Taking a Duce (A Benito Mussolini SI)

[Alenco98]

May 30, 1942
Palazzo Venezia
Rome, Italy

Another day, another death warrant. I always read them. Not because I had to—certainly not because I cared—but because some sick part of me needed to look the devil in the eye, and the devil had a thousand names.

Today's devil was named Karim El-Moussa. Tunisian. Destour Party agitator. A loudmouth with a fanbase and a vision—always a bad combination. He talked about resistance. Armed, no less. A dangerous game, especially when I was holding all the cards and the table was rigged.

Of course I had tolerated their little outbursts, their student meetings, their pamphlets. I liked the illusion of freedom. As long as the trains ran, the taxes were paid, and they bowed when the anthem played—I let them live.

But El-Moussa was charismatic. And in politics, charisma is a cancer. It spreads. So tomorrow, the Mediterranean would have one more corpse, and Tunisia one less hero. OVRA would handle it—quietly, quickly. Like a stiletto between the ribs. It would be done before the noon sun melted the wax on my office seal.

I leaned back in my chair, eyes closed, and of all things—Rugrats came to mind. Chuckie. That weird poem his dead mother wrote in that one episode. "When a gentle wind blows, that's my hand on your face." I teared up. A 21st-century man in a 20th-century hell. It was laughable.

I missed them. My real family. My brother's dumb street fighter combos. My moms refusal to eat anything that wasn't protein packed. My Sofie's morning breath. God, I even missed going my school. I wiped my face and reminded myself: this was war. Not just against the axis. Against time. Against memory. Against myself.

The warrant sat before me, my signature scrawled across it like a grim little bow. The tenth one today.

I skimmed a Navy briefing from Pricolo. Submarine ventilation systems were no longer killing the crew. Progress. The Augustus—our new aircraft carrier—was 2/3 finished. ETA: June next year. I grinned. Rome may be dying, but goddamn it, it would die beautiful.

Then came the knock. Guidi's voice crackled over the intercom.
"Duce. He's here."

"Good. Bring him in."

Two men entered. Guidi—faithful, ever-harried. And Reinhard Heydrich, looking like Hitler's wet dream in human form. Blonde, cold, the kind of man who probably ironed his socks.

"Herr Heydrich," I said, smiling thinly. "Glad to see the Czechs didn't finish the job."

He glared, stiff and silent. That look—like he was dissecting me with his eyes. I respected it. Hated it, but respected it. He was the shark in Hitler's blood-soaked aquarium. Now he was mine.

"I'll get to the point," I said, waving to a chair he refused to take. "You work for me now. You will train OVRA. You will expand our operations globally. Propaganda, insurgency, surveillance, sabotage. I want Italian hands setting colonies ablaze from Brisbane to British Honduras."

He sneered. "I will not betray the Reich."

I chuckled, low and joyless. "Betray? My dear Reinhard, I'm offering you a future. One where you're not splattered across a Prague sidewalk like a blood sausage. One where your children wake up in silk sheets, not in a Siberian gulag—or worse, in an American documentary narrated by Morgan Freeman."

He took a step forward. "My loyalty is to Germany."

I leaned forward, voice cold as winter steel. "And mine is to results. I don't care if you goose-step in your sleep. I care that you're useful."

He didn't answer. I gestured to Guidi, who handed me a folder. I opened it.

"Beautiful wife, that Lina. Two boys. Klaus, nine. He likes model planes. Has a stutter. Otto, eight. Wets the bed."

Heydrich's face twitched.

"I have artists in OVRA who can make your boys vanish in a puff of smoke, and blood" I said softly. "But I'm feeling generous. Your family will have an estate in Tuscany. Vineyards, horses, pasta. My Blackshirts will guard them like the Sistine Chapel."

He clenched his fists. "You would use children as hostages?"

I smiled, dark and detached then laughed. "You worked for Hitler. You killed innocents too. Spare me the outrage. Unlike your precious fuhrer I'm a winner. And to the Victor go the spoils, so learn your place and work for me like a good little slave dog and your family won't be beaten and brutalized to death."

He stood there, breathing heavily. The shark was realizing it had been caged.

"When do I start?" he muttered.

"Now," I said, tossing him the folder. "Start with domestic operations. Surveillance. Liquidation of dissidents. Embassy monitoring. You know the drill. Guidi will be your supervisor." I nodded at Guidi and he nodded at me.

Heydrich turned to leave. I stopped him.

