Fear Itself (81 page)

16
Cited ibid., p. 51. “I can say with pride,” Mussolini stated, “that I am an aviator, a title that I earned by flying at a time when few people flew, and by crashing; because I was determined to be a pilot at 37 years of age, and, naturally, continued to fly after I crashed” (p. 105).

17
Ibid., p. 49.

18
Cited ibid., p. 70.

19
These mass flights were intended in part to advance Douhet’s conception of the effectiveness of attack by massive aerial formations.
The United States Air Force Dictionary
defines
balbo
as “a large flight or formation of planes.” Air University, Aerospace Studies Institute,
The United States Air Force Dictionary
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1956), p. 69; cited in Segré,
Italo
Balbo
, p. 146. Reporting on his trip to Odessa, Balbo noted (Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1929) in
Da Roma a Odessa
that he had found common purpose with much-hated Bolshevism in its contempt, like that of Fascism, for liberal democracy, which he characterized as “rotten to the bone, lying and false, with all the wiles of a superior civilization.” Cited in Segré,
Italo Balbo,
p. 207. See also James J. Sadkovich, “The Development of the Italian Air Force prior to World War II,”
Military Affairs
51 (1987), which gives a detailed account of the Aeronautica’s scope, equipment, and organization.

20
Wohl,
The Spectacle of Flight,
p. 77.

21
John Gooch,
Mussolini and His Generals: The Armed Forces and Fascist Foreign Policy, 1922–1940
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 75; Herman Finer,
Mussolini’s Italy
(New York: Henry Holt, 1935), p. 145.

22
Reviewing the publication of Balbo’s
Diario 1922
(Milan: Mondadori, 1932), Muriel Currey observed how in that year “the largest part of the armed forces of Fascism was under the command of General Balbo in what he calls the great quadrilateral, Ferrara, Mantova, Bologna, and Modena, and with them he fought pitched battles in Ravenna, Parma, and Bologna, against the Communists and their allies, while the Government and the local authorities looked on with mingled fear and indifference.” Currey’s review appeared in
International Affairs
12 (1933): 681. In May 1922, five months before the March on Rome, Balbo’s forces had occupied Ferrara: his Blackshirts mobilized some forty thousand agricultural workers in a show of force that displayed the impotence of governmental forces, and “at the end of July Balbo led a second march on Ravenna that secured the Po Valley’s southeast exit for Fascism.” See MacGregor Knox,
To the Threshold of Power, 1922/33: Origins and Dynamics of the Fascist and National Socialist Dictatorships,
vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 364, 365.

23
Segré,
Italo Balbo
, p. 114. The other three were Cesare De Vecchi, Michele Bianchi, and Emilio De Bono. For an overview of pre-Fascist Italy focused on matters of political economy, see Douglas J. Forsyth,
The Crisis of Liberal Italy: Monetary and Financial Policy, 1914–1922
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

24
Cited in Finer,
Mussolini’s Italy,
p. 139. The source is Balbo
,
Diario 1922.
There is a brief but telling portrait of Balbo in John Gunther,
Inside Europe, Again Completely Revised
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1938), pp. 209–11. Gunther describes him as “tall, copper-bearded, a picturesque as well as arrogant figure . . . a vivacious and accomplished ruffian, reportedly the inventor of the castor oil treatment for recalcitrant non-Fascists, a ‘Fascist from the first hour,’ and Mussolini’s ‘right hand’” (pp. 210, 209).

25
Cited in Tannenbaum, “The Goals of Italian Fascism,” pp. 1186–87.

26
Cited in Finer,
Mussolini’s Italy,
p. 140.

27
Zara Steiner,
The Lights That Failed: European International History, 1919–1933
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 500–501; Gooch,
Mussolini and His Generals,
p. 373; MacGregor Knox,
Common Destiny: Dictatorship, Foreign Policy, and War in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 136. Together with the SA and SS, “Göring’s Prussian police ruled the streets” in Germany after Hitler’s selection as chancellor on January 30, 1933. See Knox,
To the Threshold of Power, 1922/33,
p. 404.

