Taking a Duce (A Benito Mussolini SI)

[Alenco98]

March 2, 1941
Palazzo Venezia
Rome, Italy

The Reich's man in Rome was punctual. A crisp knock. A practiced gait. That smug Prussian rigidity like someone shoved a telephone pole up his ass. Hans Georg von Mackensen: ambassador, aristocrat, witless errand boy for a failed painter with a superiority complex. God I hated dealing with this cunt, even looking at him made me wanna put a knife through his stomach while his bitch of a wife watched, god she had such a stabbable face.

I didn't stand. I never stood for diplomats unless they were mine or dead. He entered. Bowed slightly. The same dull suit, the same lifeless eyes. Like a taxidermy exhibit that could still speak German. I remembered I had a gun in my drawer, soon.

"Duce," he said, the r rolling faintly in that forced Hochdeutsch affectation they all had. "How may I be of service?"

I smiled. Cold. Controlled. "Herr von Mackensen. Sit. Let's talk." I took a breath, I needed all the willpower to not order this cocksucker be shoved out a window.

I gestured like a tired priest blessing a child. He sat stiffly.

"I am disappointed" I began, "of the continuing… interruptions in our arrangement. The Jewish transports." I clasped my hands together. "The flow has… ceased." 1.5 million, 1.5 million Jews taken in. Until that cocksucker Adolf got upset cause I talked to that paranoid schizophrenic Stalin and went NEIN JUDEN.

He fidgeted slightly. "Yes. Berlin has decided—"

"You mean Hitler has decided."

He blinked. "Yes. The Führer is displeased. Your recent trade accord with the Soviet Union was… unexpected."

Of course it was. That's why I did it. Nothing tickles me more than disrupting the predictable little Reich.

"I see," I said. "So because I refuse to let Germany dictate my trade, refuse to let Germany violate Italian soveirgnty you cut off my Jew supply? We're your partners, not vassals."

His face twitched. "They are not—"

"Oh but they are." I leaned forward slightly. "They are mine. My Jews. You gave them to me. You promised me. And now? Silence. Where's my next transport ambassador? I was promised another 250 thousand by February. The Lehi aren't going to recruit from nowhere."

He didn't answer. I offered him a smile that felt like razor wire.

"I ask because," I said gently, "your Jewish problem is my solution. My final solution to the British question in the middle east. And more importantly—do you have any idea how valuable they've been to the Lehi?"

A twitch.

"The Lehi." He repeated like a retarded choirboy.

"Yes, yes, ambassador the Lehi," I said, sipping my wine. "The Falag. You know, the fascist Zionists we trained in Libya? The ones tying up entire divisions of British troops in Palestine? All without a single German or Italian firing a shot, I might add. And quite a lot of British mothers mourning their boys. Why, that splendid little battle at the Jaffa Port last week? Hilarious. 100 British soldiers in body-bags in one day. Could your SS do that while outnumbered and outgunned?"

He stiffened like a mannequin in a freezer.

On the outside, I was serene. Passive. Almost Buddhist. I was the Mona Lisa of Mediterranean politics.

Inside? I was laughing. Cackling. Laughing so hard it would kill an old pope.

Inside I was also playing "Stay With Me" by Miki Matsubara in my mind like a weapon.

Stay with meeeeee…
Mayonakaaa no doa o tatakiiiii…

God. Those incomprehensible lyrics . That rhythm. Like sex wrapped in silk.

He was still talking. Something about Berlin reassessing strategic necessity or some other vague diplomatic bullshit. God just be straight, I fucking hate diplomats. This is why I want to have Ciano shot, he sounds just like this snivelling little shit in front of me. No wonder Stalin purged hundreds of thousands for no reason, I'd be annoyed too if I had to deal with these fucking worms on a daily basis. I understand your game now brother Stalin. A glass of vodka to you.

"I understand," I said, voice monotone like an 18 year old prostitute about to fuck a fat man old enough to be her father or even grandfather in a dingy motel room while she questioned her life choices. "The Führer is busy. Planning his…future campaigns, I imagine."

He frowned. "What do you mean?"

"Oh nothing." I waved it off. "Just speculation. I imagine he'll get what he wants eventually."

And then I'll gut him like a fish. All while that bitch Eva watches. Maybe I'll turn her into my second mistress, never been with a blonde. Like monkey soup in Brazil, Uma Delicia. Marylin Monroe was a blonde too, maybe I could fuck her before Kennedy. Lucky bastard.

But I didn't say that. Not out loud. I pictured Hitler's stupid face, bloodied and slack-jawed in a Roman dungeon. A broken toy I no longer needed.

I smiled again. "Do remind herr Adolf that the Middle East is… delicate. And I hold the scalpel."

He stood. "I will convey your message."

I stood too—finally. Just to flex.

"Good. Do that. And do ask Berlin where my next trainload is. Or I may have to consider other… sources. Stalin, perhaps? That trade agreement can be modified to include Jews."

His face twitched again.

I watched him leave, clicking down the marble halls like a tin soldier winding down.

That bastard knew.

They all knew I was going to flip. But they had no proof. They didn't know when.

Yet.

And I knew, that they knew.

And they knew, that I knew, that they knew.

And I knew, that they knew, that I knew, that they knew.

But soon… I'd carve my own legend. Across Thrace, across Anatolia, across Europe. With iron and flame. And every cocksucker from Anchorage Alaska to Kabul Afghanistan would bow. Let those fuckers bleed themselves in Russia. I'd have given Thrace, Constantinople, and the Aegean to my Greek vassals and the south east of turkey to my Syrian friends.

And before the British tried anything I'd backstab Germany. Too perfect, strange bedmates.

I walked back to my desk. Took a deep breath.

And in my head—

Plastic Love began to play.

God, I needed war.
War and city pop.

And maybe another cup of wine.

And Clara sucking my cock.

I'm just playing games, I know that's plastic loooooove.

Dance to the plastic beat, another morning buuuuuuuuuuuz.

I'm just playing games, I know that's plastic loooooove.

Dance to the plastic beat, another morning buuuuuuuuuuuz.

-

March 6, 1941
Reich Chancellery
Berlin, Germany

He thinks I don't know.

He thinks he's clever. Thinks I cannot see the oily wheels turning in that malformed head of his. That Mediterranean goblin—Mussolini—Duce—with his stolen laurels and antique fantasies.

He smiles too much. Like a snake with a rictus grin. Like a man who already knows the answer to the question he's asking.

Von Mackensen was clear. The Italians are no longer useful. They are no longer loyal. They are liabilities. Mussolini speaks of sovereignty, of trade deals, of Jewish "resources." He demands more trains. He wants the Jews—not for purification, not for order—but for his own ends. He is hoarding them. For leverage. For chaos.

He has betrayed us before we have even won the war.

And yet they love him.

The Greeks cheer him.
The Jews arm under his banner.
The Balkans murmur in Latin again.
And the British—yes, even the British—fear what he might awaken in Africa, in the East.

He has turned Libya into a forge.
He has turned Rome into a stage.
He has turned my war into his revolution.

He is not an ally.
He is not a Roman.
He is a parasite.

And he forgets. He forgets who gave him the opportunity . Who sided with him. Who lifted him from irrelevance.

But I do not forget.

The East comes first.
Judeo-Bolshevism must be defeated.
The Slavic filth must be extinguished. Moscow must fall like Carthage—erased.
Then the Caucasus. The oil. The breadbasket of tomorrow.

And then?

Then Rome.

We will enter like Caesars—but with tanks instead of horses. The Luftwaffe will reduce the Palatine to rubble. I will scatter his Senate like rats. I will burn the Colosseum and salt the ruins of his myths.

The SS will drag him from his palace in chains. No more marble. No more crowds. Just silence. Just the silence of history correcting itself.

I will erase him.

Him and his ridiculous dream of a mongrel empire. Him and his Jewish games. Him and his Jews.

No more.

After the East is pacified, Italy is next.

I already have the files. The maps. The routes.

Operation Saturnus.
Veneto to Tuscany.
Neapolitan coast to the Sicilian gate.

Kesselring is ready. Rommel is loyal.
And if the Italian army lifts a finger, it will be the last movement of a dying limb.

He does not know it yet.

But I have already begun the funeral arrangements.

Mussolini's empire is a mirage.

And when the fires rise, he will understand:
Rome belongs to me.

-

March 10, 1941
Palazzo Venezia
Rome, Italy

The room reeked of cologne and cowardice. They were all here—Ciano, my shitstain son in law with his dead-eyed smile and notes scribbled like a schoolgirl, Balbo smirking like he knew better (he didn't, that fucker), and the rest of the Grand Council lined up like mannequins in uniform, waiting for direction.

I watched them in silence, swirling a glass of grappa, city pop drifting faintly in the corner of my mind—Tatsuro Yamashita, "Bomber." There's something about Japanese city pop: sleek, calculated, hollow like a smile you don't mean. A mirror of the men in front of me.

Tunisia was pacified, more or less. The French had folded like cheap linen once we started dragging them out of their villas and into the camps. Of course, the French always surrender eventually. The trick is knowing how hard you need to squeeze before the juice runs.

Greater Syria was a different story. The remnants of France clung to everything west of Raqqa like lice to a dead dog. British arms from Iraq as well as Free French propaganda and men flowing in under their watch, Saadeh's boys were bleeding for every kilometer. But they had equipment, Italian advisors, and eager syrians coming in from south america ready to claim their new homeland. I figured some chemical gas and bombs poured over the free french forward positions and problem solved. Slow, bloody, full of British condemnation but efficient.

The Zaydi imam had sent me a letter—perfumed parchment, hand-written. He wanted chemical weapons for his own army. Fine. I'll be your chemical dealer. Better than a chemical romance.

I tapped my glass against the table. A pause. They all went silent, good dogs. God I hated these cunts, except I couldn't kill them, especially Ciano, my daughter was married to him and seemed to love him, sadly he had his uses.

"My friends," I said with a soft sigh, passive and disapproving like a father hearing his child had set fire to the cat. "We are facing resistance. In Serbia. In Syria. In the minds of the colonial man who still clings to the myth of French superiority. We must correct this."

Ciano leaned forward. "More troops?"

I smiled faintly. "No. More pressure." This fucking bitch. I wanna scoop his eyes out with a spoon and make him eat them.

These 'men' lack imagination. They see empire like a chessboard. I see it like a nightclub—lights, mirrors, sweat, control, drugs, condoms. You don't dominate with force, not always. You dominate with spectacle. A dead insurgent means nothing. But a few Frenchmen in cages over the gates of Damascus. That's theater.

Like in Plastic Love, the synth rolls in slow—smooth, seductive, but there's menace under it. That's how I'll treat Syria.

"We shall begin... Imprisoning every French citizen in Greater Syria we can get our hands on." I tasted my words. "Expropriate their property among the syrians. Detain the ones with influence and quietly dispose of them. Break the Free French's base of support."

Balbo raised an eyebrow. "And the press?"

"What about them? We'll say they're being relocated for their protection. As for the free french in the east. A few chemical weapons and bombs for their forward positions, no towns, no massacres, I want every European looking man who says bonjour shot and their corpses in the Euphrates. The Arabs can be let go of and recruited." I smiled with all the warmth of a guillotine then moved on.

Serbia. Always Serbia. Graveyards of empires and psychotic nationalists with dreams too big for their heads. Tito was still a rumor. But rumors grow teeth. There wouldn't be any dad's who were war criminals, not this time.

"The Ustashe were inefficient," I said calmly. "The Croats were... exuberant, but they burned too many villlages, killed too many people, too loud, bad public relations."

Pavelic thought killing children made him a genius. Idiot. You don't need to exterminate people to control them. Just kill or discredit the ones who speak too loud. Death squads? Too loud, bad PR. Blackmail, rumors, slander, entrapment, threatening families. Priests and poets first. Teachers next. Thank god orthodox priests can marry, family, good collateral, a few men in the night telling them their families daily routine and kindly asking them to tone it down was much more efficient. Pavelic would just send death squads to roam randomly at night once I told him to chill, inefficient, foolish. My way was better.

"Send in special units. OVRA units trained for counter espionage. I want them to gather blackmail, rumors. Give them full discretion to monitor key figures and their families—clergy, teachers, poets, journalists, partisans. Find the most problematic ones, drug them, send some prostitutes male or female and redoes them. Make it spicy, make it scandalous." I turned to Roatta. "You'll oversee it. But no massacres. Let the Germans have their gore in Poland. We prefer...threats, blackmail, their dead wives and children paraded in front of them if they refuse. We're civilized men unlike the so called master race."

The soundtrack shifts in my mind: Mariya Takeuchi, "September." There's a sweetness to it—false hope wrapped in velvet. Perfect for Serbia. Let them dance a little before the axe falls. September, soshite anata wa. September.

As the council murmured in agreement, I stood, finally.

"This empire is not built by force alone," I said, voice low but firm. "It is built by fear, by loyalty, by vision. We are not the Reich. We are Rome."

And Rome never apologizes.

The smell of espresso lingered, cut faintly by the scent of pipe smoke and polished leather. We'd moved from Serbia to Palestine now—closer to the heart. The map of the Levant was then stretched across the conference table like a patient on an operating table, arteries of trade and insurgency pulsing in red ink.

I gestured to the dot on the coast: Haifa. A week ago, the British still thought they owned it. Now? Two hundred British corpses in seven days. Streets slick with gun oil and blood.

There's something divine about guerrilla warfare when it's not your hands doing the killing. The Falag were magnificent—Lehi radicals turned fascist by necessity and by the sword. No morals. No pity. All purpose. That's what Zionism needed: not rabbis and lawyers, but killers with a dream.

I lit a cigarette. Italian made. Smooth. Clean. Classy. Like the Rajie song that was now playing softly in my mind—Kanashimi no Elephant.

"Haifa," I said aloud, drawing the name out like a lover's sigh. "What a surprise."

Ciano cleared his throat, his voice careful. "Officially, we've distanced ourselves."

"Yes. Publicly we must. The Americans are watching. Even the Pope is bitching at me over this. But," I turned, letting the smoke coil lazily, "we will not close the pipeline. The Falag are useful. They hurt the British. They radicalize the landscape. Let them grow. Feed them, in secret. Weapons, radio support, cash through Damascus."

A pause.

"Duce, if they win…?" Balbo asked.

"When they win. They'll break Palestine. That's enough." I smiled. "When the British tire, we'll step in and offer peace. Our kind of peace."

Israel, but with blackshirts instead of ultra Orthodox penguins. A settler state built in my image.

Roatta smirked. "We could begin arms smuggling through Egypt again."

"Perfect," I said. "Make it discrete."

The table quieted as the pointer moved north. Greece. The darling of Roman restoration, our Athenian mirror.

"We are almost prepared for the final phase," I announced. "The Thracian corridor will fall within the month once we start. Istanbul—Constantinople—will be retaken by our allies. The Greeks are sharpening their knives."

Ciano nodded. "They want the Hagia Sophia reopened."

"It will be."

I want that dome lit again. Let the turks cry out in rage. Let every Orthodox heart tremble with divine nostalgia and praise rome while sucking me off. Rome gives it all back—Jerusalem, Constantinople, Antioch. We are the empire of return. That British puppet they call a king can cry out all he wants about restraint, fucking asshole, once we take Constantinople I'm forcing an abolition of the monarchy. Send that family back to whatever German shithole they crawled out from. And if they refuse, well, the Russians did deal with their royals efficiently after the revolution.

"And the Turks?" Ciano asked.

"They'll collapse. Stalin will finish what we start. Thrace, Constantinople and the Aegean will be Greek. The Turks will get a people's republic courtesy of Stalin. Maybe even a red caliph. Something ornamental."

Mustafa Kemal's ghost can cry in its whiskey and rim my asshole. He had his rule. Now he gets a street named after him and a state that speaks Russian and pays taxes to Athens.

Another map laid out like a hooker in a cheap motel room. North Africa. Bold lines for Libya. Deep green for Tunisia. Not colonies—provinces.

"I have signed the integration decree back in February as you all know," I said calmly. "Tripolitania and Cyrenaica are now Italy. As Italian as Palermo. Tunis, too."

Muttering. These cocksuckers opposed me. But what can they do about it? I did the diplomatic checkmate, not them. I took territory for Italy without firing a shot. They bent the knee once I reminded them. Suck my cock and say thank you master once you swallow me. God I just want to be done with all this.

Ciano frowned. "It will be hard integrating them as I said."

"Yes. But it will be done."

Roatta leaned forward. "Even the Berbers?"

Yes, even the fucking Berbers you waste of sperm. You dense motherfucker. Christ. The Arabs. The desert tribes who once spat on Roman graves. Now they'll carry Roman passports. They bleed for our flag. They marry our men. And if they don't, the sands will be colored red with blood. Not just the men, but the women, and the children too.

"Yes," I said gently. "All of them. No more subject peoples. Only Romans. They fight for us now. The French pigs in the camps still cling to their old maps. We'll expel them soon. But our new citizens will speak Arabic and Italian then dream in Latin. And one day pray towards Rome, not Mecca."

This is how you rule the Third World: you give them validation and a dream, then make those sheep believe you stand with them. Once the cold war starts, I'm not going to let the soviets take the monopoly on backing decolonization, anti-racism, and civil rights. God, fascist Malcolm X, fascist Nelson Mandela. I can't wait. No communism, no capitalism, Romanism. The true third way, too much negative connotations for the word fascism, no, Romanism was the future for Italy. I should start writing a manifesto. I knew what the original future held, I was re-writing it.

I stood again. The room stiffened.

"From Casablanca to Constantinople, Rome will rule. Rome is on the cusp of its rebirth. It will soon be a reality again. And if the world trembles at our march," I smiled faintly, "let them dance to our music."

Yurie Kokubu played in my head. I love you. From her 1990 album silent moon, an enjoyable album.

A happening to me, Suma saki, ni, koboreru.....epilogue

An epilogue? No, this wasn't going to be an epilogue. It was a dream, a dream of Rome baby.

 

[Alenco98]

Excerpt from Mussolini: The Rise and Reign of Il Duce by Christopher Hibbert (2008)

By the spring of 1941, the world stood on fire—but Italy, paradoxically, was beginning to thrive. While bombs fell on London and tanks were about to rumble through the Ukrainian steppe, Mussolini's neutral Italy emerged not as a bystander, but as an economic colossus in gestation. At the center of this unexpected revival was the quiet return of an old name: Alberto De Stefani.

Reinstated as Minister of Finance in September 1939, De Stefani—a classical liberal economist ousted in the 1920s—was not Mussolini's typical appointee. He was no fiery Fascist grandstander. Instead, he was a dry-eyed technician of markets, statistics, and supply curves. And he arrived in Rome with a singular mission: to untangle the web of inefficiencies, controls, and corporate bloat that had strangled the Italian economy since the onset of autarky.

De Stefani's reforms were sweeping. The wartime emergency was used not to entrench the state, but to liberate the market. Price controls on basic goods were abolished in early 1940, allowing farmers and producers to respond to demand rather than quotas. State-owned enterprises deemed non-essential were quietly privatized, particularly in textiles, food processing, and light manufacturing. The infamous Battaglia del Grano, once a nationalist obsession, was scrapped. Italy began importing Canadian wheat through Swiss intermediaries, with Mussolini's De Stefani's blessing.

Tax policy was overhauled to reward capital investment. Corporate taxes were slashed, particularly for firms that produced machinery, transport vehicles, or military supplies. A new "Strategic Investment Fund" offered state-backed loans for factory modernization and infrastructure development, with priority given to ports, railways, and oil refining. Labor laws were relaxed, giving firms more flexibility to hire and fire, but with increased wage protections for skilled workers—particularly engineers, machinists, and logisticians. De Stefani believed industrial labor, not peasant labor, was the soul of the modern empire.

