the rest of the Maghreb to compensate for the numerical superiority of the Wehrmacht, and the possibility of the Regia Marina cutting France off from the Maghreb was considered very concerning in Paris. In a memo, St. Léger wrote that Benito Mussolini had evidently decided upon alignment with Germany and that: "Every effort to bring them [the Italians] back to us is destined to fail; it will only encourage them in their two-faced policy, leading them to name the highest price for their assets and making them value even more highly the benefits the Axis could offer them". St. Léger complained that allies of Bonnet in his "peace lobby" such as the Public Works minister Anatole de Monzie were holding unofficial talks with Italian diplomats on their own, which he felt was Bonnet's way of cutting out the Quai d'Orsay from his foreign policy. André François-Poncet, the French ambassador in Rome, was opposed to St. Léger's policy and felt it was still possible to "detach" the Italians from an alliance with Germany. St. Léger ordered François-Poncet to stick to his "day-to-day business", which led François-Poncet to lash out against him as he told the Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano that St. Léger was a "sinister man" opposed to better Franco-Italian relations. Phipps had served as the British ambassador in Berlin between 1933-1937 where he became a close friend of François-Poncet, who served as the French ambassador in Berlin between 1931-1938. All through the spring and summer of 1939, Phipps wrote letters to François-Poncet that accused St. Léger of "Italophobia" and of being rigidly hostile towards the Fascist regime as Phipps noted that St. Léger disliked Mussolini as a person. Both Phipps and François-Poncet believed it was possible to "detach" Fascist Italy from alignment with Nazi Germany, and both felt that St. Léger was the principle man blocking rapprochement with Italy. Cameron wrote that events proved St. Léger correct about Italy as even though the French did not make the concessions to the Italians that Bonnet and François-Poncet favored, Italy still remained neutral when the war began and only entered the war on 10 June 1940 when it was already clear that France was defeated. St. Léger very much welcomed the change in British policy during the Danzig crisis, as he noted the lack of British support in 1938 had made it "impossible" for France to face Germany on its