The mobilization of Italian aviation to serve the political and cultural ambitions of the regime distorted the evolution of the Italian Air Force, which found itself trapped between Mussolini’s pompous air-power rhetoric and the reality of Italy’s limited economic and military potential. A good example of the dilemma was the place assigned to Giulio Douhet, Mussolini’s first Air Minister. Although Douhet did not last long in office, his theoretical writing on the power of the massed bomber, used to strike a sudden, violent and annihilating blow against enemy cities to end wars quickly and decisively, suited Fascism’s self-image as a movement dedicated to impulsive action and flamboyant gestures. Mussolini famously committed his armed forces to the idea of ‘the war of rapid course’ (la guerra di rapido corso), the Italian equivalent of Blitzkrieg.6 He liked the idea of the surprise air strike to impose terror on an enemy population and had few scruples about ordering it during the Spanish Civil War. The bombing of Barcelona from 16 to 18 March 1938 followed Mussolini’s direct order from Rome to bomb ‘the demographic centre’ of the city. The future chief of staff of the Italian Air Force, General Francesco Pricolo, wrote in 1938 that ‘the effective arm of the air fleet is terror’.7 Like Douhet, Pricolo was attracted to the ‘decisive power’ of an air force to secure victory.8 When Italian airmen assessed the swift German defeat of Poland in the autumn of 1939, they described it as a classic example of ‘the fundamental concept of Douhet’, first achieving command of the air, then using overwhelming air power to finish off Polish resistance through the collapse of morale. The German bombing of Britain in the winter of 1940–41 was again used to underline the argument that only bombing could overcome the risk of a stalemate like Italy’s gruelling trench war against Austria in 1915–18. ‘Bombing aviation,’ wrote Lt. Colonel Bruno Montanari in February 1941, ‘is always the fundamental speciality of the air arm.’9
However, the actual development of air force doctrine and capability reflected the influence of Douhet hardly at all. The development of a large bomber fleet, whose purpose was to smash enemy war-willingness in days, fitted poorly with the actual requirements of the army and navy for support in probable surface operations in the Mediterranean basin or the Italian empire in North and East Africa. The most influential critic of Douhet was the young air force officer Amedeo Mecozzi, who thought that command of the air was always a local and temporary phenomenon. He argued for close cooperation with the army or navy using high-quality assault aircraft, capable of a fighter and fighter-bomber role, and for the overriding importance of counter-force operations. He drew different lessons from the role of Italian aircraft in Spain and the German success in Poland, both of which confirmed for Mecozzi the vital role to be played by aircraft on the field of battle rather than against enemy cities.10 Though there remained a culture of ‘Douhetism’ in the Italian Air Force, much of the actual experience of air warfare in the wars in Ethiopia and Spain confirmed Mecozzi’s arguments; Italian ground units preferred to be given close air support and expected Italian fighters and bombers to share that responsibility. One airman reflecting on Spain concluded that opportunities for the strategic use of aircraft were rare, whereas ground support had shown itself to be the ‘principal task’ and was likely to remain so into the future. Even General Pricolo was forced to conclude from German success the necessity of ‘a closer and closer collaboration between the three armed forces’. Unlike Douhet, Pricolo admitted that no one thought any longer of ‘a hypothetical independence’ for the air force.11
The factor that affected Italian air development fundamentally was Mussolini’s impatient pursuit of a new Italian Empire and a major role in European affairs. Unlike the other major powers, Italian forces were fighting almost continuously for four years before the outbreak of war in September 1939, first in Ethiopia from October 1935 to May 1936, then in Spain from July 1936 to March 1939 after Mussolini had decided to send an expeditionary force to help Franco in the civil war. This commitment was costly for a relatively poor economy with limited natural resources. Moreover, it locked Italy into a production cycle in which proven but obsolescent designs had to be produced in large numbers, while the evolution of a new generation of high-powered, monoplane fighters and bombers was delayed, at exactly the time when other air forces were moving on to a new range of advanced designs. Because Italian forces were deployed against weaker opponents, with little capacity to oppose Italian air operations, Italian air leaders could comfort themselves with the illusion of continuous triumph. Pricolo in 1940 could point to four years of war waged ‘victoriously’ and assume that having ‘personally experienced wartime reality’, the Italian Air