Background of Treason

            William Gowen’s father, a career U.S. diplomat, was a moving party in the arrest of Tyler Kent, confidential code clerk in the U.S. Embassy in London in 1940. Kent was sending copies of all the coded messages between President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to Italian intelligence.

            This case has always been clouded in mystery and reporting of it very vague and deliberately inaccurate.

            The writer has drawn on personal knowledge of his father’s actions in this suppressed espionage scandal and opens his study with background on the Italian diplomatic players.

Bastimini is Transferred to London as Italy's Ambassador

After Hitler launched his offensive in the West on May 10, 1940, against Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and France, it became clear within days in London and Paris that the Allied armies were facing a crisis of potentially catastrophic proportions. Winston Churchill realized this shortly after he took over as Britain's Prime Minister that May 10th -- after having been primarily responsible, as First Lord of the Admiralty, for the disastrous conduct of the Norwegian campaign. Neville Chamberlain, who remained Leader of the Conservative Party in the House of Commons, and who had himself proposed Churchill as his successor, soon understood as did Churchill that the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and the vaunted French Army faced likely defeat in Northern France. The two men, stunned by the turn of events, agreed, as did the French Government, headed by Paul Reynaud, that every effort had to be made to induce Mussolini and King Victor Emmanuel 111 not to open a second front against France in Southern France and the Mediterranean. The French needed every division they still had to prevent the Germans from capturing Pans.

The Royal Italian Ambassador in London was 40-year-old Count Giuseppe Bastianini, who had succeeded Count Dino Grandi in that post and had arrived in London in September, 1939, shortly after the start of the war. As a 22-year-old, he had headed the then-new National Fascist Party (PNF) in his native city of Perugia at the time of the October 28, 1922, Fascist "March on Rome" -- which had had its field headquarters at the Brufani Hotel in Perugia. Before his arrival in London, he had just served three years as Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs, after holding a series of top Fascist Party posts, including Deputy Party Secretary, and Secretary General of Fascism Abroad. In short, Bastianini was recognized by May, 1940, in London as well as Rome as one of the top leaders of the Italian Fascist Regime (Il Regime Fascista), and a very close collaborator of Mussolini and of Foreign Minister Ciano. After May 10, he became directly involved in the frantic negotiations launched by ChurchiIl with Mussolini, Ciano and King Victor Emmanuel III -- aimed at keeping Italy out of the war.

In London, one of Ambassador Bastianini's top paid espionage agents was Anna Wolkoff, a White Russian member of the Right Club, an extreme rightwing socially- pretentious political association headed by Captain Archibald Ramsay, a Conservative MP, a graduate of Eton and Sandhurst, an officer in the Coldstream Guards, a relative of the Queen and a member of London's high society. The Duke of Wellington, reportedly, was one of the some 200 secret members of the Club.

Anna Wolkoff had also developed a close relationship with Tyler Kent, the newly arrived code clerk at the US Embassy in London, whom she had introduced to Ramsay -- a declared admirer of Mussolini and of Nazi Germany. Kent, a former member of the Class of 1933 at Princeton, had, like Ramsay, distinct social pretensions; he came, he said, from "an old Virginia family" Wolkoff asked Kent to keep the secret roster of the Right Club's membership in his apartment, and Kent had agreed.

Like Kent, Wolkoff and Ramsay were strongly anti-semitic, as was Bastianini. As a member of the Fascist Grand Council, Bastianini had voted for adoption of Italy's anti- semitic decrees in 1938.

How Tyler Kent met or was introduced to Anna Wolkoff in London is not known. He spoke Russian, as did she, and, therefore, might have met her purely by accident in the White Russian "tea room" that was run by her father, a former Czarist Admiral. The establishment was well-known in "White Russian circles" in London, and claimed it served the finest caviar in the city. It seems likely, however, that Kent had been deliberately introduced to Anna Wolkoff.

Whether Loy Henderson, a senior US Foreign Service Officer, then in Washington as chief of the State Department's Russian Desk, was directly or indirectly responsible for Tyler Kent's transfer from Moscow to London remains unknown. Whatever the explanation, Tyler Kent and Anna Wolkoff met in London, and swn became more than "close friends." Whether or not Anna Wolkoff became Kent's mistress remains unclear.

