Libya to hang out the one and paste up the other.
Göring had a genuine weakness for Italo Balbo, the bearded
governor-general of the colony. Invited to cruise in Carin
eight months earlier, Balbo had bestowed on him a star fash-
ioned from black and white diamonds; Göring declared their
friendship undying, and would cry genuine tears when the
Italian was shot down by his own flak in Libya in . For three
days now he marveled at the ancient Roman excavations at Lep-
tis Magna, visited more modern establishments at Homs and
Misurata, and exposed acres of his famous boyish grin to Arabs
and Italians. He took in a military parade at Bu Ghueran and
battleships at Tripoli, then watched “desert battles” at Cascina
Grassi enacted across stretches of camel thorn and desert scrub
that would see grim fighting three years later. Before leaving for
Italy on April his party visited the “Jewish troglodytes” in
their caves at Garian.
Trying to upstage Ribbentrop, he arranged to meet the
Italian leaders in Rome in mid-April. Count Ciano had last
glimpsed him five months earlier in Vienna, wearing an Al Ca-
pone-style suit of gray, with a cravat passed through a big ruby
ring, matching rubies on his fingers, and a Nazi eagle studded
with diamonds in his buttonhole. More somberly attired now,
Göring delivered a restrained speech in Rome promising that
the Italian and German peoples would march shoulder by
shoulder in their common struggle. Meeting Mussolini on the
fifteenth, he lied blandly in the same cause of improving rela-
tions with Italy, assuring the Duce that Hitler had telephoned
instructions to express his “extraordinary pleasure” at the recent
Italian invasion of Albania (in fact, Hitler was furious). He him-
self, Göring pointed out, had been at San Remo when the deci-
sion was taken to invade Czechoslovakia but Hitler had of
course kept him “fully informed,” another lie. Confidentially