The death of Italo Balbo

Late in the afternoon of 28 June 1940 two three-engined Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 bombers appeared over the Libyan port of Tobruk. A quarter of an hour or so earlier British Blenheims had bombed the town and the airfield, smoke still hung over the harbour, and the anti-aircraft crews were waiting for another attack. As the first of the aircraft came in to land, they opened fire on it. The machine burst into flames and crashed. At its controls sat Air Marshal Italo Balbo, Governor-General of Libya and commander of all Italian forces in North Africa, one of the best-known figures of Fascist Italy. He was killed together with the whole crew and all the passengers, eighteen days after Italy declared war on France and Britain. It was a case of friendly fire, on which historians are agreed.

Airman and governor

At the time of his death Balbo was forty-four and had behind him a career such as few made in Fascist Italy. Born in 1896 near Ferrara, he fought in the First World War as an officer of the Alpini, and after the war he took command of the Fascist squads in his home town. His men were notorious for their brutality towards socialists and trade unionists. In October 1922 he was one of the four quadrumvirs who led the March on Rome, which brought Benito Mussolini to power. As air minister in 1929–1933 he built up the Regia Aeronautica. He won world fame with two mass transatlantic flights of seaplanes that he led himself: in 1930–1931 from Orbetello to Rio de Janeiro, and in 1933 from Italy to Chicago and New York. In the United States he was greeted as a hero, and a street in Chicago was named after him.

Balbo’s popularity worried Mussolini. At the turn of 1933 and 1934 the dictator appointed him governor of Italian Libya, a move widely seen as an honourable banishment of a rival far from Rome. Balbo, however, treated the colony as his own creation. He built a coastal highway from the Tunisian border to the Egyptian one, named the Via Balbia after him, and brought in thousands of Italian settlers. He was also the most independent of the regime’s senior dignitaries. At the sessions of the Fascist Grand Council in 1938 he opposed the introduction of the anti-Jewish laws, and he openly criticised the rapprochement with Germany. According to accounts collected by his biographers, after the German occupation of Bohemia in March 1939 he told other members of the Council that they would all end up cleaning the Germans’ boots. He disliked the Pact of Steel, and in the autumn of 1939, when Italy declared “non-belligerence”, he was among those who favoured keeping out of the war and even considering an understanding with Britain and France. Mussolini did not listen to this advice.

The Libyan front

When Italy entered the war on 10 June 1940, Balbo commanded forces in Libya that on paper numbered fourteen divisions and some 236,000 men. In the west, on the border with French Tunisia, stood General Italo Gariboldi’s 5th Army; in the east, on the Egyptian border, General Mario Berti’s 10th Army. It was, however, an infantry army, short of lorries, with almost no modern tanks and unprepared for desert warfare. Orders from Rome were to stay on the defensive. Balbo knew the reality and, in letters to the Chief of the General Staff, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, demanded lorries, anti-tank guns and tanks.

The first days of the war confirmed his fears. The British had far fewer troops in Egypt, but their armoured units and armoured cars were fully motorised. As early as the night of 11–12 June British patrols crossed the border; on 14 June they took the frontier forts of Capuzzo and Maddalena, and in the following days they captured hundreds of Italians, including a senior staff officer of the 10th Army. Balbo flew over the desert in person looking for British armoured cars, and on 21 June, according to Italian accounts, he landed next to one of them and helped to capture it. The situation improved only after the fall of France. Following the armistice of Compiègne, the French signed an armistice with Italy as well on 24 June; on 25 June operations on the Tunisian front ceased, and Balbo was able to begin moving troops from the west to the Egyptian border. According to some accounts, it was on 28 June that an order came from Rome to prepare an offensive against Egypt.

The last flight

On 28 June Balbo took off from the airfield at Derna accompanied by a second SM.79 carrying General Felice Porro, commander of the 5th Air Fleet (5ª Squadra aerea), the air force in Libya. Their destination was the airfield near Tobruk, from which both intended to set out on another sortie against British armoured cars. Balbo was flying the aircraft himself. There were nine people on board. Alongside the marshal flew three crew members – the co-pilot, Major Ottavio Frailich, a flight engineer and a radio operator – all three veterans of his transatlantic flight of 1933. The passengers were Balbo’s brother-in-law and nephew; the federal secretary of the Fascist Party in Tripoli, Enrico Caretti; the director of the Libyan airline; and the marshal’s friend, the journalist Nello Quilici, editor-in-chief of the Ferrara daily Corriere Padano.

