Chicago cheered as Italo Balbo led a squadron of 24 Italian aircraft that splashed down in Lake Michigan 90 years ago

Italian Gen. Italo Balbo’s arrival in Chicago was a spectacular performance freighted with future history. Early on the evening of July 15, 1933, his air fleet could be glimpsed amid the enveloping mists of the city’s heavily industrialized South Side.

The sight broke the palpable tension rippling through an immense crowd lining the city’s lakefront. Balbo and the 24 airplanes under his command were late, having had to improvise a route from Montreal for the last leg in their 6,100-mile journey from Rome.

“We had to modify the course passing to the north of Lake Ontario because thunderstorms were forming there,” Balbo explained after landing. “Throughout the day we found turbulent air, which taxed our nerves.”

Only 30 years before, Wilber Wright had flown 120 feet in a bare-bones airplane. The Wright brothers had received design advice from Octave Chanute, who in 1896 got aloft in a nonmotorized glider in Miller Beach, Indiana — over which Balbo’s squadron likely passed shortly before arriving in Chicago.

But while the Wrights’ first aircraft looked like a glider with a motor, Balbo’s planes were heavyweights: multiton metal monsters equipped with pontoons enabling them to take off and land on water.

They flew in a tight 24-craft formation with Balbo’s plane above and behind the others.

“Seagulls flew ahead of the planes as if to show them how to do it,” wrote a Tribune reporter who watched them pass over the site of Chicago’s 1933 World’s Fair and the Loop. “One large gull circled and banked and soared near the planes as they came down lower and lower, facing North and heading for the shelter of the breakwater.”

Awaiting the rest of his squadron, Balbo strolled on his airplane’s wing, a swagger stick in one hand. “He lit a cigaret, surveyed the scene and smiled happily,” reported the Tribune, which also opined that he looked like a gentleman headed to an afternoon tea.

When he did come ashore on Navy Pier, Balbo pronounced: “Chicago — grande metropoli.”

He and his squadron were driven to Soldier Field where 60,000 people had waited for them all afternoon. Their appetites had been whetted ahead of their arrival by Tribune headlines like:

“Italian Flyers Board Planes, But Snow in Alps Halts Takeoff”

“Italian Airmen Held in Ireland by Bad Weather”

“Flying Italians in Iceland: Pierce Fog in 7-Hour Flight from Ireland”

“Gen. Balbo and 24 Planes Span North Atlantic”

“Chicago recognizes the honor bestowed upon it by this great flight,” Mayor Ed Kelly announced when Balbo’s flyers appeared in Soldier Field.

“The City Council has decreed that a thoroughfare (7th Street) leading to the fairgrounds from downtown streets shall be known as Balbo Avenue.”

Balbo gave a speech in Italian, which much of the audience could only grasp a few words, like: “Duce ... Italia … Fascist ... Mussolini.” He finished by swinging his arm overhead in a military salute and shouting: “Viva Chicago!”

When the cheering finally died down, the Italian ambassador translated Balbo’s speech: “We have today accomplished the mission entrusted to us by our chiefs. It was to bring a message of friendship from the new Italy to the United States.”

Balbo’s voyage also bore a message for the Italian people. A decade earlier, fascist leader Benito Mussolini had seized power by promising to make Italy great again. The glory of Roman times would be restored by the new Italy.

The redemption of that promise would be demonstrated by exhibiting state-of-the-art Italian airplanes at a world’s fair with the theme “A Century of Progress.” There, Italy’s consul general in Chicago broadcast a real-time narrative of the day’s events to listeners in Italy.

By 1933, it was clear that the next war would be fought with huge airplanes carrying bombs to distant targets, and would fly in formation for mutual protection. Balbo’s flight would show that Italy was ready to meet the challenge.

The Italian aviators’ first day in Chicago ended at the tony Saddle and Cycle Club on Foster Avenue. The plan was to introduce Balbo to Chicago’s elite and vice versa at teatime. But it was nearing midnight when the Italians arrived.

“Pretty young ‘sub debs’ in their frilliest and most becoming organdies, and dowagers in their ‘Queen Mary’ hats greeted them and stopped them to ask for their autographs as they tried to go upstairs,” the Tribune’s society columnist wrote.

A few flyers eyed the finger sandwiches the Dante Alighieri Society laid out for them before joining their comrades who were chomping on “huge steaks,” the Tribune reported. At midnight, Gen. Balbo appeared at the reception, attired in a “handsome white uniform.”

The next day, there was a Michigan Avenue parade in the Italians’ honor. At the fair’s Indian Village, Sioux dancers encircled Balbo as he was dubbed Chief Flying Eagle.

The Tribune’s James O’Donnell Bennett reached for poetry to convey the emotional outpouring at the Italian general’s farewell parade.

“Up the sunlit avenue that fronts the lake they ride, and closed rank thousands give them hale and farewell,” he wrote. “From Eighth street on the south to the river on the north the people are standing 10 to 15 feet deep on the west side of Michigan Avenue.”

Seeing women waving handkerchiefs and parasols, Bennett added:

“To them all — to women of every race and station — this bearded man who thinks so cautiously and acts so audaciously is Penelope’s Ulysses come true.”

By then, Mussolini had had it with the adulation Balbo was getting. Someone else being compared to ancient heroes? His response was to write Balbo out of the story.

“Balbo’s reception in the United States has been converted into acclaim for Mussolini and a eulogy of his work, with Balbo hardly getting into the picture as it has been presented to the Italian public,” the Tribune’s Rome correspondent reported on July 23.

The retelling claimed that: “Italian mothers in America held up their babes as Balbo passed and said: “These are for Mussolini.”

The following month, Balbo was stripped of his air force command and made governor of Libya, a North African colony. It was a stunning demotion for the famous aviator that the government awkwardly tried to spin:

“His knowledge of aviation, air officers said, would help him in a colony where air travel plays a large part in keeping tribesmen in the interior under control,” the Tribune reported.

The scuttlebutt was that Balbo’s banishment was designed to keep “his political shadow from darkening the Piazza Venezia,” the site of Mussolini’s palace. Balbo had long been considered a logical successor to Il Duce, but he made the best of his North Africa posting.

“He rode a white horse with the air of a desert chieftain before Libyan natives,” the Tribune recalled when Balbo was killed in 1940.

His airplane was shot down over an airfield that had just been attacked by the British. By most accounts, Balbo’s plane was mistaken as an enemy aircraft, and shot down by Italian fire. World War II began the previous year, with Britain and Italy on opposite sides.

Balbo’s association with fascism has engendered ongoing controversy over whether Chicago should have a street named in his honor.

But in the immediate aftermath of Balbo’s death, a wave of sorrow passed over political and ideological borders. Rome was draped in mourning black. A memorial Mass would be celebrated in Chicago.

And upon being informed of Balbo’s death, the commander of the British air force in the Middle East ordered a wreath be dropped over Tobruk, Libya, where he was killed. It carried a note that read:

“The British Royal Air Force expresses its sympathy in the death of General Balbo — a great leader and gallant aviator, personally known to me, whom fate has placed on the other side.”

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