By May, 1940, Anna Wolkoff's most important associate in espionage, other than Ambassador Bastianini, was the US Embassy's code clerk Tyler Kent, who had been ordered transferred to London from the US Embassy in Moscow in late September 1939 and had reached London directly from Moscow in early October, 1939. (It is also possible that Kent had had Italian Fascist contacts in Moscow, and might have been recruited and paid by the Italians while still in Moscow.) He had been ordered transferred to London by a US Department of State cable signed "Hull" (meaning Secretary of State Cordell Hull) some three weeks after Britain declared war on Germany on September 3.

I.oy Henderson and Tyler Kent: Two Anti-semites in Moscow

In 1933, in Washington, Kent had been recruited for service in the new US Embassy in Moscow by career diplomat Loy Henderson, (Kent had entered Princeton in the Class of 1933, but had dropped out to study at the Sorbonne in Paris, then studied Spanish at the University of Madrid, and finally had entered George Washington University in Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1933.) Henderson had been named the First Secretary and Chief Political Officer at the new Embassy in Moscow, headed by Ambassador William C. Bullitt, which later opened in Moscow in February, 1934.

It was Kent's first assignment as a State Department code clerk. Henderson, who had known Kent's deceased father (a US Foreign Service Officer) vouched for, sponsored and protected Kent as Kent continued his duties in the code room at the US Embassy in Moscow for the next five years.

Like Kent, Henderson was strongly anti-Semitic and anti-Communist. In the Moscow Embassy, Kent worked closely with Charles E. Bohlen, another protege of Henderson's, who later became Henderson's wartime deputy on the State Department's Russian Desk. Bohlen later succeeded Henderson as wartime chief of the Russian Desk.

When Kent reached the London Embassy, then headed by Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, in October, 1939, the London Embassy was recognized by the State Department as the most important US Embassy in the world. It seemed an unusual assignment for Kent, as well as a promotion for him to a "better post."

Rut living expenses in London were much higher than in Moscow,

To explain Kent's arrival from Moscow, which seemed unusual to Ambassador Kennedy and some Foreign Service Officers in the London Embassy, it was rumored in London that Kent's widowed mother was an old friend of Secretary of State Cordell Hull. She, it was said, had succeeded in getting Hull to transfer her son to wartime London -- though that seemed implausible to some.

US diplomat Franklin C. Gowen was among those in the London Embassy who wondered whether Secretary of State Hull was really the force behind Kent's career.

Kent and Charles E. Bohlen

What Ambassador Kennedy did not know was that Kent had just participated in Moscow with Charles E. Bohlen in what had been considered -- by Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Russian Desk Chief Loy Henderson and others in Washington -- a major coup. At the US Embassy in Moscow, Bohlen had become close to Hans Heinrich Herwarth von Bittenfeld, the Secretary to the German Ambassador there, Count von der Schulenberg. Von der Schulenberg and von Bittenfeld had been working for years to arrange for a Berlin-Moscow agreement, and by early 1939 von Bittenfeld could report in detail, "confidentially," to Bohlen that von der Schulenberg's efforts were moving forward successfully, and were being encouraged by German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.

Unknown to Bohlen, von Bittenfeld was also close to Fitzroy MacLean, of Britain's Moscow Embassy, who had long considered von Bittenfeld, a snobbish but reliable Junker Monarchist (just like his chief, Count von der Schulenberg) an established informant. Maclean believed that von Bittenfeld was strongly pro-British and, as an aristocrat, also anti-Communist. (Though von Bittenfeld did not know it, Fitzroy MacLean had long been close to both Winston Churchill and MI6).

Von Bittenfeld fed MacLean the same secret information he was feeding Bohlen, as Ambassador von der Schulenberg knew. (After the war, Bohlen sponsored von Bittenfeld and other "Russian experts'' who had served in the prewar German Embassy in Moscow. Three, von Rittenfeld, former First Secretary Gustav Hilger, and former Military Attache General Ernst Koestring,, were brought to Washington by Bohlen as salaried employees of the US Department of State. Much later, von Bittenfeld became West Germany's Ambassador to London.)

