Fear Itself (10 page)

Balbo’s fanatical militarism was hardly atypical, and his actions reflected a right-wing paramilitary response not only to the devastation of World War I but also to the rise in socialist and Communist activity following the war. He explained in 1922 that the Blackshirt battle cry, “I don’t give a damn,” had been rightly interpreted by the socialist newspaper
Avanti!
as expressing “contempt for every norm of established government.” The country’s liberal parliamentary regime, he wrote in a March 2, 1922 diary entry, was “our battle objective. We want to destroy it with all of its venerated institutions. The greater the scandal generated by our actions the happier we are.”
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Most important, as if anticipating the views of Germany’s Nazis, he observed that it was impossible to reconcile the Fascist theory of violence with liberal principles: “Above all, how can one practice violence and preach respect for all opinions? The truth is one. Who believes that he possesses it must defend it with his life. And whoever does not believe that he possesses the truth in himself, absolute and unique, cannot be a Fascist. . . . It appears to me absurd that others do not think like me.”
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Balbo, though glowingly portrayed by
Time
in 1933, was widely thought to have been the most extreme of Fascism’s leaders when he first served as inspector of the regime’s militia in the mid-1920s. As a strong advocate of Fascist-Nazi collaboration, he visited Hermann Göring, in Berlin in December 1932, only one month before Hitler’s historic selection as chancellor, when Göring chaired the Reichstag as the representative of the largest parliamentary party, which had been elected six months earlier. Göring, who became minister of civil aviation after Hitler assumed power on January 30, 1933, soon commanded the Luftwaffe. He developed a close friendship with Balbo, who initiated covert training for German pilots, a step prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles.
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The apprehension and dread that later marked responses to Nazi aggression were hardly apparent when Balbo began his tour of various democratic countries in July 1933. Even though the Italian fliers represented militarized Fascism, Balbo and his crew were greeted and hailed as heroes in each of these democracies.
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As leader of “the greatest transoceanic flight in the history of aviation,”
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Balbo achieved—in Lindbergh fashion—mass adulation, a sentiment widely echoed in the press and in laudatory receptions by local and national political leaders. In Northern Ireland, the top officers of the Royal Air Force, the mayor of Belfast, and other leading provincial and national politicians were on hand when the Italians landed. Thousands cheered as “flowers and rose petals were thrown in General Balbo’s path by pretty girls inside the square.” A call was placed to Mussolini to report on the flight’s progress.
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When the Italians approached Montreal, a laudatory message to Balbo arrived from Berlin: “Congratulations on your thrilling achievement. Admiringly, Adolf Hitler.”
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As with Mussolini, the nexus between aviation and politics had not been lost on Hitler. During his election campaign in 1932, Hitler had been inspired by Balbo’s prior Fascist flights, and he had crisscrossed Germany by air in a dramatic demonstration of “
Hitler über Deutschland
” that identified Nazism with a modern and bright German future.
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The Balbo spectacle finally reached heartland America in mid-July of 1933. The
New York Times
reporter on the scene at Chicago’s downtown lakefront captured the excitement generated by the Italian armada:

It was soon after 1 o’clock when the first group of six planes, led by General Balbo, came into sight over the horizon. They were flying at about 1,500 feet, and as they headed into the sun, the light flashed from their propellers and other gleaming metal parts. . . . The thousands gathered on the shore and those who had access to the jetty greeted them with a cheer. An Italian Fascist band played “La Giovanezza” and the lines of the black-shirted Fascists on the jetty raised their arms in salute.
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Accompanied by U.S. Army planes in formation spelling
Italia,
Balbo’s air fleet reached Chicago eleven days after Independence Day, sweeping past the Century of Progress Exposition as they landed in eight groups of three in Lake Michigan. The Commerce Department cabled a salute for “the triumphant flight of your aircraft,” which it called “an epochal achievement.”
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Pope Pius XI, who had been personally following the path of the flight by placing Italian and papal flags on a large map Balbo had presented before departing, instructed Cardinal Mundelein to confer his blessing.
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The Mass he led at Holy Name Cathedral the next day was followed by the reading of “a telegram of congratulations and blessing from the Vatican, written by the future Pope, Pius XII, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli.”