Neutrality, far from being an economic anchor, became a windfall. Italy's ports—Trieste, Genoa, Naples—became Europe's arteries of wartime trade. German exports, bound for South America and the Middle East, flowed through Italian docks and were repackaged under neutral flags, often Greek or Turkish. For this privilege, Germany paid handsomely. Entire railway lines were nationalized solely for Axis goods, with tariffs negotiated by Mussolini himself. One Allied diplomat dubbed it the "Black Transit Gold"—Italy made billions in lira, marks, and Swiss francs.

Even the Allies traded, albeit discreetly. Through Turkish and Greek intermediaries, British and even Soviet agents purchased Italian chemicals, steel components, and machine tools. All neutral. All deniable. The Vatican, with its global financial web, played a silent but vital role in laundering transactions.

Perhaps most striking was how Mussolini balanced this economic revival with his military modernization, often walking a tightrope between rearmament and restraint. Where Hitler used conscription and forced labor, Mussolini relied on incentives. Military contracts were auctioned, not commanded, with competition encouraged among private firms. Fiat, Ansaldo, Breda—all were made to bid for government contracts under a new Ministry of Military Procurement, headed by the technocratic Italo Marchesi.

Rather than build weapons for show, De Stefani's team emphasized modular production and standardization. Army logistics officers worked directly with civilian factories to ensure compatibility. The new M13/40 tanks, for example, used interchangeable parts with Italian civilian tractors—a deliberate policy to simplify repair and reduce costs.

Rationing was avoided by importing food through neutral trade and leveraging Italy's new colonial resources. Libya's ports boomed with traffic from Syria and Somalia, and agricultural production in Tunisia—now an Italian province—was redirected to support both civilian and military needs. Italian settlers and Jewish immigrants alike were incentivized to farm, with generous subsidies and transport links.

Mussolini also pulled off a feat few had thought possible: mass integration without mass unrest. Arabs in Tunisia and Libya, granted Italian citizenship and military service eligibility, formed a new class of skilled laborers and colonial troops. Jewish settlers in Tripolitania, many from Germany and Poland, were granted tax breaks and autonomous schooling. The economy became a polyglot creature—Italian in rhetoric, but multinational in function.

The Italian Labor Front was transformed from a propaganda vehicle into a recruitment and training hub, establishing technical institutes in Naples, Palermo, and Benghazi. "Romanitas," Mussolini declared in a 1940 speech, "is not race—it is capacity."

By mid-1941, Italy's GDP had grown nearly 15% since 1939—astonishing in a time of global war. Unemployment in the north had fallen to its lowest level since the 1920s, and industrial output had increased by 22%. Inflation remained low, buffered by gold inflows and De Stefani's cautious monetary policy.

Critics in London and Washington remained skeptical. They saw Mussolini's maneuverings as cynical, opportunistic, or simply lucky. But within Italy, a different story emerged. Mussolini—by accident or instinct—had fused free market liberalism with a rationalized military-industrial state. Not as ideological purity, but as cold logic.

As Hibbert notes in his biography:

> "In these years, Mussolini ceased to be the caricature. He became something stranger. A man with the ambitions of Caesar, but the instincts of Rockefeller. He shouted less, calculated more. And while Europe burned, Il Duce quietly built a machine of state that could endure fire without becoming ash."

It was, in the words of one British economic observer in 1941, "the most unlikely miracle of the war."

 

[Alenco98]

April 12, 1941
The White House
Washington, D.C., United States

The door creaked open. I'd gotten off the boat yesterday. There they were, Roosevelt and Wallace. Two men with grim expressions. I couldn't care less. I had been to the court of kings and dictators, the embassies of Europe, and now here I was in the heart of it all, the land of Lincoln, my adopted homeland in my old life, the land of vast horizons and corporate greed. Man I missed modern DC, full of dive bars and good plugs if you knew where to look. This DC was old, stale, god I hated it. Nothing like a good pizza over at comet after an all day date walking around the museums. This city was a shell.

FDR, the so-called "man of the people." His tired, yet somehow still cocky voice filled the room. The wheelchair creaked as he maneuvered himself into position. Wallace stood behind him, an awkward, bony figure. His face looked like it had been made of clay that hadn't dried yet. Always so fidgety, like a mouse caught in a trap. God I wanted to throw them to the lions already

I smirked, unable to help myself as I fantasized about their bodies being ripped apart. You could smell their panic, thick as morning fog over the Potomac. But not me. No, no, I'd had worse. I'd stood in front of Hitler, Stalin—real killers who could make one word of command end lives. This? This was child's play. Pussies.

"Ah, Benito," Roosevelt greeted, with that typical warmth, probably thinking it disarmed me. "I see you've brought your documents. I'm sure they're... troubling."

Troubling? Oh, FDR, you fucking idiot. If you knew what I knew. It was perfect. A symphony of truth wrapped with deceit and paper, tucked inside lies, all carefully constructed to pull the rug from under your feet. And that's when the fun begins.

"I don't know how troubling, Mr. President," I said smoothly, leaning back in my chair, letting my hands rest on the polished wood. "But I believe you'll agree that the contents are...concerning."

I held his gaze, keeping a mask of civility. Inside, I was relishing the chaos this would bring. The way his mind would turn, ticking through the lies, the panic. I could hear "Indian Sunmer" by Miki Asakura playing softly in the back of my mind as I spoke—we're not even in the same world, FDR. He's below me, a crippled worm. I put my suitcase on the resolute desk and opened it, putting s stack of papers on the desk.

Wallace's eyes flickered over the papers once he grabbed them. His hands began shaking slightly after he skimmed over them for a good minute or two. He was trying to hide it, but it was obvious. There was a definite hum in the air, like when you know you've just crossed a line.

"These are... documents from your attaches in the SS and German Army?" Wallace asked, his voice wavering. He was playing it safe, but I could hear the doubt in his tone. These documents were meant to unnerve them, and they were doing their job well.

"Oh, yes," I answered casually, my voice dripping with a dangerous calm. "Some of them may be uncomfortable truths, but they are truths, nonetheless."

Roosevelt glanced at Wallace and he handed the papers over to him. I watched the slow twist of his expression as he read about the camps, the systematic slaughter, the genocidal machine already spinning in full force, all within the span of a few minutes, beautiful. He was too soft. That's the problem with American politics. Too many idealists, too many people who see the world through rose-tinted glasses. A shame, really.

"How long, Duce?" Roosevelt asked finally, his voice lower, almost… pained. "How long have you known about this?"

I tilted my head. "How long?" I repeated, savoring the word. "Not as long as you have, Mr. President. You've been hearing rumors for months. I'm sure you have your own informants. What, no reports on the train schedules? No one watching from the rooftops?"

I saw his expression tighten. I loved it. They always thought they were so above it all. A bit of pressure, and they crack like a rotten walnut. The pieces fall to the floor, and there they are, nothing but empty shells.

"I thought we had it bad with the Great Depression." Wallace muttered, almost to himself, but loud enough for me to hear. His voice still had that nervous pitch.

I turned my gaze to him. Wallace. I couldn't decide if I found him tragic or laughable. Maybe both. His face was too round, too soft. No one would ever follow a man like him into battle. I imagined him in a little hat, like some poor, wandering soul in a city pop music video, staring aimlessly at the neon lights as the world collapsed around him. My head ticked to the beat of Singing in the snow by Mikiko Noda.

Ohhh baby you're my baby

So happy Christmas tonight

Shining down free in your eyes hold me tightly in your sweet arms

Koibito tachi no

Yoru wa haji maru

"Such naivety," I said with a smile, "Mr. Wallace, you're one of the few people who could still speak of the world as if it were not already in ruins. A fine man, truly."

Roosevelt didn't take my bait. He was stewing in it, his eyes squinting through the haze of knowledge. It wasn't just the Jews. It was everything. The mess I was making in the Mediterranean. The way I was drawing lines in the sand—each one thicker, bolder. He understood now.

"I know you," I said softly, watching FDR's eyes narrow. "You think you're being clever. Playing the long game. But here's the thing, Mr. President—your 'long game' just became a short game. You can't stand by and do nothing, not after what you read about Japan."

FDR shifted uncomfortably. As he continued reading my reports. Japan, pearl harbor, Russia, Barbarossa I didn't have the exact dates but I knew Barbarossa was sometime in the summer and Pearl in December. A few false reports by my ambassadors in Japan and Germany, a few bribed naval and military officers leaking falsified documents. I could feel the pulse of tension rise. I had already played my cards, and now they were forced to make a choice. A crucial one.

"There's a front to open, Mr. President," I said. "On your side. And I will be waiting. I can handle the bulk of Europe so long as you open up a front or 2 in France. But I want something in return. Turkey, Mr. Roosevelt. The Balkans. The Mediterranean. We both know you can't have it all."

Roosevelt tried to steady himself, but I could see it in his eyes. He knew I was right. There was a limit to the power of the United States. A limit to what they could control, especially with the likes of me in play. My empire—my Roman Empire—was already marching forward.

"What's your price?" Roosevelt asked quietly.

"A recognition of my conquests," I said flatly, "A nod from your esteemed government. Spain's acquisitions in Morocco and Algeria. My claims in Turkey, North Africa and Syria. A little formality in exchange for total cooperation."

Wallace looked up suddenly, a flash of something like pity in his eyes. What did he think I was? A madman, or worse, a genius with a warped mind? Either way, he wasn't the one to decide. Neither was Roosevelt, really. Not in this moment.

"I will let you know," Roosevelt said after a long pause, shifting his weight. "We'll talk it over. But these… are dangerous moves, Duce. Dangerous."

"Ah, Mr. President," I said, tapping the desk with my fingers, "It's not dangerous, it's called gambling. And so far I'm winning. Hopefully you make the right decision. Germany has stopped giving me my Jews after all, there's millions of lives at stake." I gave him my smugest smiles. "Officially I'm only here to sign a trade agreement, tell someone over in the senate to come up with some false trade agreement. I'll sign it immediately if you want."

I stood up and left, the door shut behind me as I left. And inside, I allowed myself a quiet laugh.

I was on top.

-
Later that day
White house situation room

The clock ticked louder than it should have. Roosevelt hated that. It was the kind of noise that filled the silences when no one wanted to speak. Around the long oak table, his war cabinet sat in grave silence, papers spread before them like confessions. The air stank of ink, tobacco, and doubt.

Wallace sat stiffly to Roosevelt's right, his jaw clenched, the veins in his temples twitching every so often. He hadn't said a word since the briefing began, but his eyes were thunderclouds.

Stimson, Knox, Hull, Hopkins, and the Joint Chiefs—all here. All weighed down by the bomb Mussolini had dropped on them. Not just Pearl Harbor—though that alone would've shaken any man—but the camps. The machine of death running across Eastern Europe like a fever through a sick child.

Roosevelt leaned forward slowly, resting his elbows on the table. "We have to face facts, gentlemen," he said, his voice low, deliberate. "Mussolini has presented us with information no other source has confirmed. Japan will strike. Hitler is murdering millions. The Germans will turn on Stalin. This… this is our future, and it's coming whether we like it or not."

Wallace finally broke. "With respect, Mr. President," he said, the words almost biting, "that man is deranged. He's consolidating an empire, playing god with borders, cutting deals with tyrants. He's flooding the Middle East with armed Zionist fascists and he thinks he's Augustus reborn! We can't—we can't—ally with him."

A hush fell. Wallace didn't raise his voice often, but now it rang out like a shot in church.

Stimson, ever the pragmatist, cleared his throat. "He's unhinged, yes. But he's also not wrong. The Mediterranean's already lost to us. The Vichy holdouts are collapsing, and Mussolini's cleaned house across the region. He's got control. We have no leverage there."

Hull added, "And we will need a southern front once our hand is forced. Badly. He's offering troops. A navy. Bases across the Med. If we don't act soon, he could potentially hand that whole empire over to Stalin, and we'll be left playing catch-up in a Soviet-dominated postwar world."

Roosevelt steepled his fingers. He didn't want to do this. He hated Mussolini. The smugness, the needling sarcasm, the way his eyes glinted like a reptile's as he spoke. But the offer—damn it—the offer made sense.

Hopkins leaned in. "We don't have to like him, Franklin. We don't have to agree with his politics. But he'll bleed the Germans in the Balkans. He's already made Hitler paranoid. If Italy joins the war the moment we do, and opens a front from Italy into the Balkans, that's hundreds of thousands of German troops tied down. That buys time. Time we don't have otherwise."

Wallace looked sick. "And the Jews?" he said, bitterly. "He's using them as weapons. Settling them like pawns across North Africa and Palestine. He's turning survivors into tools for his own conquests."

FDR didn't answer for a long time. He stared at the tabletop, at a map of Europe hastily pinned under stacks of papers. His thumb tapped slowly. One beat. Then two.

"You think I don't know that?" he finally said. "You think I don't see the kind of man he is? He disgusts me, Henry. But if what he says about the camps is true—and my gut says it is—then time is running out for the people in them. And if he's right about Japan and Russia—God help us—we'll be at war within the year anyway."

He looked around the room. The weight of history pressed against the walls.

"Gentlemen," Roosevelt said, "we are not making an alliance. We are making a transaction. We acknowledge his conquests—formally, quietly—and in return, he throws the full weight of his war machine at the Germans the moment we join in."

"And the Middle East?" Wallace asked, bitterly.

"We don't touch it. Let him burn himself out there. The British won't like it, but they'll take the help. They need it."

Roosevelt straightened in his chair. "I'll write a letter to Churchill. A personal one. Nothing official until Japan Strikes. Until then, Mussolini gets what he wants—on paper only. If we win this war fast, if we drive straight to Berlin with his help, we may not need to honor it in full. But right now? Right now, we need the bastard."

Silence.

Then slow nods. Reluctant. Cold. But agreement nonetheless.

Wallace said nothing more. He only stared down at the papers, his hand trembling slightly as he lit a cigarette.

God forgive them.

-

April 15, 1941
War Rooms, Whitehall
London, United Kingdom

The lights flickered ever so slightly in the subterranean chambers beneath Whitehall. The air smelled of old stone and smoke. Outside, bombs hadn't fallen for days—but inside, another kind of shock detonated. A dispatch from Washington lay flat on the table before them, its contents read aloud just minutes ago.

No one spoke.

Churchill stood by the map wall, a fresh glass of scotch in his hand, a cigar in the other. He hadn't puffed it once. It hung there, smoke curling upward in slow, ghostly ribbons.

"So…" he muttered finally. "The Americans have made a pact with the devil."

No one laughed. Eden looked ashen. General Brooke had gone red in the face. Attlee sat frozen, fists clenched tight against his knees.

Churchill turned, slowly. His eyes were hard, glinting beneath the heavy bags of fatigue and fury. "I want no illusions in this room, gentlemen. We are now aligned—however temporarily—with a Mediterranean butcher who speaks of empire with the same casual fervor one orders a steak. Roosevelt is playing the long game. And he's playing it with a madman."

Eden spoke first. "With respect, Prime Minister… if it brings the Americans into the war—if it shortens the war—surely—"

"Don't." Churchill's voice cut like wire. "Don't you dare rationalize this as diplomacy. Mussolini is not Bismarck. He is not Metternich. He's a lunatic in love with marble statues and the sound of his own voice."

Brooke grumbled. "He's also holding the Suez Canal hostage. Half the Med. The horn of Africa. The Balkans. Hell, he's offering to crack Turkey in half with Stalin, and now he's got Jews in Palestine setting fire to British barracks and killing British boys. That's not diplomacy. That's a chessboard made of corpses."

Attlee finally spoke, quiet but clear. "We've done worse. Backed worse, even. And if Roosevelt believes Mussolini can help turn the tide…"

Churchill didn't respond at first. He paced—slowly, methodically, boots heavy against the stone floor. "Yes," he said at last. "We have done worse. But never while pretending it was anything but horror. And that's the difference. Roosevelt is still convincing himself this is politics. That this Italian devil can be used like a hammer and then discarded."

He turned back to the room. "But Mussolini is not a hammer. He is a fire. You use him, and you burn with him."

Silence.

General Ismay stepped forward, stiff and formal. "Operationally, we could gain. If Italy joins the war on our side—formally or otherwise—it opens the southern flank. Turkey becomes a battlefield, and the Germans must stretch themselves thinner across the Balkans. It would also tie down the German Army ."

Churchill grunted. "Yes. And perhaps he'll conjure elephants to cross the Alps again. If he follows through."

"He will," Eden muttered. "That man lives for betrayal. He is willing to betray Hitler. Now he wants to set himself up as the architect of a new order—one that doesn't end with a swastika, but a damn laurel crown."

Churchill sipped the scotch. Finally. It burned like truth.

"Then let it be known," he said, voice rising now with grim finality, "that Britain does not endorse this arrangement. We accept it. Under protest. Because the world is on fire, and beggars cannot be choosers. But let history remember who lit the match in the first place."

He turned to Eden.

"Draft a letter to Roosevelt. Vague. Reaffirm our commitment to cooperation with the United States. Say nothing of Mussolini. Nothing at all. The world will know soon enough. And when it does—when this deal is made public—pray God they remember who fought the Nazis from the beginning. Alone. Continue sending weapons to De Gaulle and anyone else in the Balkans willing to oppose this lunacy. Let the free french march through Iraq and into Syria. Send British troops and ships to assist the free french in capturing all remaining Vichy possessions across the world and have them resettle the french Mussolini and Franco are expelling from north Africa. If that knockoff Cesar wants his Mare Nostrum let him pay for it with blood."

He sat. Drained the glass. Lit the cigar at last.

"Gentlemen," he said, smoke billowing like prophecy, "we have made a pact with a devil in the hopes he might drag another one down with him. May he fall faster than we do."

 

[Alenco98]

April 28, 1941
Villa Torlonia
Rome, Italy

They arrived dressed like parodies of themselves—turbans too stiff, medals too shiny, those absurd little British-style jackets straining across their bellies. The emissaries from Baghdad, fresh off the boat, stinking of desperation and that sweet sweat of doomed men. Golden Square my ass. They looked like a fucking wedding band that got lost on the way to a funeral.

I sat in the garden, under a canopy of vines and bougainvillea. Spring in Rome was unbearable—too warm, too nostalgic. Like a postcard from a world that no longer existed. I sipped wine and watched them approach. Miki Matsubara's "Safari eyes" was playing somewhere in the back of my skull, looping again and again. Beautiful and false. Just like them. Unlike my precious Miki though I wanted to crucify these assholes for wasting my time.

They knelt. Actual kneeling. Christ. I almost burst out laughing. I looked down at them like Caligula, wondering how far I could push this before they broke. Maybe I should order them shot.

"We seek the protection of the Roman Empire," one of them said in stilted Italian, looking up with eyes too wide, too wet. "Iraq is ready to enter your sphere. The people are with you. We will rise against the British if you help us."

Oh yes, of course. Rise. Like dough, like vomit, like the price of crude. These men wanted protection, but they didn't understand what I was protecting. Me? I was protecting narrative. I was protecting the future. And the future didn't need a bunch of second-rate pan-Arabists roleplaying as Caesars in the fucking desert. Greater Syria and pan Arabism? I already backed one horse, this one was useless to me.

I took a long sip and let the silence stretch.

What they didn't know was that I was already planning a deal. Just yesterday, I'd requested to speak to the British ambassador through an intermediary. I told them about some intelligence I had regarding Iraq. In return? Once I revealed the existence of this little plot. They'd stop arming the Free French west of Raqqa. Leave Syria and Africa alone. Let Saadeh finish the job with Italian guns and gas. And let me and Franco finish shipping every one of those french jackasses back to West Africa.

The French settlers in Tunisia and Algeria were already eating sand in internment camps. Franco had Algeria now. Soon, Spain might get all of French West Africa, though I doubted it. That was just extra, when asking for 10 ask for 100 instead.

Me, I was clearing the map. Carving up the old world like a Roman banquet. And these Iraqi jackasses thought they could join in? Please.

I looked at them and smiled—benevolence stretched thin over contempt.

"Of course, I will help you," I said. "Italy aids its friends."