"Oh—and one more thing. If you ever think about running, or giving secrets to the Americans, soviets, British or their friends, remember this: your family won't just disappear. I will have them marched into your office, alive and sobbing. And you will watch as I kill them personally. One by one. Then we'll see if your loyalty still lies outside Italy."

He left without a word.

I poured a glass of whiskey. Pop crackled faintly on the phonograph in my mind, Self control by Laura Branigan echoing through the marble silence like a ghost from the future.

This empire was my cage. And I was the lion eating my own heart.

-------------------------------


TOP SECRET – TRANSCRIPT OF CABINET MEETING
DATE: June 1, 1942
LOCATION: White House Cabinet Room
TIME: 10:02 AM – 11:37 AM EST
CLASSIFICATION: EYES ONLY

PRESENT:

President Franklin D. Roosevelt

Secretary of State Cordell Hull

Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson

Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox

Director of the FBI J. Edgar Hoover

Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy

General George C. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff

Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner

Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles

---

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

FDR:
Gentlemen, thank you for coming on short notice. As you know, I've just returned from Moscow. Gentlemen, we have a problem on our hands. And his name is Benito Mussolini.

He leans forward, cigarette holder in hand.

Now I ask you—how in God's name did Mussolini know about our atomic program?

Stimson:
Mr. President, our program is classified at the highest level. Only a handful of our own Congress even knows it exists. If Mussolini is aware, it suggests a catastrophic breach.

Hoover:
With respect, Mr. President, we've long underestimated the OVRA. Italian intelligence has been building itself up since the mid-30s, particularly under Arturo Bocchini before his death and by Guido Guidi. They've embedded agents in émigré communities across Latin America, the Balkans, and even here.

FDR:
Yes, yes, but he warned us about Pearl Harbor. Mussolini prevented the attack by personally delivering proof of it to us. And he warned Stalin months in advance about Hitler's plans. Then handed us documents about Hitler's mass extermination campaign in Poland—some of the most horrifying photographs I've ever seen.

He pauses, staring into the distance.

How does he know so much?

Welles:
Sir, I spoke with our Rome embassy. OVRA's currently going through reforms, bringing in former Gestapo and Abwehr agents as well as all of their equipment. There's talks of Mussolini completely reorganizing it and redubbing it the Central Intelligence agency. They're even establishing so-called, special operations groups. All this while he's rallying people behind him using Jewish emancipation and anti-Nazism as banners.

Hoover:
Exactly, and that's what worries me.

FDR:
Explain.

Hoover:
He's giving the Jews a homeland. He's championing their suffering. He's laundering himself. And I'll say it plainly, Mr. President: the Jews in this country and abroad have noticed.

Some murmuring in the room.

We already know certain Zionist groups in New York, Chicago, and British Palestine are in contact with Italian agents. After what Mussolini did—warning the world, exposing the camps, even recognizing Avraham Stern's guerrilla army—we'd be fools to think they aren't grateful. Some may even be collaborating.

FDR:
So you're telling me American Jews might be passing secrets to Rome?

Hoover:
Sir… I wouldn't rule it out. Nor would I exclude the Italians either. Especially those working on advanced physics projects domestically. I can name three physicists right now—two Jewish, one Italian-born—who have family ties to the Mediterranean.

Marshall:
Mr. President, I must object to blanket suspicion. Many of these men have served loyally. Some escaped Hitler's Germany or Mussolini's early policies to work for us.

FDR:
And Mussolini has reversed those policies, General. That's the issue. He's rewritten his narrative. And people—perhaps even some of our own—are buying it.

Stimson:
If there's surveillance, it must be tightly controlled. We're balancing national security with dangerous territory—public trust, civil liberties.

FDR:
I want full surveillance authorized immediately. Focus on the following:

1. Italian-Americans employed at every institution and facility dedicated to our nuclear program

2. Jewish-American physicists with links to Zionist organizations or family in Palestine or Italy.

3. Italian and Jewish cultural and political groups in New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Philadelphia.

4. Communications between the US and Rome, Palestine, and Cairo.

5. Watchlists on prominent Jewish and Italian figures—especially those in Hollywood, publishing, academia.

Hoover:
Understood. I'll initiate covert observation and wire authorizations immediately. No arrests. Just shadows—for now.

FDR:
I want results, Edgar. This is no time for procedural dithering. Mussolini may have spared us a long war with Japan, and he may be trying to redeem himself—but the man is dangerous, unbalanced, we need to know what he's up to.

