In the southern Illinois town of Marion, an octogenarian recalls the arrival of the Italian armada of 24 Savoia Marchetti S. 55X hydroplanes at Chicago’s Century of Progress on July 15, 1933. He was a 21-year-old clarinetist with the Jefferson Barracks (Saint Louis) Sixth Infantry band stationed in Chicago for the exposition. For months his band had alternated with its Fort Sheridan counterpart in escorting distinguished visitors and Chicago politicians onto the grounds. On that limpid Saturday he had been ordered to report unusually early to the bowels of Soldier Field, where the band rehearsed briefly with an Italian tenor whose volume made it difficult for the musicians to hear themselves play. By 9 AM, a crowd the clarinetist now thinks must have been made up of 125,000 Italians (reporters estimated that perhaps 100,000 Chicagoans were in the stadium) had congregated above, expecting to see General Italo Balbo and his armada fly over around noon. They were to have a long wait. One band played for 45 minutes as the tenor sang, then after a 15-minute break in which the crowd chanted, “Where’s Balbo?” the other band performed its 45 minutes while the tenor sang. And so on throughout the day.
Even in a time of exhilarating aerial successes and noble failures, the Balbo flight was an impressive achievement. Balbo and Mussolini, each understanding by professional experience how to get the attention of the masses through the media, dedicated extraordinary effort and resources to this display of Fascist technology and human accomplishment. The brochure of the Italian Pavilion at the Century of Progress pointed out that the building, located at the south end of the Avenue of Flags, symbolized Italy’s technological competitiveness–it resembled a giant airplane. Italy’s enormous exhibit stressed the nation’s “remarkable achievements in engineering, physics, medicine, geography, astronomy, agriculture, shipping and aviation from the time of the Caesars to the present day.” The pavilion could not hold all its country’s displays, which spilled out into portions of the Hall of Science and the Adler Planetarium, and even into the Museum of Science and Industry far to the south.
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It was Balbo, however, whose chemistry focused the world’s attention. A consummate planner and organizer, he had a flair for the dramatic gesture. After years of political and technological preparation, three weeks of flight covering 6,100 miles, and the loss of a plane and a crewman in Amsterdam, he ended the ordeal with the aplomb befitting an international hero. In the words of a Tribune reporter:
These flights were but preparations for the North Atlantic trip that was to catch the world’s imagination and demonstrate that not only commercial but also, perhaps, large-scale and long-range military flights were possible. Balbo’s armada, as Segre points out, carried 96 fliers to Chicago–11 more men than the three ships of Columbus contained and 28 more than had been involved in Balbo’s own crossing to Rio. And this flight was accomplished with little loss of life and aircraft.
For Balbo to refuse the honors accorded him would have been rude if not impossible. Balbo was launched in the States into high society and into the popular imagination. Everyone wanted to see or be seen with him. On the return trip to Italy, Balbo and his fellow fliers were accorded a ticker tape parade in New York. President Roosevelt–not unaware that Mussolini’s Fascist regime had worked something of an economic miracle during those early Depression years–invited Balbo and a few of his top officers to lunch. Even after he returned home and was made governor of Libya by Mussolini–in what was universally understood to be an attempt to diminish his political importance–Balbo remained a prominent figure in aviation, respected particularly among his fellow fliers around the world. In 1935, he and Aldo Pellegrini, second in command of the armada, were awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, an honor previously reserved for American citizens such as Lindbergh, Richard Byrd, and Amelia Earhart.
Without neglecting Balbo’s faults, Segre suggests the way in which Balbo’s heroic self was molded. It was a mixture of deeds and personality, a combination Dwight Eisenhower knew to be attractive to Americans. He was naturally gregarious, generous, fun- and pleasure-loving, and theatrical, but he was deadly serious when it came to discipline, particularly when discipline was needed to forward a political goal, win a confrontation, or lead an armada to distant destinations. He knew how to balance high risk with precautions that gave him the odds. (In his mid-20s he masterminded the campaign to crush the socialists and any others who would deny the fascisti their rise to power.) But above all he was pragmatic in a way that Mussolini and other Fascists never seemed to be. He sensed that Mussolini had signaled the death knell for Italy when Il Duce threw in with Hitler, and he seemed bemused by his position as a general who would carry out orders from Rome even though he knew a disaster was in the works. Some believe his “accidental” death was a direct result of his differences with Mussolini. When Balbo, family members, and some friends were shot out of the air by “friendly” fire at Tobruk on June 28, 1940, just short of a fortnight after Italy entered the war, nations aligned against one another joined in common expressions of sorrow that a great man had died.
As the survivors among the 1933 atlantici became fewer, and the significance of their flight more obscure, its public memory was kept alive primarily by decennial celebrations in Chicago. But the last celebration of consequence took place 20 years ago. In Chicago a parade was led by Mayor Richard J. Daley and Governor Dan Walker, and the flight–in Segre’s words–was remembered as “a great adventure, an inspiration to courageous and resourceful aviators of all nations,” and “as a memorable link in the long chain of Italian-American friendship.” In stark contrast, the few atlantici who got together in Italy in an “almost surreptitious” meeting seemed “almost embarrassed” by a film of the crowds welcoming the aviators in Chicago, New York, and Rome 40 years before.