Inside, I was already composing the press release. Unfortunate news from Baghdad—four senior officers of the Golden Square and their families found dead in their homes. The British, acting on intelligence, preempted a rebellion. Blah blah blah. My fingerprints nowhere. My reward everywhere. God I was a monster, ordering people killed like texting an escort service and requesting their newest girl on a Friday night.

City pop bloomed again in my head—Gozen Go-ji no māmeido by Rajie this time. Fitting. That's what they were. Mermaids deep in the ocean while I had a spear gun and a deep dive suit. I'd toy with them like action figures then shoot them once I was done.

My empire was a mosaic, and they were just broken tiles.

They looked up—naïve, grateful, squinting against the Roman sun like stray dogs finally thrown a bone. I almost pitied them. Almost.

"I can provide you arms," I said, savoring each syllable like a line of poetry. "Trucks, rifles, uniforms. Chemical weapons. Italian engineers. We'll even repaint the planes so the British think they're your own. Yemen will offer advisors. Maybe even volunteers." I gave them a benevolent nod, like a king distributing bread to a starving crowd. "You will rise. Baghdad will be yours. You will strike the Empire where it hurts."

They lit up. The one in the front, the leader, I think—leaned forward with fever in his eyes. "Grazie, Duce! You are the only man in Europe who understands the East. You see our struggle. Allah sent you."

Allah sent me?

I smiled, nodding solemnly. No, little man, I thought. Allah didn't send me. I am Allah now.

"We will declare our loyalty in the broadcasts," another one chimed in. "We will swear allegiance to Rome and to the new order. Iraq will stand with you. With Italy."

I spread my arms. "Then go back. Prepare your uprising. Italy is with you. Soon the whole East will be with you. A plane will be arranged to bring you all back to Iraq once your preparations are done. Discreetly. Then, set Iraq on fire. Kill your oppressors."

They stood up, bowing again, rambling thanks in Italian, Arabic, and that ugly British Arabic the clerks in Basra picked up from Scottish missionaries. God scots. I hated them. Incomprehensible accent, like someone shoved their dick down their collective throats and told them to speak. I motioned for one of my aides, who stepped forward with a folder—logistics, drop points, names. All fake, of course. All designed to make the arabs feel like they'd won the lottery. Dumbasses.

Once they left the garden and I secured myself a spot deep in the 9th circle of hell. I poured myself another glass of wine, stared out over the garden, and started laughing. Quietly, at first. Then harder. Louder. Until my ribs hurt.

The fucking nerve. They actually believed it. They believed they'd be the start of some grand Arab renaissance under Roman wings. They didn't know I was soon going to be having dinner with the British ambassador, offering to sell them out in exchange for silence in Syria and a green light in Anatolia. So unexpected, so convenient.

I'd even written the script for their fall. British spies would conveniently have intelligence leaked from the inside. The authorities would crack down. The British would roll in and arrest them in the airport in Baghdad then quietly execute the lot, and hand me Syria on a silver plate. Fuck the free French, I was going to hang their leaders over Damascus square while their families watched.

The band was changing in my head now. Anri's "Remember Summer Days" hummed through my brain like the soundtrack to a war montage. Syria. Turkey. Constantinople. I could already smell the salt of the Bosphorus.

Hitori, aki o, umi no
Mitsumete ooooo mo idasu
Ano natsu no kage o sagashite

And Iraq? Iraq would burn just long enough to distract the world while I tore Asia Minor in two.

Later that day
Villa Torlonia
Rome, Italy

The British ambassador was precisely what I expected—an Oxford-educated corpse in a well-fitted suit. Pinched face, waxy hands, smelling faintly of brandy and tweed, like some forgotten drawing-room relic that had dragged itself off the set of a Merchant Ivory film to lecture me on "international norms."

He sat across from me on the veranda, legs crossed too tightly, feigning ease. His mustache twitched every time I sipped from my espresso. I wanted to reach across the table and tear it off with my teeth. Then blow his brains out. But I had other plans, and a suitcase full of evidence regarding the holocaust.

"My government," he began, "is gravely concerned about the recent developments in Iraq. There are whispers—Italian agents, promises made to a clique that openly threatens His Majesty's rule—"

I held up a hand, smiling like a Vatican priest pretending not to notice the young boy on his lap.

"My dear ambassador," I said, voice like warm milk. "Italy does not promise. Italy offers. And what we offer—order, vision, stability—is far preferable to what your precious Free French have been offering in Syria."

That shut him up. His jaw clenched. He reached for his cigarette case but thought better of it. I leaned in, elbows on the table.

"Let's not pretend, sir. We both know the game. You need the Suez and your way to India protected. I need Syria quiet for my plans in Turkey, and I need your little French chess pieces off the board. De Gaulle is a nuisance. A ghost pretending to be a general. He's trying to carve out a future from the ashes of a republic that no longer exists." I let the words hang there, then delivered the blade: "I want the french out of Syria. And I want the French gone from West Africa. All of it. Given to Spain. And I want no British intervention in Turkey once I send Greek boots down Thrace."

His eyes bulged. "That is preposterous! Absolutely untenable! You cannot possibly expect the Empire to—"

I cut him off with a laugh. "Oh, but I do. In exchange, we give you the Golden Square. They'll be conveniently flying off to Iraq tonight, I just met with them before you arrived actually. You'll keep the gulf of Persia safe, and your soldiers won't need to bleed across Iraq at the hands of the Golden Square. And maybe—maybe—Italy won't tell the world how Britain stood by and kept the Jews out while the Wehrmacht built crematoriums from Poland to the Baltic." I handed over the files I had, he took them and began skimming them.

He went pale after a minute. There it was. The subtle twitch. The panic behind his temples. God I loved it.

I leaned back again, savoring the silence like a final chord in a symphony. "I'm pretty open to negotiations however. But Turkey will be given to my allies. You need an exit. And I need Syria—before the summer ends."

He cleared his throat. "And if London refuses?"

I smiled, teeth sharp and white. "Then I tell the Golden square to burn every oil well in Iraq and Iran. And I let the Falag off their leash. Chemical weapons, bombs, rifles, machine guns, thousands of angry Jews hungry for British blood being smuggled into Jaffa after I show to the world Germany's atrocities while you sat back and closed the doors to Israel. I got hundreds of copies of those files you just read. How would you like it if I leaked them to every newspaper around the world. It's one thing for your empire to kill a bunch of African and indian farmers on the other side of the world. But Jews? Europeans? Men, women, children in camps, mass murder? Genocide? The name of the British empire would be dragged through the mud."

That silenced him. Good. The song in my head shifted again—Mariya Takeuchi's Plastic Love. So smooth, so fake, so beautiful. Just like diplomacy.

"Think it over, Ambassador," I said, rising. "This is a moment. A historical moment. Either you play your part or history plays it for you."

He stood, nodded stiffly, and walked out beneath the swaying pines. I grabbed the bottle of wine on the table we'd sat on then poured myself a drink, watching the smoke curl like a map of the future. The crescent was almost mine. The cross had already bent. And soon, oh so soon, the sickle would be bleeding Turkish soil.

-

Transcript: War Cabinet Meeting – British Government
Date: April 30, 1941
Location: Cabinet War Rooms, London
Subject: Italian Diplomatic Gambit and the Golden Square Crisis

Attendees:

Prime Minister Winston Churchill

Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden

Lord Halifax (Ambassador to the United States, attending remotely)

General Sir John Dill (Chief of the Imperial General Staff)
Lord Beaverbrook

Sir Alexander Cadogan (Permanent Under-Secretary, Foreign Office)

Duff Cooper (Minister of Information)

Archibald Wavell (via secure line from Cairo)

---

[Transcript begins]

Churchill (lighting cigar):
So. Benito fancies himself Augustus now. Neutral, yet maneuvering like Metternich on amphetamines. Offers us the Golden Square on a silver platter while carving up the Levant behind our backs. Syria, Anatolia, Constantinople—he wants it all wrapped in a Roman bow.

Eden:
The reports are clear, Prime Minister. The Italians received the Iraqi conspirators in Rome. Promised them arms and support. And now—suddenly—a dossier arrives in our hands, thanks to Il Duce's "generosity."

Churchill (dryly):
Yes, how charitable. Like Jack the Ripper offering to help clean the streets.

Dill:
The military value of his offer can't be ignored, sir. If we can crush the Golden Square before their uprising takes shape, we save lives. Especially if they were planning to sabotage our oil interests.

Beaverbrook:
At what cost, though? He wants the Free French gone from Syria. That's a hard sell to de Gaulle. And giving Franco West Africa? The Spaniards haven't even lifted a finger against Hitler.

Cadogan:
And he wants a free hand in Turkey. Greek boots in Thrace and the Turkish Aegean islands. Constantinople gifted like a bauble at a Roman orgy. It's madness.

Churchill (gruff):
Madness is a man with leverage. And Mussolini has it. We must ask ourselves: is Syria worth Baghdad? Is West Africa worth the Persian Gulf?

Halifax (from Washington):
The Americans will see this as weakness, Winston. You make a deal with fascists, hand over French colonies, and you lose the moral argument in Washington. Roosevelt is watching. Carefully.

Churchill:
Roosevelt is always watching, and never acting. He may be stirring now, but we'll drown in blood before a single American rifle lands in Bordeaux.

Wavell (crackling through line):
If I may, gentlemen—on the ground, this deal has appeal. The Golden Square is a real threat. Iraqi troops are well-armed. If they seize British assets, we'll have to launch a full-scale intervention through Palestine. And we don't have the men.

Eden:
So we reward Mussolini for playing arsonist and fireman in the same breath? He fuels a rebellion then sells us the fire escape.

Churchill:
That's diplomacy, Anthony. A good liar needs an honest man to believe him. Mussolini knows we're desperate to avoid another front. If he's truly neutral, and truly willing to screw Hitler while we watch, then he becomes...useful. Obnoxiously, gloriously useful.

Dill:
But Constantinople?

Churchill:
Let the Greeks have it. Let them walk through the Hagia Sophia and raise the cross again—Mussolini gives them the illusion of empire, and we give the Turks a choice: ally with us or be trampled by Roman jackboots. We might just crack Ankara that way.

Beaverbrook:
And the Jews?

Cadogan:
Mussolini threatened to leak intelligence about German Atrocities. He's not bluffing. The files are detailed, horrifying—and if publicized, they could shatter whatever goodwill the world has towards Britain.

Eden (sharply):
So we cave? Let Franco gorge on colonies? Let Italy dictate terms?

Churchill (stands):
No. We cannot let Franco have Africa. Let Italy take Syria and Constantinople, but Anatolia and West Africa are off limits. This war is not about purity—it is about survival. Mussolini thinks he's playing Rome. Let him. When the dust settles, we'll see who rules the ruins. Until then—we play the game.

[Pause]

Churchill (finishing his cigar):
Tell the ambassador to signal back to Rome:

We accept the information. We deny all complicity.
We'll let the Free French stew in their pride.
Franco gets nothing in West Africa.
And if Mussolini wants Thrace, Constantinople and Syria—he can have it.
But Anatolia? No. We draw the line there.
Let the crescent burn if it must. But Anatolia? That's still in play.

We must however expect Mussolini to find a way to hoodwink us again. Send advisors, weapons, special forces and free french troops to Turkey. If he wants Thrace he'll have to pay for it in blood.

[Transcript ends]

 

[Alenco98]

Excerpt from Mussolini: The Rise and Reign of Il Duce by Christopher Hibbert (2008)

On the eve of Barbarossa, Benito Mussolini's grip on Italy had never appeared stronger. He stood atop a wave of nationalistic fervor, his image omnipresent in every city square and rural hamlet. His speeches—now sharpened, confident, and often oddly prescient—galvanized the masses, while victories in the Balkans and diplomatic gamesmanship with both Axis and Allied powers earned him an almost mythic reputation among Italians.

The average Italian viewed Mussolini not only as the Duce, but as a kind of political oracle—a man who had weathered the chaos of the 1930s and emerged in 1940 with uncanny clarity. He had, after all, kept Italy out of the Second World War's initial bloodbath, positioned the country as a growing Mediterranean power, and outmaneuvered Hitler and Churchill time and time again without fully alienating Berlin or London.

Newspapers dubbed him "Il Redentore d'Italia"—the Redeemer of Italy. Citizens spoke of "the Duce's wisdom" with reverence. Even among skeptics, there was a reluctant awe. Some believed Mussolini had grown wiser with age; others whispered he'd experienced a divine epiphany. Nobody questioned his authority. Why would they? Food was returning to the markets, the economy was stabilizing, and for the first time in almost a decade, Italy was winning.

Within Mussolini's inner circle, however, admiration was laced with deepening unease.

His closest advisors—men like Count Ciano, Marshal Graziani, and General Roatta—had begun noticing disconcerting shifts in his demeanor. He rambled at times, speaking of places and events that didn't exist, making vulgar references no one understood. During a Council session in early 1941, Mussolini referred to Stalin as "a cocksucker with a fetish for political purges and prison camps," and offhandedly muttered "America is gonna clean this bullshit up in the 80s," before returning to a tactical discussion on Yugoslavia. None dared question him.

To the world, he was lucid. Behind closed doors, he was something else entirely.

Ciano noted in his diary in early 1942:

"He is no longer the man whose daughter I married. He spoke of America's entry into the war as if it was written in stone. Predicts Hitler's mistakes before they occur. He talks to himself in the quiet—singing foreign songs in Japanese about love, and midnight, all by some singer named Tomoko Aran. He may be mad. But he is winning. God help him when he starts losing because we wont."

Graziani privately confided that Mussolini was "either guided by God or plagued by spirits." He suspected neither. His instincts whispered something darker: that Mussolini had become possessed by a vision of a world no one else could see.

And yet, for all his eccentricity, the Duce was always three steps ahead. He warned the Council about Hitler's imminent invasion of the Soviet Union months before Barbarossa began. He predicted the Japanese assault on American interests long before Pearl Harbor. He secured deals with Spain, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Greece with surgical precision. Even his odd requests—like demanding dossiers on Jewish migration patterns in Eastern Europe or discreetly acquiring German troop movements through Swiss banking intermediaries—produced tangible results.

The consensus among the Grand Council of Fascism was clear: he may be mad, but he is our madman. And as long as he kept delivering victories, no one would dare remove him.

Mussolini, for his part, gave them just enough normalcy to believe he was still somewhat lucid. A slight smirk here, a thundering speech there, a calculated silence in a key moment. He played the Duce like an actor reciting a familiar script, all while plotting schemes his contemporaries couldn't begin to imagine.

They followed him—into war, into peace, into dreams they couldn't yet comprehend.

They would follow him until his voluntary resignation.

 

[Alenco98]

May 1, 1941
Palazzo Venezia
Rome, Italy

Night had fallen over Rome. I'd just finished dinner after making love to my mistress, now I was sprawled out on the couch like some decadent prince of a dying empire. May—spring in full bloom. The war had settled into another uneasy lull since France fell. Britain still fought, but the Germans had stopped trying to destroy the RAF and were now playing with firebombs like angry children. The Blitz. Idiots. They couldn't even bomb strategically.

And me? I was in the middle of it all. Playing both sides, milking the chaos for concessions and influence like some Faustian court jester. September was four months away. That would mark two years of this circus. This charade. I shook my head, exhausted.

If the accident hadn't happened—if I hadn't woken up in the body of Benito fucking Mussolini—I'd be in a very different place. My Peace Corps service would be over. I'd be back home, probably planning a wedding with Sofie. I hummed Living Together by Miki Asakura under my breath. Her favorite. She introduced me to city pop. Elegant, catchy, bittersweet. Like her.

God, I missed her.

Every time I hummed a tune, I felt like I was howling into the void. My friends, my family—her, especially her—all gone. Reduced to memories and melodies. I closed my eyes and imagined us, Sofie and I, laughing on our old couch with her music playing in the background. It was the only piece of that world I still had. Everything else had slipped through my fingers like ash.

I had no one now. Just sycophants. Hollow-eyed bureaucrats, mistresses with perfect smiles and asses, family that wasn't mine. Automatons. They approached me like children begging a god: "What do we do, Duce?" Idiots. And when I proposed something reasonable, something sane, they'd tilt their heads and whisper, "What do you mean, Duce? Are you mad?" If not that, it was always, "Per favore, more money! More this, more that, per favore!"

No one ever asked, How are you doing, Duce?

I wanted to scream. To cry. To rip the weight from my chest and hurl it into the Tiber. But there was no one to talk to, no one who would understand. Over Fifty million Italians depended on me, not to mention the colonial populations. Then there were the Jews—the million and a half I had saved from death, the hundreds who crossed the borders every day under false names and forged papers. A secret lifeline. One I maintained in silence.

I had long stopped believing I'd ever get back.

And then there was the war machine. The generals. The council. The specter of Russia looming on the horizon. Barbarossa. I didn't know the exact date—but I knew what was coming. Millions. Millions would die. And I had to stop it. How could I stand by and let history burn again?

But still... I was a monster.

The Balkans. North Africa. Syria. Tunisia.

Millions of Frenchmen expelled and shoved into camps. I was no better than Hitler. The Serbs—persecuted, killed, forcibly converted by that butcher Pavelic. I stopped him. But it was too late. The damage had been done. Tens of thousands were dead because of me.

In Syria, I had set up an authoritarian puppet regime. The French were expelled, tossed into desert holding camps like yesterday's trash. Was it genius? Maybe. But it was immoral genius. Tunisia and Libya—given rights, yes, eventually, but only after I'd threatened genocide to force the populace into line. We killed their activists in secret. Cloak and dagger. No death squads. No massacres. Yet. God help me, I hoped there would never be.

I was alone.

I found myself humming Jasumin wa Kanashii Kaori by Wink. Soft. Haunting. It echoed in my head like wind through an empty cathedral. I leaned back into the couch, eyes glazed over, picturing Sofie's face. Her smile. Her voice. God, I couldn't breathe without her. Couldn't exist without her. I wanted to hold her close and never let go.

Why? Why was I thrown into this? My family, my friends... why me?

Tears rolled down my cheeks. Useless, silent tears. But it was something. At least I could still cry.

A knock at the door.

I looked toward it, my face wet and drawn. Rage boiled beneath the grief. I had told them specifically—no interruptions.

"I should have the guards executed," I muttered under my breath.

Then louder:
"Tell whoever it is to FUCK OFF!"

A second knock.

The nerve.

I jolted up from the couch, wiping my face with a silk handkerchief I didn't remember grabbing. My tears had soaked it, mascara-like shadows blotched across the weave. I wasn't wearing any makeup. I felt like I should've been.

A third knock. Then the unmistakable creak of the heavy oak doors opening.

"Duce," came a voice. Nervous. Too meek to be Badoglio, not oily enough to be Ciano. "We've received word… Prime Minister Metaxas of Greece is dead."

Silence.

My left eye twitched.

Then came the scream. "SON OF A BITCH!"

The glass on the coffee table shook. I flung the empty wine decanter against the wall—it exploded into a dozen glittering shards like a disco ball ripped from the ceiling and punished for daring to sparkle. My breath was ragged. Metaxas. The one goddamn stabilizing thing in that syphilitic Balkan ulcer. Dead. And now I had to go there. I had to pick up the pieces. I had to deal with every limp-dicked general, every corrupt colonel, every Greek Prince who thought Rome was the fucking Whore of Babylon.

"Oh sure, now I have to go to Greece. Just what I need! Another puppet state to prop up, another corpse to mourn, another fucking civilization to drag kicking and screaming into the 20th century like some political Orpheus doomed to fail!"

The aide flinched as I stormed toward the hallway, shirt unbuttoned halfway down, hair messily parted like a washed-up idol. I looked like hell. I felt like hell.

"Do you know what I was doing, boy?" I spat at him as I passed. "I was mourning. Mourning the only woman who's ever loved me. Do you know Living Together by Miki Asakura? Of course you don't. Of course you fucking don't. You're Italian. You think Pagliacci is deep."