Knox:
Should we consider counterintelligence operations against OVRA assets in the Western Hemisphere?

FDR:
Yes. Operate through the Bureau and ONI. No overt acts. No media leaks. And for the love of God, don't let the press know we're investigating Jews or Italians.

Silence hangs heavy over the room.

FDR:
This war is about survival. And so is our Republic. Never forget that.

END TRANSCRIPT
Filed: June 2, 1942 – WHITE HOUSE / OSS CHANNEL
Distribution: EYES ONLY – President, FBI Director, War Department

 

[Goodman65]

Thanks for the chapter.

 

[Alenco98]

June 2, 1942
Palazzo Venezia
Rome, Italy

The air smelled like cigarette ash, oiled walnut, and last night's guilt. I had slept in the office again, sprawled out on the couch like some bureaucratic corpse, still wearing my black tunic, stained with coffee and regret. My mind was spinning midnight pretenders for the third time. I couldn't help it. Tomoko Aran's voice hit that exact frequency of melancholy I needed to remain functional—like a melancholic IV drip. Every night I heard her. Every morning she reminded me that the future would never return.

Across the desk stood Otto Skorzeny. Tall, built like an industrial refrigerator left too long in the cold, with that scar across his face that made him look like a Bond villain crossed with a rugby hooligan. I didn't like him. I didn't need to. He was the right monster for the right job.

He saluted, stiff and militaristic, as if he was still goose-stepping through Hitler's daydreams.

"Don't do that," I muttered, waving the salute away like a bad smell. "This isn't a Nuremberg rally. This is Rome. We do things differently here. We stab our leaders in the back artistically."

He raised an eyebrow. I smiled.

"Sit down, Otto. Or stand. Whatever makes you feel more in control. We both know that's what you like."

He chose to stand, arms crossed, posture ramrod straight. Like a statue of war built by an angry drunk.

"I brought you here because I need someone who understands how to weaponize chaos," I said, lighting another cigarette. "Not command it. Not discipline it. Just… surf it. Like Mr. T in the A Team."

He blinked. "I don't know what that is."

"You will one day," I muttered.

I pointed at the large map pinned to the wall—Africa, stretched and bleeding under my red ink annotations. Circles around French Equatorial colonies. Arrows pointing from Egypt to the Congo. Skulls drawn over British cities and colonies.

"I'm going to set Africa on fire," I said, deadpan.

Skorzeny tilted his head slightly. "That's… a large place."

"Yes," I said, dragging on the cigarette. "Which means there's more to burn."

I turned to face him, smoke curling from my lips like incense in a funeral parlor.

"I'm done playing catch-up with the Nazis and their Wagnerian fantasies. I'm not building a thousand-year Reich. I'm building a new Rome. And you, Otto, are going to teach a new generation of arsonists how to use matches to help me burn down the old world."

He squinted. "You want special forces?"

"yes, but that's later," I said, pouring whiskey into two glasses. "Right now I want demons. Jungle ghosts. Desert phantoms. I want men who disappear into the sand, who reappear with a British officer's head in a burlap sack and no explanation. I want to train the future of africa. Help them free it one British, french, Belgian, and Portuguese corpse at a time."

I slid a thick leather dossier across the desk. He opened it—inside were photographs, files, fingerprints, blood-stained intelligence. African revolutionaries, ex-French colonial troops, Kenyan bandits.

"They hate the British. They hate the French. They hate everyone. Perfect." I gestured to the folder. "You'll teach them everything you know. How to slit a throat silently. How to rig a train with half a bar of soap and some wire. How to make love to an explosives manual."

He looked up. "You think I can turn these men into soldiers?"

"I don't want soldiers, Otto. I want nightmares. And you—scarface Nazi Rambo that you are—are going to be their Moses."

He didn't laugh. Neither did I. I was dead serious, in the way only madmen and saints ever are.

"You'll be based out of Addis Ababa and Tripoli. You'll get whatever you need—planes, money, smuggled whiskey, opera tickets, thermobaric grenades. You'll have full OVRA authorization. You'll train these men to burn the colonial world down to its velvet-draped skeleton. The Kingdom's of France and Spain will give you their own men and resources as well."

He looked back at the folder. "These people will kill each other when we're gone."

