Commemoration of Italo Balbo
By Benito Mussolini
Officers! Student pilots! Airmen!
Today is a day of both pride and sadness for the Italian Air Force. A year has now passed since Air Marshal Italo Balbo and his whole crew crashed into the flames while on their way to inspect the troops fighting in the Tobruk sector.
Allow me on this sad but glorious anniversary to succinctly commemorate him.
For twenty-six years he was, at first, my disciple, later my follower, and, finally, my intimate collaborator. He was barely a boy when, in the stormy winter of 1914-1915, he presented himself in Milan at the editorial office of the "Lair". The "Lair" was indeed a lair where the young wolves of the new Italy were preparing to eliminate the pacifistic sheep that wanted to anchor themselves to the shame and dishonor of the 'parecchio' of Giolittian memory.
When war broke out, Italo Balbo left voluntarily and served throughout the whole war as an Alpino; an Alpino because he always had a love for high altitudes.
After the war, it was a matter of claiming victory and Fascism arose: two years, three years of hard battles, bloody clashes, during which thousands of Fascist martyrs fell in the streets and squares of Italy. Italo Balbo was the head squadrist of the Po Valley. Twenty years ago, I went to Ferrara to see what a profound moral transformation had taken place in the people of that fertile and generous land.
After three years, there was the March on Rome. Do not forget that today there would be no march on Moscow — a march that will be infallibly victorious — if the March on Rome had not taken place twenty years earlier, if, as the first in the world to do so, we had not raised the flag of anti-Bolshevism.
We were masters of power and we wanted to begin to remake Italy, not only materially, but above all spiritually; it was necessary to reform Italian Aviation, which I found in a state of bare minimalism, without sufficient equipment and without even the notion of what an Air Force must be.
A few years later, I appointed Italo Balbo as Undersecretary of the Air Force and shortly thereafter made him a minister.
We are in the era of great flights, we should remember also their forerunners: Ferrarin's first flight from Rome to Tokyo, the flight of Antonio Locatelli and thereafter De Pinedo. After individual attempts came mass flights.
The first was that of the southern Atlantic. I leave it to you to imagine the profound emotion of the three million Italians of Brazil when they saw Italian planes appear in the cities and on the soil of the great country that they had fertilized with their sweat and their blood.
Then came the North Atlantic Flight; more difficult, but also happily successful. An immense multitude welcomed the airmen upon their return to Rome. The superb skyscrapers of the most plutocratic city — New York — saw upon them the triumphant wings of the new, young Italy.
Later Italo Balbo was my precious collaborator as governor of Libya and head of the Armed Forces of Italian North Africa. What he has done is still well-preserved in our memory, from the emigration of the 20,000 Italian farmers to the construction of the great road that connects the two borders of Libya—whose usefulness has been revealed during these recent events.
Italo Balbo, a strong, passionate pilot, put all the enthusiasm and discipline of his spirit into his initiatives. He belonged to that Italian generation to which I gave the proud order to "live dangerously". If you want to appreciate the meaning and pride of life, you must live it dangerously. Be calm in the face of danger; only then will you be able to overcome it and achieve victory.
You too have been given this direct order. And you will succeed when you feel at one with the aircraft, when you feel that it is not the aircraft that flies, but it is you who flies, when you feel calm and safe in the skies during both peace and war, with the same security that the swallows and eagles show as they soar through the sky.
