The Atlantic Dreaming of Italo Balbo

Every day, about 600 transatlantic flights carry thousands of passengers safely between continents, high above one of the most dangerous stretches of ocean. It’s doubtful if more than a few give a thought to those who pioneered the routes, in primitive flying machines powered by unreliable engines. For many, it proved a leap too far.

This month marks the eightieth anniversary of one of those remarkable flights, now almost forgotten, that proliferated in the 1930s as aviation came of age. Daring flyers chased fame, records, sometimes prizes, their brave exploits uplifting the mood of a depressed world and promising a new era of transportation. But this event was different. Shortly after 7 p.m. on Wednesday July 19, 1933, a formation of twenty-four flying boats appeared over New York, circled the skyscrapers, saluted the Statue of Liberty and then touched down smoothly on the waters of the Floyd Bennett Naval Air Station off Coney Island. It had been a triumph of planning, training and technology. It was also a statement of politics and ideology and a massive publicity coup for the fascist government of Italy.

Italo Balbo, the swashbuckling blackshirt squadrista whose thugs had terrorised Ferrara’s co-operatives and fledgling workers’ movements into submission, promoted to head Italy’s air force, had been planning the flight for five years. One of the four leaders of the March on Rome which bluffed King Victor Emmanuel into establishing Mussolini’s fascist government in 1922, Balbo had seized the appointment of Secretary of State for Air as an opportunity to keep himself in the public eye and enhance his political prospects. His flamboyant style, his nose for publicity and his leadership qualities soon led to his being seen as Mussolini’s deputy and possible heir.

Balbo, however, was a more complex character than the other fascist leaders. Strongly republican in sentiment, he had written his degree thesis on the thoughts of Mazzini, the great intellectual campaigner for the unification of Italy. Yet one of his first acts in the Air Ministry was to create the Regia Aeronautica Italiana, the Royal Italian Air Force. His royalist sympathies increased as he became more disillusioned with Mussolini.

Balbo threw himself into aviation. He learned not only to fly, but also to pilot the clumsy multi-engine bombers, transports and flying boats of the era. Excited by the combination of evolving aeronautical technology and Italy’s superb engineering skills, he conceived the idea of a round-the-world flight of a squadron of flying boats. It was quickly abandoned, partly because of the cost, but also because of the difficulty in negotiating necessary landing rights due to Sino-Japanese tensions.

It was the age of flying boats. Every European power, as well as the USA and Japan, was designing and building flying boats and seaplanes, which then seemed the logical vehicle for commercial aviation. Aerodromes were scarce and undeveloped. Lakes, rivers and coastlines offered limitless landing fields, and with engines still unreliable, ubiquitous emergency landing areas.

One of Balbo’s first acts had been to lure back to Italy Filippo Zappata (who had been working in France for Bleriot) as chief designer for the Trieste-based builder of aircraft for Cantieri Aeronautici e Navali Triestini. This appointment had one of the strangest sequels in the Second World War. Zappata’s last design, the Z-511, was the biggest floatplane ever built, a four-engine monster intended for transatlantic passenger traffic. In 1943 the Italians planned to use the only two planes completed for an attack on American shipping. The idea was to fly the Atlantic, land offshore, and then taxi into New York harbour under the radar, where they would release Maiale manned torpedoes. These murderous devices with frogmen astride had already wrought havoc with British shipping in the Mediterranean. But one floatplane was crippled by allied aircraft at its training base on Lake Trasimeno, and the scheme was abandoned. It would have made a great movie.

The German Dornier company was the world’s leading flying-boat designer, and its Wal twin-engine high-wing monoplane was used around the world, as far as the Dutch East Indies. With production in Germany prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles, Dornier had to build these craft in Italy until 1932. In August 1930 Wolfgang von Gronau pioneered the northern route across the Atlantic in a Wal, flying from Sylt in the North Sea to New York via the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland and Labrador in forty-four hours. The same year, the Wal’s successor, the Do X, one of the biggest flying boats ever built, with twelve engines and accommodation for 100 passengers, flew from Germany to Brazil, then on to the West Indies, Miami and New York.

Italian companies Macchi and Savoia Marchetti were also developing flying boats in the 1920s, and the Marchetti S 55 was eventually improved in performance and reliability for it to be ordered in squadron numbers for the air force. Radical in design, it sat on twin hulls with a high single wing thick enough to house the cockpit. Above the wing were two engines, mounted in-line with tractor and pusher propellers. Twin booms supported the tail assembly. This was the aircraft chosen for Balbo’s Atlantic flight, designated S 55X—the X commemorating the tenth year of the fascist regime.

