Donovan

by Richard Dunlop

  During the summer of 1935, Donovan became increasingly concerned by the buildup of Italian military power in Eritrea. He knew from his friend Italian Ambassador Augusto Rossi that Italy’s dictator, Benito Mussolini, was determined to conquer a new market for Italian exports and solve southern Italy’s critical unemployment problem. Il Duce was avid to avenge the 1896 Italian defeat at Aduwa and above all to prove to the world that Fascism would be victorious in battle. In September Donovan traveled to England and the Continent; he returned to America convinced that Mussolini was not bluffing and fully intended to invade Ethiopia regardless of what the League of Nations threatened to do.

  At a reunion of Rainbow Division veterans, Donovan and his old comrade-in-arms Douglas MacArthur, now chief of staff of the U.S. Army, talked over the idea of Donovan’s going to Africa to learn exactly what was going on. On September 17, he wrote to MacArthur that he was “impressed with the fact that this little adventure of Italy may resolve itself into something that could include us all.” He added that “a close view of the situation at this time might help us later,” and he asked for the general’s suggestions as to how he might arrange the necessary trip with the War Department. There was no response from MacArthur.

  “Donovan scared MacArthur and other military men,” remarked Jim Murphy. “They considered him just too brilliant. They were afraid he might show them up. Let him get started, and he’d soon be running everything.”

  In October MacArthur finished his tour of duty as chief of staff and went to the Philippines at the request of President Manuel Quezon to create and train an army for the commonwealth, which was to become independent in another ten years. On September 30, Deputy Chief of Staff Gen. George S. Simonds agreed with Donovan that he should “go abroad and look over the situation in the Mediterranean.” Simonds said that he was “most sympathetic with your desire to get a look-in on this impending fracas,” but that he could not provide funds for the trip. Donovan assured him that he was not thinking of making “any charge against the government at all.”

  On October 3, Marshal Pietro Badoglio led Mussolini’s armies into Ethiopia. The expeditionary force was made up of more than 200,000 men and 7,000 officers, 6,000 machine guns, 700 cannon, 150 tanks, and 150 pursuit planes and bombers. When General de Bono in Africa asked him for more men, Mussolini wrote, “You ask for three divisions by the end of October. I mean to send you ten, repeat ten; five divisions of the regular army, five formations of Blackshirts. For the lack of a few thousand men, we lost the day at Aduwa. We shall never make that mistake. I am willing to commit a sin of excess, but never a sin of deficiency.”

  The European powers and the United States damned the invasion as a sin of another sort. The League of Nations members were convinced that economic sanctions would so cripple the Italian war machine that it would not be able to sustain its attack. The Ethiopians, it was confidently reported in the French, British, and American press, would surely prove too wily and difficult for the Italians. Optimistic reports circulated in the corridors of the League of Nations, and Italian delegates were themselves certain that their country was likely to suffer a disaster in Africa.

  When Donovan went to see friends in the State Department, he found that they shared the optimism of their colleagues in Europe. They were sure as well that Mussolini would never give him permission to go to Badoglio’s field headquarters. They pointed out that the British and American military attachés in Rome had been denied permission to visit Africa. British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden had even gone to Rome to see Mussolini and learn about his plans: If Italy completed the conquest of Ethiopia, did he intend to strike at Egypt? Did he plan to advance from Libya to seize the Suez Canal? How strong was his army, and what was its temper?

  “Eden tried to find out, and Mussolini had treated him like a child. Miffed, Eden and his entourage had flounced home,” Donovan said later.

  When the State Department refused to accredit Donovan as an observer, he went directly from the department to the Italian Embassy, where he called on Ambassador Rossi. The ambassador obliged him by writing a letter introducing Col. William J. Donovan, distinguished lawyer, who wished to understand the progress of affairs in the Mediterranean and Africa in order to advise his clients, who were among the most important corporations in the United States. Mussolini was also informed that Donovan wore the Croce di Guerra for his heroism in World War I.

  Donovan reached Rome on December 23, 1935, and called on the foreign minister. “I am traveling as a private American citizen,” he said, “and I want to understand the Italian situation because it affects business at home.”