The key German objective of the "secret leaks" by von Bittenfeld -- which should have become clear to Bohlen when the August 23. 1939, Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed in Moscow by Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop -- was to dissuade Britain from declaring war on Germany after Hitler duly invaded Poland.

Bohlen's increasingly dramatic, and accurate. reports dnring the summer on the progress of the German negotiations with Stalin were sent from Moscow to Washington by code clerk Tyler Kent. Kent transmitted Bohlen's reports by the St.ate Department's most. secret code.

These reports, that climaxed with the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, hypnotized Secretary of State Hull -- who immediately and naively passed them on to the British Ambassador in .Washington. These reports forever "made" Bohlen's reputation in Washington. Bohlen then sent a series of follow-up reports to Washington -- all handled by Kent -- which summarized the maturing of the Nazi-Soviet negotiations over recent months and evaluated the immediate and foreseeable consequences of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Shortly after the September 17 invasion of Poland by the Soviet Union and the resulting partition of Poland between Hitler and Stalin, Kent was transferred to London.

This transfer was clearly a "promotion to a better post" as a reward for the fine job Kent had done for Bohlen. However, nobody in the US Embassy in London had known anything about the dramatic background to Kent's sudden transfer from Moscow to London.

Gowen, when on night duty at the Embassy, began noticing, starting in October, 1939, that Kent made and received a variety of personal phone calls while on night duty when he was busy encoding and encrypting outgoing messages. These included messages from Churchill to Roosevelt. He also decrypted and decoded incoming messages from the State Department addressed to Ambassador Kennedy, as well as incoming messages from Roosevelt to Churchill, and others from the State Department.

Gowen was one of thirteen US Foreign Service Officers assigned to the Embassy; he had been transferred to London in 1932, seven years before, from Rome, and consequently was quite familiar with London and also with Mussolini's regime. In 1940, moreover, Gowen began serving more frequently on night duty in the Embassy, at the request of Ambassador Kennedy, and routinely spent the night there, rather than return to his home in Knightsbridge. (His wife and children had returned to the US after the war began.) His suspicions of Kent grew, as the code clerk almost arrogantly, and certainly very confidently, continue to make and receive phone call while working at night in the Embassy code room.

But Gowen did not know or suspect that there was any link between Tyler Kent and Ambassador Bastianini or anybody else in the Italian Embassy. But he expressed his suspicions of Kent to an old contact at Scotland Yard's Special Branch, which was, in fact, M15.

Kent's 'Disorderly' Life Style

At the London Embassy, Gowen was serving as Second Secretary and as Diplomatic Secretary to Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy. In that capacity, Gowen had his office in the anteroom to Ambassador Kennedy's office.

Gowen's curiosity about Kent's nighttime phone calls confirmed earlier rumors that Kent, a bachelor, led what then was considered "a disorderly private life" -- involving, allegedly, a variety women. This lifestyle Kent camed blithely into his nighttime duty hours, making no effort to conceal personal habits that seemed, to Gowen, incompatible with the increased security concerns of the Embassy in wartime London. Consequently, Gowen was prompted to wonder and inquire about "the women" who somehow routinely chatted with Kent in the middle of the night. Perhaps because Kent thought himself pretentiously -- or was, in fact -- a personal protege of the Secretary of State, Gowen concluded, he took liberties that other US code clerks would never even consider. And so Gowen also voiced his suspicions to Ambassador Kennedy, and also repeated them to Scotland Yard's Special Branch -- with which he had had some contact during his years in London.

Most of the message traffic handled by Kent in the Embassy Code Room involved urgent and secret British requests for US military, naval and air equipment and supplies and the US responses to the same, plus reports by Ambassador Kennedy and other Embassy Officers.

