CHAPTER 1
In the spring of 1933, Germany’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, arrived in Rome to arrange the details of the first meeting between his master, Adolf Hitler, and Italy’s Il Duce, Benito Mussolini. He arrived in style. Ensconced aboard the giant airship, the Graf Zeppelin, Goebbels descended from the skies like some queer, elfish genie. The Graf’s captain, Hugo Eckener, held a low opinion of its VIP passenger and the noxious ideology he propagated. Perhaps, then, it was no coincidence that his trusted lieutenant, Ernst Lehmann, commanded the airship on its flight to the “Eternal City” instead. Lehmann was a professional. The airship’s landing required all his attention, and the theatrics were a symptom of the wonder this creation engendered, something to which he had long since become accustomed. The Nazis clearly hoped to highjack this for their own purposes. For Eckener, stunts such as this were forcing him closer to having to make a choice between decency and expediency. He wasn’t always going to be able to beg off these unpleasant interactions with high Nazi officials.
The rise of Adolf Hitler to absolute power earlier in the year had occurred with dizzying speed once the aging President Paul von Hindenburg had appointed him chancellor. Hitler had never won an election, but his rogue political party had been brought into the circles of power by the political right in Germany, in the hope that it could be contained and used. It turned out to be the other way around. With the Brownshirts holding torchlit vigils and marching through the streets chanting blut und Boden (“blood and soil”), the Nazis terrorized their opponents and insisted on using their swastika emblem as the national symbol. Hitler’s will to power would now embody the national will as well. Coverage of giant rallies, and an endless barrage of chauvinism, half-truths, and outright lies poured forth from cheap new mass-produced radios. The evil marketing genius behind this campaign was Goebbels. Perhaps of all of Hitler’s lackies (who ran the gamut from the urbane intellectual, Albert Speer, to near-moron, Rudolf Hess), Goebbels was the most in tune with Hitler, and the most effective (and therefore dangerous) advocate/enabler for his twisted worldview. His trip to Rome aboard such an indisputable and virulent symbol of German technology and aeronautical skill held significance, which he fully understood. And Rome was not just any city; it was, after all, the Eternal City, the great imperial city of ancient Rome. Not for nothing had the Nazis adopted the Roman imperial eagle for their standards on display at rallies and other public events. The Fascist salute with the right arm outstretched, at a slight angle with palm down, was not merely aping Mussolini’s Italy; it was making an explicit connection between the Third Reich and the glory that was Rome. Hitler’s Germany (and by implication, not Mussolini’s Italy) would be the new Rome, whose world mastery, like that of her ancient forebears, would last one thousand years. Swept up with the speed and totality of Nazi political success in Germany, it was easy to see why someone like Goebbels could actually believe nonsense such as this. And what is propaganda anyway, but national or ideological mythmaking? Goebbels’s visit looked to shape that myth. In a speech he made during that period, he was quite explicit about this, but he went beyond it to mine and cultivate old hatreds and suspicions of his fellow Germans toward their Jewish neighbors:
A good government cannot survive without good propaganda. Nor can good propaganda without a good government. If Jewish papers think they can intimidate National Socialists. I tell them, beware. One-day our patience will end and then we’ll shut those lying Jews’ mouths.1
Anti-Semitism would prove to be the line that Italo Balbo would not cross in his endorsement of the Fascist life. In his own time, he was a world-renowned celebrity aviator and probably the world’s best public face for fascism as an ideology, in the world. But he was not a racist, and thus being chosen by Mussolini to be his official emissary, to stand beside the king, and to welcome this raving bigot to Rome must have been a trying experience. In a film produced at the time to commemorate the giant airship’s visit, one can readily sense the awkwardness of the meeting.2 This would be repeated throughout Balbo’s career as an aviator and then as a colonial governor—he would make nice because Il Duce willed it, but his heart clearly wasn’t in it. Neither was his head. He would long be a (quiet) critic of an Italo-German alliance, fearing Italy would simply become a puppet of the Nazis, with likely destructive results for his country.3 That said, he shared with the Nazis their disdain for leftists and liberal democracies, arguing in a similar fashion to Goebbels the expediency of propaganda for controlling the masses: “Propaganda is the instinctive need of the convinced. . . . It appears absurd that others do not think like me.”4
Photo taken during Joseph Goebbels’s 1933 visit to Rome. Goebbels is third from left; Italo Balbo is fourth from left. Getty Images.