"They wont," I said, sipping whiskey. "Because you will remind them who fed them, who gave them freedom. This freedom will come with a price, once their flags fly they let our companies extract their resources and our banks control their money. They'll remember us. They'll name their children after us. In ten years, some warlord with a necklace of Belgian ears will be yelling your name and mine across a battlefield, calling us prophets. We will be symbols of African liberation. The black flag of revolutionary fascism will fly from Cairo to Cape town. And every activist for black liberation from the farms of Mississippi to the jungles of the Congo will look to us for inspiration instead of silly ideas like freedom and democracy."

He looked skeptical. That was fine.

"And what if I say no?" he asked.

I leaned forward, the smile draining from my face like wine from a shattered goblet.

"Then I'll have your mistress hanged from the Castel Sant'Angelo and pipe opera through the loudspeakers while I feed your pet dog to a crowd of starving orphans."

Pause. He stared.

"…You're insane," he finally said.

"Yes," I replied. "And visionary. They're not mutually exclusive."

He laughed once. A short bark of something that might have been amusement or threat. Then he closed the folder.

"When do I start?"

"Now," I said. "Your first trainees are already in Libya. Tell them this: uniforms are relics and the war will rage everywhere, and there will be casualties."

I raised my glass. "To the end of the world, Otto."

He clinked it with mine, drank, and left.

Midnight pretenders faded out. I dropped the needle again.

I had work to do. Africa wasn't going to burn itself.

-------

Excerpt from Scarred by Shadows: The Life and Crimes of Otto Skorzeny by Patrick Suskind (1997)

By 1945, Otto Skorzeny had ceased to be merely a man. He had become myth—a moving shadow trailing behind the collapse of European empire. In the deserts of North Africa, the mangroves of Guinea-Bissau, the rice paddies of Madagascar, and the ash-swept peaks of the Cameroon Highlands, his name passed between clenched teeth and whispered lips like a spell, a curse, or a warning. He was Al-Bahr al-Aswad—the Black Sea—to the Sudanese tribesmen who followed him; Le Diable Boiteux, the Limping Devil, to the Gaullists who hunted him; and "the Long Scar" to American intelligence officers who knew his dossier but could never confirm his face. His legend grew like fungus in the wounds of war—parasitic, spreading, nourished by chaos.

After the fall of Berlin and the final collapse of Vichy authority across Africa, Skorzeny refused the grave most offered his kind. While others stood trial, disappeared into hiding, or died in dusty cellars clutching Luger pistols, he did what he did best: disappeared into the seams of history. With Free French forces attempting to consolidate control of their African empire, and British colonial interests fraying under postwar exhaustion, Skorzeny found fertile ground. He embedded himself within the OAUL—the Organization of African Unity and Liberation—a half-formed pan-African fascist network originally dreamed up in the waning years of Mussolini's reign as a tool of sabotage against British and French imperialism.

Under Skorzeny, it mutated into something far more dangerous.

The OAUL, as reimagined by Skorzeny, was not merely a proxy insurgency or a fascist fifth column. It became what one CIA report would later call "a roaming university of violent ideology"—a continental academy of subversion. Its jungle camps—some hidden deep in the Congolese rainforest, others beneath cloistered Catholic missions in the hills of Cameroon or Eritrea—operated like monastic orders of war. Their curricula were both ancient and modern: guerrilla warfare manuals marked by Skorzeny's own hand, annotated translations of Doctrine of Fascism, tribal folklore recontextualized as fascist mythos, and lectures that merged German military discipline with the pageantry of African nationalist symbolism.

Trainees were drilled not just in explosives and ambush tactics but in ideology. They read Montesquieu in the mornings and disassembled French rifles blindfolded in the evenings. They practiced skinning goats and, in whispered rumors, enemy officers. They were taught to become what Skorzeny termed martiri del metodo—"martyrs of method." Loyalty was bred through hardship; devotion was proven through blood.

Graduates were not sent to wage traditional war. Skorzeny, ever the pragmatist, knew Africa's liberation would not come from lines on a map or formal declarations. His objective was rot—systemic, viral, irreversible. He did not want to defeat the colonial powers in battle. He wanted to make them unravel from within.

In Senegal, OAUL-trained fireteams assassinated pro-French officials, derailed trains, and hijacked radio towers to broadcast fascist slogans in Wolof and French. The capital, Dakar, endured two years of intermittent car bombings and infrastructural sabotage. Bridges were destroyed. Bakeries were blown up during market hours. Water supplies were poisoned with livestock blood. These were not random acts—they were psychological warfare calculated to terrorize settlers, provoke repression, and radicalize the indigenous population.