The British requests for materials became increasingly numerous, panicky and desperate, after Hitler invaded Denmark and, Norway in April, 1940, and by deliberate implication requested direct US intervention in the war -- to prevent a Hitler victory. In addition, there had been an ongoing exchange of messages since September, 1939, between Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty in the Chamberlain Government, and President Roosevelt. These secret messages continued after Churchill became Prime Minister on May 10, 1940, and became increasingly urgent in asking for massive US assistance and even intervention in the war.

Because of his trusted position, Kent handled most of this traffic, including all the Churchill-Roosevelt messages.

Kent's code room duties were officially supervised by Embassy First Secretary Rndolph E. Schoenfeld, a career diplomat, who was formally in charge of the Embassy code room. For example, Schoenfeld logged in all the Churchill-Roosevelt messages, that is those outgoing from Churchill and those incoming from Roosevelt, as well as the other message traffic handled by the code room.

In his supervisory capacity, Schoenfeld was also responsible for evaluating Kent's performance and for filing and signing the required State Department "efficiency reports" on Kent.

Gowen Arrests Kent on May 20, 1940

There have been many proferred explanations by the British, since the war, to explain why on Monday, May 20, 1940, US diplomat Franklin C. Gowen led a team from Scotland Yard's Special Branch to Tyler Kent's apartment to arrest him and seize the more than 1,900 copies of messages he had taken from the US Embassy code room -- including all the the Roosevelt-Churchill messages. These secret texts, found in Kent's apartment, were seized personally by Gowen, for immediate return to Ambassador Kennedy at the Embassy. The raid had been discussed, decided and approved by Ambassador Kennedy. Kennedy formally waived Kent's diplomatic immunity and was furious and red with anger that he and President Roosevelt had been betrayed by the State Department, which had assigned Tyler Kent to the London Embassy.

Tyler Kent was later tried in London secretly, as the sole defendant, in the Old Bailey in October, 1940. with Franklin C. Gowen the sole American witness testifying against him. Kent pleaded guilty. Two of Churchill's messages to Roosevelt, of January 29 and February 28, were introduced into evidence by the Crown, to substantiate the criminal charges under the Official Secrets Act. Only two other similar texts were introduced as evidence (because nearly all of the more 1,900 texts found by Gowen in Kent's illegal possession, on May 20, remained with the US Embassy, as US classified texts not available to the British prosecution).

Kent was convicted by the secret British tribunal and sentenced to seven years of penal servitude. No public announcements of his arrest, trial and conviction were made.

Anna Wolkoff was later also tried secretly, separately by herself, on charges of being a "foreign agent." The British did not call Franklin C. Gowen to give testimony at Wolkoff’s trial, Neither did they give Gowen a transcript of Anna Wolkoff's secret trial. What she said at her trial or whether indeed she was then permitted to say anything at hcr trial about her contacts at the Italian Embassy has never been revealed by the British. Because her trial has remained secret, it is also not known if she was convicted under the Official Secrets Act and if so if she received a prison sentence.

(Apparently, the British were primarily interested in receiving, from Wolkoff, the details of her relationship with Ambassador Bastianini -- who later, in February, 1943, was agaiii appointed Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs by Mussolini. Bastianini had alleged after he returned to Rome from London that he had opposed Italy's declaration of war against Britain in June, 1940. And in 1943 he attempted renewed negotiations with the Churchill government as Mussolini's new Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs.)

No official announcements were or have ever been made by the British referring to or let alone detailing Anna Wolkoff's and Kent's relationship with the Italian Ambassador, Count Giuseppe Bastianhi and the Italian Embassy in London.

Much later, in the 19SO's, the State Department, the CIA and MIS conducted a joint secret investigation of the Tyler Kent case, which was supervised by Loy Henderson, Kent's original sponsor, who had risen to the rank of' Deputy Undersecretary of State. Apparently, it had been decided at a high level "to rewrite history." The CIA's investigation of the Kent case was handled by James J. Angleton, in his capacity as Chief of their Counterintelligence Staff.