28
“It was not polite,” the
New York Times
(June 30, 1940) obituary reported, to recall “that the natty flier was the inventor of Fascism’s ‘castor oil treatment’ for its enemies.” On the February to April exercises, see Gooch,
Mussolini and His Generals,
p. 169. For overviews, see Giorgio Rochat,
Italo Balbo aviatore e ministro dell’Aeronautica, 1926–1933
(Ferrara: Bovolenta, 1979); Giorgio Rochat,
Italo Balbo
(Turin: UTET, 1986); and Carlo Maria Santoro, ed.,
Italo Balbo: Aviazione e potere aereo
(Rome: Aeronautica Militare, 1998).

29
New York Times,
July 13, 1933.

30
Ibid., July 3, 1933.

31
Ibid., July 14, 1933. Four days later, Balbo’s counterpart, aviation minister Hermann Göring, suspended the publication of
Deutsche Zeitung,
a pan-German nationalist newspaper, for alleging that Balbo was “a baptized Jew,” an allegation taken from a Nazi Party publication,
The Handbook of the Jewish Question.
The three-month ban was lifted the next day, when the paper apologized for its “editorial blunder.” See
New York Times,
July 18, 1933; July 19, 1933. In August 1938, Balbo, then governor of Libya, flew from Tripoli to Berlin “on a non-stop flight intended to emphasize Italo-German collaboration.” See
New York Times,
August 9, 1938.

32
Cited in Knox,
To the Threshold of Power, 1922/33,
p. 377.

33
New York Times,
July 15, 1933.

34
Ibid., July 16, 1933. The cable was written by Assistant Secretary of Commerce Ewing Y. Mitchell, who was dismissed in 1935 by President Roosevelt after refusing to resign following his allegations of corruption in the department. He reports on these matters in
Kicked In and Kicked Out of the President’s Little Cabinet
(Washington, DC: Andrew Jackson Press, 1936).

35
New York Times,
July 16, 1933.

36
Wohl,
The Spectacle of Flight,
p. 93.

37
New York Times,
July 24, 1933.

38
Ibid., July 16, 1933.

39
The Stevens, which had opened in 1927, was then the world’s largest hotel, with three thousand guest rooms, multiple ballrooms, and conference facilities. During the Depression, it went into receivership.

40
New York Times,
June 30, 1940.

41
Segré,
Italo Balbo,
pp. 243–44;
New York Times,
July 16 and July 17, 1933.

42
New York Times,
July 16, 1933.

43
Ibid., July 20, 1933.

44
Ibid., July 21, 1933.

45
Ibid., July 20, 1933.

46
Ibid., July 21, 1933.

47
Ibid., July 24, 1933.

48
Long contributed the fifth largest sum to Wilson’s 1916 presidential campaign. See “Report Campaign Fund; $1,006,283 Raised by Democrats to Reelect Wilson,”
Washington Post,
October 28, 1916. Only four individuals donated more than the $5,000 donated by Long. The biggest supporter was Bernard Baruch, at $25,000. In 1920, Long was an unsuccessful Senate candidate from Missouri, and, later, he became an outspoken isolationist before rejoining the Department of State as the official responsible for refugee policy, where he actively opposed any relaxation of quotas that might help admit threatened Jews in Europe.

49
New York Times,
July 25, 1933.

50
New York Times,
August 20, 1933; Finer,
Mussolini’s Italy,
p. 305.

51
New York Times,
August 14, 1933.

52
Cited in Amos Elon, “A Shrine to Mussolini,”
New York Review of Books,
February 23, 2006, p. 33.

53
New York Times,
April 18, 1934 and October 12, 1927.

54
Ibid., August 30, 1934.

55
Ibid., April 5 and May 14, 1935. “The expedition was bid Godspeed by Pope Pius XI. In the Cathedral of Milan, Cardinal Alfred Schuster blessed the banners which would ‘bear the cross of Christ to Ethiopia.’” Geert Mak,
In Europe: Travels through the Twentieth Century
(New York: Vintage, 2008), p. 294.

56
Congress voted this honor in early April 1935. See
New York Times,
April 15 and May 14, 1935. Balbo then was governor of Libya, something of an exile arranged by Mussolini, who feared Balbo’s popularity, because Balbo was widely touted as “the next Duce.” Breckenridge Long was an important force in the administration’s promoting of cordial relations with the Italian regime, which, he believed, offered both useful economic models similar to that of the New Deal’s National Recovery Administration (NRA) and the chance to moderate Hitler’s geopolitics.