According to Italian accounts, the two aircraft reached Tobruk at about half past five in the afternoon, shortly after the British raid. Balbo came down to land without warning the base. The aircraft came in low, out of the setting sun, and the airfield and the harbour were still shrouded in smoke. The first to open fire was the old armoured cruiser San Giorgio, anchored in the harbour and serving as a floating anti-aircraft battery, and guns and machine guns on land then joined in. Porro’s aircraft managed to escape with a sharp turn. Balbo’s machine, hit on its approach, caught fire and crashed. No one survived. Which battery scored the hit has never been settled. One of the San Giorgio’s gunners claimed for years that he had shot the aircraft down, while the journalist and documentary maker Folco Quilici, son of one of the dead, drew attention in a 2004 book on the events and in later publications to an Italian submarine then lying in the harbour, from which, according to some publications, a burst may also have been fired.

Rumours of assassination

The official Italian armed forces communiqué of 29 June stated that the marshal’s aircraft had “fallen in flames” in the skies over Tobruk “during an enemy air raid”, and called Balbo himself “an air marshal fallen in combat”. It did not say outright who had shot him down. National mourning was declared from 29 June to 4 July, the marshal was posthumously awarded the Gold Medal of Military Valour, and on 4 July he was buried in Tripoli.

Because Balbo was regarded as Mussolini’s rival and critic, and because the editor of a newspaper not always obedient to the censors was also on board, rumours soon spread that his death had been no accident. They were repeated most insistently by his widow, Emanuela Florio, who was convinced that the order had come from Rome. Mussolini is credited with saying of Balbo: “A fine Alpino, a great airman, a true revolutionary. The only one who would have been capable of killing me.” Historians who have studied the case, however, including Balbo’s biographer Giorgio Rochat and the American historian Claudio Segre, consider the assassination theory groundless. Too many soldiers took part in the firing, no one could have foreseen that the marshal would land just after a British raid, and the report of the general who flew in the second aircraft, found among Mussolini’s papers, describes the course of events in line with the account of a tragic mistake. Folco Quilici reached the same conclusion. Most researchers accept that nervous gunners, in the confusion after the raid, took the approaching aircraft for a second wave of British bombers.

Badoglio, who was with Mussolini when he learned of Balbo’s death, recalled that the dictator showed not the slightest emotion. Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law, noted in his diary that Balbo had not deserved such an end; that he was exuberant and restless and loved life in all its forms; and that he had not wanted this war and had opposed it to the very last.

His enemies, too, paid tribute to him. The RAF commander in the Middle East, Air Chief Marshal Arthur Longmore, who had known Balbo personally, ordered a wreath with a letter of condolence to be dropped over an Italian airfield a few days later. In it the British air force expressed its sympathy at the death of “a great leader and a gallant airman”, whom “fate had placed on the other side”.

Graziani in Libya

A few days later Mussolini appointed as Balbo’s successor in both his posts, as governor of Libya and commander of the forces in North Africa, Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, until then chief of the army general staff, notorious for the ruthless pacification of Cyrenaica in the early 1930s and for his rule in Ethiopia. The choice was telling. In place of an airman who doubted the sense of the war, even as he loyally prepared for it, came a general whose fame rested on colonial warfare against poorly armed opponents.

Place in the war

Balbo’s death was the first major loss to the Italian high command in this war and at the same time a symbol of its chaotic beginning: Italy’s most famous airman was killed by his own side’s guns, in a colony that, just as every warning had said, proved unprepared for war with the British. It also removed from Mussolini’s circle one of the few men who openly criticised the alliance with Hitler.

Graziani long delayed his offensive, convinced, as Balbo had been, that his army was not ready. Only under threat of dismissal did he advance into Egypt on 13 September 1940, reaching Sidi Barrani and halting there. In December 1940 much smaller but motorised British forces destroyed the 10th Army in Operation Compass, took the whole of eastern Libya, including Tobruk in January 1941, and captured some 130,000 Italians. The defeat prompted Hitler to send German troops to Africa under Erwin Rommel, and for the next two years the Libyan-Egyptian front was one of the main theatres of the war. How Balbo would have conducted this campaign has remained one of the many “what ifs” of the historiography. His remains lay in Tripoli until 1970, when, after Muammar Gaddafi seized power in Libya, his family moved them to Orbetello.