Force had a substantial advantage over any potential enemy.12 The truth was rather different. Italy began and ended the four years of war-before-the-war still in the biplane age. The culture of air aces and stunt flying, inherited from the Balbo years, and sustained by Mussolini when he became Air Minister in Balbo’s place in 1933, gave a privileged place to the pilot’s view of war. The biplane Fiat Cr.32 (replaced in 1939 by the biplane Cr.42) was liked by Italian airmen because it was exceptionally manoeuvrable and easy to fly and, in the absence of radios, the open cockpit allowed pilots to signal and gesture to each other. Biplane light bombers eventually gave way to monoplane bombers with limited power and carrying capacity, the Savoia-Marchetti Sm.79 and Sm.81, both of which saw service in Spain alongside a small number of other models.13
The experience of fighting in Ethiopia and Spain nonetheless persuaded the Italian Air Force that it was technically advanced enough for current air warfare. In Ethiopia around 450 aircraft were committed, of which 80 were shot down or written off in accidents, and 100 aircrew killed. Although the Italian Air Force was told that it could bomb to terrorize the population, most bombing, with high explosive or gas, was tactical, directed at lines of communication and assembled Ethiopian forces. Attacks on towns were suspended from December 1935 following the international outcry at the destruction of Red Cross facilities, but the army demands for close support to overcome stiffening Ethiopian resistance in 1936 would anyway have focused bombing on the battlefront. An estimated 1,890 tons of bombs were dropped and a further 1,813 in the year-long pacification operations conducted after Ethiopian surrender. Ethiopia had no effective counter-air capability.14 Two months after the end of the war, Mussolini committed Italian forces to intervention in Spain at the side of the Nationalist rebels against the Spanish Second Republic. The air force sent an expeditionary force (l’aviazione legionaria) composed of fighters and light bombers. Over the three years of intervention 197 bombers were deployed, flying 782 bombing missions. As in Ethiopia, most bombing was undertaken in support of ground operations (a handful of Sm.79s took part in the raid on Guernica).15 But Mussolini was keen for the air force to demonstrate its debt to ‘Douhetism’ and in 1938 bombers stationed in the Balearic Islands – the so-called ‘falcons of the Balearics’ – began systematic attacks on Barcelona and southern coastal towns still in the hands of the Republic, aimed not only at oil and shipping but also at the morale of the population. The force seldom numbered more than 30 aircraft, and is remembered chiefly for the three-day bombardment of Barcelona from 16 to 18 March 1938 in which a modest 44 tons of bombs destroyed 80 buildings and killed, according to different estimates, between 550 and 1,043 civilians. Barcelona suffered 57 attacks during the civil war but a number of other cities were also regularly raided by both Italian and German bombers: Valencia 69 times, Sagunto 47, Castellón de la Plana 39, and Tarragona a total of 29. Over the three years of civil war, bombing killed an estimated 2,600 and injured 5,798.16
Losses in combat were relatively modest in Spain, but all the aviation equipment, including the aircraft, was left behind when the air legion returned to Italy in May 1939. The biplane fighters had proved their worth even against the few poor-performance monoplanes supplied by the Soviet Union (although 41 per cent of the fighter force was lost, mostly to non-combat causes). The bombers had faced little opposition; Barcelona in ear
ly 1938 was defended by just two anti-aircraft batteries of eight guns and a few anti-air machine guns. The eventual nationalist victory in Spain was used to justify the propaganda claims that in aerial warfare Italy was a vanguard state, possessing, as one commentator put it, ‘all the necessary elements to construct a superb air power’ and blessed with a government willing to achieve it.17 Success, in this case, was the enemy of progress. The gap between illusion and reality was wider by 1940, when Mussolini began seriously to contemplate joining his German Axis ally in the war against Britain and France, than it had been three years before. The list of factors limiting the Italian Air Force in a war with the rapidly modernizing Western states was prodigious, not least the absence of a uniform doctrine for the employment of the air force. The navy and army assumed that aircraft would chiefly be used to assist them in an imminent war. An independent air defence system was almost entirely lacking. Bomber units were numerous, but the air force remained divided between the commitment to assault aviation in support of a ground campaign and the shadow of Douhet. In the end, the air force undertook a mix of tactical and long-range operations to support the general campaign of the armed forces rather than pursue a more ambitious independent air strategy.