57
Time,
June 26, 1933, p. 37.

58
John Whitaker, the European correspondent of the
New York Herald Tribune,
recorded the popularity of the Ethiopian war in Italy. “I went to Rome thinking the Italian people were duped and dragooned into war; I left believing that the war had become a popular war of the people.” On October 2, 1935, the population, “mobilized in every Italian city, village, and hamlet, roared the country’s solidarity from Sicily to the Alps.” See John T. Whitaker,
And Fear Came
(New York: Macmillan, 1936), pp. 233, 255. For an overview of the brutal and efficient campaign conducted by Italian forces in Ethiopia, see Gooch,
Mussolini and His Generals
, pp. 252–314. The air force, he notes, dropped 1,853,000 kilos of bombs and 1,074,000 of supplies, while losing only 8 of some 250 aircraft (p. 372).

59
Chicago Daily Tribune,
July 1, 1936.

60
A. J. Barker,
The Civilizing Mission: The Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935–36
(London: Cassell, 1936).

61
New York Times,
February 12, 1937.

62
Cited in Scott Berg,
Lindbergh
(New York: Berkley, 1998), pp. 360, 361.

63
New York Times,
December 22, 1936.

64
Ibid., October 20, 1938. Anne Morrow Lindbergh recorded in her diary, “C. came back late from his dinner, with a German decoration presented him quite unexpectedly by General Göring. Henry Ford is the only other American to get it. The parchment is signed by Hitler.” On October 25, Lindberg wrote Göring, “I want to thank you especially for the honor which you conferred on me at the dinner given by Ambassador Wilson. I hope that when the opportunity presents itself, you will convey my thanks to the Reichschancellor. It is difficult for me to express adequately my appreciation for this decoration, and for the way you presented it that evening. It is an honor which I shall always prize highly.” Both are cited in Max Wallace,
The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003), pp. 185, 186. Shortly thereafter, the week following Kristallnacht, Lindbergh was reported to be considering a move to Berlin to conduct aviation research with German partners. The
New York Times
noted (November 16, 1938) that “the Colonel’s German friends were particularly anxious to find a house with a garden for him so his two small sons might have a place to play. . . . Friends said that the recent abandonment of many Jewish homes might make available apartments for rent.”

65
New York Times
, August 10, 1940.

66
Ibid., July 2, 1941.

67
The rally was on September 11, 1941; cited in Berg,
Lindbergh,
pp. 378, 427.

68
New York Times,
August 11, 1941.

69
Ibid., July 1, 1940.

70
Ibid., July 2, 1940. Italian armed forces invaded Egypt in November under Graziani’s command and were repulsed in January in Operation Compass. British forces, with Australian and Indian troops, captured Tobruk later that month. In June 1942, the Germans took the city, which was retaken by the Allies in November.

71
Ibid., July 4, and July 3, 1940.

72
Ibid., July 1, 1940. In 2002, the forecourt at Ciampino Airport, just south of Rome, was renamed Piazza Balbo. Gen. Leonard Ticarico, then military adviser to Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, defended the naming, saying it was a response to a demand by air force pilots to honor a person who continued to be a point of reference for them. “It is an act consistent with our tradition,” he said, “which acknowledges the merits of Italo Balbo in the history of the Italian Air Force.”
See
Times
(London), August 1, 2002. Balbo has not been forgotten in the United States. By chance, I discovered an obituary of a ninety-year-old seamstress, Tomasina Grella Armoian, who had served as president of the Italo Balbo Women’s Club of Everett, New Hampshire. See
Boston Globe,
March 30, 2006.

73
The Russians wanted the trial to be held in their zone of Berlin; the other delegations opted for Nuremberg, in the American occupation zone. As a compromise, Berlin was designated as the “permanent seat of the Tribunal.” See Ann Tusa and John Tusa,
The Nuremberg Trial
(London: Macmillan, 1983), p. 84. For a discussion of the continuing importance of the trial, see Richard Wasserstein, “The Relevance of Nuremberg,”
Philosophy and Public Affairs
1 (1971): 22–46.