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Anne and Charles Lindbergh telegrammed “our congratulations on your splendid flight,” with Balbo responding that “the greeting of America’s outstanding transoceanic flier, who performed a legendary enterprise, flatters and honors the crew of the Italian air fleet.”
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As the news filtered into Italy, “people paraded the streets, singing Fascist hymns and cheering Il Duce and General Balbo,” as if the invasion of Sherwood Anderson’s mythical American heartland represented a return to Roman glory.
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When the planes finally descended, some 100,000 Chicago observers gathered near the Navy Pier. Their numbers included a rear admiral, the governor, who read warm messages of greeting from the new national administration’s secretary of war and secretary of the navy, and the mayor, who compared Balbo to the fifteenth-century discoverer Columbus, proclaimed “Italo Balbo Day,” and renamed Seventh Street as Balbo Avenue, a name it still has.

At the lakefront, a monument to Christopher Columbus was inaugurated with the inscription “This monument has seen the glory of the wings of Italy led by Italo Balbo, July 15, 1933.” Small indignant demonstrations by the Italian Socialist Federation and the Italian League for the Rights of Man were dwarfed by the far more dominant mood of the day. That evening, a dinner for some five thousand of the city’s political, economic, and religious leaders was held at the recently opened Stevens Hotel (now the Chicago Hilton), which occupied the full city block on Michigan Avenue between Seventh and Eighth streets.
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Many rose to offer a Fascist salute when Balbo and his squadron entered the ballroom. At dinner, “girls and women fought for the chance to dance with the dashing flier.”
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The event was chaired by a former American ambassador to Fascist Italy and the room was decorated by a huge black silhouette of Mussolini. The gathering heard an invocation by the bishop of Chicago, addresses by Mayor Edward Kelly and the president of Loyola University, who proffered an out-of-season honorary degree, and, as a highlight, a message of salutation sent by the president of the United States. The next day, America’s new Fascist hero was made an honorary Sioux at the world’s fair and was dubbed “the Flying Eagle.” Perhaps reluctant to be tainted by an association with a group he thought inferior and defeated, and afraid it might sully his image as a representatives of Il Duce, Balbo accepted this honor from Chief Black Horn only reluctantly.
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Following a night at a local casino, Balbo and his crew left Chicago, serenaded by a parade attended by no fewer than one million onlookers along the full length of Michigan Avenue. It was as if the Cubs had brought a World Series victory back to Chicago, only it was July 18. The Italian airmen next traveled to New York, invited by Mayor John Patrick O’Brien and Governor Herbert Lehman, who had reminded Balbo that “the great Empire City of New York . . . includes among its population the largest group of Italians in any city in the world outside Rome.”
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In New York, the festivities were no less intense. The fliers landed at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, to a nineteen-gun salute from the navy, which was followed by a flight down the Hudson, skirting Manhattan’s shore. The event was witnessed by euphoric crowds estimated by the
New York Times
as “millions,” and reported by a broadcaster perched at the top of the Empire State Building.
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This stay in New York was brief, and the airmen traveled to Washington the next day. Here, Balbo was greeted along the Potomac by a nineteen-gun salute before laying a wreath at Arlington Cemetery’s Tomb of the Unknown Solider and stopping at the Lincoln Memorial. Secretary of the Navy Claude Swanson (a Virginian who previously had served seven terms in the House of Representatives, four years as governor, and four terms in the U.S. Senate) saluted him for his “enviable reputation” and “remarkable capacity for organization and leadership.”
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The trip climaxed at the White House on July 20, where President and Mrs. Roosevelt hosted a luncheon in Balbo’s honor, a day before receiving Prince Ras Desta Demtu, the son-in-law of Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia, whose country Italy would ravage just three years later.
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Swept up by the national frenzy, the president tried to persuade Balbo to prolong his visit for some months to undertake a countrywide tour. The
New York Times
glowingly described how, “to the youthful and bearded leader of Italian aviation,” the president’s “words conveyed genuine feeling,” and that the “Air Minister left the White House with his face wreathed in smiles.”