Goebbels, perhaps sensing Balbo’s discomfort, insisted on having Italy’s world-renowned air minister ascend for a cruise above Rome in the Graf. Balbo had accompanied King Victor Emanuel III to greet their German guests, but he clearly outshined the uninspiring representative of the House of Savoy. Photographs taken of the giant airship hovering over the Eternal City provided a powerful juxtaposition of the past and the future, as St. Peter’s Basilica, the Colosseum, and the Palatine Hill fell under its shadow as it flew overhead. For his part, Balbo was not particularly fond of airships. His countryman, Umberto Nobile, had crashed the airship he was commanding during an Arctic expedition just a few years before, with tragic results. Italy had to call on the efforts of an international team, along with the resources of its own Aeronautica, to rescue the survivors. And for what? Balbo questioned the utility of such enterprises, never mind the risk. But the Graf held a certain allure. Hugo Eckener and Italo Balbo were certainly aware of each other. Three years earlier they had been asked, along with Charles Lindbergh, to provide testimony before the League of Nations’ Committee on Communications and Transit, in Geneva. The topic was air transport cooperation. The three eagles cumulatively made a compelling argument for an international air transit system, in which zeppelins, land-based aircraft, and seaplanes would complement rather than compete with each other.5 It was a promising beginning. Both Eckener and Balbo knew they shared a common destination later that year—Chicago. It was an exciting time, but it was also one fraught with anxiety.
Soon after the rendezvous in Rome, Balbo headed north to his base at Orbetello on a lagoon near a remote peninsula on the Tyrrhenian Sea. Named Scuola di Navigazione Aerea di Alto Mare,* it began operations on New Year’s Day, 1930.6 Balbo’s pilots were some of the world’s finest. Over the past five years they had completed three great aerial cruises flying twin-hulled Savoia-Marchetti seaplanes: two to either end of the Mediterranean, and the most ambitious, a trans-Atlantic crossing to Brazil. Though not without cost, the success of the 1931 expedition to Brazil had not only catapulted Italo Balbo to truly worldwide fame, it had also convinced the Italian government to back his long-planned Chicago project. Now, he and his pilots and their crews were readying themselves to cross the North Atlantic to the World’s Fair on Lake Michigan. It would test both their skill and the technology at their command. As May blurred into June on the blue waters, practice flights increased in frequency, and night flights and celestial navigation became de rigueur for what Balbo called his “aristocracy of the Aeronautica.” He claimed the base maintained a monkish, quasi-religious atmosphere, and yet Balbo had his own personal field tent furnished with polar bear and lion skins, pitched in a grove of dark green pine trees. Here under the stars with a beach and the peak of Monte Argentario nearby, he lived what he termed an “aboriginal life” with—it was rumored—his beautiful mistress. But always he donned a dinner jacket in the evening. America consumed his thoughts. He had visited it once before.
In 1928–1929, Italo Balbo had visited the United States with his wife and a number of aides to present a paper at an international aviation conference in Washington, DC. He decided to take advantage of the opportunity to make a coast-to-coast tour of the country. Presaging what was to come, he was invited to visit an aeronautical exhibition in Chicago as an honored guest. The “Windy City” with its famous downtown “Loop” was utterly unlike anything in Europe: Its size, pace, the height of its buildings. In fact, everything he experienced in America—particularly the country’s scale—made a lasting impression on Balbo. While in the Midwest, he and his wife had stopped in Dayton to meet Orville Wright, and then stopped in Detroit to meet with Henry Ford. Ford was an odd mix of ruthless businessman, socially-minded progressive, and vicious anti-Semite. According to Balbo biographer, Claudio Segrè, the Italian aviator found Ford “a charmer whose directness in appearance and manner Balbo found delightful.”7 Ford would later play a critical role in advancing aviation and space exploration in connection with the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair.
Balbo toured U.S. military bases and was impressed with the skill of American pilots. It might now seem strange that the U.S. military would have allowed such close inspection of its facilities and methods by a Fascist air minister. In 1941, of course, the two countries would go to war. But in the late 1920s up through of the creation of the Rome-Berlin Axis in 1936, this inevitable collision was in no way self-evident. As historian R. J. B. Bosworth remarked, Fascist Italy at this time had a “fascination with aspects of the U.S. mission in the world” and until “very late in its history . . . did not reliably place the USA among its certain foes.”8
During this transcontinental odyssey, Balbo also felt keenly his transplanted countrymen’s pride in having remade their lives anew in the New World and their sense of quiet humiliation about the country they had felt forced, by want, to leave. He longed to return, but this time not as an observer of America, but as a discoverer of new air routes to her shores, and as an unarmed conqueror of her skies. Chicago’s World’s Fair, which by its announced opening in May 1933 was being held against all the odds in the bleakest days of the Depression, was his vehicle for realizing this vision. Chicago knew something about hosting world’s fairs. Balbo was sure the city would know how to frame his achievement—if he could pull it off.
As soon as the Graf Zeppelin left Rome, Balbo’s thoughts returned to the upcoming mission. The seaplanes he and his men would be flying were Savoia-Marchetti’s latest upgrade, designated with an X by the Sesto Calende–based company. Also, for the first time. Balbo would have directional gyros and artificial horizons—manufactured by Sperry of the United States—installed in the instrumental panels on the flight decks. Everything that needed to be done was being done, but there was always the unconsidered factor, the “unknown unknown” that can drive leaders mad with anxiety. But the objective was worth it. This could prove to be the greatest World’s Fair of all time—he understood this. After another day of training and training again, and again, making sure all of the pieces were steadily coming together, then turning in for the night, and in that nether world between wakefulness and dreams, one image appearing over and over again in his melting consciousness, Chicago . . .
Footnote
* “The High Seas Air Navigation School.”