The state of readiness left a great deal to be desired. Although the air force claimed on the eve of the Italian declaration of war on 10 June 1940 to have a grand total of 1,569 bombers, only 783 were serviceable.18 Of these the majority were the Sm.79, Sm.81 and the Fiat Br.20 light/medium bombers. Their performance was mixed: an average of 250–280 miles per hour, a range of 1,100 miles with around 2,250 lbs of bombs compared reasonably with the performance of some of the current British and German medium bombers, but the bombload was one-quarter of the load of a Wellington and half that of the Junkers Ju88.19 The aircraft generally lacked radios, had no modern navigational equipment for night-time bombing, lacked a sophisticated bombsight, and were weakly armed with three or four small machine guns against the fast, heavily armed fighters they were likely to encounter. Radar had been developed in Italy from the mid-1930s, and was in some respects in advance of other countries, but its introduction stalled through the hostility and indifference of the air force High Command until it became essential in 1942–3. Airbases were poorly resourced and in some cases still laid to grass rather than concrete.20 The Italian aircraft industry was certainly capable of producing more advanced designs, but the choice of a new generation of aircraft to replace those that had fought in Spain was the victim of the organizational structure responsible for technical innovation. Italo Balbo, during his period as Air Minister, had separated the development and experimental branch from the air force organization in charge of procurement and production. Although large numbers of experimental prototypes were produced in the 1930s and early 1940s, the final decision on which to produce rested with the air staff and, in his role as Air Minister, with Mussolini. Development of a heavier four-engine bomber began in 1937, but the final choice of the Piaggio P.108, in preference to other more effective development models, was the result of judgements by individuals who lacked the technical competence to make them. Both this model and the successor to the Sm.79, the three-engine Sm.84, proved to be dangerous to fly and little better than the older models. The Cant Z.1007, developed in the late 1930s, became the most up-to-date Italian medium bomber, but it was prone to engine problems and deterioration of its wooden structure, was insufficiently powered, lightly armed, and could carry only 2,500 lbs of bombs over a range of 625 miles.21 The confusion over modernizing the air force was compounded with Italy’s shortages of fuel, steel, coal and machinery, which severely inhibited the scale of the Italian war economy. In 1940 Italy produced 3,257 aircraft of all types, in 1942 only 2,821, one-tenth of the quantity produced for Britain’s air force.22
There has never been any doubt that Mussolini’s decision to launch Italy into the world war was taken in defiance of the real economic and military situation faced by the armed forces and Italian industry. Almost as soon as war was declared on 10 June, Italian aircraft bombed targets in southern France; the first raid on the British air and naval base on Malta took place on 11 June. France soon sued for an armistice, leaving Mussolini as the junior partner in German victory. On 26 June he offered to help the German armed forces to defeat Britain by sending 10 divisions and 30 squadrons of aircraft to assist in any subsequent invasion. Hitler and Göring rejected the proposal on the ground that Italian forces would be better concentrated in the Mediterranean rather than dispersed around Europe. Air force commanders warned against sending Italian units to an area where climatic conditions were entirely different from the Mediterranean, and with aircraft whose performance was dangerously lower than those of the RAF.23 Mussolini persisted because of the propaganda value he attached to Italian participation in a direct attack on the British homeland, and by mid-August German leaders finally accepted the offer in order to demonstrate to the wider world a common Axis bond in a struggle now described by the German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, as ‘a question of life and death’. But instead of the promised aerial armada, the Italian Air Force sent an Italian Air Corps (Corpo Aereo Italiano) composed of two bomber groups, a group of fighters and a reconnaissance squadron, a total of 180 aircraft, 66 of them bombers.24 Finally sent north