Italo Balbo Oversees Trans-Atlantic Flight of 12 Italian Seaplanes to Brazil | December 1930

Описание: December 1930.

Footage of the start of a 10,400 km mass flight of Twelve Savoia Marchetti S.55X from Orbetello, Tuscany to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil led by Italo Balbo, the head of the Regia Aeronautica Italiana (Royal Air Force of Italy) during the era of Musssolini and Italian Fascism.

The flight began on December 17th 1930.

Balbo and his seaplane Squadron finally reached Rio de Janeiro on January 15th 1931.

Note:

Air Marshal Italo Balbo (1896-1940): Charismatic leader of the Italian Fascist state and aviation pioneer.

Balbo was one of the principal architects of the "March on Rome" which brought Benito Mussolini to power and subsequently became one of the members of the Grand Council of Fascism.

He was entrusted with the task of building Italian air power and he did so with great aplomb, taking Italian prestige to great heights with his trans-Atlantic mass flights of seaplane squadrons in 1930 (to Brazil) and 1933 (to the United States).

His popularity is said to have threatened Mussolini.

Mussolini made him the governor of the Italian desert protectorate of Libya. The gossip in Rome at the time was that Balbo was sent to Libya to keep his "political shadow from darkening the Piazza Venezia".

Balbo was killed in a plane crash caused by "friendly fire" as his aircraft descended towards an airport in Tobruk soon after an earlier attack by British forces. Many at the time suspected that Balbo was the victim of a conspiracy by Mussolini. However, most historians dispute this.

Balbo is remembered for his efforts in promoting Italian Fascism through his feats of aviation which, as his visit to the Chicago World's Fair, brought pride to Italian diapora communities in the United States and Latin America. He disagreed with Mussolini's policy of alliance with Nazi Germany and was claimed to have been against the Fascist state's drift toward a policy of anti-Semitism.

But his legacy is also tainted by the documented violence instigated by Italian Blackshirt gangs including his own, the "Celibano". These gangs were involved in beatings, shootings and arson directed at political opponents. Indeed, he was implicated in the murder of Giovanni Minzoni, an anti-Fascist parish priest in Argenta, which is within Balbo's home region of Ferrara. And despite his often claimed opposition to state anti-Semitism, Balbo had Jews whipped for closing their stores on the Sabbath. He was part of the machinery of Italian colonialism which was replete with atrocities against Ethiopians, Libyans and Greeks.

Balbo has 3 civic tributes in his honour in the city of Chicago, namely the lakefront roadway known as Balbo Drive, an ancient Roman column in Burnham Park, sent by Mussolini as a gift to the city, and a statue of Columbus near the Field Museum, which bears a reference to the flight in an inscription on its base.

Efforts to rename Balbo Drive and remove the monuments have been strenously resisted by the Italian-American community which in an address in 1933 he had exhorted to be proud of their heritage because “Mussolini has ended the era of humiliations.” The first campaign to rename Balbo Drive occurred in 1946, but the resistance to renaming most streets and monuments bearing the names of Fascists such as Balbo had fewer complications in post-war Italy.