  The minister said that Mussolini was very busy and could not see him.

  “I am just as busy in America,” replied Donovan. “I cannot wait indefinitely. If Mussolini cannot see me, I want to know so that I can leave at once.”

  Donovan returned to his hotel. In only a few minutes a message arrived from the minister, who said that Il Duce had granted him an interview at three o’clock the next afternoon. On December 24, Donovan pinned on his Croce di Guerra.

  “I went to the Venetian Palace at 2:50,” he wrote in his diary. “At the door were two sentries, not particularly smart. Inside the corridor was a major domo, dressed like a Park Avenue doorman. I gave him my letter, and he went to the telephone. A moment later a plainclothesman arrived with a paper, and compared it with the name on my letter. I tried to get my letter back, but they confiscated that. We climbed two flights of stairs, he pressed a button, a door opened, and a footman in livery ushered me into a waiting room.”

  While he waited, Donovan studied the room. Later he recalled the paintings that hung on the velvet walls. There were a Van Dyck, an anonymous 17th-century Italian, a Van Ploem, a Giovanni Pini of the early 16th century. At precisely three o’clock the plainclothesman returned, saluted Donovan, and ushered him into the council chamber, which was fitted with tables of dark wood covered by blue damask. Donovan and his guide paused at a door at the far end.

  “The door was opened by an older usher in a black Prince Albert coat,” wrote Donovan. “I entered a large room, bare and high. At the far end was a plain table, a few papers on it, a desk light. Behind the desk was Mussolini.”

  When Il Duce wished to make a visitor feel ill at ease, he customarily looked down at his papers as if preoccupied with their contents. The visitor was left shifting from one foot to another until Il Duce felt he had been kept waiting long enough. Catching Mussolini’s glance as he entered, Donovan held it with his own as he walked the length of the room.

  “I walked as if I were leading my regiment,” he remarked later.

  Mussolini stepped from behind the desk and shook hands. The Italian dictator and the American made small talk.

  “Mussolini asked me how long I had been in France during the war,” Donovan said later. “I told him nineteen months.”

  “Wounded?” asked Mussolini.

  “Three times,” Donovan replied.

  Mussolini seemed impressed. “And now you wish to go to Eritrea?”

  “I would be interested in seeing the spirit of your soldiers,” replied Donovan. “I did not think much of your troops in the World War—neither the discipline of the men nor the quality of the officers. After the war I saw your officers chased by crowds through the streets of Milan.”

  “It is different now,” Mussolini snapped. “You will see a vast change.”

  “I would like to see that change, and I would like to be where the men are because, to judge of their power and strength, one must see how they take care of their feet, of their middle, and their heads. If Italy is to have a new empire, she must have a new Tenth Legion.”

  Mussolini clapped his hands and smiled with pleasure at Donovan’s mention of the crack Roman unit. “Tenth Legion, that is right.” He regarded Donovan with a shrewd expression. “Your country will aid Britain? Are you in favor of the oil embargo?”

  “I am in favor of a foreign policy that is our ow
n, and not one that makes us an instrument of someone else,” Donovan replied.

  Again Mussolini clapped his hands in delight. “You will go to Africa. First to Libya and then to Abyssinia. You will see our colonization. You will see our soldiers, and you will see that Italy has a new Tenth Legion.” Mussolini summoned an aide. “See that Colonel Donovan is put on the next plane and cable Marshal Badoglio that he personally must escort the colonel on a tour of the front.”

  Donovan went to Ethiopia as a representative of Benito Mussolini.

  “Mussolini offered not only to let Bill see anything he wanted to see, but gave orders that all forms of transportation—horse, mule, camel, or airplane—should be made available to him,” wrote Hugh Wilson. “All this under the one condition that Colonel Donovan promise to return straight to Rome and tell him what he thought of the show.”