I paced into the hallway, past the busts of Caesar and Augustus, glaring at them as if they too judged me.

"You know what Japan has that we don't? Soul. Funky basslines. Synthetic melancholy. Emotion. Yasuha. Anri. Tomoko Aran. These women—goddesses—they understood the pain of drifting through neon nights and sterile relationships. They wrote music for people like me. For ghosts in their own flesh."

I staggered into the situation room. Maps. Reports. Lives. All neatly stacked in manila folders as if this were an office, not the staging ground for crimes against humanity.

And then I stopped.

I stared at the Balkans.

That cursed peninsula. That black hole of ancient grudges and bad poetry.

I sank into my chair, face buried in my hands.

"I never wanted this," I whispered. "I wanted to teach ESL to Rwandan kids. I wanted to have a dog. I wanted to die forgotten. Instead I'm Benito fucking Mussolini, and I know exactly when the world will burn."

Silence. Then the low hum of the ventilation. The buzz of electric light.

I exhaled. A whisper.

"Mayonaka no Joke. Takako Mamiya. 1983."

I began to hum it—off key, broken, the way someone dying might sing a lullaby to themselves.

Then I laughed. A strange, cold laugh.

"Maybe I'll burn Greece to the ground. Make it a monument to failure. Or maybe I'll save it. Crown a new king. Or maybe I'll just disappear. Walk into the Aegean and never come back. Nah. I gotta restore Byzantium, fuck the Turks."

I glanced at the aide. His mouth hung open.

"Close your mouth," I hissed. "You look like you're waiting for my cock."

He closed it.

I slumped back.

"I want Sofie," I said, not to him, not to anyone. "I want my music. I want my family. I want modernity. I want out."

Another silence.

Then I stood, composed myself. Dusted off the black shirt. Straightened the sash.

"Get the plane ready. Athens awaits."

I smiled.

"Maybe I'll kill the entire royal family."

 

[Alenco98]

May 1, 1941
Quirinal Palace
Rome, Italy

The king sat still beneath the gilded ceiling, surrounded by the stony gazes of his forebears—Margherita, Umberto, Charles Albert—all peering down in oil and canvas, relics of a prouder age. A thin trail of cigar smoke curled above his head, vanishing into the chandeliers like the last breath of a dying monarchy.

King Victor Emmanuel III exhaled and placed the half-smoked cigar in the crystal tray before him. His fingers, gloved in white, trembled ever so slightly as he reached for his brandy. His advisors stood at a respectful distance. None of them sat. Not tonight.

"So," the king began, "he has left for Greece."

The words hung heavy. No one dared respond at first.

General Pietro Badoglio cleared his throat. "Yes, Your Majesty. The Duce departed by plane from Ciampino at 2200 hours. He insisted on leading the mission to stabilize the Greek government personally."

"Personally," the king repeated, voice flat. "Of course he did."

He leaned back and stared at the painted ceiling for a long moment, as if hoping for divine revelation. None came.

"Is he mad?" the king asked suddenly.

A silence fell, deeper than the first. The men around him exchanged quick glances, like nervous schoolboys called to recite Latin.

Marshal Enrico Caviglia spoke at last. "Your Majesty, I don't believe we can call him mad… perhaps erratic. Driven. He believes he's destined for something beyond mere politics."

"Beyond politics?" the king scoffed, eyes narrowing. "He speaks in riddles. Sings foreign songs under his breath. Refers to events that haven't happened yet. I watched him sketch a map of the Middle East on a napkin at dinner last week. Said something about a 'new middle east under Roman guidance.'" He drained the glass. "He's building a myth. And I fear he believes it."

Count Galeazzo Ciano, pale and fidgeting, added nervously, "But he's popular, Sire. With the army, the workers, the southern peasants. They see him as a man of destiny. A savior. You saw the crowds after Tunisia. After Syria. No one can deny his effectiveness."

"Yes, I saw," the king said bitterly. "Thousands of fools cheering a man who dresses like Caesar and speaks like a messiah. And I, the king of Italy—of Rome—reduced to a footnote in my own kingdom."

Badoglio shifted uncomfortably. "We could… persuade him to delegate more authority. There are ways—"

"No," the king snapped, cutting him off. "You and I both know that won't work. He knows his power. He feeds on crisis, on movement. He's always ahead of us. And if we tried—if we moved against him now…"

He paused. The thought didn't need finishing.

Ciano spoke again, voice lower. "It would tear the country apart."

"Worse," the king said. "It would make him a martyr. And my family would end up like the Romanov's." The thought of that made him shiver.

He stood slowly and walked toward the tall window. The lights of Rome shimmered below. A city ancient and aching, dragged into modernity by sheer will and madness.

"I am the king," he said, as if reminding himself. "But he is the empire."

None corrected him.

"He's building something," the king murmured, almost to himself. "A dream. Or a nightmare. But whatever it is, we are trapped inside it."

He turned back to his council. "Watch him closely. Indulge him, flatter him if you must. But do not trust him. And if there comes a moment—if—when the people turn…"

He left the rest unspoken.

Outside, the bells of the city chimed the hour.

Inside, the air thickened with unease.

 

[Alenco98]

May 2, 1941
Airport outside Athens
Greece

The flight was turbulent. Appropriate, I thought. The skies mirrored my mind—angry, uncertain, blue-veined with lightning. I stared out the window at the approaching sprawl of Athens, its hills like the folded robes of some sleeping titan. Byzantium, reborn in the wrong country.

I hummed "Mayonaka no Door" under my breath, eyes unfocused. The chords throbbed in my skull like a phantom limb. I could still see her dancing—Sofie—bathed in warm apartment light, hips swaying like an idol in a Shōwa-era lounge. I had watched her move the way Theodora might've moved through the Great Palace—majestic, soft, dangerous.

The plane landed with a thud that jolted me back to hell.

I disembarked with a scowl, the tarmac shimmering under the sun like the Aegean itself had spilled onto the ground. Waiting for me stood Theodoros Pangalos, squat, stiff, surrounded by a half-ring of Venizelist officers, their faces unreadable but their eyes clinging to mine like supplicants to an angry saint.

He saluted. I didn't return it.

"Duce," he said in poor french with that gravel voice I remembered from '39. "We are honored—"

"Enough," I said, brushing past him. "Tell me what that fucker Koryzis is doing."

Pangalos exchanged glances with one of his men before falling into step beside me. "Prime Minister Koryzis is... weak. The King is steering the ship. There is talk the war with Turkey might be—postponed."

I stopped cold. The heat bit through my uniform. "Postponed?"

"Yes, Duce. They're citing British pressure."

My laugh came out hollow. "The British? The British?! They couldn't conquer a fruit stall in France without American dollars and Indian blood. They're finished. They've been finished since Dunkirk and you people are still worried about British pressure?"

I turned, eyes boring into him. "Get your men. Quietly. If that little monarchist shit doesn't agree to our terms, we will ensure Greece finds itself... unburdened by what has been."

Pangalos nodded, lips curling upward in the slightest hint of anticipation. I saw it in his eyes—he'd been waiting for this.

Tatoi Palace
Later that afternoon

The heat inside the palace clung to the furniture like sweat to skin. I stood before King George II, a thin man with watery eyes, and Alexandros Koryzis, who looked like he wanted to disappear into his shoes.

I didn't sit. They did.

"You both understand why I'm here," I began in French, pacing slowly before them like a lion in a butcher's shop. "Metaxas made promises. He understood the path forward. He knew the Balkans had to be stabilized, united, under Italian guidance. And now I hear rumors—British influence, hesitations, cowardice."

George II's lips pressed into a thin line. "We do not wish to provoke London—"

"They don't matter!" I thundered. The palace shook with my voice. Paintings rattled in their frames as far as I could tell. "They are a dying empire, held together by gin, arrogance, and cricket! They are nothing! Byzantium didn't fear the Franks. They spat at them and built domes that touched the sky!"

Koryzis coughed meekly. "Perhaps a... diplomatic approach—"

"Diplomacy is the tool of cowards without armies," I snapped. "And you, Prime Minister, have neither the spine nor the soldiers to use either."

Silence.

Inside, I was already planning the end of this monarchy. God I wanted to kill this cocksucker. One chance, one chance or he was out. The King's fingers trembled slightly as he reached for his glass. I watched it. Memorized it. Pathetic. Patrician cowardice dressed up in bloodlines and tailored suits. "We will consider it."

I turned without a word and left them in their silence. I was done.

The shadows had lengthened like spears from the past. I met Pangalos near the palace gates.

"Do it."

That's all I said.

He saluted. This time, I returned it.

Italian Embassy, Athens
An hour later

I poured myself a brandy and stepped out onto the balcony as the first of the tanks rolled down the avenue, their rumble low and steady like thunder from the underworld. Greek soldiers stood aside or joined in. Pangalo's boys were precise. Professional. Not a single shot fired—just a quiet coup, orchestrated with the tempo of Mikiko Noda's "Heaven in Heaven'" playing in my mind.

City pop and the fall of a monarchy. God, what a world.

I heard shouting in the courtyard below about an hour later. Then came the King bloodied and bruised, his family in tow—pale, confused, clutching luggage like refugees. They were ushered in at bayonet-point.

I descended the stairs slowly, savoring the moment. The King looked at me with wounded dignity. I could've laughed.

"You'll be taken to Rome," I said, voice cold. "You'll be safe, of course. Comfortable. But Greece will no longer be ruled by cowardice and colonial puppets. Byzantium is returning. And we don't need kings."

He opened his mouth, but I was already turning away.

"Take them."

The armored cars growled back to life. Pangalos stood at my side, silent, reverent.

"You really are going through with it," he muttered.

I nodded. "No half-measures. No games."

Athens glittered beneath the stars like a chalice filled with fire.

My mind shifted. "Indian Summer" by Miki Asakura began to play. The beat pulsed through the floor, melodic and sad. I thought of Sofie. Her voice. Her laughter. That purple jacket with white stripes and her ponytails the day we met in high school long ago. Her ghost, watching me dismantle nations to the sound of her music. I teared up a little and stopped myself. I wondered what she'd think? She always did say I could either be really kind or really cruel. Lately I was on a really cruel streak. God. I would kill every man, woman, and child in Athens to hold her tightly for even a minute.

Was I building a better world? Or simply dragging Byzantium back to life in my own image? Fuck it who cares.

I didn't know. But I couldn't stop.

Not now.

Not when the night smelled like destiny.

A few minutes later the last of the royal motorcade had disappeared into the dark. Their destination was a villa outside Rome—sumptuous enough for dignity, but guarded like a prison. Let them rot in marble. Let them drink from gold and feel the iron just beneath it. I didn't care. They were done. Finished. History would flatten them like wax seals pressed underfoot.

I leaned against a railing on the second floor, cup of wine in my hands and the alcohol in my mouth. My throat filled with alcohol and grief and triumph.

Behind me, boots clicked.

"Pangalos," I said without turning.

"Duce."

He stepped beside me, his uniform now heavier with implication. The epaulettes glinted in the moonlight. Below us, Athens stirred nervously—confused but not panicked. The Greeks were used to coups. They expected betrayal the way the British expected rain.

"She's beautiful, isn't she?" I said. "Athens. A corpse dressed in marble. We're going to make her sing again."

Pangalos didn't reply.

I took a long breath, exhaled. "The war will happen."

His head turned. "Even without the King?"

"Especially without the King," I snapped. "Metaxas understood. We can't wait for Turkey to arm itself or for the British to prop them up. Strike first. Fast. Brutal. Historical. Once Germany attacks Russia it's go time."

He nodded slowly, but his brow furrowed.

"I'm giving you Greece," I said, pivoting toward him. "Not as a province. As your kingdom, if you want it. Call it a republic, call it a directorate, call it Pangalosia for all I care. You run it. You cleanse it."

Pangalos stiffened. "What do you mean by cleanse, Duce?"

I leaned in, voice low. "You know exactly what I mean. Every royalist who lifts a finger and their families too if you have to. Every British agent. Every liberal newspaper editor. Every Bouboulina-descended aristocrat who whispers the word 'restoration' over their ouzo. Kill them. Quietly if possible. Loudly if necessary."

He looked down, jaw clenched. "And the army?"

"Will be yours. We'll supply you with everything—artillery, chemical weapons, armored cars, modern radios. Whatever you need to strike Constantinople. Rome will approve your military budget without limit and send you support." I took a deep breath. "But only if you follow through. No half-measures. No mercy to our enemies."

He turned to face me fully. "And if I fail?"

I smiled. "Then I'll come back, hang you from the Acropolis, and give Athens to someone hungrier."

Silence.

Then he saluted. "Understood."

I returned it.

Later That Night
I watched from the embassy rooftop as trucks rumbled across Athens, commandeering barracks, detaining officers loyal to the old regime. Somewhere near Syntagma Square, I heard gunfire. Short bursts. Surgical.

I had given the order. I didn't care about the names or lives anymore. I had read enough Byzantine court histories to know—power came not from loyalty, but fear. And now, fear wore a Venizelist uniform.

I poured myself another drink. This one, something Greek. Brandy, maybe. I didn't know. I didn't ask. It burned beautifully.

I took a deep breath.

Dance in the memories by Meiko Nakahara drifted through my mind.

I just dance in the sweet memories

I closed my eyes. The song wasn't just sound—it was memory. Summer nights, hot ramen, Sofie's laughter under blinking restaurant lights. Her favorite. Always her favorite. God I missed her.

Beneath the music, I imagined a new empire being born—not through conquest, but orchestration. Like a producer shaping a perfect track: fade in the artillery, cue the speeches, drop the hammer.

History would dance to my beat. Whether it liked the tune or not.

Tomorrow, I would meet with the press. Declare Greece liberated from monarchy. A provisional directorate. Elections in the future. Lies. Necessary ones.

But tonight... tonight I was a god of broken records and burning thrones. And Greece?

Greece was just another note in my new symphony.

-

May 3, 1941
Quirinal Palace
Rome, Italy

King Victor Emmanuel III sat in his private study, surrounded by busts of monarchs who had somehow held their thrones longer than he would. He held the telegram with both hands, eyes squinting beneath his thick-rimmed glasses. The message from Athens was clear: The Greek monarchy had been forcibly dissolved by General Pangalos with full Italian logistical and political support. The Greek royal family had been taken—taken—to Rome and placed under heavy guard by Mussolini's personal security.


"Like criminals…" the King muttered. "They were royalty…"

He glanced up. Count Pietro d'Acquarone, his Minister of the Royal Household, stood nearby, grave and awkward. The room felt thick with smoke and history and cowardice.

Victor Emmanuel slammed the telegram on his desk, his voice cracking:
"Does he think he's Augustus now? Does he think he can simply abolish kings like a man sweeping crumbs from a table?"

D'Acquarone shifted nervously. "Your Majesty… the Duce claims it was necessary. That the stability of the Balkans required a swift transition. The Greek court was—how did he phrase it—a British ulcer in the Roman gut."


"A British ulcer?" the King spat. "What am I then? A decoration in his Roman carnival?" He stood up, trembling with impotent fury. "I am the King of Italy. Emperor of Ethiopia. Protector of Albania. Of Croatia. I should have been consulted before a European dynasty was decapitated!"

D'Acquarone opened his mouth, then wisely closed it.

Victor Emmanuel rubbed his temples. "He didn't even warn me. Not a word. He drags King George's children and his family through the streets like loot. As if they were taken from a Turkish seraglio. And now we have to house them. Feed them. Play host to exiled monarchs like we're the damned Holy Roman Empire!"

He slumped back into his chair, breath shallow. His age showed in moments like these. Small. Fragile. Italy's king in title, Mussolini's prisoner in practice.

"Does he even remember that I am his sovereign?" he whispered, more to himself than anyone else. "That I gave him the keys to Rome in 1922? That I made him?"

No answer came. Only the faint creak of leather and the distant, chilling sound of church bells echoing over the Eternal City.

After a long silence, Victor Emmanuel finally spoke, voice low and bitter:

"Send him a message. Congratulate him on the success of the Greek transition. Praise his 'vision.' Thank him for ensuring Mediterranean stability."

D'Acquarone blinked. "Your Majesty?"

"And then…" Victor Emmanuel sipped his tea, hands steady now with resignation, "send word to the Vatican. I want to know if exile to London is still an option… discreetly."

He stared out the window toward the hills.

"Rome is no place for kings anymore."

-

May 5, 1941
Rome, Italy

I had just stepped off the plane. A sleek Fiat G.12, polished like obsidian and humming like a prayer. Athens was behind me, and so was the fire I'd lit there. Pangalos had taken the reins like a warhorse on morphine—erratic, frothing, brutal, perfect. Royalists rounded up. Judges purged. The press cowed like street cats during a thunderstorm. A temporary madness, I told myself. A necessary purge. The rebirth of order from chaos.

The air in Rome smelled like jasmine and old stone. Spring clung to the city like a ghost that refused to leave. I walked into the Palazzo Venezia, fingers absently tugging at the collar of my black silk shirt. No tie. I never wore one anymore. Ties were for bankers and corpses.

I was halfway to the grand staircase when Bianchi, one of my OVRA men, caught me. Pale, sweating, hollow-eyed like a mole that had seen the sun for the first time.

"Duce… urgent intelligence. From the Quirinal."

I raised an eyebrow, waved him into my office. He followed like a hound.

Once the door closed behind us, he opened his folder with trembling hands.

"The king… he's made inquiries to the British. Via the Vatican. He intends to send the Greek royal family to London."

My heart stopped.

London.

I stood in silence, letting the words settle. I could hear a clock ticking. It was probably imagined. My brain always added drama like that. Then—without a word—I crossed the room and poured myself a glass of limoncello. I downed it in one go, the sweetness clinging to my teeth like guilt.

London.

A hostage transfer.

Did the little man even realize what he was doing?

"I'll handle it," I muttered.

And I did. I got a car and ordered it to go to the Kings palace. I went to the King's chambers like a volcano dressed in linen.

No guards. I had given the order years ago that I was never to be stopped at the Quirinal. A courtesy between monsters.

I found him in his sitting room, surrounded by clocks and portraits of long-dead Savoys, sipping tea like he hadn't just tried to sabotage the Empire.

"Maestà," I said, smiling too wide. "We need to talk."

He looked up. Tired. Resigned. "Is this about the Greek—"

"Yes," I snapped, my voice a blade in silk. "It is."

I didn't yell. I didn't need to. My rage simmered just beneath the surface, bubbling like lava under a porcelain crust. I sat across from him, legs crossed, fingers steepled like I was posing for a fascist Vogue cover.

"They are leverage, Your Majesty," I said coldly. "They are symbols. To the royalists still hiding in the hills. To the officers in Athens who haven't chosen sides. To the Greeks who still write 'King' on the walls when no one is watching. If we send them to London, we hand the British a propaganda coup on a platinum plate."

He opened his mouth, but I cut him off.

"They stay. In Rome. As guests. Protected, respected… and useful."

Silence.

I leaned forward. My voice dropped into something darker, something deeper.

"You forget what I've done for you, Vittorio. You forget who rebuilt Italy's prestige. Who brought the Empire back from the grave. I could've taken it all for myself—but I didn't. I let you keep the crown. I let you wear the purple cloak of the Caesars while I did the work."

I stood now, walking to the window.

"But understand this," I said, gazing out over the city like a god drunk on nostalgia. "Once the war ends, I will make the announcement. Roma restituta. The world will know. The Empire is reborn. And you—you—will be crowned Emperor. The Augustus of a new age."

I turned back to him.

"But only if you behave."

He didn't respond. Just stared into his tea like it could save him. A man who knew he was no longer king, just an artifact clinging to relevance.

I left without another word, footsteps echoing like judgment in the marble halls.

Back in my car, I played Kimi wa 1000% in my mind by 1986 Omega Tribe. Neon sax. Casio drums. That lonely, aching optimism.

I closed my eyes and mouthed the words.