The resulting report concluded, incredibly, that Tyler Kent and AnnaWolkoff had been NKVD agents, and that Kent had been recruited as an agent by the NKVD while he was serving as a code clerk in the US Embassy in Moscow, after Loy Henderson's transfer from there to Washington. No reference was made, in this report, to Ambassador Bastianini, or to Secretary of State Hull's alleged relationship to Kent's mother, or to Loy Henderson, Kent's sponsor of record, or to Charles E. Bohlen. That report still remains secret.

(Earlier, in 1944, the British issued a public statement in London asserting that Kent, who was then still in prison in Britain, had been convicted by the British as "a German agent." But, as both Ambassador Kennedy and Gowen knew, secretly, and the public did not, Kent had been convicted only of violating the Official Secrets Act, and had not been charged or convicted of having been a German agent.)

Franklin C. Gowen, who had played a key role in the case, never received a State Department citation for his outstanding performance, and was not interviewed by the investigators who produced the secret report, issued in Washington by the Eisenhower Administration, under the supervision of Deputy Undersecretary of State Loy Henderson. (Much earlier, the British separately reported, informally and falsely, that US Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy's had tried to protect Kent in 1940 "after MI5 started closing in" on him.)

Later, in late 1957, after the joint State Department-CIA-MI5 secret report on the Tyler Kent case had been approved hy Henderson, Henderson personally advised Gowen that he would be retired from the Foreign Service. Gowen retired early in 1958.

Kent's Texts Were Transmitted to Rome by Bastianini

What had really happened in London in 1939 and 1940 as a result of Kent's collaboration with Anna Wolkoff? And why did the British and the Americans continue to lie about Kent's treason -- probably the worst case of espionage in the history of the US Department of Slate? And why was Kent not extradited to the United States during the war for trial for his crimes against the United States? Or charged and tried for espionage after he returned to the US from Britain in 1948?

After the war, Kent was released from prison by the British, and then returned by ship a free man to the United States. No US Marshals awaited at dockside in Manhattan when he landed. The US government brought no criminal charges against Kent, who then married  an American millionairess and proceeded to live a leisurely life of ease. Ever confident, Kent even brought a lawsuit against former Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy. It failed.

There also had never been an internal State Department investigation in 1940, or thereafter, to fix responsibility and blame for the disastrous September, 1939, decision to assign Kent to London and there entrust him with the most secret communications between wartime London and Washington. Had there been, Loy Henderson, Charles E. Rohlen and Rudolph E. Schoenfefd probably would have faced severe censure -- at the very least. In fact, however, they all later enjoyed unusually successful careers as US diplomats.

And, much later, despite the secret Washington report, supervised by Deputy Undersecretary of State Loy Henderson, describing Tyler Kent and Anna Wolkoff as NKVD agents, Kent was not charged, let alone ever prosecuted, by the United States as a foreign agent serving the USSR. Neither was Anna Wolkoff ever charged as a Russian agent by the British.

Kent had passed hundreds of secret texts, which he had handled as a code clerk supervised directly by US Embassy First Secretary Rudolph E. Schoenfeld, to Anna Wolkoff, an agent of the Italian Ambassador, Count Giuseppe Rastianini, who in turn transmitted them to Rome, where Italian Foreign Minister Connt Galeazzo Ciano handed some of them personally to the German Ambassador, Hans-Georg von Mackensen. He, in turn,, transmitted them to Berlin. These messages, given by Kent to Anna Wolkoff, gave Ciano and the Germans key secret information at the most critical stages of the Battle of Norway and of the Battle of France.

By Thursday, May 16, for example, the French, British and Belgian armies were in headlong retreat from Belgium. The Dutch Army had formally surrendered to the Germans a day earlier, on May 15 -- only five days after the start of the German offensive.

A huge hole had been drilled through the French lines south of Sedan, between what had been the French 9th and 2nd Armies -- and by the May 16th both those armies had been shattered. Southwards, the roads to Paris were open to the German advance, and, westwards, so were the roads to the Channel coast. The German panzer divisions were racing forward, almost unimpeded. That day French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud sent Churchill an urgent Secret message, pleading desperately for additional British support. It said: "Last evening we lost the battle. The way to Paris lay open. Send all the troops and planes you can." Churchill duly advised Roosevelt, in a message encoded, encrypted and transmitted by Tyler Kent in the US Embassy's code room, with the approval of First Secretary Rudolph E. Schoenfeld.

