ITALO BALBO

Evening Star, Issue 21743, 11 June 1934, Page 12

ITALO BALBO

HIS REMOVAL FROM ROME Monsieur Chiappe, refusing to be “ kicked upstairs ” from Paris police headquarters into the magnificent office of Resident General in Morocco, has rudely shaken the third French Republic (writes a correspondent to the ‘ Manchester Guardian ’). In Italy a Milan under orders to depart and govern his fatherland’s African realms had no choice but to quit the Ministry which he /had almost created and had identified with his own name these last ten years. Italo Balbo to-day sits in Tripoli, and his flatterers will tell him that he will soon be known as the Lyautey of Libya. Meanwhile, in the event of an emergency in Rome, Balbo would not, unless by a lucky chance, be the man on the spot ready to meet it. A month or two ago, as Minister of Aviation, Balbo was unquestionably the most powerful of Mussolini’s collaborators—-to-day, at several hours’ flight from Rome, he may. not quite know the measure of his powers and of those marshalled against him. The relegation of Italo _ Balbo to North Africa has been a decisive turning point in Fascist politics. Mussolini’s coadjutors—even the most notorious —have disappeared by the dozen, generally to obscurity or even disgrace. Farinacci, whom his followers in 1926 dared to , acclaim as Yice-Duce, dropped out of high politics in a week; he has continued only to exercise a certain sway in his local city of Cremona. His successor as Parliamentary Secretary, Augusto Turati, dropped into sheer obloquy. Earlier than these, in 1924, Aldo Finzi fell from close intimacy with the Duce straight into political limbo. These were among the tried “ revolutionaries ” whom Mussolini abased each in his due hour ; amateur Fascists like Giovanni Gentile and Count Volpi, who knew a brief or even a prolonged period of glory as collaborators, quietly "slipped back into academic or financial grooves, without causing the slightest difficulty. Blit Balbo—could he be liquidated so easily ? Has he, in fact, retired in dudgeon to the major Italian pro-con-sulate, or does he at .heart acquiesce in the Duce’s decision ? Formally, at all events, all is serene between the Duce and the Marshal Quadrumvir. But the inner story of the dismissal from_ the Air Ministry is told in many versions. A RECENT “LIFE.” A' book about Italo Balbo by an Italian writer, Antonio Aniante, was published in French in Paris at the moment of the recent change. Aniante is by way of being a particularly ardent Fascist, but his life, in French, of Mussolini, published not many months earlier, was banned from the bookshops in Italy with strong demonstrations of Mussolinian vexation. Some ascribed the life not to Aniante, but to a wellknown Fascist writer _ who was shortly after sent to exile in Lipavi Island. In the new book, ‘ Italo Balbo,’ the writer exalts Duce and Marshal as twin genii of the new Fascist civilisation, but the hyper-orthodox sentiments are expressed in a queer narrative in which the gossip of unofficial Italy is painstakingly introduced in the _ interstices of the panegyrics. Political indiscretions are not easily tolerated in Italy, and if Aniante meant real business with his Duceolatry would be risk some of the paragraphs in this book? Or is Aniante—if he wrote the book—obtuse or scheming? Balbo is fourteen years younger than Mussolini. Born in 1897 at Ferrara, he was already (as Aniante relates) contributing to Mussolini’s daily paper in 1914. .A “Fascist of the first hour” in 1919, he was, around that time, “ a tall, slender, well-propor-tioned youth, with tanned cheeks, lively roguish eyes, curly hair tossed to the wind, and a beard like a musketeer’s,” and he has not changed much since then. “MUSSOLINI’S GOERING.” In a very short time “ Balbo was Mussolini’s right-hand man; he did for him what Goering did. for Hitler.” In 1921 he collected 3,000 men and captured Ravenna from the Reds; the prefect in his own town of Ferrara humbly took orders from him. In 1922 Balbo twice besieged Parma, refusing to accept the mediation of prefect and bishop, but ready to lose hundreds of lives to gain the city. Fearful that Liberals and Socialists might any day agree to collaborate to suppress Fascism; he was all for the speediest resort to open rebellion, and was one of the four leaders of the- March. He still kept bludgeon in hand after the March on Rome until 1926, the end of the period of internal violence, when he turned all his energies to the air. As Air Minister, Balbo not only captained the two grandiose transatlantic flights in mass formation: he established his office in summer in a tent on the seashore, and wore shorts in preference to a Ministerial frock coat, and counted this a great achievement. In his new Ministry of Air, constructed (1932) with all glass doors, Balbo tried to break down by architectural suggestion, as well as by discipline, the tradi-

tion of the sedentary bureaucrat, well fenced off from the world with which his contacts are only epistolary. “ A demi-god of the upper regions,” Aniantc calls the young marshal, who can abstain from or indulge in the pleasures of the senses with equally robust departures from moderation, and lyrically alternates between savagery and tenderness towards his fellowhumans. Balbo undoubtedly had developed a “myth” which exalted him above even the supreme “ hierarchs ” of the party, to a sort of quasi-Dueeship, in the eyes of his admirers, who are particularly numerous in the armed forces. Of one of these, no longer the least important, he had direct personal control. The volume of hatreds against Balbo in the party is in proportion to the admiration. For those outside it he represents a more heady and insolent venturesomeness than Mussolini’s at any stage has been. Is North Africa field enough for such energy and ambitions?