Sofie...
Don't worry. I'm almost done here.
One more war.
One more empire.
Then I'll find my way home.
Wait for me

 

[Alenco98]

May 5, 1941
Near Abu Kamal
Syrian-Iraqi Border
Italian 5th Expeditionary Army HQ

The sun over the Euphrates was a molten hammer, smelting the horizon into a blur of sand and shimmering heat. By mid-morning, even the vultures had abandoned the sky. Nothing moved except men and machines—Syrian infantry trudging forward alongside Italian advisors in dust-caked uniforms, tanks groaning as they crawled across the wadi, and the last rattling convoys of captured French matériel wheezing their way north toward the supply hub in Deir ez-Zor. The Free French were finished. Their final stand had ended in a crumbling Ottoman-era fort, barely ten kilometers from the Iraqi border.

And he was still alive.

General Benito Albino Mussolini.

Twenty-six years old.

He had led the 3rd Bersaglieri Regiment personally from the front—not out of vanity, and certainly not out of necessity. His name alone was now enough to send both sycophants and skeptics scrambling. But he needed the dust on his boots, the weight of command pressing down on his shoulders. His father had made him a soldier, not a politician—Finland had ensured that. And here, in this searing heat, among these hardened men, he felt something rare: alive. In control of his fate.

At dawn, the French commander had been dragged from the cellars of the fort. Général Rousset—a bloated, red-faced man, stinking of cognac and wounded pride. He had refused to speak until the Syrian troops raised their flag over the courtyard. Then, he broke. Weeping like a schoolboy. Mussolini had offered him water. Rousset spat in the sand like a child denied his toy.

His men were finished—either scattered or dead. What remained would be processed and sent to camps outside Homs and Aleppo, far from the new northern front already taking shape. There was no room for mercy. No room for anything, really. The war moved like a tide, and Mussolini felt its pressure pushing up against the fragile framework of empire his father was so carefully stitching together.

Syria wasn't a prize.

It was the beginning.

Rome's return to the levant after over 1 thousand years.

He stood atop the ridgeline, binoculars raised, scanning the road eastward into Iraq. Behind him, staff officers murmured over logistics reports. The British in Iraq wouldn't dare cross the border—at least, not openly. But they would make life hellish from afar. He had seen it in the faces of those they captured in border towns—British agents, desert Arabs muttering about "foreign puppets" and "a Christian ruling over us." Ghost words, worn thin from use, but dangerous nonetheless.

Then he turned the binoculars north—toward Turkey.

That's where the real movement was happening.

In the past week alone, five convoys had arrived through Latakia. Thirty CANT Z.1007 bombers offloaded from carriers. Italian mountain troops were being ferried into the Alawite ranges, scattered along the Orontes like seeds sown before a storm. The old French forts near Idlib and Latakia were being fortified again. Everyone knew what that meant.

The men weren't stupid. They heard the rumors just as clearly as he did.

"The Turks are next."

No one said it outright. Not yet. But every mention of Ankara was followed by silence, pregnant with understanding. They weren't massing near the Turkish border out of fear. They were waiting—for orders, for movement, for history to repeat itself.

It was Yugoslavia all over again.

He lowered the binoculars. The glare made his temples throb.


An aide approached—Vittorini. Barely eighteen. Loyal to a fault.

"Telegram from Beirut, sir. The Duce landed safely in Rome. Says the situation with the King is… resolved."

Mussolini nodded.

Of course it was.

His father resolved problems the way nature resolved weakness—through pressure, fire, and madness disguised as genius.

"Tell command in Aleppo to double the fuel convoys. The hills will be dry by June. And inform Damascus—we need another wave of engineers in the north. I want the entire Turkish line surveyed before the month is out."

"Yes, General."

He watched the boy disappear into the swirling dust of the encampment.

Then, alone again, Mussolini turned back to the ridge.

Syria lay before him like a cracked mosaic—half-built roads, bombed-out minarets, and gleaming new construction shimmering under the desert sun. Rome's promise, carved into the bones of yet another conquered land.

But nothing lasts forever.

He lit a cigarette, the wind fighting his match with the spite of a cornered child.

If the Turks resisted, they would bleed for every inch of Anatolia.
The French had been soft. The Turks would not be.

Still—he smiled.

The Empire was moving again.

God, he hated the heat.

 

[Alenco98]

May 7, 1941
Palazzo Venezia
Rome, Italy

The chandeliers above us glittered like a thousand suspended daggers—crystal teeth refracting sunlight into fractured rainbows that danced across the marble floor. The Palazzo felt colder than usual, as if the stone itself were bracing for blood. I adjusted the cuffs of my uniform, watching as Miklós Horthy—Admiral, Regent, puppet—was ushered into the chamber like a magistrate clinging to relevance in a crumbling province. His boots echoed with theatrical precision, polished to a narcissist's gleam. He walked like a man who'd heard of his own importance too many times to ever doubt it.

I smiled at him. Politely. Respectfully. Like a wolf greeting a limping rival.

But in truth? In truth, I wanted to put a bullet between those damp, rheumy orbs he called eyes.

"Regent Horthy!" I extended my hand, addressing him in French—the diplomat's tongue. "Bienvenue à Rome. I trust your journey was pleasant?"

He bowed stiffly. "Duce. The hospitality of your railways continues to impress," he replied in a French accent so mangled it sounded like Helen Keller trying to recite Baudelaire after a stroke—one-handed, in sign language. I nearly gagged. I wanted to rip his tongue out while listening to Singing in the Snow. God, I loved Mikiko Noda. Her voice was silk. Silk and salvation.

"Good," I said, the corners of my mouth twitching. "I hate bad impressions."

We sat across from one another in the Map Room. The Balkans stretched between us in faded sepia, a corpse on a table. Red and blue grease-pencil lines skittered across the surface like veins on a swollen cadaver. Hungary was circled. So was Romania. Germany too—Germany, bleeding outward like a gangrenous wound.

I leaned forward, fingers steepled. "I'm going to tell you something now, Miklós. And I need you to listen. Don't react—just listen."

His brow creased. He didn't like being addressed by his first name. That made me like it even more.

"The war is reaching its climax," I said flatly. "The Germans are going to invade the Soviet Union. This summer. I don't have the exact date—but I've known it would happen since the war began."

He blinked, then chuckled politely. Forced. "An ambitious claim. But surely the Soviets and the Germans—"

"Don't interrupt me."

My voice was calm. Quiet. But beneath it—steel. He froze.

"The Germans are delusional," I continued, "but not suicidal. Or rather—they are suicidal, but they believe they're gods. And that's worse. They think they can fight Britain in the west, the Soviets in the east, and America across the ocean—all at once. Do you understand what that means?"

He opened his mouth. I didn't let him speak.

"It means they're going to lose."

I slid a dossier across the table. It spilled open like a confession. Black and white photographs—grainy, unnamed, but unmistakable. A woman, half-naked, being marched into a pit. A man with a blurred face, rifle in hand. Children's corpses. A mountain of shoes. A bloodstained coat, sized for someone barely old enough to read.

A mosaic of horror. The SS, just getting started.

Horthy stared, silent.

"That is your ally," I said. "That is what your German friend is doing while pretending to unite Europe."

"I—I had no idea—"

"No one does," I cut him off again, smiling like a shard of glass. "Because Germany is still pretending it's fighting for civilization. But this isn't war. It's ritual slaughter. Jews, Slavs, Roma, political dissidents—anyone who doesn't fit their grotesque dream of racial purity."

I stood and walked slowly to the window. Rome shimmered below, ancient and ravenous.

"They'll come for you too, Miklós. Eventually. You think they respect Hungary? The Crown of Saint Stephen?" I scoffed. "To them, you're a stepping stone to the oilfields of Baku."

I turned to face him, eyes cold.

"But you don't have to be their pawn."

Still, he said nothing. Still staring at the photos.

"I can offer you Slovakia," I said quietly. "When the Reich begins to unravel—and it will—there will be… opportunities. Hungary can grow. Legitimately. Safely. Under the protection of Rome. And when the Soviets come knocking, when they're hungry for new vassals, I'll keep them out—if you stand with me. I'm not asking for an invasion. I'm asking you to delay. Feign incompetence. Do anything but send your men east. If you do, they'll die for Berlin's madness. And Stalin will use their corpses as a bridge straight to Budapest. Not even I will be able to stop him then."

He looked up, voice low. "And if Germany wins?"

"They won't."

I said it with such certainty he blinked.

Because I knew. I had read about their defeat. Not here. Not in this reality. But in the world I lost.

America would rise. The Soviets would endure. Britain would never fall.

Inside, my hands trembled. I wanted to scream at him. To shake him. To tell him everything—about the firebombs over Dresden, Hitler's corpse rotting in a bunker, the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I wanted to tell him about Japan, island to island, fighting a war it could never win while city pop played in some alternate heaven I'd never see again.

But instead, I smiled. Cool. Composed.

Because that's what the Duce would do.

Inside, though, I was burning alive.

A soul with no soul.

I hated Horthy. His smugness. His royal delusions. His antique medals. This man—a crusted fossil playing king in a theater of ruins. A cocksucker with more goulash than gray matter. I had the arrow Cross Party in Hungary on my payroll. When the war ended, they'd put a bullet in his head and crown Victor Emmanuel King of Hungary. Let that idiot have another kingdom—maybe then he'd stop bitching at me about Greece. Christ I hated that royal midget almost as much as Horthy.

But Horthy, I loathed this fossil. This coward. This dead empire wearing boots. I could almost feel my hands around his throat. Soon. Soon.

But more than anything—I wanted Sofie. I wanted to be on the couch again. Her head on my chest. Yurie Kokubu on the speakers.

Take a little bit of my love...

I wanted to forget all of this.

I stared at the city—The Seven Hills. The Tiber. The ghost of Byzantium whispered in my ear.

Restore me, it said. Restore what was lost.

I would. I had to.

But first—I wanted Hungary.

"I'm not asking you to betray Germany," I said at last. "I'm asking you to survive it."

He stared at me. "And if I say no?"

I smiled, razor-thin. "Then you'll be buried beside them. And I'll let the Soviets run wild in Hungary. I wonder how the Hungarian version of the Internationale sounds. Lovely, I imagine."

The chandelier above flickered. Rome was listening. I smiled wider.

"Do whatever you need to do. I can dispatch OVRA agents, some Alpini. Quietly. Discreetly. I know about the arrow Cross—your Nazi knockoff club. I have agents embedded with them, whispering promises of support. The moment they plot, I'll let you know. Then you can throw their bodies in the Danube."

"How soon can you send them?"

"You can leave with them. Tonight."

He was quiet for a long moment. Hedging. Calculating. Fence-sitting bastard.

Finally—he sighed. "Very well."

"Good." I nodded. "It was a pleasure speaking with you."

"Likewise."

He left, and I was alone with my thoughts.
Yeah, you dumb fuck. I had agents in the Iron Cross. The moment I say the word, Hungary is mine. I reminded myself to give the Alpini orders—once the arrow Cross made their move, kill Horthy and his family.

I waited until I was sure he was gone—then I broke.

I sobbed.

Sofie.
Why was I torn from you?
Mom. Dad. Blake. Gary. My baby brothers.
All gone. All lost.
I didn't know how long I cried.

A knock at the door.

I wiped my face. Straightened my collar.

"Back to work," I muttered, and walked to answer it.

 

[Alenco98]

May 9, 1941
Palazzo Venezia
Rome, Italy

I wake up at 5:55 am. I don't know why. My body simply jolts upward, like a glitch in some divine programming. I stare at the ceiling for a moment and imagine it's collapsing on top of me. Not in a dramatic, operatic way—just collapsing. Random entropy. Then I remember I'm not allowed to die yet. Too many deadlines.

I slide off the bed, silently. My wife is still asleep, drooling slightly. It disgusts me. Not because of the drool—because I envy her. I grab the pillow, throw it onto the cold marble floor, and get into a headstand. I count to 200. My eyes water around 160. I keep going.

Afterwards, I put on a plain black shirt and dark gray trousers, regulation cut. I walk outside into the hazy Roman morning, my bodyguards silently falling in behind me. I run. Past the fountains. Past the Piazza. Past the people waving, smiling, worshipping.

They don't love me. They love an idea of me.

I put on my pretend headphones—small, compact, imported from Japan through Lisbon—and I play Plastic Love by Mariya Takeuchi. Basic. Predictable. But effective. And it's all in my thoughts. The opening synth line feels like the pulse of some lost utopia, like neon melting through marble. I pretend I'm running through Tokyo in the rain, not Fascist Rome.

6:45 AM, I arrive at the Palestra dil duce, my home gym/palace. It's empty except for my trainer and one of the OVRA goons, clipboard in hand, stopwatch ticking. No music here, just the sound of my breath and the metal rings creaking.

I do 3 sets of 10 pull-ups with 30 kilograms in a weighted vest. Between sets I rest exactly 90 seconds. No more, no less. Then 4 sets of push-ups, slow, deliberate, almost ritualistic. The weight in the pack goes up by 10 kilos. I can feel my tendons screaming. I keep going. Squats, 3 sets of 10.

After squats, five minutes of stretching. I look in the mirror. I see Mussolini. But not the real one. The idea of one. The abstraction. The polished, mythologized demigod they wrote about in elementary textbooks. Not me.

8:30 AM, I shower. Clara is already there, waiting. Submissive. Still beautiful in a ruinous way. We have sex under the hot stream. Violent. Joyless. I don't cum. I haven't in over a year.

9:15 AM, I'm in the car. My driver doesn't speak. Oatmeal, strawberries, honey. Cold milk. I eat it slowly while listening to Mayonaka no Door by Miki Matsubara in my mind. I imagine her voice is Sofia's.

10:00 AM, Council chambers. The ministries sit around me like exhausted apostles. They offer reports like holy scripture. Army—holding steady. Treasury—positive growth. Interior—more roundups. Navy—always a disappointment.

I nod. I smirk. I say little. I pretend to listen.

On the inside, I'm staring at Sofia again, the last time I saw her, hair backlit by a dying Rwandan sun when she came to visit me. Turn it into love by Wink plays softly in my mind. I miss her in a way I can't even articulate, like missing a limb I was never born with.

Di Stefano is talking. Something about trade volumes. I nod again. He's competent. A rare thing these days. I let him speak.

Then the Interior Minister tells me about another Serbian priest. Drugged. Filmed. Compromised. Good. A serpent in the church, another lever we can pull. When we're done with him, we erase him. Like erasing lines of code.

Noon, lunch. I skip the garlic and oil. I want pizza. Napoli style. Extra olive oil, thick crust, sweet tomato. I devour it like it's a substitute for emotional fulfillment.

Clara comes again. Blows me while I'm eating. I pretend to finish. She asks me to meet tonight. I nod. I already know she'll show up.

2:00 PM, we reconvene. More reports. More failures disguised as progress. Then: Cavagnari. My daily dose of blood pressure.

He enters, overly formal. Hair combed back, medals polished. A coward dressed as a soldier.

I smile. Warmly. The way a cat might smile at a mouse.

"Cavagnari," I say gently, as Dance in the Memories by Meiko Nakahara plays faintly in my head.

"Duce," he nods. The cowardice is palpable.

"How goes our Navy?" I ask. Hands folded. Patient. Benevolent.

He breathes in. "Progressing. Coordination with the Regia Aeronautica has—"

I wave a hand. "Not the cruisers, Cavagnari. The submarines."

His face tightens. He tries not to blink.

"We are making refinements—"

"Refinements?" I interrupt. "To coffins?"

His mouth opens. Closes.

"Submarines slower than gondolas. Air systems that poison the crew. Turrets with no use. Engines designed by blind men. I read the reports. Depth limits at seventy meters? Seventy? That's suicide."

"I understand—"

"No, you don't understand, Cavagnari," I snap. "Because if you did, I wouldn't be reading about another fucking depth-charge massacre every goddamn week while listening to Chisato Moritaka sing about Stress."

He's sweating now. Good.

"Our enemies aren't men. They're wolves. And we send them bloated, leaking coffins with flags."

"I'm working with engineers—"

"Then fire them. Replace them. Build new hulls. I don't care. I want predators. I want nightmares with propellers. I want them to dive silently beneath British warships and rip their fucking hulls open like a murder scene in a bad French film."

A silence. I let it sit.

"Fix it."

He nods, robotic. Broken. Still the best we have. I don't fire him. Not yet. Too loyal, too competent, a rare mix. I play good cop after, telling him I believe in him, that he can do it. He looks at me like a wounded puppy, the urge to strangle him is still there.

6:30 PM, I retreat to my office. Signatures. Executions. Censorship orders. Death warrants. Memos to ministers I hate. I hum Telephone Number by Junko Ohashi.

8:00 PM, Clara arrives. We fuck on the couch. Again, violent. I imagine she's Sofia. Her face, her voice, the little gasps—nothing lines up, but I fake it. Clara tells me she loves me. I don't respond.

9:00 PM, dinner. Spaghetti with basil. Parmesan. Eggs. A steak, rare. I eat it like punishment.

10:00 PM, back in my bedroom. My wife wants to talk. She wants Bruno and Vittorio promoted. I agree. Who cares? They're mannequins with my last name. They'll die like good Roman soldiers—smiling and oblivious.

I lie in bed. Eyes open. I feel the night like a weight.

In my dreams, the original Mussolini appears. We talk. He complains. He praises. He's the only one I can relate to.

There is an idea of a Benito Mussolini. A glimmer of flesh over steel. But beneath that idea?

Nothing.

Just a name echoing into silence.

-

May 9, 1941
Gian Galeazzo Ciano's Personal Journal (Eyes Only)

He's losing his mind.

No—has lost it.

I sat across from him in council today and watched a man who once held the fate of nations in his palm bark like a junkyard dog about submarines. Submarines! As if those rusted steel phalluses will win this coming war for us. As if drowning a Turkish cargo vessel will fill the spiritual abyss that yawns behind his eyes.

It was just after lunch. He'd returned to the hall reeking of pizza, sex, and desperation. His shirt collar open—never like before—tie loosened just slightly, like some noir detective unraveling at the climax. His face... there was a sheen to it. Not sweat, not oil—film. Like a projection of the Duce was melting right before our eyes.

He tore into Cavagnari with the fervor of a priest on morphine, slamming the desk, hissing insults wrapped in poetry. Floating mausoleums, he called them. Steel sarcophagi. Cavagnari looked like a schoolboy about to vomit on his exam. And I—God help me—I laughed. Not because it was funny. Because it was terrifying.

And then...
He started singing.

Softly.

Under his breath.

City pop, some Japanese nonsense he's been obssesed with lately. Yurie Kokubu, Tomoko Aran—names that meant nothing to me two years ago, and now haunt the edges of every meeting. He says it relaxes him, but the effect is closer to derangement. As if the smooth japanese crooning from half a world away is the only thing keeping him from putting a bullet in someone's skull—and I don't know if that someone would be Cavagnari or me.

But the worst part wasn't the tirade. The worst part came after.

He sat back, sighing, suddenly calm, suddenly lucid. He told Cavagnari he believed in him. That he was his man. That he was the only one who could fix this.

The entire council froze. This wasn't mercy. This was madness masquerading as grace. The Duce is playing both priest and executioner, lover and tyrant. His affections come like lightning—burning and unpredictable. His hatred, like a tide: slow, inevitable, and devastating.

He barely looked at me today. When he did, it wasn't at me—it was through me. Like I was a prop in his performance.

There's a story I once heard about Roman emperors: how Caligula appointed his horse to the Senate. People laugh at that. They don't understand—it wasn't a joke. It was a test. Mussolini is testing us now, each of us, every goddamn day. And we're all failing.

After the meeting, I passed his office. The door was slightly ajar. I heard Clara laughing, breathless, and him whispering something in Japanese. Japanese.

He doesn't even dream in Italian anymore.

I miss the old Duce. The one who bellowed from balconies and stirred nations with a single phrase. That man is dead. What remains is a ghost in a well-tailored suit, fucking mistresses and reciting japanese lyrics while the world tilts toward annihilation.

