Junio Valerio Borghese (6 June 1906-26 August 1974) was an Italian neo-fascist politician and general who commanded Decima Flottiglia MAS during World War II and masterminded the failed 1970 Golpe Borghese coup attempt against the Italian government.
Biography[]
Fascist war hero[]
Borghese during World War II
Junio Valerio Borghese was born in Artena, Lazio, Italy in 1906, and he was a member of the same noble family as Pope Paul V. He entered the Regia Marina in 1929, and became a submarine commander in 1933. Borghese fought in the Second Italo-Ethiopian War and the Spanish Civil War during the 1930s and in World War II during the 1940s, and he became commander of Decima Flottiglia MAS, an elite naval sabotage unit. Following the Italian armistice in September 1943, the X MAS was disbanded, but Borghese chose to fight for the fascist Salo Republic, leading a revived Decima Flottiglia MAS, which had a strength of 18,000 troops at the end of the war. In April 1945, he moved his unit to Veneto to defend the Tagliamento River from Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslav Partisans, suffering 80% casualties.
Political career[]
After the war, he served only 4 years of a 12-year prison sentence, and he became a figurehead for neo-fascist and anti-communist groups. From 1951 to 1954, he was honorary president of the Italian Social Movement, but advocated an ideology even further to the right of the MSI. In 1970, with the help of the National Vanguard, the National Front of Italy, the Sicilian Mafia, and Propaganda Due, Borghese planned to launch a coup - the Golpe Borghese - but it was called off before it could occur, and its discovery three months later forced Borghese to flee to Spain, where he died in 1974.