De Gaulle's family was evacuated to French Guiana after multiple assassination attempts, including a grenade attack on their motorcade outside Dakar. Charles de Gaulle himself would remain under near-continuous military guard for the next decade.

In Upper Volta, entire French battalions disappeared into the grasslands. Their corpses—when found—were mutilated beyond recognition. Some were discovered floating hundreds of kilometers downriver, skinned, castrated, eyes gouged, with the letters "OAUL" branded into their torsos. A chilling communique from a desperate Free French colonel captured the mood of the time: "We are not at war with men. We are at war with a race—a theology of vengeance."

Madagascar became the burning crucible of the conflict. In 1947, the OAUL-backed Red Spear Movement, a fusion of Malagasy nationalism and fascist theology, stormed and seized control of Tananarive. Their brief declaration of independence prompted a brutal siege by Free French troops, supported by American Marines stationed in Diego Suarez. What followed was a massacre. An estimated 10,000 were killed—civilians, priests, entire villages accused of harboring insurgents. But the memory of rebellion could not be bombed away. Red Spear cadres vanished into the highlands, where they would fester and return, again and again.

In Mauritania, Bonapartist agents courted Berber warlords with offers of a Nouvelle Empire—a new French Empire that recognized tribal autonomy and religious law. The result was a Sahara crawling with betrayal. French armored patrols vanished in sandstorms and were never found. Grain convoys were ambushed, convoys of aid rerouted, and entire towns declared themselves sovereign microstates before being razed by airstrikes.

The Free French counterstrike—Operation Vigilance—was orchestrated by intelligence chief André Dewavrin. It mirrored the Gestapo in all but name. Suspected OAUL sympathizers were disappeared. Torture became commonplace. Abidjan and Brazzaville saw nightly executions. Journalists who reported on French brutality were hanged, their presses set aflame. The tricolor still flew over West Africa, but it flew soaked in blood.

Across the Atlantic, the reverberations were profound.

In Harlem, Detroit, Chicago, and New Orleans, Black veterans of World War II watched the news of the African revolts with a mix of pride, awe, and terror. Some denounced OAUL as fascist wolves in liberationist sheepskin. But for others—especially those who had seen the hypocrisy of American democracy firsthand in the segregated barracks of Europe and the Pacific—the message was seductive. Here were Africans not just resisting colonialism but winning.

Beginning in 1947, a trickle of African Americans began quietly leaving for Africa. Some traveled as missionaries or journalists. Others stowed away or joined merchant vessels. Most were veterans. Some were radicals. All were searching for something America had denied them: agency.

They returned transformed. Hardened. Trained. Ideological. Many brought OAUL training manuals in English. Some brought explosives. Others brought trauma. They formed new underground movements: The Sons of the Soil, The Black Flame, The Ashen Guard. Their doctrines fused the mystique of Africa with the burning reality of American injustice. They rejected liberal integrationism. They saw no difference between a plantation and a ghetto. To them, America was just another colony.

By 1950, the American South began to shift. What had once been the terrain of Klan lynchings and Jim Crow law became a patchwork of insurgent zones. In Mississippi, sheriffs were gunned down in coordinated nighttime attacks. In Alabama, Black farmers erected armed barricades around their communities. In Louisiana, entire counties declared themselves "liberated zones" and dared federal officials to enter.

The Ku Klux Klan, once the apex predator of white supremacy, found itself hunted. For every burning cross, a judge's house was torched. For every lynching, a Klansman's mutilated body was nailed to a church door, gutted, emasculated, marked with the words "Never Again".

The FBI responded with brutal urgency. Under J. Edgar Hoover, COINTELPRO-ZULU was born—a subprogram of infiltration, psychological warfare, and assassination aimed at what the Bureau called "Afro-Fascist Insurgents." But the networks were fluid, decentralized, and doctrinally unlike anything the FBI had encountered. They weren't Marxists. They were religious, tribal, mystical. They saw themselves as prophets. They called themselves the Blood Children of Ogun, the Heirs of Nat Turner. They did not want equality. They wanted conquest.

Mainstream media reported a rise in "Negro Crime." Southern governors blamed jazz, marijuana, and Communism. But in backrooms, pool halls, juke joints, and barbershops, a new mantra passed like gospel: "Africa fights, and so do we."

And Otto Skorzeny?

He split his time between North Africa and Italy, where he helped train the Gruppo Specializzato di Operazioni Critiche—the GRESOPCRI—a shadowy Italian unit forged in Africa's crucible, later feared across Latin America and the Balkans. Africa was their nursery. Europe would be their playground.