Most of the many British texts that Count Ciano received, including Churchill's personal messages to Roosevelt, portrayed Britain's and France's military position and potential in catastrophic terms -- thus leading Ciano and Mussolini and King Victor Emmanuel III to conclude that both England and France were facing imminent defeat. Therefore, instead of accepting Churchill and France's concessions to remain out of the conflict, as Churchill had hoped, the Italian Fascist regime decided to enter the war against England and France -- and did so on June 10, four days before the German Army entered Paris.

Logically, Churchill of course had not protested Ambassador Bastianini's involvement with Anna Wolkoff and Tyler Kent immediately after their arrest on May 20th -- because he was still hopeful that through his negotiations with Bastianini, he would prevent Fascist Italy's entry into the war. 'These frantic Churchill negotiations, in turn, had permitted Bastianini to transmit the so-called "Kent texts" to Rome quickly without difficulty.

But for Tyler Kent's treason, one might conclude, and the transmission of the purloined texts by Bastianini to Count Ciano, Fascist Italy might not have entered the war in June, 1940. Possibly, too, Hitler might not have won the Battle of France so quickly -- because by May 16 or a day or two later, he had learned, thanks to Kent, that the French Army was shattered, and that Britain either could not or would not send niore troops and planes to France. That critical information permitted him to order his panzer divisions to plunge headlong south from the Somme - - as soon as other units cleaned up the Dunkirk pocket. Without hesitation, Hitler's panzers then rushed forward confidently, seizing Paris, reaching the Swiss border (trapping the 500,000 French troops manning the Maginot Line), and capturing Lyons on their way down the Rhone Valley.

Churchill's Proposals to Italy

During April and May and early June, 1940, the British and French governments made a series of increasingly urgent proposals to Mussolini, Ciano and the King to induce Fascist Italy not to join Hitler in the war. Exactly what these proposals were has remained a secret, but it became known in Rome that they included very substantial concessions to Italy in the Mediterranean, including an offer to permit Italy to become a major shareholder in the Suez Canal, the possible ceding of Tunisia by France, and important financial and trade concessions. Indeed, Mussolini and Ciano apparently made counter-proposals, seeking substantially more than was initially offered.

Hut no trace of Churchill's correspondence with Rome and of the minutes of the secret negotiations between London and Rome in May and early June, 1940 surfaced after the end of the war.

In 1945, Churchill, concerned by potential embarassments, assigned to the SIS the job of recovering this secret correspondence negotiation file from Italy. Bastianini himself went into hiding under an assumed name in a Tuscan monastery after the Italian surrender, remaining there dressed as a monk, allegedly for several years. As a member of the Fascist Grand Council, he had voted for Grandi's motion and against Mussolini the night of July 24-25, 1943. Later, he had been tried for treason in absentia by the Fascist tribunal that had condemned Ciano to death, and had also been condemned to death. He died in Italy in 196lwithout revealing anything about Churchill's 1940 proposals to Italy or his secret negotiations with the Churchill government in 1943 -- and without ever commenting publicly on the Tyler Kent case. Both Churchill and the US Department of State must have been pleased that Bastianini "never talked."

The 1940 British and French proposals to Italy were made in Churchill's name, and were seriously considered by Mussolini, Ciano and the King. Top members of the Fascist regime became aware of them, including Count Dino Grandi (Ambassador to London from 1932 to 1939 and a "founder" of Italian Fascism), National Police Chief Arturo Bocchini, and others.

What Churchill and Reynaud did not know at the time was that Mussolini, the King and Ciano had a huge laundry list of territorial claims against the French Republic and the British Empire -- that by comparison made Churchill's proposals seem ridiculously insignificant. These claims were made later by Ciano personally to Hitler in July, 1940, after the French surrender. They included the following from France: Nice, Corsica, Tunisia, the Algerian Districts of Bone and Constantine, French Somaliland (Djibouti) and Syria. They included the following from the British Empire: Malta, Cyprus, Egypt, British Somaliland, Palestine, Aden, and Iraq. (Hitler reportedly commented, according to Ciano, that he did not plan to offer France a peace treaty, as the French ports and other parts of Occupied France were essential to the prosecution of the war against Britain.)

