Roosevelt and Franco During the Second World War: From the Spanish Civil War to Pearl Harbor Book

Benito Mussolini was Count Galeazzo Ciano's father in law. Ciano had married Mussolini's daughter Edda, and the two soon became the most glamorous - and scandalous, since both had many affairs -couple in Italy. Ciano was an aristocrat, a masher, a soldier, a diplomat and a politician - and he only was good at the first two of that list of five. He was largely unfit to fill the role of foreign minister when it still mattered in the years preceeding the war; too arrogant, too gullible, too out-of-touch with the specialists in the diplomatic corps. Despite having been informed by the charge d'affaires in Berlin as early as May 1939 that a war against Poland was in the making, he chose to ignore this counsel. With devasting consequences: Italy blundered into a war, and it did so in no small part to Ciano's lack of professional and moral spine. This development was doubly tragic, since there were instances when he did prove he had one (he vehemently argued with Mussolini to stay out of the war in 1939 after it had started).

Moseley shows Ciano and his father in law as bundles of contraditions, full of ambition an empty of all political morals, devious and naive at the same time, criminals without any qualms to order murder on the one hand, loving husbands and fathers on the other. In both cases, the word schizophrenic seems like a good description.

Ciano was appalled at what he saw as an immoral attack on an innocent Poland, but had no qualms about annexing Albania and starting an unprovoced war against Greece. He despised the double game that Hitler played with Italy, but he betrayed and treated the representatives of smaller nations just as condescending no different than that. And as the greatest irony of al he thought the Italian people loved him whereas in fact he was the most hated man in Italy.

What the book also does exceptionally well besides following Ciano's professional life and death is shining a light onto the character of Benito Mussolini, a man of fickle judgement and so volatile of character he made Hitler look amicably stable in comparison. Mussolini's mood swings were no less pronounced than those of Germany's "Führer", but whereas Hitler managed to maintain a keen mind in military and technological matters, making him at least gifted amateur, Mussolini not only lacked the knowledge but was outight delusional even during the best days of the war.

That, and Moseley's book is of course a fountain of hilarious and mind-boggling quotes like this one:

"I am very happy about the fact that - for once - Italians spread terror through their hawkishness instead of spreading pleasure through their skills as mandoline players."

-- Benito Mussolini after the bombing of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War, as quoted in the Diaries of Count Ciano.

Moseley does well in condensing thousands of pages of Ciano's diaries and correspondence, and statements of his friends, associates and enemies into less than 300 pages. It's not the full picture - it's never the full picture - but it is a fascinating overview over the rise and fall of Italy's second man behind Mussolini.

Final Verdict: 5/5 Moseley's biography of Galeazzo Ciano is an insightful, frustrating, and at times surprisingly amusing volume shining light on the man who saw himself as the heir to the Duce, and who only too late found the strength of character to act. Buy it. Read it.