And yet... he wins.

The British fear him. The Germans are wary
of him. Our own people still bow. Even now, in the shadow of his mental decline, Italy wins.

God help us all if it starts losing.

—Ciano

 

[Alenco98]

May 30, 1941
Palazzo Venezia
Rome, Italy

We were knee-deep in the kind of meeting that made me want to gouge my eyes out with the tip of a fountain pen. Stefani was droning on about trade negotiations with Switzerland—neutral, smug little gnomes swimming in gold teeth and Nazi loot. I stared at the long mahogany table, tracing a knot in the wood grain with my thumbnail while "Mayonaka no Joke" looped in my skull like a taunt. Takako Mamiya, please save me.

My temples throbbed. I wanted to stab Stefani in the neck with a letter opener. His voice was a wet sock in a blender. I counted the seconds until I could get out of this room and throttle someone.

Then the door slammed open.

"Duce!" my aide gasped, practically hyperventilating. He looked like a boy who had just walked in on his parents having sex with Mussolini and Hitler masks on.

My guards lunged for him—I almost let them. Watching someone get beat to death might've finally made this day interesting. But I raised a hand. "No. Let's hear what he has to say."

He gulped, eyes darting. "Germany has invaded the Soviet Union. War was declared. This morning."

I blinked. My mouth twitched. The timeline was off. That wasn't supposed to happen for weeks. It was supposed to be summer, not spring. I remembered it from college—one of the few things that stuck between cheap 4loko and all-night study sessions.

So, I was really doing it. Changing things.

And that meant Constantinople was now in play.

I rose slowly. "Meeting adjourned." I didn't look at anyone. I didn't need to. They'd follow like the lapdogs they were. "Get a plane ready. We leave for Greece immediately. Graziani, Cavagnari, Pricolo—you're coming. Have a message sent to Pangalos. The war with Turkey is moving up."

As I turned on my heel, I imagined the whole room bursting into flames behind me, Stefani screaming as the Swiss decapitated him with a fondue fork.


May 30, 1941
Ciampino Airport
Rome, Italy

The drive to the airport was quiet, and I liked it that way. My driver didn't speak unless I told him to. I respected that. The sun was low, Rome casting long, golden shadows like a painting I'd once seen in an art textbook, or maybe a dream. I couldn't tell the difference anymore.

I kept thinking about Tatsuro Yamashita's "Bomber'" as we pulled up to the airstrip. His voice cooed in my memory. City pop: the soundtrack of a life I'd never get back.

The SM.79 was fueled and ready. Graziani climbed aboard with the enthusiasm of a man who thought conquering Turkey would validate his existence. He looked at me like he wanted praise, like a dog who brought back a stick.

I gave him a nod that might as well have been a death sentence. "Maps?"

"Yes, Duce."

Cavagnari and Pricolo followed. I resisted the urge to scream. They all smelled like old paper and Catholic guilt.

As I boarded the aircraft, I told myself again: we were going to take Constantinople. No, reclaim it. I would stand in the Hagia Sophia. I would listen to Yuko Saito's "Itsuka" in my mind under the golden dome while Greek Orthodox chants echoed against the stone. That was the dream. That was the only dream left.

May 30, 1941
En Route to Athens
Over the Ionian Sea

We were in the air. The cabin was cramped, and the air smelled like sweat and petrol. I sat by the window, watching the blue-green Ionian slip beneath us.

Graziani leaned in. "Our landing in Greece is scheduled for 20:30. Pangalos will meet us at the base."

I nodded slowly. "Good. Has the message been sent to our people in Syria and my son?"

"Yes. They're preparing our forces now."

I could feel my heartbeat in my jaw. I imagined myself on the shores of the Bosphorus, blood soaking the marble streets. I imagined crucifying Kemalists in front of Hagia Sophia like some Old Testament fever dream while their families watched.

"Any word on Kurdish contacts?"

"Initial feelers sent through arab intermediaries. We think they'll cooperate if we promise independence."

Of course they would. Everyone's got a price. "Do it, have our ambassador in Athens reach out to the soviets. Discreetly, tell them we'll be backing Kurdish independence and letting Kurdistan be under the Soviet sphere. Do this once we land. We'll send our recognition for Kurdish independence once the war starts. I expect the soviets to do the same."

I shut my eyes. "Bay City" by Junko Yagami was next on the mental playlist. I imagined leather driving gloves and neon signs. A glass of something cold. Silence.

But instead, I had Pricolo, clearing his throat. "Duce, should we reconsider pushing toward Ankara after securing Thrace?"

I opened my eyes and stared at him. "No. The British won't let us."

May 30, 1941
Athens Airport
Athens, Greece

We landed smoothly. The warm air of the Aegean hit me like a memory. Greece always smelled like thyme, motor oil, and unresolved trauma.

Pangalos waited, dressed in his absurd uniform like a cartoon general in a Punch magazine sketch. He saluted too crisply.

"Duce. Welcome to Athens."

I saluted, wanting to get it over with. "Let's get to work."

May 30, 1941
Athens Military Headquarters
Athens, Greece

The headquarters was a repurposed villa. Marble floors. Chandeliers. Ottoman ghosts.

We gathered around a massive map table. Officers filled the room like bad cologne. The hum of military planning buzzed in the air.

I tapped the map. "Two prongs. One from here—Greece—direct push to Constantinople. The other, from Syria: take Adana, Hatay, Tarsus. Fast, clean. We split the Turkish army's spine."

Pangalos lit a cigarette. "And the Bosphorus?"

"We take it. The European side only. State all ships will be allowed to pass and that nothing will change."

He raised an eyebrow. "And the Kurds?"

"We give them what they want. Enough guns to keep Turkey bleeding out the ass for months."

I caught my reflection in the window. Mussolini's face. My face. God, I missed Spotify. I missed hot showers that didn't smell like rust. I missed not having to pretend to be this bloated fascist balloon while keeping the world from tearing at the seams.

But we were so close.

"Operation Nikephoros," I whispered.

"What?" Pangalos asked.

"That's what we'll call it. After the general who retook Antioch. It's poetic."

No one said a word. Good. They didn't get it. They never did.

But I would stand in Constantinople. I would hear Momoko Kikuchi echoing through the Hagia Sophia in my thoughts.

And maybe then, I could finally breathe.

"How soon can we start?" I snapped back to reality.

"Late June." Pangalo's replied. "Early July."

"Good."

WAR CABINET MEETING TRANSCRIPT
Location: Cabinet Room, 10 Downing Street
Date: 2 June 1941
Time: 11:15 BST

Churchill:
Right, let's begin. The soviets are in the thick of it now—Hitler has turned east. Our Soviet friends are now in the lion's mouth. What's the latest on the Italians?

Menzies:
Prime Minister, we have confirmation from our Athens station and intercepted traffic: Mussolini is mobilising forces in both Greece and Syria. Two-pronged operation, likely aimed at Turkey. The name "Operation Nikephoros" has surfaced in some coded transmissions.

Churchill:
So he really means to take Constantinople. The bloody madman's trying to revive Byzantium now. Any formal declaration of war?

Eden:
None. Italy remains formally neutral. But Pangalos—Greece's tinpot generalissimo—is cooperating fully. Our attaché in Ankara believes the Turks are preparing for war. Mobilisation has begun in eastern Anatolia.

Dill:
They'll be hit on two fronts: north from Greece and south through Syria. The Italians have troops in the Levant—a mix of local troops, Italian army and elite Alpini. It's a real hammer and anvil maneuver.

Churchill:
Is it credible? Does Mussolini actually have the teeth for it?

Beaverbrook:
He's not the man he was in 1939. He's cunning, dangerous, that business in Yugoslavia. Vienna. The military reforms. And the meeting with Roosevelt a few months back.

Churchill:
(pauses, lights cigar)
A pact with the bloody devil. (Scoffs) He wants to carve up the Middle East like it's the bloody Congress of Berlin. And he expects us to watch.

Menzies:
He's promised to keep the Bosphorus open, His only demand is non-interference in the war.

Churchill:
(grumbling)
The man's a peacock in jackboots, but he might be our peacock once he enters the war. Eden, draft a communique to Ankara. Offer matériel support, and suggest we dispatch Free French units to reinforce Anatolia—make it clear the Turks won't be alone. If this war spills east, we must be seen as defenders, not aggressors. If Mussolini wants Thrace and the southeast so badly let him bleed for it.

Dill:
We can dispatch elements of the 1st Free French Brigade from Iraq, along with some RAF support. It'll be modest, but symbolic.

Churchill:
Good. Symbolism counts. As for Mussolini... let's keep the channels open. Once he's in the war on our side we need to keep all eyes on him. We cannot let him take Europe under the pretext of siding with us.

Beaverbrook:
—Then we welcome him to the family, awkward bald head an
d all.

Churchill:
(with a wry smile)
Indeed. The enemy of our enemy, gentlemen... might just be our Byzantophile lunatic in Rome.

Meeting Adjourned: 12:02 BST

 

[Alenco98]

Excerpt from Mussolini: The Rise and Reign of Il Duce by Christopher Hibbert (2008)

On the morning of July 1st, 1941, under a sweltering Aegean sun, Benito Mussolini launched what would be one of the most audacious and controversial military campaigns of his long career: Operation Nikephoros, the Greco-Italian invasion of Turkey. It was a war of opportunity and ambition, conceived in the halls of Rome and Athens, and executed with characteristic fascist flair—ruthless efficiency mingled with theatrical bravado.

The plan was bold, and its name—Nikephoros, or "Bringer of Victory"—was a deliberate echo of Byzantine martial glory. The campaign had two principal thrusts. The first moved eastward from Greek Thrace, along the ancient invasion route of emperors and crusaders, through the Maritsa valley, and toward the fabled city of Constantinople. The second, more logistically complex, drove northwest-ward from the Italian client state of greater Syria, with forces—many under the command of Mussolini's son, Benito Albino—striking into southern Anatolia. These troops, seasoned from prior Levantine operations against the free french, took Adana on July 25, bolstered by air superiority, superior armor, and the liberal—indeed controversial—use of chemical weapons.

Kurdish separatists, long at odds with Ankara, were courted and armed by Italian agents, encouraged to rise up and disrupt Turkish lines from within. Their effectiveness was mixed, but the resulting chaos played into Rome's strategy of destabilization.

The Turkish response was both immediate and tenacious. Despite being caught off-guard, Ankara mobilized swiftly. Free French units were transported in by the British via Iraq to aid the Turks, while British material aid—arms, fuel, and aircraft—began pouring in through neutral Persia and the Black Sea. Turkish forces dug in along the Çamak Line, a formidable defensive belt protecting Constantinople from the west.

The turning point came on August 4, when Italian paratroopers landed behind the Çamak like while the main Greco-Italian army, supported by a rolling artillery barrage and clouds of mustard gas—breached the Çamak Line in a withering assault. The ensuing week saw brutal house-to-house fighting across the Thracian plain and into the ancient suburbs of the Queen of Cities. On August 11, 1941, Italian and Greek flags flew over the Hagia Sophia. Constantinople, once thought unconquerable, had fallen to a new Caesar.

Simultaneously, the southern front saw a violent Turkish counterattack into Adana on August 11. For six days, Turkish troops fought with desperate courage, reclaiming suburbs and temporarily surrounding key Italian positions. But by August 17, the combined use of tanks, chemical agents, and aerial bombardment by Mussolini's legions had crushed the offensive. Adana remained in Axis hands.

Operation Nikephoros was a triumph in strategic terms, but a moral catastrophe. The Italian use of chemical weapons—openly and without apology—was condemned internationally, even by Hitler. Yet for Il Duce, it was proof of the strength of his emerging ideology of Romanism: an evolution of fascism, a fusion of religious fervor, imperial ambition, and political will that reshaped the Eastern Mediterranean in his image.

As he addressed cheering crowds from the ruins of Constantine's city, Mussolini spoke not only as a conqueror, but as a man convinced he had turned the clock of history back to the era of empire.

In the wake of Operation Nikephoros, the Greek banners had scarcely settled over Constantinople before troubling reports began to emerge from the hinterlands of Thrace and southern Anatolia. While the Italian high command triumphantly declared the region pacified, a different reality was unfolding beneath the surface—one of vengeance, score-settling, and ethnic cleansing.

Much of the Greek army that marched into Eastern Thrace had been drawn from communities of Anatolian Greeks—descendants of those displaced by the catastrophic population exchanges and pogroms following the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922. For many, the campaign was not merely a military operation; it was a pilgrimage of retribution. Every Turkish or Muslim village was razed. Civilians were summarily executed or expelled in death marches across the Bosporus.

In the south, in Hatay, Adana, and Tarsus—where Italian forces held control under the leadership of Benito Albino Mussolini—the pattern repeated itself, this time under an Italian banner. Turkish populations were driven from their homes, accused of resisting occupation or collaborating with Ankara. Syrian officials issued orders with euphemistic language: "ethnic realignment", "strategic relocation". Behind these phrases hid atrocities—rapes, massacres, and death from starvation or exposure during mass expulsions.

International observers, including Red Cross delegates smuggled through Cyprus, began compiling discreet reports of what would later be described as "the second Smyrna." Entire Turkish communities disappeared from the map. The Italian press, tightly controlled by the regime, painted a different picture. Il Popolo d'Italia ran headlines like "Order Restored in the East" and "Hellenic and Syrian Brothers Reclaim Ancient Lands."

Benito Mussolini, sensing international condemnation mounting, addressed the issue with characteristic bravado. In a radio speech from the steps of the Hagia Sophia, he declared:

"What we have done in Thrace and Cilicia is not atrocity—it is justice. For Smyrna. For the Armenian children butchered in the snows of Anatolia. For centuries of oppression under the crescent. History remembers the victor, and I write that history with steel and fire."

This rhetorical pivot—casting the ethnic purges as righteous vengeance and a religious crusade—resonated among certain nationalist and religious circles in Europe. Mussolini extended an olive branch to the Armenian diaspora, announcing that resettlement land and homes would be offered to Armenians willing to return to the ancestral homeland in southeaster turkey, recently annexed by Greater Syria. Thousands took up the call, settling in what had been emptied Turkish villages under Syrian military supervision. New towns were christened with names like New Yeveran and Ararat, reinforcing Mussolini's narrative of rebirth through conquest.

Privately, his advisors worried about the instability of such demographic engineering. The Turkish resistance had not been extinguished—merely scattered. Cells of nationalist fighters continued to harass supply lines, and whispers of Kurdish separatists about to turn on their Italian patrons added to the uncertainty.

Nevertheless, by the autumn of 1941, Mussolini presented the campaign not merely as a military victory, but as a civilizational one. The Eastern Mediterranean, he claimed, was no longer a battlefield of empires but a crucible for a new roman order—one forged in blood, history, and myth.

While Mussolini stood before cheering crowds in Constantinople proclaiming the dawn of a new Roman East, the halls of diplomacy in London, Washington, and Moscow buzzed with alarm. What had once been a neutral Turkey—an unpredictable but independent actor—had now become a powder keg.

And behind the scenes, the Italian Duce had been playing an even deeper game.

Since early 1941, Mussolini had quietly probed the Allied powers with offers of cooperation—contingent on timing. Mussolini went on an official state visit to the US, officially signing a trade agreement but in reality offering his support for the allies should the US enter the war and recognize it's conquests and giving evidence of the Holocaust to president Roosevelt. The US, already giving lend lease aid to Britain couldn't turn away this opportunity, and so they lobbied Britain to focus on the war against Germany rather than Italy.

To the dismay of Ankara, Allied pressure mounted. With their armies bloodied and Istanbul in enemy hands, the Turkish government under İsmet İnönü found itself increasingly isolated. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, promised a sphere of influence in Turkey by Mussolini, offered only silence. The Americans, more focused on preparing to enter the and war, advised compromise. The British, overstretched by the continuing blitz and battle on the Atlantic pressured Turkey to accept a settlement.

Thus, under intense trilateral pressure from London, Washington, and Moscow, Turkey was forced to accept terms that it considered humiliating.

On September 29, 1941, the Treaty of Salonika was signed. Turkey ceded Eastern Thrace, Constantinople and it's Aegean islands to Greece. Hatay, Adana, and Tarsus meanwhile were given to the Italian satellite kingdom of Greater Syria. Constantinople was declared the new capital of Greece. A Turkish delegation stormed out during the signing, declaring it a "treaty of chains."

The internal reckoning was swift and violent.

Just one week after the treaty was signed, a group of ultranationalist officers led by a young officer named Alparslan Türkeş staged a coup in Ankara. President İnönü was arrested and later executed on charges of cowardice and "collaboration with the enemy." The new junta declared the Kemalist era dead and issued a chilling decree: the Kurdish people, having "sided with foreign invaders," were now enemies of the state.

Within weeks, what began as arrests and relocations devolved into full-scale genocide.

Villages in Diyarbakır, Van, and Erzurum were leveled. Men, women and children were shot en masse. The Turkish state, now under military rule, portrayed the genocide as a necessary purge to restore national unity. Propaganda posters labeled the Kurds "the knife in our back," echoing post-World War I German rhetoric.

Mussolini, ever the opportunist, remained silent. Privately, he instructed his diplomats to use the Kurdish massacres as leverage—secretly suggesting to the allies that a Soviet occupation of Turkey was necessary as they would bring order to the current situation. It was a grim and cynical calculation and his way of paying back Stalin for him turning a blind eye.

The Allies issued only perfunctory condemnations. The Soviets were silent. The Americans were focused on preparing to enter the war. The British filed the tragedy under "unfortunate but internal."

For Mussolini, it was a geopolitical coup. With a weakened, brutalized Turkey on one side and new Syrian colonies in the south east brimming with settlers and roads, he could now portray his empire not just as a fascist experiment, but as a necessary buffer—between East and West, chaos and order.

And that was just the beginning.

 

[Alenco98]

Excerpt from Mussolini: The Rise and Reign of Il Duce by Christopher Hibbert (2008)

Publicly, Mussolini beamed with pride in August 1941. With Constantinople in his grasp and the Eastern Mediterranean reshaped in his image, he spoke of destiny fulfilled. Crowds cheered. Newspapers proclaimed the "rebirth of empire." Yet behind the marble smiles and choreographed spectacles, Il Duce fumed.

What was meant to be a triumph of modern fascist warfare—swift, precise, devastating—had instead become a grinding affair. The operation that Mussolini had envisioned as a Mediterranean Blitzkrieg, modeled in spirit on Hitler's lightning strikes into France and the Low Countries, had dragged on for over six weeks, with unexpectedly fierce Turkish resistance bogging down both the northern and southern advances. Italian paratroopers, instead of soaring symbols of the Rinnovamento, had struggled through weeks of logistical disarray and spotty coordination with ground forces. Supplies arrived late, units fought disconnected, and the terrain—harsh, mountainous, and hostile—punished even the most disciplined formations.

On August 19, just days after the fall of Constantinople and the repulsion of the Turkish counteroffensive at Adana, Mussolini demanded a full internal assessment of the campaign's performance. It was not a rhetorical gesture. He summoned Marshal Graziani, Chief of the General Staff Ugo Cavallero, and Air Marshal Francesco Pricolo to his private study in the Palazzo Venezia. According to aide diaries, he stood before them and spoke not in fury, but in cold, methodical disappointment:

"We were promised thunder. I heard nothing but shit."

The report that followed—compiled in what later became known within the General Staff as the Libro Nero di Nikephoros—was clinical, candid, and painful.

Despite two years of reforms under Il Rinnovamento, the Italian armed forces remained a work in progress. The Army had improved in doctrine and logistics, but many of its officers still clung to prewar habits. Communications broke down under strain. The three-regiment divisional model was better, but not yet universal. Light tanks—outmatched by Turkish anti-tank guns—suffered significant losses in Thrace.