Italy Rejects Churchill's 1940 Proposals

Grandi, Bocchini and some other top Fascist leaders were frankly afraid of war, aware as they were of Italy's weak financial and military position -- and uneasy, personally, about the ruthlessness of Hitler and the ultimate consequences of the German alliance signed by Ciano. Rut Miissolini, Ciano, Roberto Farinacci and other top Fascist leaders considered the "desperate British and French proposals" a sign of weakness that should be taken full advantage of -- in the company of an apparently already victorious Nazi Germany. The "Tyler Kent texts," received by Ciano from Bastianini seemed to confirm that judgment unequivocally, and so war was declared.

Some argued, in effect, that a deal with Britain and France was more profitable and much less risky than gambling on war as Hitler's junior partner; others "wanted it all," and opted for a deal with Nazi Germany.

The split in the top ranks of the Fascist regime was real, and the King who was pro- British but violently anti-French seemed to remain ambiguous. As a result, Mussolini did not call for a meeting of the Fascist Grand Council to decide the issue of war or peace, as constitutional procedure required. Such a meeting would have created, and revealed, a serious split in the regime, and forced Mussolini and Ciano to discuss the details of their secret negotiations with London (Churchill) and Paris (Reynaud). In effect, Churchill's proposals, endorsed by the French, might have been too tempting for a majority of the Grand Council not to accept, or so Mussolini and the King may have feared.

So Mussolini went ahead, with the King's permission, and on June 10, 1940, declared war on France and Britain in a speech from his balcony overlooking Piazza Venezia. In his speech, the Duce distinguished, as did the King in private, between those in Europe who followed the tenets of the French Revolution, namely and specifically the French Republic -- that threatened "Revolution" and disintegration throughout Europe -- and the mighty rejuvenation of Europe through the "New Order" proposed by Germany and Fascist Italy. To the King, the 'New Order" meant, of course, an eventual return to the "old order" of Monarchy, aristocracy and class -- and "control of the masses." The name "New Order" appealed, however, to his cynical sense of humor. In addition, the King, as head of the House of Savoy, had long had his eyes on Savoy -- his family's ancestral feudal home -- that was French territory across the Alpine Franco-Italian frontier. Savoy adjoined Italian Piedmont, and would make, he thought, a handsome, and appropriate addition, to his Kingdom of Italy.

France Surrenders

The King's son, Crown Prince Umberto was, officially and pretentiously, the commander-in-chief of the Italian armies that then ineptly attacked southern France -- advancing only a few hundred yards after the King's June 10 declaration of war. The French resisted stubbornly, yielding no ground.

On June 14, the German army entered Paris, which had been declared an "Open City" by the French government headed by Paul Reynaud. The French military commanders, General Alphonse George and the new Generalissimo, General Maxime Weygand, reported to Reynaud -- and to a visiting Churchill -- that the French front had collapsed, that the German Panzer divisions had broken through at different points, and that the French Army was disintegrating. Weygand demanded new British air and military support (just as had Premier Reynaud on May 16).

These desperate, renewed requests for British troops and planes were made directly to Churchill, and to the British Ambassador to France, Sir Ronald Campbell -- who was in daily direct personal contact with Reynaud and other French leaders. (Later, in 1943. as British Ambassador to Portugal, in Lisbon, Campbell would play a role in the negotiations leading up to the secret signing of the Italian surrender.)

On June 16, however, Churchill completed the withdrawal of all remaining British forces in France, that i s those remaining south of Paris. Some 47,000 embarked for Britain that day, taking only 250 vehicles with them, and leaving all their heavy equipment behind. (Earlier, on June 12, two days before the fall of Paris, 8,000 men of the British 51st Division had surrendered, with their commanding general, at St. Valery, on the coast southwest of Dieppe, where they had been trapped --by Erwin Rommel's 7th Panzer Division -- together with the remnants of four French divisions.) That same day; June 16, Marshal Henri Philippe Petain was sworn in as the new Premier of France, with General Maxime Weygand as Minister of Defense and Paul Baudouin as Foreign Minister.