The Atlantic crossing had been in the minds of aviators and designers since the First World War established the potential of the aeroplane. The challenge quickly became an issue of national pride. As early as 1913, the London Daily Mail had offered a prize of £10,000 for the first flight between the USA, Canada or Newfoundland and Great Britain or Ireland, either way, within seventy-two hours. The war intervened before an attempt was made, but the prize was reinstituted in 1918.

The first successful flight was made in May 1919 by Lieutenant Commander Albert Read in a US Navy Curtiss flying boat, the NC-4. The plane had been built to hunt German U-boats, but it never saw service, and the Navy decided to put it to use as a display of American airpower. Read and his crew reached Portugal via the Azores in nineteen days, and Plymouth four days later, the first flight across any ocean. Three aircraft had set out. Despite the Navy having stationed twenty-one ships like a string of pearls along the route to guide them, NC-1 strayed off course in fog, ran out of fuel, and its crew had to be rescued by a freighter. NC-3 landed when it got lost, then taxied 200 miles to the Azores! NC-4 was restored and today is on display in the Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida, a proud relic of the biplane open-cockpit era.

In July the same year, the British airship R34 made the first round-trip crossing of the Atlantic from Scotland to New York and back. When it reached Long Island, a crew member had to parachute to the ground to organise the mooring.

In an attempt on the Daily Mail prize, Australian Harry Hawker, designer and test pilot for Sopwith, set off from Newfoundland in May 1919 but came down in mid-Atlantic when his engine over-heated. He and his navigator were rescued by a Danish tramp steamer without radio, and they were given up for lost. King George sent a telegram of condolence to his “widow”. When the ship reached port six days later, Britain rejoiced; the aviators were given a hero’s welcome and the newspaper give them £5000 for their pluck. The Harry Hawker Airport at Moorabbin, his birthplace in Victoria, is one of the few memorials to this pioneer airman, who died in a crash in 1921.

The next month, Alcock and Whitten-Brown won the prize with their flight in a Vickers Vimy bomber, flying non-stop from Newfoundland to Ireland in sixteen hours. It finished rather ignominiously when the landing field they chose in County Galway turned out to be a bog, and the plane ended on its nose. The aircraft is now in London’s Science Museum. Another Vimy flown by Ross and Keith Smith won the Australian government’s prize of £10,000 in December 1919 for the first Australians to fly an aircraft from England to Australia. Their plane, registration G-EAOU, affectionately known as “God ’elp all of us”, is preserved behind glass at Adelaide Airport.

The 1920s brought an aviation boom. In August 1924, four US Army officers flew around the world east to west, with the last hops via England, Iceland and Greenland. Their Douglas World Cruiser Chicago can be seen in the Smithsonian Museum, Washington.

In 1926 and 1927 Spanish and Portuguese flying boats crossed the South Atlantic safely to Brazil, but by then attempts to fly the North Atlantic from east to west against the westerlies were claiming lives. In May 1927, Frenchmen Nungesser and Coli took off from Paris in a Levasseur PL-8 biplane L’Oiseau Blanc but disappeared. Wreckage found in lobster pots off Maine has been claimed to be from the plane, and French expeditions are still trying to prove that the flight crossed the ocean before Lindbergh’s historic flight a fortnight later. While attempting the flight, Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Minchin in a Fokker in August 1927 and Ray Hinchcliffe in a Stinson in March 1928 both disappeared, with their passengers.

Australia’s excitement about Charles Kingsford-Smith’s epic trans-Pacific flight in 1928 has obscured his equally courageous east-west crossing of the Atlantic in the Southern Cross in June 1930. Three quarters of the way through the thirty-one-hour flight, Smithy became disoriented by fatigue and refused to believe his compasses. He flew around in circles for three hours, using fuel that would have enabled him to reach New York. He was fortunate to find a small airstrip at Harbour Grace in Newfoundland. His subsequent arrival in America was greeted with a ticker-tape parade down Broadway, and a reception by President Hoover in Washington. The Southern Cross is displayed at Brisbane Airport. Three months later, French pilots Costes and Bellonte flew from Paris to New York in thirty-seven and a half hours, to claim the record for the first successful non-stop east-west crossing.