  Donovan flew to Cairo. He traveled by air by way of Luxor and Khartoum in the Sudan to Ethiopia, where he spent ten days at the fighting front. He slept in a striped tent set up next to Marshal Badoglio’s. He had a chance to see firsthand the thrust of modern tanks and aircraft against poorly armed if brave men. He spent time not only with Badoglio, with whom he formed a soldier’s friendship for another soldier whose professional ability was evident, but also at corps, division, and brigade levels. He filled his daily diary with comments on battle positions, motor transport, and the S-81, which he described as “a huge bomber, much like the new Boeing the Army is getting out.” Indefatigably he jotted down camp layouts, the soldiers’ diet and morale, the apparent condition of army mules and horses. He analyzed Italian military strategy and talked about Italy’s foreign policy with Badoglio. He concluded that Italy would easily win the war.

  On his way back to Rome from Ethiopia, Donovan stopped off at Bengasi in Libya, where he interviewed the commissioner of the province, and at Tripoli, where he discussed Italy’s plans for the Mediterranean with Gen. Italo Balbo, who had been pro-American since he led a flight of Italian warplanes to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933. Balbo liked Americans for their open ways, and he readily confided in Donovan.

  Back in Rome, Donovan reported to Mussolini and gave him his candid views on the undoubted prowess of the Italian Army in Ethiopia. He went to see the American ambassador and told him that the Italian “service of supplies was excellent, that morale was high, that health and sanitation were splendid, efficiency first-rate, and that the military positions now occupied were secure and could be easily held.” The ambassador informed Secretary of State Cordell Hull.

  From Rome, Donovan went on to Paris, where he telephoned Hugh Wilson in Geneva on January 14. “Bill told me over the phone that he had just been to Ethiopia and asked whether I would like him to fly down and tell me about it,” wrote Wilson. “Since Ethiopia was the one subject that was present with us day and night, I accepted enthusiastically and Bill duly arrived the next day.”

  Donovan briefed Wilson about the Italian war effort, the road construction, the health of the army, and how a great advance was being organized. “It would not be launched until it was ready, but when it was launched it would be irresistible,” Wilson reported Donovan said. “We could count with certainty on the Italians’ entry into Addis Ababa in good season before the rain commenced.”

  Significant to Wilson was that Donovan’s views contradicted the optimistic reports still circulating in Geneva and in the other capitals of European diplomacy.

  The news brought by Donovan was of overwhelming importance; the whole of the League policy and, especially, British policy was predicated on the effectiveness of the sanctions in preventing an Italian victory. If the sanctions had no such effect it was obviously the better part of wisdom to alter radically the policy which depended on sanctions for success. Bill’s story carried absolute conviction to me. I knew he was a competent observer. I knew he was completely unprejudiced, and I knew he submitted to me his observations only because he was convinced of their complete soundness.

  In the morning Wilson walked with British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden along the lake to the Old Disarmament Building, where the day’s council session was to be held. He told Eden about Donovan and about some of his views.

  “Eden was deeply perturbed,” remembered Wilson later. “He recognized the importance of the report and asked me to send Donovan to see him at six o’clock that evening.”

  “Wilson wanted me to talk with Eden,” Donovan wrote in his diary for January 16, “but I thought it was a mistake to go to Eden’s hotel.” After all, he had just been a guest of Benito Mussolini, Eden’s foe, and Italian spies would certainly be watching and would report to Rome. He preferred to meet Eden in some clandestine fashion.

  At five o’clock Wilson’s phone rang. It was Eden. King George V had just died, and he had been ordered to return to London by the first airplane. He hoped that Colonel Donovan would be able to see him in London and asked for his address there.

  Within a few days Donovan arrived in London and notified Eden’s private secretary. But the funeral of the king and the ceremonies attending the coming to power of a new monarch and a new cabinet prevented Eden from seeing Donovan. These events apparently did not keep him from talking about Donovan’s observations on the Ethiopian war, however. When Wilson arrived in London two weeks later he found that at dinner party after dinner party, people were telling the story of the American observer who had the “temerity to question the judgment of the best military opinion on the Continent.”

