Junio Valerio Borghese

Junio Valerio Borghese was born in Artena, Province of Rome, Kingdom of Italy. He was born into a prominent noble family of Sienese origin, the House of Borghese, of which Pope Paul V was a notable member. His father, Livio Borghese, was the 11th Prince of Sulmona and younger brother to the more famous Scipione Borghese. Borghese was the second son of the prince and, as such, had the title of Patrician of Rome, Naples and Venice and the style of Don Junio Valerio Borghese. However, the press and the English-language historiography routinely used the courtesy style Prince Junio Valerio Borghese. Borghese was first educated in London, England, and, from 1923, he attended the Royal Italian Navy Academy (Accademia Navale) in Livorno.

In 1929, the naval career of Borghese began. By 1933, he was a submarine commander. Borghese took part in the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. During the Italian intervention in the Spanish Civil War, he was in command of the submarine Iride, where he allegedly lost two seamen after his unit was depth-charged by the British destroyer HMS Havock.

The elite World War II Italian naval unit Decima Flottiglia MAS is considered by many to be the first modern naval commando squad. Assembled by Prince Junio Valerio Borghese at the beginning of the war, these "frogmen" were trained to fight undercover and underwater with small submarines and assault boats armed with a variety of torpedoes—pioneering tactics that remain a standard for Special Forces around the world today.[2]

At the start of the Second World War, Borghese took command of submarine Vettor Pisani, and in August 1940 was in command of submarine Sciré, which was modified to carry the new secret Italian weapon, the human torpedo. Known as "slow speed torpedoes" (siluri a lenta corsa, or SLC), and nicknamed "pigs" (maiali) for their poor maneuverability, these were small underwater assault vehicles with a crew of two.

These were part of the 1ª Flottiglia Mezzi d'Assalto (MAS), the "First Assault Vehicle Flotilla" (later called Decima Flottiglia MAS), an elite naval sabotage unit of the Royal Italian Navy (Regia Marina Italiana).

As commander of Sciré Borghese took part in several raids using SLC. The first of these, in September and October 1940, were directed at Gibraltar. The September raid was abandoned when the harbour was found to be empty. In the October raid, Borghese took Sciré deep into Gibraltar Bay, making a difficult submerged passage in order to release the SLC as close to the target as possible.[3] For this he received the Medaglia d'Oro al Valor Militare (MOVM), despite the mission's overall lack of success.

In May 1941 a further attempt ended in failure, but on 20 September 1941, a successful mission damaged three merchant ships in the harbour. After this last attack, he was promoted to Capitano di Fregata, and named commander of the Decima MAS' sub-surface unit.[4]

On 18 December 1941, he reached Alexandria in Sciré and launched the daring raid by three SLCs that heavily damaged the two Royal Navy battleships HMS Valiant and HMS Queen Elizabeth and two other ships in the harbour. The six Italian Navy crew that attacked Alexandria harbour all received the Medaglia d'Oro al Valor Militare, and Borghese was named Cavaliere dell'Ordine Militare di Savoia.

In May 1943, Borghese took command of the Decima Flottiglia MAS[5] ("10th Assault Vehicle Flotilla"), or Xª MAS with Roman numerals, which continued active service in the Mediterranean and pioneered new techniques of commando assault warfare. The Roman numeral was in memory of Caesar's famous Decima Legio.

Borghese in 1970

With his record as a war hero and his support of Fascism, he became a figurehead for pro-fascist, anti-communist groups in the immediate post-war period, acquiring the nickname Black Prince.

Borghese wrote a supportive introduction, affirming his political ideology of an idealistic neo-fascist new aristocracy meritocratically based purely on character, to far right revolutionary-conservative theorist Julius Evola's book Men Among the Ruins .[8] He later wrote a memoir of his wartime exploits, published as Sea Devils in 1954. He was associated with the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), the neo-fascist party formed in the post-World War II period by former supporters of the dictator Benito Mussolini.

Later, advocating a harder line which the MSI was not able or willing to uphold, he broke from the MSI to form an even stauncher neofascist formation, known as the Fronte Nazionale.

He was born as Junio Valerio Scipione Ghezzo Marcantonio Maria of the Borghese princes in Rome, in one of the most important families of the Roman nobility, of ancient Sienese origins, with 4 cardinals, a pope and Napoleon Bonaparte's sister, Paolina, among his ancestors. He was the second son of Prince Livio Borghese of Sulmona (1874–1939), Prince of Rossano, Prince of Vivaro Romano, Prince of Monte Compatri, Duke of Palombara, Duke of Poggio Nativo and Castelchiodato; his mother was Princess Valeria Maria Alessandra Keun (Smyrna, 1880 – Catania, 1956), daughter of Alfred August Keun and Virgina Amirà. His parents separated in Rome on 31 May 1911. As a consequence of the fact that his father was a diplomat (with the rank of plenipotentiary minister), Junio Valerio spent the first years of his life travelling between Italy and the main foreign capitals, staying in China, Egypt, Spain, France and Great Britain. In Italy, he mostly spent his time in and around Rome. He married in Florence, on 30 September 1931, the Russian countess Darya Vasilyevna Olsufeeva (Moscow, 1909 – Rome, 1963), sister of Alexandra "Assia" Vasilyevna Olsufeeva, wife of Andrea Busiri Vici. [11] They had four children:

• Elena Maria Nives (born in Rome in 1932);
• Paolo Valerio Livio Vasilj Michele Scipione Romano Maria (Rome, 1933 – Rome, 1999), who married Nikè Arrighi, with whom he had his daughter Flavia;
• Livio Giuseppe Maria della Neve (Rome, 1940 – Sperlonga, 1989), who married Piera Loreta Rita Vallone (1941), from whom he had: Daria (1968), who married Carmelo Tibor Salleo of the Barons of San Filippo, Livia, Marcantonio (Rome, 1970), who married Francesca d'Amore and Niccolò;
• Andrea Scirè Maria della Neve [78] (Rome, 1942), who married Marisa Canti, from whom he had: Luca, Alessio (twins), Karen and Valerio.

• Jack Greene; Alessandro Massignani (2004). The Black Prince and the Sea Devils: The Story of Prince Valerio Borghese and the Elite Units of the Decima MAS. Da Capo Press. ISBN 0306813114.
• Junio Valerio Borghese (1954). Sea Devils. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company.
• Junio Valerio Borghese (1950). Decima Flottiglia MAS. Milano: Garzanti.
• Paul Kemp (1997). Underwater Warriors. ISBN 1854094556.
• Mario Bordogna (2003). Junio Valerio Borghese e la X Flottiglia MAS. Mursia.
• Sergio Nesi (2005). Junio Valerio Borghese. Un principe, un comandante, un italiano. Bologna: Lo Scarabeo.