in late September 1940, several weeks after the abandonment of Operation Sea Lion, the force lost seven aircraft on route to its Belgian base at Ursel as a result of bad weather. The first attack was made on 24 October 1940 against coastal towns in East Anglia, the last on 2 January 1941. The force found the weather a continuous problem, while the technical means to keep the aircraft flying were damagingly deficient. It was a tribute to the skill of Italian pilots that the targets were found at all. A total of 64 tons of bombs were dropped in 24 operations against Harwich, Ipswich, Great Yarmouth and the Kent port of Ramsgate. Out of 104 sorties, 22 bombers and 14 fighters were lost, a rate of one-third. In February the force was withdrawn to meet urgent needs in the war in North Africa and the Mediterranean.25
The Italian contribution to the Blitz was negligible, but Italian propaganda managed to make the most of the experience. A poster was produced showing London in flames below an Italian hand with the traditional Roman gesture of thumbs down, though not a single Italian aircraft attacked the British capital.26 A photograph showed one of the crew at Ursel painting slogans on the bombs before they were loaded on the aircraft – ‘for dear Eden’, ‘for Churchill’, ‘Buckingham Palace’.27 The Italian contribution was presented to the home population as equivalent to the German and relations between the two forces one of ideal ‘comradeship’. Mecozzi, writing in autumn 1940, chose the headline ‘Fascist wings dominate the war’.28 The image presented to the Italian public was a military fantasy. German forces regarded the Italian Air Corps as an oddity; detailed reports of German operations were sent regularly to the Italian Air Ministry, perhaps to rub salt in the wounds of Italian incompetence by showing what a modern air force could really do.29 The Italian Air Force drew some obvious lessons from a difficult experience. It was evident that even the German Air Force had sustained high losses during the air operations in 1940, requiring a shift to night-time bombing, for which Italian airmen were poorly prepared. By day, it was reported, a heavy fighter escort three to four times larger than the number of bombers was required, a practice adopted by Italian units in raids carried out in the Mediterranean. German claims that ports or cities had been destroyed were regarded sceptically by Italian observers, who understood that for much of the time cloud and smoke obscured effective post-raid reconnaissance.30 Above all, Italian commanders could see that the Italian Air Corps was out of its depth in a modern bomber offensive. Reflecting in May 1941 on the Italian experience, Colonel Andrea Zotti ruefully concluded that bombing would only be effective against a much weaker enemy.31
The British enemy in the Mediterranean was certainly much weaker than the RAF and the Anti-Aircraft Command in metropolitan Britain. The Italian Air Force
was under strong pressure from Mussolini to demonstrate that bombing would contribute to the establishment of Italian hegemony in the Mediterranean basin, and as a result a number of long-range operations were undertaken against Palestine, Cyprus, Gibraltar, British bases on the Egyptian coast, and the island of Malta. Some 30 per cent of operations in the first year of the Italian war were conducted by bombers.32 The raids were usually small in scale and the damage insignificant, though in the attack on Tel Aviv on 9 September 1940 from bases in the Italian Dodecanese Islands, 137 people were killed and 350 injured. There was no anti-aircraft defence of Palestinian ports, and the death toll was the highest from any Italian raid. A further raid on Tel Aviv in June 1941, from bases in Syria, left 13 dead.33 Most attacks were made against the port of Haifa, raided 30 times with 61 tons of bombs. Most of the operations were tiny in scale. A lone raid on the Persian Gulf port of Bahrain was made by four bombers; the average number of aircraft for the long-distance raids, including the operations against Britain, was just 3.4.34 The official objectives were ports, naval bases, railway communications and oil refineries (which alone accounted for one-third of all operations), though bombs also destroyed residential housing and public buildings. The pattern of long-range Italian air attacks is set out in Table 8.1:
Table 8.1: Italian Air Force Long-Range Operations, June 1940–September 1942
The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 Page 67