The Navy, though spared the worst of the campaign, had failed to interdict British material aid reaching Turkish ports in the Black and Mediterranean Sea. Poor coordination with land forces, outdated doctrine, and a lingering disdain for combined operations rendered the Regia Marina more an ornament than an instrument.

And the Air Force—though boasting newer fighters and bombers—was still plagued by uneven fuel distribution, limited radar coverage, and patchy command integration. While air superiority was achieved, it was not decisive. Turkish fighters, many British-supplied, continued to harass Italian columns well into August.

Yet it was logistics, not valor, that nearly undid the campaign.

Fuel convoys from Albania to Thrace were delayed by mountain sabotage thanks to Serbian partisans. Ammunition dumps were hit by Turkish stay behind units. Italian troops sometimes fought without maps, relying on outdated pre-1923 Ottoman charts. The Army's rear echelons, reorganized but overstretched, struggled to feed, clothe, and arm a modern force advancing through hostile, depopulated terrain.

Mussolini read the report in silence. According to Graziani's postwar memoirs, the Duce placed the file on his desk, lit a cigarette, and muttered:

"We need to continue with the process of getting our shit together."

He did not punish his generals. Nor did he reward them. Instead, he doubled down on reform. Procurement for motorized transport was expanded. Field radios were to be universal by 1942. Air-ground integration exercises were ordered across occupied Yugoslavia and Libya. And most tellingly, Mussolini authorized the creation of Scuole della Guerra Moderna—"Schools of Modern War"—designed to retrain fascist officers in combined arms warfare, logistics, and armored doctrine, borrowing liberally from both German and Soviet models.

In public, the Duce continued to roar. But in private, he no longer believed his own propaganda. Victory in Anatolia had been purchased at the cost of illusion. Italy was now a power, yes—but not yet a great one. And Mussolini, who had waited and planned in the quiet years of neutrality, understood something his more reckless contemporaries did not:

That the empire he was building could only survive if it learned to fight not like Rome—but like the future.

Among Mussolini's most enduring legacies, the Scuole della Guerra Moderna—the "Schools of Modern War"—stand as one of his least theatrical, but most consequential innovations. Born not out of triumph but dissatisfaction, they were Duce's answer to the lessons of Turkey.

Operation Nikephoros, though victorious, had revealed fatal fractures within the fascist war machine: tactical rigidity, fragmented communications, and a lingering culture of obedience over initiative. The campaign had been won with brutality and chemical weapons, not finesse. For a man obsessed with futurism and the myth of efficiency, it was unacceptable.

Thus, in October 1941—barely two months after the Treaty of Salonika—Mussolini issued Ordine Supremo 74/41, establishing the first Scuola della Guerra Moderna in Livorno, followed by secondary academies in Milan, Taranto, and Naples.

The goals of the program were ambitious, and unorthodox by fascist standards:

1. To break the hierarchy of incompetence – Political appointees and aristocratic officers were to be re-evaluated on tactical acumen, not pedigree or party loyalty. Some were quietly retired. Others were sent back to the schools themselves.

2. To train a new generation of "war artisans" – Not merely soldiers or engineers, but masters of combined arms, logistics, and psychological warfare. The curriculum was aggressively interdisciplinary. Officers studied Clausewitz, Tukhachevsky, Liddell Hart—and, controversially, even Sun Tzu and Mao's guerilla theory.

3. To marry theory with terrain – Unlike traditional academies, which trained in sanitized parade grounds, the Scuole drilled in Sicily's hills, Libya's deserts, and the forests of Dalmatia. Live-fire exercises were relentless. Failure was not punished with demotion, but with repetition—until excellence became instinct.

4. To emphasize information warfare – With input from philosopher-turned-propagandist Giovanni Gentile, a unique psychological warfare module was introduced. Officers learned not just how to win battles, but how to shape narratives: planting rumors, countering Allied radio, and exploiting ethnic fractures—as seen with the Kurds.

5. To prepare for total war, not total victory – Reflecting Mussolini's shift in thinking, the Scuole taught war as a long, grinding process. Logistics officers were trained with the same intensity as tank commanders. A motto emerged from one of the first Livorno classes: "Il silenzio della linea di rifornimento è più forte del ruggito del cannone." — "The silence of the supply line is louder than the roar of the cannon."

Graziani, who oversaw much of the implementation, described the schools as Mussolini's "monasteries of mechanized devotion." They operated outside the traditional chain of command, reporting directly to the Comando Supremo. Graduates received not just commissions, but placement within reformed divisions, tasked with testing doctrine in Yugoslavia, Libya, and later, Germany.

By late 1942, evidence of their impact was unmistakable. Italian armored battalions in Libya, once ponderous and brittle, began to demonstrate tactical fluency rivaling the Wehrmacht's Panzer divisions during military exercises. In Albania, modernized regiments deployed radio-coordinated artillery strikes in seconds, not hours. Even air-ground operations—long Italy's Achilles' heel—showed signs of lethal synchrony.

The Allies, noting the shift, quietly revised their assessments. A 1943 British intelligence report declared: "The Italians no longer simply imitate German doctrine—they now interpret it."

Yet Mussolini never allowed the Scuole to become shrines to himself. Their iconography was sparse, their instructors unadorned. The focus was not on loyalty to the Duce, but on loyalty to the mission: to win. To endure. To evolve.

In private, he told Marshal Cavallero:

"I need an army that kills, not one for parades."

And indeed, in the decades after the war, as Italy's imperial ambitions faded and fascism evolved, the Scuole della Guerra Moderna endured as institutions of raw competence.

For in the end, Mussolini understood what so many dictators did not: that glory fades, flags fall—but systems remain. And he intended to leave behind a system sharp enough to outlast even his own shadow.

-

British Foreign Office & War Office – Joint Intelligence Committee
TOP SECRET
Ref: BFO-WO/Nikephoros-9/41
Date: 12 October 1941
Subject: Strategic Assessment of Italian Performance in Operation "Nikephoros"

Summary:
Italian-led Axis forces (principally Italian and Greek) have concluded offensive operations against the Republic of Turkey with the occupation of Eastern Thrace and portions of Cilicia. Despite the operation's eventual success, its execution exposed numerous deficiencies in Italian doctrine, coordination, and capability. However, signs of structural reform and modernization are visible. This merits continued observation, particularly in light of potential postwar realignment.


---

1. Strategic Overview:
Operation Nikephoros, launched 1 July 1941, was a two-pronged Italian-Greek offensive into Turkish territory. The northern axis advanced via Thrace toward Constantinople; the southern thrust originated from Italian-held Syria and targeted Adana and Hatay. Kurdish uprisings were encouraged and materially supported by Italian intelligence.

Initial expectations (including Mussolini's own) suggested a rapid campaign, modeled on German blitz operations. In practice, terrain, stiff Turkish resistance, and uneven Italian command execution resulted in a protracted and costly fight. Constantinople fell on 11 August; Adana was secured by 25 July, though the front did not stabilize until late August after significant Turkish counterattacks.


---

2. Operational Conduct:
Army:

Italian ground forces displayed mixed performance. Unit cohesion and morale were high in elite formations (notably elements of the Ariete Armoured Division and Divisione Alpina Julia), but coordination between Greek and Italian forces was inconsistent.

Deployment of chemical agents during the Çamak Line breakthrough (4 August) and later at Adana underscores both desperation and a willingness to breach accepted conventions of warfare.

Italian officers relied heavily on overwhelming artillery and airpower to compensate for poor tactical flexibility in complex terrain.


Navy:

The Regia Marina was largely absent in meaningful operational terms. Failure to interdict British supply to Turkey via the Black Sea or Eastern Mediterranean is notable. Intelligence suggests continued doctrinal backwardness in carrier and convoy warfare.


Air Force:

Marked improvement observed in Italian air operations, including use of newer fighter types (Macchi C.202, Reggiane Re.2001). Air superiority was eventually achieved over southern Turkey.

Bombing campaigns lacked precision but were persistent. Significant civilian casualties reported in Adana and Tarsus, with potential long-term reputational damage.



---

3. Command & Control:

Mussolini's direct involvement in strategic planning is evident; sources suggest frustration at operational delays.

Italian high command demonstrated improved logistical management compared to campaigns in Ethiopia and early Libya, though the system remains brittle.

Notably, Italian command has begun integrating newer officers and restructured divisions, suggesting ongoing military reform (see: Scuole della Guerra Moderna initiative, ref. BFO/Training/8/41).



---

4. Political Ramifications:

Italy is quietly positioning itself for postwar accommodation with the Allied powers. Documents obtained via SIS sources indicate prewar diplomatic backchannels remain open.

Italian propaganda has framed the conquest as revenge for Smyrna and restitution for Armenian and Greek suffering. Public calls have been made for Armenian resettlement in Cilicia, an overt bid to consolidate control via demographic reshaping.

Widespread atrocities reported in Thrace and Hatay, particularly targeting Turkish civilians and minority populations. Greek irregular units implicated in ethnic cleansing operations. Verification pending.



---

5. Strategic Assessment:
While the Italian war machine remains inferior to British or German standards, a dangerous evolution is underway. Operation Nikephoros revealed:

A willingness to adopt and adapt modern military doctrine.

A degree of operational resilience previously unseen in Italian arms.

A political regime capable of both brutality and flexibility.


Italy's continued trajectory will depend on its industrial capacity and the success of internal military reform. While still second-rate, the Italians are no longer amateurs.

RECOMMENDATION:

Continue intelligence penetration of Italian General Staff and training institutions.

Monitor Kurdish insurgency and Italian political overtures to minority groups.

Reinforce naval presence in Eastern Mediterranean to check further Italian adventurism.


Prepared by:
F. C. Rawnsley, War Office – Middle East Division
Co-signed:
E. L. Shenton, F
oreign Office – Southern European Desk

Distribution:
Prime Minister's Office (PMO)
Chiefs of Staff Committee
Mediterranean Fleet Command
SOE – Levant Branch

 

[Alenco98]

July 15, 1941
South of Adana, Turkey

The heat was punishing. The kind of heat that made the air shimmer and your thoughts blur at the edges. I kept my eyes on the village ahead, nestled behind a grove of citrus trees and Turkish machine gun nests. My uniform clung to me, soaked through. Dust caked every crease, every pore.

General Benito Albino stood beside me in the command car, gloves resting on the doorframe like he was out for a morning drive. He didn't flinch when the mortar landed near the convoy, didn't so much as blink when one of our Syrian boys was turned into rags. I did. Not out of cowardice. Out of memory.

I gave the report: trenches under the citrus grove, a tunnel system under the mosque. He didn't even wait for me to finish before he said it. "Then bury it."

"Sir…" I hesitated, not from fear, but because I still had a sliver of something left. "They've already deployed the gas."

He didn't say a word. Just watched.

From our vantage point, we saw the canisters roll in—our own artillery, Syrian-manned, German-designed. Chlorine. Mustard. The sort of things you're not supposed to use. The sort of things we swore after the last war would never be used again.

But this wasn't Europe. This was Albino's war. His father's war. And we were just hands pulling triggers.

I saw the fog roll out over the grove, soft and almost beautiful—like something divine, until the screaming started.

The Turks writhed and choked in the trenches, clawing at the gas, at the air, at their own eyes. Some dropped their rifles and begged. Others crawled. The Syrians mowed them down without hesitation.

I watched the general light a cigarette with calm hands. I wanted to believe they were shaking from guilt.

---

July 16, 1941
West of Hatay, Turkish Police Station, Field HQ

The map of Cilicia was laid out in front of him like a half-carved corpse. I delivered the intercepts—Turkish troops redeploying from the plateau. A good sign. Ankara was feeling the pressure.

He nodded. "That means Father's hammer in the north is working."

I watched his eyes as he glanced at the photo on the table—Constantinople, Hagia Sophia. His father had sent letters about it, mad scribblings dressed as strategy. Albino read them like scripture. I never saw him pray. But he believed in something. Or someone. And it terrified me.

Gas was used again on the road to Hatay. Targeted, they said. Not indiscriminate. As if that changed anything.

Some of our boys laughed at the aftermath—at the twisted corpses, at the spasms. I didn't laugh. Neither did Albino.

But neither of us stopped it.

---

July 25, 1941
Adana, Governor's Office

Three tries. It took three brutal pushes to take the city. I was in the command vehicle when we finally broke them. The Syrian tanks flattened the last trenches like vermin under bootheels. Bombers turned the palace into a funeral pyre.

We used gas in the sewers. He gave the order without blinking.

But later—he told them to treat the bodies with respect. He said they died fighting. I believed him. I believed he meant it.

That didn't make it better.


---

July 26, 1941
Adana Airfield

We walked the ruins side by side. British aircraft lay twisted and gutted like fish. The tarmac was ash and oil and blackened bone.

I gave the report. Adana secure. Tarsus holding. Hatay pacified.

He turned from the wreckage like it bored him. "Dig in."

"Sir?"

"You heard me. Dig in. No further."

I knew what he meant. The orders were from Rome. From his father. This wasn't conquest. This was calculus. A border carved with fire, nothing more. The Russians could take the rest.

And thank God for that.


---

August 1, 1941
Adana Civil Administration Center

The new administrators arrived from Damascus. Italian-trained Syrians, trying to look like proper provincial governors. They smelled like ink and ambition.

They took over everything: roads, post, education. Turkish was banned by the end of the week. Arabic and Italian went up on signs like graffiti sprayed over history.

The civilian deportations began soon after. Quietly. Efficiently. I didn't ask where the bodies were buried. I didn't need to.


---

August 11, 1941
Southern Adana Province

They hit us hard. Ankara's desperation in uniform. They had men. We had gas.

The 2nd Syrian Gas Battalion hit them under cover of fog. The screams came quickly. I heard them even from the armored column. Some Turks dropped their weapons and ran into the night.

I watched Albino give the order to let the Syrians hunt the stragglers. I said nothing.

Behind the lines, Kurdish raids tore holes through Turkish supply routes. It was working. But we were barely holding.

I wondered how long before the wind changed. Before this whole damn thing came back on us.


---

August 17, 1941
Adana, Rooftop Overlooking the River Seyhan

The night was mercifully cool. The front was quiet. For now.

I joined him on the roof, handed him the report. More Turkish assaults repelled. Some losses.

He asked about the north.

I told him. Constantinople was his father's now.

He didn't smile. Didn't shout. Just nodded. Lit a cigarette and watched the ash fall into the river.

A holy fire burned in his father. And here he stood, the son—drenched in smoke and silence—laying the southern stone of a mad empire.

I didn't know if he believed anymore.

But I did.

We would hold.

Because we had no other choice.

-

July 15, 1941
South of Adana
Turkey

The sun beat down on our convoy as it snaked through the jagged hills south of Adama. My hands rested on the edge of the command car, leather gloves stained with dust and sweat. The air reeked of scorched metal, diesel fumes, and something darker, heavier—like burnt almonds, probably corpses. It had been the same for 15 days ever since the war started.

Our new medium tanks crawled forward under the cover of Macchi fighters circling overhead, hunting for Turkish artillery positions. We had air superiority—thanks to dad and his obsession with the Regia Aeronautica, well, the military in general—but the Turks weren't rolling over. No, they were fighting like cornered dogs. Desperate. Vicious. Admirable.

A mortar round exploded 20 meters to our right, throwing a Syrian conscript into the air like a broken doll. I didn't flinch.

"General," came the voice of Colonel Haddad beside me, half-Syrian, half-armenian, all nerves. "The village ahead is still resisting. Trenches dug along the citrus grove. The scouts found a tunnel system under the mosque."

"Then bury it," I said. "We've wasted enough time here."

He hesitated. I looked at him.

"Sir… they've already deployed the gas."

Of course they had.

From my position on the ridge, I watched the 7th Syrian Infantry deploy the canisters—modified shells of chlorine and mustard gas, made from German blueprints. I'd authorized their use before we crossed the border. Dad's orders. This wasn't Geneva. This was war, war did not tolerate delay. And dad wanted the objectives captured at any costs necessary.

The wind held steady. The shells hissed out from the howitzers like mechanical snakes. A greenish fog rolled over the orchard where the trenches lay.

At first, nothing.

Then the screaming began.

The Turks clawed at their throats as they stumbled from their pits, eyes seared shut. Their rifles were dropped, hands raised in primal panic. A few crawled toward the syrian lines only to be cut down by automatic fire from the Syrian troops.

No mercy. No quarter.

I lit a cigarette with shaking fingers, not from nerves, but rage. Not at the Turks. At myself.

Because it didn't bother me.

Not anymore.

July 16, 1941
West of Hatay
Temporary Field HQ, Former Turkish Police Station

I stood over the map table as the final reports came in. Adana was still contested. Turkish reinforcements had arrived by train, throwing themselves against our flanks like suicidal ants. We had the armor. We had the skies. But they had the land and the will to bleed for it.

Haddad returned with intercepted messages. "They're pulling forces from the central Anatolian plateau. Ankara's feeling the pressure."

"Good," I muttered. "That means Father's hammer in the north is working."

I glanced at the black-and-white photo clipped to my orders. Constantinople. Hagia Sophia, towering over a skyline of domes and spires. I wondered what he saw in it. What madness whispered to him from those marble walls.

He wrote me letters—pages of manic prophecy. Constantinople this. Justinian that. Byzantium reborn under his shadow. I read them by candlelight, like scripture penned by a drunk angel. I wonder what mom, god rest her soul, would think of all this? She probably wouldn't have approved.

The chemical strikes occured on the road to Hatay. Not indiscriminately. Thank god. But we used them—on fortifications, tunnels, dug-in strongpoints. The Syrians grew used to it. Some laughed when they saw Turkish soldiers convulsing in the gas. Animals.

Though I didn't laugh. I didn't stop them, either.

Because every kilometer we gained brought us closer to our objective. And like a faithful son—or a broken weapon—I would deliver it.

Even if I had to burn all of Cilicia to do it.

-

July 25, 1941
Adana, Turkey
Former Governor's Office, Temporary Command Post

We took Adana on the third try. The final push broke their lines just before dawn. It wasn't elegant. Most victories aren't. The tanks crawled over trenches like bloated beetles, flattening corpses into the mud. Our planes came down like avenging angels, torching the last pockets of resistance. The final Turkish holdouts in the mayoral palace fought to the end. Gas was used there as well as the sewers. I didn't flinch when I gave the order. I don't think I flinch anymore. I still ordered them to treat the corpses with respect, they died fighting I'll give them that

They gave us hell. But in the end, we gave them a chemical cocktail of chlorine and firebombs. No contest.

-

July 26, 1941
Adana Airfield
Adana, Turkey

I walked the ruins of the Turkish airstrip with my staff including Haddad. The tarmac was cratered, blackened by weeks of bombing. The bones of downed aircraft jutted like metal ribs from the scorched earth. British as far as I could tell. Spitfires, hurricanes, a headache for the air force.

I lit a cigarette as Haddad reported the obvious.

"Adana secure."

"Tarsus holding."

"Hatay has been pacified. The Syria army is in charge of perimeter security."

I turned away from the wreckage. "Dig in."

"Sir?"

I met Haddad's eyes. "You heard me. Dig in. We're not going further. Father's orders were clear. These three provinces—no more. Hold the line."

He nodded. I knew what he was thinking. We could push to Kayseri. Maybe even Konya or even Ankara. But no—this wasn't conquest for conquest's sake. The rest would go to Russia's sphere of influence. Let the British have two heart attacks instead of 1. And even if we did, then what? Guerrilla warfare all over Anatolia? Our supplies were thin enough as is. I'd read the reports from Bulgaria, most of what was once Serbia was under their heel and they were still getting hell for it. No thank you.

August 1, 1941
Adana Civil Administration Center
Former High School Converted to Government Office

The first wave of bureaucrats arrived from Damascus—Italian-trained Syrian administrators with stiff collars and poor Italian accents. They smelled like ink and old ambition.

Greater Syria. That was the name now. A polite fiction. A paper crown handed to the Syrians by my father while the real authority sat in Rome, wrapped in military dossiers and grand speeches.