Italians had not been idle. In 1925, Francesco de Pinedo flew a single-engine biplane flying boat from Rome to Australia, the Philippines, Tokyo and back, covering 55,000 miles in six months. Arturo Ferrarin and Carlo del Prete in 1928 made a non-stop Atlantic crossing from Italy to Brazil to set a world distance record of 7188 kilometres. This was 1600 kilometres further than Lindbergh’s flight the previous year and lasted sixteen hours longer.

So when Balbo came to plan what he called “The Atlantic Cruise”, the route was well-travelled but still dangerous. In 1930 he had led a flight of twelve S-55s down the coast of Africa and then across the South Atlantic to Brazil. Accidents on that trip cost five lives and three aircraft; that taught him that meticulous preparations were needed for the North Atlantic crossing. At the flying-boat base at Orbetello on the Tuscan coast, he set up a special training school for seventy elite airmen, where they were drilled in mathematics, navigation, aeronautics, meteorology, wireless communication and English. The flying boat hulls were rebuilt and more powerful engines installed. The latest Marconi direction-finding equipment was fitted and the new Sperry artificial horizon went into each aircraft to permit blind flying in fog and cloud. Eleven ships including six English whalers were commissioned to hold station at 340-kilometre intervals across the ocean.

The expedition had no space for risk if it was to showcase the modern Italy under Mussolini. It was a propitious time. Primo Carnera had just won the world heavyweight championship; the liner Rex had taken the Blue Riband of the Atlantic for the fastest crossing; Mussolini had just orchestrated the Four Power Pact between Italy, France, Germany and England. Britain might have won the Schneider Cup for seaplane racing outright, but an Italian Macchi MC-72 seaplane (which couldn’t be made to work for the Cup) set a new world record of 682 kilometres per hour. Despite the depression, it was opportune to drop in on the Century of Progress Fair in Chicago.

Balbo was as theatrical as Mussolini. He organised his twenty-four aircraft into eight arrowheads of three planes each and began with his armada soaring magnificently over the Alps. The registration of each aircraft incorporated the first letters of the captain’s name; his was I-BALB. The stops at Amsterdam, Londonderry, Reykjavik, Cartright (in Labrador), Shediac (in Newfoundland) and Montreal attracted huge excitement.

How did twenty-four aircraft maintain formation over that distance? Balbo himself described the technique in one of his communiqués syndicated to the world press. When fog was sighted, the outside aircraft in each group of three altered course by forty-five degrees for a fixed time, and then resumed the original compass heading. Even with greater separation, this involved incredibly accurate flying to avoid collision.

After two weeks, forty-eight hours flying time, and almost 10,000 kilometres covered at 200 kilometres per hour, the arrival in Chicago was sensational. Forty-three American fighter aircraft escorted the flotilla from Detroit, forming the word ITALY; the huge airship Macon cruised overhead, and 300,000 Italo-Americans were waiting to cheer the atlantici, as Balbo called his crews. Seventh Street was renamed Balbo Avenue, and Mussolini promised the city a Roman column from the ancient city of Ostia. Both are there today. At the Indian display at the Chicago Fair, Sioux Chief Crazy Bull made Balbo “Chief Flying Eagle”, with headdress.

When the planes flew on to New York, there was a Broadway parade, a banquet for 4000 at the Hotel Commodore and a huge welcome in Madison Square Garden. The flyers were showered with flowers as they made their way to the podium. Balbo’s address was described by American author Claudio Segre in his history Italo Balbo: A Fascist Life as little more than the credo of a patriot, scarcely passionately fascist as Mussolini had hoped.

“Italians of New York,” he began,

people of my blood and faith; my aerial expedition has come to New York to bring greetings from Mussolini’s Italy. Be proud to be Italians. Mussolini has ended the period of humiliations; to be Italian is now a sign of honour.

Never had the two nations of the tricolour and the star-spangled banner been divided, he said. Nor (taking a risky leap into prophecy) “would the future ever divide them”. General “Billy” Mitchell, the gadfly opposing dreadnoughts, later to become known as the father of the American Air Force, took the opportunity to assert that the USA was allowing foreign nations to outstrip it in air forces.

Balbo was invited to the White House; President Roosevelt suggested the Italians should go barnstorming around the USA. But the tensions between Balbo and Mussolini were starting to surface. Mussolini demanded that Balbo organise a message of congratulation to him from the President. Protocol demanded that it be sent to the King, and it was; Mussolini received a message from the Secretary of State.