The new French government considered the complete British military withdrawal from France a betrayal, and the next day, June 17, requested a military armistice of Hitler. That same day, Petain made a radio broadcast to the French people, announcing that the French government had requested an armistice. These developments energized Mussolini, Ciano and Crown Prince Umberto, who then decided to launch "a major offensive" on June 21 against the French forces on the Italian frontier. Their earlier "offensive" had made no progress.

The French armistice delegation did not meet with Hitler, at Compiegne (north of Paris), until June 21, after having been ordered to Paris -- which they reached, under German escort, on June 20. The French delegation signed the armistice the evening of June 22.

By June 21, German units were advancing rapidly, south, along the Rhone Valley, directly threatening the rear of the French divisions facing the Italians. However, as Mussolini later wryly noted, 'the major offensive" launched by Crown Prince Umberto on June 21 had not captured a centimeter of French soil. Later, Italy was surrendered a strip of French territory about 30 miles (SO km) wide along the Franco-Italian frontier as a "demilitarized zone" controlled by Italian troops -- after the French army evacuated the zone, under the armistice terms.

Italy's comic-opera offensives against the French army had been totally ineffective, and the King did not get to annex Savoy to the Kingdom of Italy.

Following the French armistice, Hitler and Mussolini held a joint public meeting in Munich. Prominently in public attendance was elderly General Franz Ritter von Epp, the Nazi Governor of' Bavaria, who 21 years before had commanded the Munich militia unit that had first given postwar employment to Ernst Roehm and Adolf Hitler after World War I. Hitler had initially served it in mufti as a secret street agent reporting on Communist activities. News photos in the German and Italian press showed General von Epp, identified only as Governor of Bavaria, smiling with Hitler and Mussolini.

The War Continues

But the war against Britain continued, though ltaly did not launch any attacks from Libya into British-controlled Egypt, or attack British naval or land forces elsewhere. Instead, it was the British who attacked. On the night of June 11-12, a British Army patrol moved into no-man's land on the Egyptian-Libyan border, checking for Italian deployments and seeking prisoners for interrogation. Surprisingly, no Italian military activity was detected. All was quiet along the front. But the patrol did succeed in capturing Britain's first Italian prisoner of war. He was a general who had driven out into the desert in a sedan, alone with two prostitutes -- with which per Italian Army regulations its officer corps was provided -- and was caught with his pants down. Thus began the "war in the Western Desert," that later starred Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and Field Marshal Bernard L. Montgomery.

Churchill, infuriated by Mussolini and the King's declaration of war, immediately ordered the R4F to bomb major targets in Italy. But the RAF had already suffered very heavy bomber losses in the battle of France, and had not planned and was not organized to launch a bombing campaign against Italy. For the night of June 11-12, however, a small raid was ordered on the main FIAT works (Mirafiore) in Turin, and less than ten British bombers reached the city that night in very bad weather; the FIAT plant was not hit, and no apparent damage was done anywhere in Turin. Churchill then ordered further RAF bomber raids on Italy from airfields in southern France, but these were blocked by the French-government.

When, despite all the American diplomatic efforts, led by Sumner Welles, Mussolini declared war on France and Britain, that June 10, both Roosevelt and Taylor were outraged. Taylor, who was in Rome, told the Pope, in a private audience, that "Mussolini and the Fascist Party have to go." Taylor, who justifiably considered himself a financial expert, reportedly asserted to the Pope that Italy's financial situation was hopeless, that the Italian economy and banking system were poorly managed, corrupt, inefficient, and essentially bankrupt, and that Italy was, therefore, in no condition to enter, let alone fight, a major war. (Taylor never imagined, in June, 1940, that a year and a half later Mussolini and the King would also be stupid enough to declare war on the United States.) Pope Pius XII replied to Taylor that Mussolini had been hypnotized by Hitler and was acting without consulting even his closest Fascist associates.