I oversaw the transfer of infrastructure: post offices, telegraphs, road commissions. Turkish street signs were pulled down. Arabic went up alongside Italian. Turkish was forbidden in schools and broadcasts by the end of the week.

Resistance simmered. Not for long. The trucks filled with the Turkish civilians the Syrians hadn't butchered were already leaving Adana. They were going to be Turkey's problem soon.


August 11, 1941
Southern Adana Province

They came at us in waves—infantry divisions from central Anatolia, scraped together in haste. They had numbers. We had everything else.

The Macchis tore their lines apart from the sky, while our armor rolled through the cotton fields like divine wrath. The Turks fought hard. I respected that. But respect doesn't stop Chlorine and mustard gas.

The 2nd Syrian Gas Battalion hit their flanks under cover of fog. The screams came a few minutes later, followed by retreat. Some didn't even drop their weapons—they just ran until they collapsed. I gave the order to let the syrians take the stragglers.

Reports came in daily of Kurdish attacks deep in eastern Turkey. Ammunition depots sabotaged. Convoys ambushed. Turkish units redeployed from our front to deal with them.

It was working.

We were holding. Barely.

August 17, 1941
Dawn
Adana, Rooftop Overlooking the River Seyhan

The air was cool, for once. Quiet. The front was stable. I stood on the roof of the old customs building, looking west to where the Frontline was. Even from here I could hear some gunfire. Not as intense as days ago, but still there.

Haddad joined me with a radio report in hand. "More Turkish probing attacks repulsed near Adana. Some losses."

Of course there were losses. A cornered animal always fights hard

"Any word from the north?"

He nodded. "Yes sir, Constantinople, it's captured. It happened the day the Turkish counter assault started."

I nodded. I could feel it, even from here—his obsession, his madness, burning toward Constantinople like a holy fire. I could see him now, wrapped in a Roman cape, muttering about Theodora as he ordered the sack of the Queen of Cities.

And here I was, his son, laying the southern foundation of his empire with gas and tanks.

I flicked the ash from my cigarette and watched it tumble into the night.

We would hold.

And
when he raised his banner over Constantinople, I would be ready for whatever hell he next sent me to.

"Of course it was captured." I sighed.

 

[Alenco98]

July 25, 1941
Çamak Line, Thrace
West of Constantinople

Diary of Pvt. Mattias Berg, 3rd Italian Expeditionary Corps

I used to dream of this. Glory. Fire. Flags waving over shattered lines.

Father warned me. Said war was rats and mud and screaming.
Mother cried.
My fiancee called me a fool.

Still signed up.
Me and Giustino. Idiots in uniform. Border guards playing legionnaire.

"To Constantinople or death," he laughed. Sounded like a game.

It isn't.

This line—Çamak—is hell.
Trenches. Hills full of bunkers. Concrete like bones. Machine guns barking day and night.

They're not running. Turks are dug in. Fighting like they've got nowhere else to go.
Maybe they don't.

They told us two weeks.
"Army's reformed. Stronger than ever."

Three days to cross the Evros. We lost a quarter of our regiment.
Edirne was worse. Gas masks. Poison. Street by street. Seven days of choking and screaming.

Now it's been fifteen days.
Still fighting.

"If they fight like this, maybe we'll get there by Christmas," Giustino joked yesterday.
I laughed. Couldn't help it. More like a cough than a laugh.

Our tanks groaned like beasts, crawling over blackened fields.
First shell hit the lead tank.
Second lit the grass on fire.

Then the gas.
Our gas.

Green clouds, low and fast.
Orders: advance under cover.

Mask on. Sweat in my eyes.
No choice. Move or die.

Giustino grabbed my arm, said something under the mask—probably some joke.
Didn't hear it.

Then a shell landed ahead.
Man in front torn in half.
I think it was Di Angelo.

We crawled forward. Inch by inch.
Short bursts.
No time to think.

The Turks didn't break.
Never do.

Civilians fought too. Women. Kids.
I saw a boy—maybe 13—try to strangle a Greek with wire.

I shot him.
Didn't hesitate.
God help me.

---

July 26, 1941
Çamak Line

Aircraft woke us.

Buzzing above. Italian bombers. Gliders.
Paratroopers dropping behind Turkish lines.

Operation Iupiter.
Two-pronged assault.

We pushed from the front.
They hit from the rear.
Bloodbath.

Took a trench near dusk.
Me, Giustino, dozen others.
Narrow, dark, reeking of piss and death.

Didn't see the sniper.

One second, he was talking.
Next—wet crack. Blood.

Hit in the neck. Arterial spray.
Dropped fast.

Held him.
He gasped. Eyes wide.

"Am I dying?" he asked.
Didn't sound scared. Just… surprised.

"No," I lied. "You'll be fine."

He looked at me.
"You… damn liar…"

He died in my arms.

---

August 1, 1941
Çamak Line

We took the line.

Every inch of it soaked in blood.
Turks fought till the end. Wounded ones too.

Greek and Italian flags raised over bunkers full of corpses.

Didn't feel like victory.
Just felt heavy.

Sat in a foxhole. Mask still on.
Couldn't take it off.
Couldn't take him off me.

Greeks were executing prisoners.
"Vengeance for Smyrna," they said.
Officer told us not to interfere.

All I thought of was Giustino.
Grinning like a fool.

Now silent.
Cold.

---

August 10, 1941
Outskirts of Constantinople

We reached the Marmara.

March after march. Town after burning town.
Snipers on rooftops. Traps everywhere. Dogs rigged with grenades.

We bled for every meter.

Saw the city from a hill near Silivri.
Constantinople.

Domes in the haze. Minarets slicing the sky.
The Hagia Sophia—timeless.

Giustino should've seen it.

Bullet whizzed past.
Dropped. Cursed. Moved on.

Camped a kilometer out.
Artillery in olive groves.

Officers barking in Greek and Italian.
We were ghosts.

Duce and Pangalos are flying in tomorrow.
He's obsessed. Has been since he joined the Greeks.
Talks about Byzantium like it's his mistress.

He'll walk through the Golden Gate.

We're the ones who opened it.

Sat by the Bosphorus that night. Quiet. Calm.
Watched scuttled ships burn.

Held Giustino's dog tags.

"Almost there," I told him.
"But it cost too much."

Didn't cry.
Not yet.

---

August 11, 1941
Constantinople

They abandoned the city before dawn.
Rumor: Duce threatened to gas the city if they didn't surrender.

We marched in. Full kit.

Through the Land Walls. Past broken gates.
Greeks cheered. Flags. Bruises on their faces.
Probably revenge.

Latin priests in purple.
Orthodox priests in gold.
Incense everywhere.

Duce wore a laurel crown. Looked like a bad Caesar.
Eyes on the Hagia Sophia.

He and Pangalos gave a speech. Long. Boring.
We clapped. Officers ordered it.

Then the mass.

Inside, the Greeks held their own. Chanting. Icons. A new patriarch.
The church hadn't seen this since before the Ottomans.
Two rites, side by side.
Neither at peace.

Rome and New Rome.
Uncomfortable marriage.

I stayed outside.

Tired. Dirty. Hollow.

By afternoon, the expulsions began.

Turkish families lined up. Quiet. Afraid.
Suitcases. No resistance.
Just fear.

"Thrace to be pure," a Greek officer said.

Pure.

That word tasted like bile.

Saw a boy crying for his dog.
Soldier kicked it, shot it. Almost shot the boy.
An Italian stopped him.

I wanted to kill that bastard.
Instead, I smoked.

That night, I went back to the plaza. Alone.

City was too quiet.

Looked at the dome.
Didn't feel proud. Didn't feel like a conqueror.

We took the city.
But lost something.

Giustino didn't cheer.

Neither did I.

Held his tags.
Looked up.

Finally let myself cry.

 

[Alenco98]

August 12, 1941
Outside Constantinople
Province of Thrace, Greece

The car reeked of sweat and leather polish. My mind crackled out Ordinary world by Duran Duran of all things—it had been looping for hours, because it made me feel something, anything. I larped so fucking hard yesterday. Constantinople, my little twisted crusader fantasy forged by hours of playing EU4, CK2 and endless browsing of Wikipedia was fulfilled. Yet it felt so ordinary, so meaningless. It reminded me of Griffith's little dream sequence before sacrificing the band of the hawk, him reaching for that castle in the sky while the bodies piled beneath him. I bet my pile was bigger than that closeted Twink.

Still I felt nothing.

I made them stop the convoy.

Had to piss. Had to breathe. Had to feel anything.

The weight of empire sat like wet cement in my skull. I pissed behind the corpse of a villa that smelled like roasted masonry and melted shoes while some guards stood close to me. The city—my prize—loomed just a few kilometers behind me, but it felt like it was light years away. Nothing feels real anymore. Not the uniforms, not the grand speeches, not the LARPing. Not the endless shallow toasts with generals who have the emotional range of dry toast. I finished and zipped up my pants. God I just wanted to be home.

And that's when I heard it.

A sound. Tiny. Mewling.

I turned.

The ruins of a house, charred and half-collapsed. And there she was.

A baby.

A girl upon closer look. And next to what I assumed to be the bullet riddled corpses of her parents.

Skin smudged with soot, little fists trembling like she was trying to hold onto life with the same desperation I used to have before I woke up in this nightmare timeline. She wasn't Turkish anymore. She wasn't Greek. She wasn't anything, just a baby. She was just there. Like a note out of place in a Tatsuro Yamashita track. Fragile. Wrong. Perfect.

And her eyes.

Brown.

Sofie's eyes were brown.

The same soft brown that made me stupid every time she looked up from her phone, chewing ramen, telling me I needed to stop doomscrolling and take a picture of her. Jesus Christ, what was that life? Was that real? Was she real?

I dropped to my knees. My uniform pants soaked in dust and blood.

I didn't cry.

I don't cry.

I just stared.

At her. At the eyes. At the echo.

"What have I done?" I whimpered.

The words slipped out before I knew they existed. They hung in the air like a curse. The baby didn't answer. She just blinked, her lips wobbling, as if she could feel the weight of me collapsing inside.

The Duce of Italy. Destroyer of the Balkans. The man who gassed mountains and split nations and wanted to drape the double-headed eagle in Roman purple.

And now I'm shaking in front of a fucking baby like a coked-out raver in a Berlin alley.

I scooped her up. She didn't fight me. She didn't even cry.

I walked back to my car with my guards behind me and looked at my adjutant and said, "She's mine now. Get a nurse. Get three. Make sure she lives. And bury her parents." I pointed to their corpses. "Give them actual graves, Mark them, have their locations written out, just do it and don't ask questions."

He asked what her name was.

I didn't hesitate.

"Sofia."

Of course it was.

Because if I can't go back to that life, maybe I can delude myself into thinking I never left. Maybe if I raise this little remnant of the world I burned, the building realization of what I've done along with my budding guilt will ease.

But I know it won't.

It never will.

 

[Alenco98]

May 30, 1941 – The Kremlin, Moscow, USSR
Emergency Session of the Politburo

The room was cold, though not from the temperature. The kind of cold that seeps in when history decides to pivot. The long table in the conference chamber was full, every chair taken, every ashtray already overflowing with half-smoked cigarettes. The smoke curled under the chandelier like ghosts. Guards stood by the door, silent and still.

Stalin sat at the head of the table, a thick file open before him. He wasn't speaking yet. Just... smoking, staring, brooding. He hadn't taken off his overcoat. That alone put the rest of the Politburo on edge.

To his right, Andrey Vyshinsky fidgeted with his pen, a nervous tic picked up from too many late nights writing accusations. He'd only just taken Molotov's seat after the latter was purged post-Finland. Some said Stalin did it for the embarrassment. Others said because Molotov talked too much. Maybe both.

Stalin finally looked up. His mustache twitched ever so slightly.

"They've begun," he said simply.

Everyone knew what he meant. Operation Barbarossa was no longer a rumor or theory. Hitler had launched it—nearly two million men tearing through Belarus, Ukraine, and the Baltics like wolves through a field of sheep.

Lazar Kaganovich was the first to speak, the old Bolshevik unable to hold back.

"Comrade Stalin, we must act immediately. The lines are strained in the west. Luftwaffe bombings have already reached Minsk!"

"Of course we act," Stalin said, his voice low but sharp as a blade. "I am not Molotov. I am not here to negotiate with fantasy." He shot a glance at Vyshinsky.

Vyshinsky adjusted his glasses and cleared his throat. "The People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs is prepared to denounce the German treachery at once. We've already begun messaging our embassies—"

"Shut up, Andrey," Stalin interrupted. "We are not pen-pushers today. We are warriors now."

Georgy Malenkov leaned forward, his voice oiled with the usual bureaucratic calculation. "Mussolini's reports were accurate, Comrade Stalin. His information was precise. Romanian troop movements, the buildup in Lviv, even the SS divisions shadowing Army Group South. It all lines up. Perhaps we should consider... expanding our cooperation?"

Stalin's eyes flashed dangerously.

"Mussolini is a snake," he said. "But sometimes a snake tells you where the fire is so it doesn't burn itself. He'll have his sphere of influence soon enough." He tapped the file with two fingers. "He warned us. He delivered. I don't like it, but I respect it."

Nikolai Voznesensky, young and sharp, spoke up. "Then why didn't we strike first? If we knew... if we had months of warning—"

"Because we were not ready!" Stalin snapped. The room went dead quiet. "And don't presume to question hindsight, Comrade. That's the privilege of the dead."

Beria sat with his fingers steepled, eyes gleaming like a vulture. "The NKVD is already preparing purge lists in the western districts. Traitors, saboteurs, kulak remnants—there are many we can remove to ensure rear security."

Stalin gave him a dark look. "No mass purges this time, Lavrentiy. Not now. We need every warm body with a gun who can walk straight. We will cleanse later. First—we bleed them."

There was a grim silence.

Voroshilov, still nursing his humiliation from the Winter War, asked bitterly, "What of the Red Army's deployment? We can't repeat Finland. Are we mobilizing the reserves?"

Stalin lit another cigarette. "The army was alerted months ago. We held exercises in Ukraine, Belorussia. Our defenses are not perfect, but they are ready enough. We'll bleed Hitler white in the forests and fields. I want scorched earth. If the Nazis take a town, they take ashes."

Zhdanov, ever the ideologue, spoke with a grim smile. "And what of the people, Comrade Stalin? How shall we explain to them that we trusted the Germans... but took advice from a fascist in Rome?"

"We'll say nothing about Mussolini," Stalin growled. "Let the papers call it treachery, a coward's ambush. The people don't need to know who gave the warning. They only need to know we were prepared."

Vyshinsky scribbled frantically. "So... an official statement? Perhaps I draft one by nightfall?"

Stalin glanced at him with cold disdain. "Make it short. Dramatic. Righteous."

He stood up slowly, the room rising with him.

"Let Hitler come. Let him throw his armies at us. He will find more than frost waiting for him. He'll find rifles. He'll find fire. He'll find hell."

And without waiting for approval or applause, Stalin walked out of the chamber.

The Politburo stood in silence as the door slammed behind him. Only Beria spoke again, his voice dry and amused:

"Well. It seems the war has begun."

-

August 17, 1941 — Kremlin, Moscow
Extraordinary Session of the Politburo

The heavy doors to the Politburo chamber groaned as they swung open. A damp summer light filtered through the high windows, stained with the soot of Moscow's factories. The air smelled of cigar smoke and ink. Around the long mahogany table, each member took his seat in grim silence.

At the head of the table sat Stalin, his overcoat shed but his posture as rigid as ever. A sheaf of couriered dispatches lay before him—one marked with the royal seal of Rome. His expression was inscrutable as the room settled.

Vyshinsky, seated immediately to Stalin's right, cleared his throat. "Comrade Stalin, we have just received word from Rome via our back channels. Signore Mussolini writes that he has completed his campaign in Turkey—occupying Constantinople, Thrace, the Anatolian Aegean islands, and the Cilician provinces as per our secret understanding last year. He further states he supports our placing Turkey wholly within the Soviet sphere of influence."

Stalin's eyes flickered once. He tapped a finger on the sealed envelope. "So the snake keeps his promise," he murmured.

Lazar Kaganovich leaned forward, excitement in his lined face. "A boon to our southern flank, Comrade! With Italy controlling the Straits, the Germans will be kept at bay. Our Black Sea Fleet can operate unmolested."

Stalin nodded slowly. "Good. The letter."

Vyshinsky broke the seal and extracted the letter. He read aloud in measured tones:

> "Il Duce extends his congratulations on your successes against the German invader. As agreed, Italy will not contest Soviet claims to Turkish territory and will withdraw all forces to agreed demarcation lines once formal annexation is complete. May our alliance—however unholy—endure for the defeat of Hitler."

He folded the letter back into its envelope. "That is all, Comrade."

A murmur of satisfaction rippled around the table.

Stalin steepled his fingers. "Report on the front."

Marshal Kliment Voroshilov cleared his throat. "The Germans have been halted outside Smolensk and Minsk. The spring rasputitsa combined with our pre–Barbarossa fortifications and preparations along the Dvina and Dnieper slowed the Germans at the start of their campaign and gave us time to consolidate our defenses. Their supply lines are strained already. Our partisans are active behind their lines, sabotaging rail and fuel convoys."

Nikolai Voznesensky added, "Lend-Lease shipments from America have begun arriving at Murmansk and Vladivostok. We've received trucks, jeeps, and enough aviation fuel to keep our Yak fighters aloft. The British have sent Spitfire squadrons to defend Leningrad's skies."

Stalin tapped his pipe on the table. "And Leningrad?"

Georgy Malenkov answered crisply, "The siege has begun, but the city holds. Civilians have been evacuated along the Neva; factories moved east. Our new T-34 brigades are engaging the Panzers at the outskirts—inflicting heavy casualties."

Stalin nodded once. "Good. And our defenses in Moscow?"

Voroshilov's lips tightened. "The anti air defenses are almost complete. Every able bodied man, woman, and child is either on the factories or working on fortifying the city."

A grim smile touched Stalin's lips. "Good. Let them come. The only things they'll get is ashes."

Vyshinsky spoke again, voice cautious: "Comrade, with Italy securing the Straits, he has allowed free Transit of all ships. Given the Germans lack of naval assets, It's safe to say lend lease will flow as long as we can control the black sea."

Stalin considered this, then turned to Beria. "Lavrentiy, what of internal security? Now that the Germans occupy our western territory, we must guard against espionage and fifth columns."

Beria's eyes gleamed. "NKVD detachments are already in position. Any suspected agents will be dispatched to 're-education' camps."

Stalin gave a curt nod. "Very well. But keep it quiet. We do not need rumors of massacres distracting our people."

Andrey Zhdanov leaned forward, voice earnest: "Comrade, we should broadcast Mussolini's letter as proof of Soviet strength. Portray him as the one forced to capitulate to our might."

Stalin's gaze hardened. "No. We don't mention Mussolini. Let the people believe that Britain and America are our only allies. We must keep the fascist collaboration secret—at least until after we have beaten Germany."

Zhdanov's face fell but he bowed his head.

Stalin rose. The table fell silent. He surveyed his colleagues one by one.

"Gentlemen," he said, voice cold steel, "the enemy bleeds. Our allies keep their word—however begrudgingly. Soon we will push them back to the Oder and the Elbe. But until then, we fight on every front. Mobilize another million conscripts. Transfer the 5th Guards Tank Army to the Smolensk sector. Increase production of 122 mm howitzers. And maintain the scorched-earth orders—no German shall live off the land."

He paused. "As for Italy—watch them closely. A viper's promise is no shield. But for now, they serve our purpose."

He swept out of the chamber without another word.

The Politburo sat for a moment, absorbing the weight of his commands. Then Beria exhaled.

"Comrades," he said softly, "let us prepare for the winter of
our discontent."

They rose as one, the echo of boots on marble marking the Kremlin's resolve: steel in the forge, unbroken.