Gino Birindelli

Gino Birindelli

Gino Birindelli (* 19th January 1911 in Pescia , † 2. August 2008 in Rome ) was an Italian NATO - Admiral and neofascist politician .

Military career

Gino Birindelli graduated from a Piarist school in Florence. In October 1925 he joined the Accademia Navale , which he left in 1930 with the rank of Guardiamarina ( lieutenant in the sea ) and embarked on the cruiser Ancona . In the further course he served on the battleship Andrea Doria , the destroyers Quintino Sella and Confienza and on the submarines Santorre Santarosa and Naiade . In 1931 he was promoted to lieutenant in the sea and in 1935 to lieutenant captain. In 1937 he completed an engineering degree at the University of Pisa . As a result, he was given command of the submarines Foca , Millelire , Dessiè and Rubino . From April 1939 he was in command of a submarine group in Tobruk . From September 1939 he was trained in the mouth of the Serchio near La Spezia to become a combat swimmer of the Decima Flottiglia MAS , where he suffered lung damage.

Under Benito Mussolini , Italy entered World War II on June 10, 1940 on the side of Hitler-Germany against the United Kingdom and France. On August 12, 1940, the submarine Iride set sail under the command of Francesco Brunetti in La Spezia with three SLC torpedoes . On August 21, 1940, it met the torpedo boat Calipso in the bay off Menelaus Portus , which brought nine divers, including Birinedelli, on board. Shortly thereafter, Iride was sunk by a torpedo from a Fairey Swordfish . The Iride's crew was rescued by the torpedo boat Calipso and the supply ship Monte Gargano . On September 9, 1940, the Italian invasion of Egypt began from Italian Libya .

On September 24, 1940, the submarine Scirè left La Spezia for a mission against the Royal Navy off Gibraltar under the command of Junio ​​Valerio Borghese . On October 30, 1940, three two-man SLC torpedoes left the Scirè at the mouth of the Río Guadarranque and attacked British ships off Gibraltar. Problems with the air supply and the torpedo led to the abandonment of the mission and the capture of the Italian combat swimmers. Even so, Birindelli received the gold medal for bravery .

After the Cassibile armistice , Birindelli was released from captivity. From December 1943 he took part in the war on the side of the Allies, first as a corvette captain , from 1944 as a frigate captain . He was used with light units off the coast of Albania and Yugoslavia . Towards the end of the war he served as battalion commander in the San Marco regiment , then he became deputy commander of the battleship RN Italia (ex RN Littorio ), which was interned in the great bitter lake with its sister ship RN Vittorio Veneto and its crews until 1946 according to the armistice conditions .

After the war he was involved in the reconstruction of the Italian combat swimmer unit . He led a corvette and a torpedo boat squadron. Birindelli was promoted to sea captain in January 1952 and completed admiral staff training in Livorno. In July 1954 he became commander of the Combat Swimmer Association in Varignano near La Spezia, then commander of the training ship Montecuccoli , with which he circumnavigated the globe from September 1, 1956 to March 1, 1957. Then Birindelli became deputy chief of staff in the naval command in Santa Rosa near Rome. With his promotion to rear admiral ( Rear Adminar Lower Half ) in December 1959 he was transferred to the command academy of the armed forces ( Centro Alti Studi Militari ). He then served as a representative of the Allied Naval Forces in the Mediterranean at the command of the Allied Land and Air Forces in Southern Europe . It was used in the general staff of the Italian armed forces. In the other admiral ranks Birindelli led the 1st division of the fleet, the personnel department of the navy and the fleet command.

In February 1970, as the commander of the fleet, Birindelli complained at a press conference about the crisis in the Italian Navy and took members of the parliamentary defense committee in the engine room of the flagship Giuseppe Garibaldi on a four-hour tour in a wind force two to three. This action (it was a deprivation of liberty ) contributed to the passage of the Naval Law of 1975, which initiated a major modernization of the Navy.

From October 21, 1970 to March 23, 1972 he was in command of the Allied Naval Forces Southern Europe . The headquarters was on a British military base in Malta . When Dom Mintoff was elected Prime Minister of Malta in 1971, Birindelli was declared persona non grata in Malta on June 25, 1971 . In December 1973 he was in the rank of Vice Admiral in the retirement staggered.

In politics

From 1972 to 1976 Birindelli sat as a member of the neo-fascist party Movimento Sociale Italiano - Destra Nazionale for the constituency of Florence in the Camera dei deputati . When the MSI parliamentary group split on June 28, 1974 after various quarrels, he joined the Gruppo Misto, whose board consisted of Luigi Silvestro Anderlini , Roland Riz and Hans Benedikter . In Parliament, Birindelli was a member of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committees. In 1977 he founded the more moderate conservative party Democrazia Nazionale , which existed until 1979.

From July 7, 1973 to March 14, 1974, Ugo La Malfa was finance minister in the government of Mariano Rumor and party secretary of the Partito Repubblicano Italiano . Michele Sindona applied to the Finance Minister for FINAMBRO for a capital increase and thus an increase in the default guarantee. La Malfa refused to do both and resigned from the government on March 14, 1974 in a dispute with the budget minister over tax policy, which broke up the Mariano Rumor government. In 1975 La Malfa became chairman of the Partito Repubblicano Italiano. Licio Gelli led Birindelli under the card number 1670 as a member of the secret lodge Propaganda Due . The suspicion arose that the break-up of the MSI faction under Birindelli was part of a threat against the Democrazia Cristiana , which so a competitor in the conservative camp arose in order to achieve a compliant behavior by the finance minister towards FINAMBRO . In November 1974 he founded the Unione Nazionale Italiana (UNI).

Awards

• 1940: Medal of Bravery
• War Merit Cross
• 1967: Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic
• 1977: Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic

Web links

• Entry in the Portal Storico of the Camera dei Deputati

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Mario Guarino, Fedora Raugei, Gli anni del disonore: dal 1965 il potere occulto di Licio Gelli e della Loggia P2 tra affari, scandali e stragi p. 362
2. ↑ La loggia P2 e il mondo politico
3. ^ Professional: Gino Birindelli , in: Der Spiegel , November 11, 1974.
4. ↑ http://www.quirinale.it/elementi/DettaglioOnorificenze.aspx?decorato=35750

predecessor	Office	successor
Giuseppe Roselli Lorenzini	Allied Naval Forces Command, Southern Europe October 21, 1970–23. March 1972	Giuseppe Pighini