  Donovan briefed Eden’s aides, but Eden took no action. Within a few weeks the worst happened in Ethiopia. The Italian advance indeed proved irresistible, and Addis Ababa fell. Italian soldiers, having destroyed most of Emperor Haile Selassie’s army in the field, now wantonly slaughtered the imperial lions kept in a pound at his palace. The emperor fled to Britain.

  “If I had been able to tell Eden that the Italians were sure to overrun Ethiopia, there might have been a shift in British policy that would have kept Italy in the League and prevented the birth of the Axis between Rome and Berlin,” said Wilson.

  “The history of mankind is the history of men,” he wrote. “Sudden unpredictable decisions sometimes dictated by nothing more serious than indigestion have changed the fate of history. In this case an infinitely more serious factor, true, the death of a king, may have been that fortuitous event which kept Europe on the steady path to disaster.”

  At least if either London or Washington had realized the validity of Donovan’s report on the competence and leadership of the Italian Army, the mounting danger in the Mediterranean might have been curtailed. Donovan returned to the United States and made a personal report to President Roosevelt. Setting political differences aside, Roosevelt appreciated that Donovan was America’s leading intelligence expert and valued what he had to say. Donovan told the President that Italy’s army was vastly improved and that if the army could be taken as an expression of the people’s will, the Italians were possessed of a spirit of determination to the point of desperation. The Italian people knew the danger of their advance in Africa, but they would go through with it, pulling down the rest of Europe if it tried to block them.

  Donovan also reported to the War Department, and on February 24, Major General Simonds commended him for the “pertinent and valuable information” that could not have been obtained through any other channel.

  His Ethiopia mission may have been successful, but Donovan’s law partners rebuked him. The government had brought suit against American Telephone & Telegraph Company just before his departure, and the Donovan firm had been retained to defend the case.

  “We were fighting for our place in the Wall Street sun,” recalled John Howley, then a junior partner. “Our success in the AT&T case all depended upon Donovan, and there he was running around in the wilds of Africa.”

  Donovan plunged back into the affairs of his law office. He also supported Frank Knox for the Republican nomination for president. It was inevitable that Col. Frank Knox, publisher o
f the Chicago Daily News, and Bill Donovan should become friends and political allies, for both were Republicans in the vigorous image of Teddy Roosevelt. Knox was close to Roosevelt in thought, manner, and appearance, for he had ridden with him in the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry at San Juan Hill. Knox, a Rough Rider to the heart, had supported Roosevelt’s Bull Moose campaign for the presidency. By late spring 1936, Donovan was holding a series of dinners at his Beekman Place duplex to win support from prominent politicians for Knox. When the Republican convention picked Gov. Alfred Landon of Kansas as the nominee for president, Donovan and his friend Albert Lasker were instrumental in obtaining the vice-presidential nomination for Knox. Donovan was an adviser to Knox during the campaign, which President Roosevelt easily won.

  Events in Europe had taken a tragic turn. The Spanish Civil War began on July 17, 1936, when Francisco Franco and a group of generals led their forces in revolt against the republic both in Spanish Morocco and in Spain. Rightists and leftists fought in the streets of Spain. Hitler and Mussolini had both promised to support Franco, and they lived up to their pledge not only with arms and supplies but with military personnel.

  The Neutrality Act of 1935, which President Roosevelt had espoused in an effort to block American assistance to Italy during the Ethiopian invasion, could not be applied to the struggle in Spain since it was a civil war. Not until May 1, 1937, was new legislation passed and signed into law to prohibit the shipment of arms, munitions, and the tools of war to Spain. This had little effect in cutting off arms for Franco since nations other than the United States were providing men and arms. By this time Italy had sent upward of 60,000 men to Spain to help the rightist insurgents, and was employing its air force and navy. Germany had contributed between 10,000 and 20,000 men with tanks, artillery, planes, and communications equipment. Russia was dispatching men and arms to help the leftist Popular Front government.

  Donovan kept one eye on affairs in Spain and the other on his law practice. Guy Martin, at that time a new member of the firm, remembered years later that, “Donovan was an indefatigable traveler on the shortest notice. At the same time he knew what the cases were about and exactly what I was doing. I don’t remember his tossing a case and going off and leaving it.”