Poland Street and chloroformed.
When she awoke, Stead was in the room and she was promptly taken off to Paris while he ran a story in the paper that was said to “set London and the whole country in a blaze of indignation”.
But although he secured massive sales of the paper, he was widely criticised for publishing obscene material.
The missing Eliza was eventually discovered in Stead’s Wimbledon garden and he was convicted of having fraudulently taken her from her parents.
He spent three months in Holloway prison (not then an all-female establishment).
However, his campaign was vindicated when the Criminal Law Amendment Act promptly raised the age of consent from 12 to 16, banning procurement of minors.