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Balbo then returned to New York, where this wreath of smiles must have been perpetuated, for he was sent off by some two million New Yorkers in a massive downtown ticker-tape parade. The festivities terminated at a gathering of 65,000, most Italian-American, at the Madison Square Garden Bowl. Balbo, the newspaper reported, “had deliberately given a speech there of political propaganda character, accentuating its Fascist tone, ‘to show those who still do not believe that the miserable remains of international anti-Fascism is forced to resort to a bluff destitute of any seriousness and consistency’.” Wiring a report to Mussolini before returning to Europe, Balbo observed “that the existence of anti-Fascist sentiment abroad was a myth which was exploded by the enthusiastic welcome his air squadron has received in America.”
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Echoes of the thunderous reception resounded across the ocean. The following day, the U.S. ambassador to Italy, Breckenridge Long, a Princeton classmate of Woodrow Wilson who bred horses,
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visited Mussolini to communicate “President Roosevelt’s admiration for the flight of General Italo Balbo and his men to America,” and to report how “the American people had acclaimed them with enthusiasm and admiration.”
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Back in Italy, Balbo and his crew, resplendent in white dress uniforms, were greeted by a triumphal procession, bedecked with Fascist banners, to Rome’s Domitian’s Stadium on August 13. Balbo was promoted to air marshal and praised by Mussolini, dressed in the uniform of a commander of the Blackshirt militia, for having “consecrated Fascist revolution in the skies of two continents.” In turn, Balbo presented Mussolini with an air marshal’s hat, announced that Il Duce had guided the enterprise with his daily telegrams, and fawned about how “the whole credit for the Italian armada’s successful flight was due to Premier Mussolini.”
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As the ceremony ended, “the fliers saluted in the Roman fashion and gave the Fascist cry, ‘A Noi’. . . while cannon boomed and thousands of Fascist women threw flowers and laurel leaves in their path.”
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American expressions of appreciation hardly ceased that summer, a dire one, with the Depression economy showing no sign of recovery. In April 1934, Columbia University, whose president, Nicholas Murray Butler, though hardly known for his support of ethnic diversity, compared Mussolini to Cromwell,
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announced an Italo Balbo Crociera Atlantica Fellowship for graduate students at the university’s Casa Italiana, a copy of a fifteenth-century Roman palazzo that had been opened on Amsterdam Avenue in 1927 at a ceremony whose keynote speaker, representing Mussolini, was Guglielmo Marconi, the Nobel laureate pioneer of telegraphy, and a committed Fascist.
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The creation of this fellowship for study in Italy was followed four months later by a ceremony in Rome in which Mussolini awarded high decorations to ninety-nine Americans, recognizing the assistance they had given to Balbo’s armada. The highest honor—the Grand Cordon of the order of the Crown of Italy—went to three men: Secretary of the Navy Claude Swanson; Chief of Naval Operations Adm. William Standley; and Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the army’s chief of staff.
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In May 1935, only six months before Mussolini sent 500,000 troops to conquer Ethiopia, Ambassador Long responded in kind by visiting Tripoli to confer the United States Distinguished Flying Cross on Balbo, an award that had been approved by Congress and confirmed in April by President Roosevelt.
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At the time of his decoration, Balbo had become governor-general of the Italian colony of Libya, a post he had assumed at the start of 1934, all the while continuing to run
Corriere Padano,
the leading Fascist newspaper in Ferrara. Only months later, Long sang a more ominous tune, reporting to Secretary of State Cordell Hull that Italy was preparing for war against Ethiopia. Factories in Milan were suddenly turning out tanks, trucks, and artillery at a breakneck pace. Fascist troops were being shifted surreptitiously, shipping out from Naples, camouflaged as part of the merchant marine, and moving through Balbo’s Libya and Italian Somaliland.
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Dropping bombs and grenades laden with mustard gas, targeting not only soldiers but also civilians and Red Cross camps, Balbo’s beloved Aeronautica became the first air force to be deployed against a sovereign enemy since World War I. Instrumental in subduing Ethiopia, the fliers, heralded only two years earlier by America’s leaders, citizens, and press, helped initiate a reign of terror that included mass executions, chemical weapons, and forced labor camps, having been ordered by Mussolini to conduct a murderous campaign of systematic terror against any resistance. “Aircraft,” Balbo prophetically had explained in 1933, “must be used in masses like infantry in the next war.”
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Now they were.
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