Yet, I had no memory of it when I picked up volume 5 at random today and began re-reading. I must have posted it on Publocc, I thought to myself but searching this blog for Mussolini, I never did! This is what Churchill wrote in 1951:
"Thus ended Mussolini's twenty-one years' dictatorship in Italy, during which he had raised the Italian people from the Bolshevism into which they might have sunk in 1919 to a position in Europe such as Italy had never held before. A new impulse had been given to the national life. The Italian Empire in North Africa was built. Many important public works in Italy were completed. In 1935 the Duce had by his will-power overcome the League of Nations--'Fifty nations led by one'--and was able to complete his conquest of Abyssinia. His regime was far too costly for the Italian people to bear, but there is no doubt that it appealed during its period of success to very great numbers of Italians. He was, as I had addressed him at the time of the fall of France, 'the Italian lawgiver.' The alternative to his rule might well have been a Communist Italy, which would have brought perils and misfortunes of a different character both upon the Italian people and Europe. His fatal mistake was the declaration of war on France and Great Britain following Hitler's victories in June 1940. Had he not done this he could well have maintained Italy in a balancing position, courted and rewarded by both sides and deriving an unusual wealth and prosperity from the struggles of other countries. Even when the issue of the war became certain Mussolini would have been welcomed by the Allies. He had much to give to shorten its course. He could have timed his moment to declare war on Hitler with art and care. Instead he took the wrong turning. He never understood the strength of Britain, nor the long-enduring qualities of Island resistance and sea-power. Thus he marched to ruin. His great roads will remain a monument to his personal power and long reign."
I have often admired Churchill's writing on the war for his ability for detached thinking. Although deeply invested personally he could always step back and say, e.g. "If Goering had kept up the blitz we may have been done for". As a warlord Churchill thought like a lawyer. That passage on Mussolini is all of that but is as well admiring! I was astonished--manifestly both times I read it lol.