A favourite theme of Nazi and Fascist pagandists before the outbreak of the present War is now very conspicuous by its absence—the alleged decline of the British Empire and dis, manhood. Chief purveyor of such a tale in wood old days when he still played first fiddle (a part now taken by Maestro Hitler) in the Fascist state, was Benito Mussolini, whose well-equipped warriors bravely had pushed back and had defeated thousands of dusky, spear-carrying natives to occupy Abyssinia and who, later on, completed the occupation of Albania. which had practically no army at all. With chest blown out he blared forth for years on the invincibility of the Fascist state and its armies. Time and time again he roared into the well-trained ears of the Italian masses stories of his navy's control of the Mediterranean—italy's "mare nostrum"—and of his air force's Supremacy in the skies And hen he entered the war on the side of Germany and woke up! For years Britain had heard Mussolini's boastings silently. She had listened to tales of the alleged spinelesmess of her sons
place in the totalitarian states in those days.
bad malled, for such stories were common-Britain still had faith in her sons even if Hitler and Mussolini believed they were like filleted And then the testing time came. At k, man for man, the British Tommy made. his Axis counterpart, who had all the Odds on his side at the time, appear in a bad light to the rest of the world. That finished Germany's boasting of the superiority of Germans over Britons. Mussolini came next. The flower of his armies was in Libya, he told the world, and soon Italians would be at the Suez Canal after they had annihilated the men in Khaki, who faced them. True enough, he got into Egypt, but when it came to the final test something went wrong, and the "decadent" youths, who faced his legions, not only chased his fleet-footed Fascists out of the country but didn't stop chasing them until they had occupied Cyrenaica and had captured crestfallen Italians, who had received such a drubbing that they were absolutely demoralized, like a punch drunk fighter reeling from one rope to another. Not only did the "decadent" Britons occupy half Libya. however, but they pushed on into Italian Somaliland' and Abyssinia where the chasing still goes on today. In Albania, too, something else went awry and, instead of occupying Athens in three weeks, the Italians found themselves running like mad before determined Greek warriors, whose victories had astounded the world. But it was Mussolini's hide and seek navy that lowered Italian Prestige more than anything else. Time and time again those "spineless" fellows in the British Navy steamed up and down Italy's "mare nostrum" and asked for a fight. They never got it—the Italians had no stomach to face them. And so, with only one course left open, the British fleet steamed right into Italian waters and created havoc at Taranto and Genoa.
In the air too British supremacy over the Italians has been proved—no wonder the Fascist propagandists today have forgotten all that they said about the invincibility of Italy and the decadence of the British Empire's manhood. It will be Hitlers turn next to face that manhood.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.