I have a copy of the Italian film of the flight and the visit, taken by the cameraman on the planes. It shows Balbo everywhere saluting in the American style, not once with the fascist salute. American newspapers, while enthusiastic about the aviators’ feat, were cautious about fascism in their editorials.

After two weeks of exhausting hospitality, the Italians’ last days were overshadowed by two other aviation events. Wiley Post flew home in his Lockheed Vega after the first solo circumnavigation of the world. (His plane is in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.) He had left the day the flotilla reached Chicago and was back again to share their spotlight in New York. Then James Mollison and his wife Amy Johnson crash-landed on the racetrack-airfield at Bridgeport, Connecticut, at the end of their Atlantic flight from Wales in a de Havilland Dragon Rapide. They stole the headlines, and were feted too, when they recovered from their injuries.

Bad weather forced Balbo to play safe and change the route home—via the Azores and Lisbon —dimming his hopes that the flight would prove a pathfinder for commercial services. Commercial flights would not be possible until precise weather forecasts were available, he said. “By 2000,” he wrote, “passengers will think nothing of crossing the Atlantic at 20,000 metres.” Italian aircraft were not capable of such all-weather flights, but in August 1938 a four-engine Focke-Wulf Condor flew non-stop from Berlin to New York to demonstrate a Lufthansa Atlantic service.

On their return, Balbo and his atlantici were given a Roman triumph, with a procession down the Via dei Fori Imperiali and through the Arch of Constantine, with Balbo, newly promoted to air marshal, the conquering hero. Mussolini welcomed him somewhat coldly: “With the passage of time, your flight will become legendary.” In the streets of Rome, large posters of Mussolini in flying suit in front of a squadron of planes suggested he was the great Atlantic aviator; the Italian press referred to “the Wings of Mussolini under the guidance of Balbo”.

Two months later, Mussolini signed an order relieving Balbo of his Air Ministry post, took all three armed services under his personal control, and appointed Balbo governor of Libya. The crews of the Atlantic flight were dispersed, and emphasis was switched from flying boats to land-based transports that could serve as bombers.

Rumours swirled around these moves. Undoubtedly Mussolini was keen to neutralise Balbo’s immense popularity in Italy, and prevent the strong royalist sentiment in the armed forces being energised against him. Anti-fascists in exile claimed Balbo had an incriminating letter Mussolini wrote to him at the time of the March on Rome, saying, “I’ll leave you to get rid of the King.” Mussolini’s counter was an accusation of mismanagement of the air force, overstating its strength and capacity while concentrating on his Atlantic frolics.

In the event, Balbo went quietly and threw himself energetically into the development of Italy’s most important colony. His letters and writings show his propensity to intemperate criticism of Mussolini but he never challenged his authority. He was always a fascist, but a strong opponent of Nazism. We know from Count Ciano’s diaries that Balbo opposed Italy’s entry into Hitler’s war, argued that Italy’s armed forces were inadequate and unprepared, and flew back to Rome to try to persuade Mussolini to side with Britain. From Tripoli, he telegraphed Mussolini for planes and tanks, saying that “at the first English thrust, the front would collapse like a sand castle”. It did.

In June 1940, nine British Blenheims bombed the T2 airfield in Italian-held Tobruk, catching the defenders by surprise. A few minutes later two more planes approached at low level; this time the gunners were ready and shot them down. They were Savoia Marchetti 79s, and one was carrying Italo Balbo.

The Chicago flight was a tour de force of formation flying and attracted worldwide interest. The Lord Mayor of Sydney, Alderman R.C. Hagon, invited the squadron to Australia, and Japan also issued an invitation. But it proved little in aeronautical terms; indeed the cost and effort diverted resources better spent on developing the air force. The S 55 boats were obsolete. Only two years later, the first flight of Boeing Model 299 took place; a four-engine bomber with a range of 3500 kilometres that Italians later came to know well as the B-17 Flying Fortress. Its civil sister, the Model 300, became the pressurised Stratoliner and was to have been built under licence in Italy by Breda in 1940.

The only known example of an S 55 flying boat surviving today is an early model in Museu Asas de Um Sonho (Wings of a Dream Museum) in Sao Carlos, Brazil. I-BALB was being conserved for a museum to commemorate the Chicago flight when it was destroyed in the war.