Mussolini, now transformed into a quasi-mystical patriarch of a "Third Way" Fascist bloc, rewarded his favorite butcher handsomely. Skorzeny was granted a sprawling villa outside Asmara, in nominally sovereign Tigray—a city overrun by mercenaries, smugglers, and spies. He kept a private army of ex-Legionnaires and tribal warriors, drank Algerian cognac, smoked clove cigarettes, and read newspapers that reported on coups he had scripted half a decade earlier. A map hung in his study—Africa, covered in pins. Red for collapsed regimes. Black for insurgencies. White for planned offensives. He called it his garden.

When asked by an American journalist in 1956 whether he regretted the bloodshed, Skorzeny is said to have laughed through cigar smoke and replied:

"You don't ask the gardener if he regrets planting seeds."

 

[DarkObelisk]

Good God,

Il Duce is a madman. A visionary cult leader of the New Roman Empire. He will go down in history as a Great Man in History.
Great but Terrible, All Shall Love Him and Despair!

 

[Alenco98]

May 5, 1942
Tianjin, Italian Concession
Private Diary of Private Enrico Polo

Tianjin feels like a city abandoned by time itself. Once a bustling enclave of foreign diplomats, merchants, and families, it has become a ghost town in the truest sense. The streets are silent, the air heavy with dread. For weeks now, our commander has ordered us to strip the concession bare. Everything that could be packed has been—furniture, rifles, crates of ammunition, even the polished silverware from the officers' mess. It's as though we're erasing our presence, pretending we were never here.

Antonio told me yesterday that the Italian outpost in Shanghai was evacuated two weeks ago. Where they went, no one knows. No formal communiqués, no radio confirmation—just rumors passed between men in hushed tones. All we've been told is that we're to "relocate to a more favorable position." Whatever that means.

The local Chinese have retreated into their homes. The streets are empty, shutters drawn tight. I don't blame them. We've all heard the stories—what the Japanese did in Nanjing, in Manchuria, in Shanghai. Rape, slaughter, experiments, and fire. Civilization means nothing to them. They're beasts in uniform. The fear in the eyes of the Chinese here is unmistakable—and justified.


---

May 10, 1942
Tianjin, Italian Concession

Today we loaded the last of our supplies onto trucks. In the end, we had to bribe the Japanese with what remained of our funds just to get the trucks and permission to leave. Ironic—buying our own escape from the very devils we fear. Every crate was accounted for: weapons, rations, even personal belongings. We took every Italian civilian we could find—diplomats, merchants, a few teachers. Anyone who could make it to the gates in time.

The orders finally came through this morning: all Italian nationals in China are to evacuate to neutral countries. Missionaries and businessmen outside the concession were not included. They're on their own now. I try not to think about what will happen to them.

Our commander briefed us solemnly. We are to travel north, cross into Soviet territory, and from there, arrangements will be made to return us to Italy. I never thought I'd see the Motherland again so soon—or that I'd feel so unsure about going back.

When I was first assigned to China, I counted myself lucky. While Mattias used his family's connections to stay back home in Italy, I drew what I thought was the better lot—adventure, exotic posts, escape from the monotony of barracks life. But now? Now I envy him. He's been promoted to lieutenant, they say. And here I am, scraping together an exit with the taste of failure and ash in my mouth.


---

May 12, 1942
Outside Tianjin

We left Tianjin at dawn.

The sun had barely risen when we began our withdrawal, trucks rumbling slowly through the once-familiar streets. The civilians came out—men, women, even children. They cried, pleaded, threw themselves in our path. Some begged us to take them, others simply clutched at our boots, at the canvas sides of the trucks, sobbing as if the world were ending.

In a way, for them, it is.

When they blocked the road, our commander gave the order to move forward—at all costs. We raised our rifles. I couldn't believe it at first. But the moment the first shot rang out, it became real.

One man clung to the side of our lead truck, shouting in broken Italian. I don't know what he said—maybe he thought we'd help him, maybe he was cursing us. Mangione, that rat-faced bastard from Palermo, leaned out and shot him point-blank. Grinned as the body hit the dirt and muttered something about "excess baggage falling off." The others laughed. I did too God forgive me.

There was blood on the road as we left. Behind us, smoke rose from the quarters we abandoned. Ahead of us, uncertainty. I wonder if this is what retreat feels like—not just a military maneuver, but a kind of spiritual failure. We are leaving ghosts behind in Tianjin. And I fear they will follow us.

-----

May 18, 1942
North of Tianjin, Hebei Province

We are on the move.

The convoy snakes its way north, a battered procession of Italian trucks weighed down with equipment, supplies, civilians, and uncertainty. Our column of 600 troops—infantrymen, engineers, signal corps, and a handful of Carabinieri—escorts not just our comrades-in-arms, but families. Officers brought wives and children to China, and now they ride with us under canvas, silent, wide-eyed.

We move cautiously, avoiding Japanese patrols. The price of our departure was steep, and the Japanese presence grows thinner the further north we travel, but we know they still watch us.

Nurse Claudia Marini rides with the medical corps. She's from Milan—blonde, composed, with a quiet fire in her eyes. She's assigned to our medical truck. I find excuses to ride beside it more often than I should.


---

May 27, 1942
Approaching Zhangjiakou

We lost a man today.

Private Lazzaro was riding point when we were ambushed by bandits in the hills. A makeshift roadblock—a felled tree—and then the crack of gunfire. Lazzaro was hit in the neck. He bled out before Claudia could reach him.

We fought them off, killed three, captured two. Locals, desperate and armed with mismatched rifles. Our commander—Colonel Vitale—ordered them hanged. We left them swinging in the wind as a message.

No civilian was harmed. That, at least, is something.


---

June 3, 1942
Inner Mongolia

We've had to abandon several trucks. The terrain is unforgiving, and the roads have become little more than goat trails. We purchased horses from a local village—sturdy Mongolian stock—and redistributed the weight of our supplies. We now move half on wheels, half on hooves.

The nights are bitter. The children cry in the dark, and the men are growing weary. We've had minor skirmishes with Communist guerrillas. They accuse us of being fascist imperialists—our commander argues back that we are fleeing, not invading. A tense standoff. We gave them medical supplies and food. They let us pass.


---

June 14, 1942
South of Hohhot

The world changed today.

Rome has declared war on Japan.

We heard it over a crackling shortwave radio. The announcement was brief—"Duce Mussolini, prime minister and regent of the Kingdom of Italy declares a state of war with the Empire of Japan."

We froze. Some cheered. Most did not.

Within hours, we were spotted. Japanese planes flew low over our column. A message was clear—our neutrality was over. They would come for us.

We pushed onward with renewed urgency.


---

June 17, 1942
Ambush at the Grass Sea

They came at dawn.

Japanese cavalry, supported by a light armored car, intercepted our rear column. The battle was chaos. Bullets tore through our supply carts. Horses screamed. One shell hit a munitions truck—we lost eight men.

I dragged Claudia from the wreckage of the medical tent. She was dazed, covered in dust and blood, but alive. She clung to my uniform as we ran.

Captain Silvestri led a counterattack. Our mortars forced the Japanese back. We held the line. Just barely.


---

June 25, 1942
Crossing into Communist Territory

We're in territory controlled by the Chinese Nationalists now, but the lines blur.

Warlords, bandits, partisan fighters—no one trusts anyone. We were stopped by a militia under General Ma Bufang's banner. They demanded bribes. Colonel Vitale handed over gold coins from the officers' treasury.

Every mile north is harder. We bury our dead in silence. But the civilians remain safe. Somehow.


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July 3, 1942
Gobi Outskirts

The trucks are gone. All of them.

We burned the last of them three days ago after another engine failure left them stranded in the dunes. We're now entirely on horseback and foot. We travel by night to avoid Japanese aerial patrols.

Claudia walks beside me often. She hums quietly when she's tired—Italian lullabies. Yesterday, she touched my cheek when I joked about looking like a desert bandit. It wasn't just affection. It felt like hope.


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July 14, 1942
Mongolian Border

We made it.

The border was a line in the dust, marked by a single red flag flapping on a post. A Soviet patrol met us there. They looked at us like ghosts—dusty, ragged, bloodied Italians leading horses and carrying children.

They let us in.

The civilians collapsed in the shade of the first Mongolian village we encountered. Claudia wept openly. I held her.

We have reached peace, if only briefly.


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July 29, 1942
Ulaanbaatar, Soviet Mongolia

Orders have arrived from Rome via Moscow.

All civilians—diplomats, merchants, teachers, nurses—will be evacuated to Italy via the Trans-Siberian Railway, then ship from Murmansk. Claudia will go with them.

We soldiers, however, are not going home.

By decree of the Duce, we are to remain. Italy has formed a joint task force with the Red Army. Our mission: to fight the Japanese across China.

I kissed Claudia goodbye this morning. She placed a rosary in my hand. I promised her I would return to Milan and find her.

War waits again, just beyond the hills.

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Postwar Epilogue: The Legacy of Private Enrico Polo

Private Enrico Polo returned to the Roman Empire in July 1944, exhausted, lean, and haunted by what he had seen in the Chinese interior. His unit had fought alongside Soviet and Chinese Communist forces for over a year—ambushing Japanese convoys in the mountains of Hebei, training partisan fighters in guerrilla tactics, and enduring the bitter cold of Inner Mongolia with rifles frozen in their hands. By the time they were recalled to Italy, over half the original 600 men who had fled Tianjin were dead. But the civilians—including every woman and child—survived.

Claudia, the Milanese nurse who had bandaged his wounds and shared her bread, waited at the military airstrip in Bari, her Red Cross uniform clean but her eyes tired. Enrico proposed to her that very night, beneath a fractured moon.

They were married within the month in a quiet ceremony in Milan attended by both their families. Claudia wore a borrowed dress; Enrico wore his field uniform. He never took off his dog tags—not even for the wedding.

In 1947, Enrico was convinced by a wartime friend in Rome to submit his wartime diary to the Ente Nazionale per il Cinema Popolare e Fascista—The Roman Empire's newly consolidated national film board, a cultural arm of the postwar Fascist government. By then, Rome had emerged from the war prosperous and victorious, the Rome Pact a major player on the world stage. Fascist Realism had become the dominant artistic style—emphasizing sacrifice, duty, family, and the moral endurance of the Italian soul.

The director Leni Rifenstalh, known for her propaganda epic "Triumph of the will", read the diary and immediately optioned it. She rewrote it into a screenplay titled:

"Fuga dal Regno di Mezzo" — Escape from the Middle Kingdom

Shot in stark black-and-white with rare touches of color to highlight emotional moments (a red scarf on Claudia, a rising sun at the border), the film was released on May 17, 1952.

"Escape from the Middle Kingdom" was a smash hit. It drew massive crowds in Rome, Milan, Naples, and Palermo. Word of mouth spread quickly across the Rome Pact—Hungary, Croatia, Bulgaria, and even fascist Greece hailed the film as a defining portrait of wartime courage and unity. In Athens, the film played to sold-out theatres, with Goebbels-like critics calling it a "masterwork of disciplined emotional clarity."

Even Joseph Stalin, notoriously cold toward Fascist Italy, reportedly watched the film at his private dacha outside Sochi. According to later records revealed in Soviet archives, Stalin said:

"Italians know how to bleed. That soldier—Polo—he should have been my son."

By 1953, the film had been dubbed into over a dozen languages. In Japan, it was quietly circulated among dissidents and former Kempeitai victims. In the United States, it was banned from mainstream release but received underground acclaim at film festivals in San Francisco and New York.

Actor Marcello Viscari played Enrico Polo—his quiet stoicism and piercing gaze made him a national hero overnight. Claudia was portrayed by Giulia Marini, who would go on to win the Mussolini Prize for Cultural Heroism in Cinema. The final scene, where Enrico walks with Claudia into the hills after the final Japanese ambush, clutching a copy of his diary, became one of the most iconic shots in Italian cinematic history.

The film altered a few details—Claudia was portrayed as a former partisan instead of a nurse, and the Japanese were more openly demonized—but the emotional truth remained intact. It was a story of survival, moral clarity, and the endurance of love under fire.

By the 1960s, Enrico Polo had become something of a quiet legend. He refused to run for office, declined offers to write memoirs, and instead opened a small café in Verona with Claudia. They had two children. He reportedly never watched the film in full, claiming it brought back "too many ghosts."

But he kept the original screenplay in a drawer beneath his kitchen counter—next to his rusted dog tags and a dried-out rose Claudia had tucked into his uniform the day they crossed into Soviet lines.

He died in 1985, at age 66. Claudia followed him six years later.

In 2002, on the film's 50th anniversary, Escape from the Middle Kingdom was digitally restored and re-released in theaters across Italy and the European Federation. It remains a staple of Italian film history courses and is still shown every May 17 on national television—a reminder of a forgotten exodus, a desperate fight, and a love that crossed continents.

Note: by Mattias, yes, that Mattias from the other diary entries. Hometown pals