Unlike the German and Soviet dictatorships, Fascist Italy failed to mobilize a large mass movement for voluntary civil defence. Instead a more modest Unione Nationale Protezione Antiaerea (UNPA) was set up in August 1934 under the direction of the War Ministry to help educate the civilian population on how to observe civil defence requirements, to prepare for the blackout, to convert cellars and basements into improvised air-raid shelters, and to train volunteers for post-raid welfare and rescue work. By 1937 UNPA had recruited only 150,000 volunteers, in contrast to 11 million in Germany, and was constantly short of adequate funds.143 UNPA organizers had to be members of the Fascist Party, and local block or house wardens (capi fabbricato), responsible for organizing civil defence in their neighbourhood buildings, were also appointed directly by the Party from among UNPA members. Most of them were men over 45 (all younger men were reserved for the armed services), women or youths; they had in many cases only limited training, and numerous civil defence exercises before 1940 demonstrated a persistent confusion between the responsibilities of the police, civil defence workers and the military air defence authorities.144 There can be little doubt that Italy entered the Second World War with inadequate resources to protect the civilian population and a civil defence organization uncertain of its functions and short of trained personnel. The inadequacies were fatally exposed when nine RAF bombers arrived over Turin and two over Genoa on the night of 10–11 June 1940 to find both cities entirely illuminated despite a plethora of instructions on operating the blackout in priority areas and regular blackout practices for years. Although detailed orders for observing the blackout had been distributed in May, there were regular complaints throughout the early period of raiding about its inadequacy, conspicuously so on air force bases and in ministry buildings in Rome. When Ciampino airbase, near the capital, was asked in October 1940 to explain the bright lights visible through a large window, the commandant replied that they had been unable to find a curtain large enough to cover it.145
The first raids were militarily insignificant but they prompted an immediate sense of crisis among a population unprepared for the realities of war. On 18 June the prefect of Genoa complained to the Interior Ministry in Rome that the raids and alerts (three raids and 17 aircraft) ‘have caused great delay to the trains’.146 It was immediately realized that alerts had the effect of halting production for long periods as workers scrambled to use the factory shelters or disappeared for hours in panic, leaving machines unattended and electricity and gas switched off. Factories working on war orders were circulated with stern instructions to treat workers ‘like a soldier, who has an obligation to stay at his post in front of enemy fire’.147 Although factory workers were not in the end militarized, the UNPA personnel found themselves transformed into the status of ‘mobilized civilian’ in August 1940 to maintain standards of discipline and to prevent members from trying to abandon civil defence responsibilities in the face of the real menace of bombing. The capo fabbricato by a law of 1 November 1940 became a public official to emphasize their role in serving the community.148 For most of Italy beyond the major ports in the south and Sicily serving the Axis armies in North Africa, the bombing ceased to be a serious threat almost at once. Throughout 1941 and the first nine months of 1942 there were almost no raids, and as a result much less pressure to speed up effective civil defence preparations. Shelter provision remained poor (the War Ministry told prefects to let civilians use shelters in factories and public buildings because of the evident deficiency in domestic shelter) while basic protection for industry, including blast walls or sandbagging, depended on the funds available or the good sense of the owner. The same problem confronted the effort to organize the protection of Italy’s vast artistic and architectural heritage. Decrees and instructions on protection were regularly published from 1934 onwards, but a general law on the Protection of Objects of Artistic or Historic Value was only published by the Ministry of Education in June 1939.149 Its provisions had scarcely begun to be introduced when on 6 June 1940, just days before the declaration of war, the local superintendents, responsible for the artistic heritage, were instructed to begin packing up and moving any portable artworks and putting sandbags and cladding over major churches and buildings. Around 100 depositories were established in Italy and hundreds of monuments given minimum protection, enough to cope with shrapnel or a distant blast, but not enough for a direct hit.150
All of this changed with the start of the Allied offensive in the autumn of 1942. The poor level of preparation for attacks on this scale helps to explain their substantial material and psychological impact compared with raiding on Germany. The bombing of Turin, particularly the heavy raids of 20–21 and 28–29 November by aircraft of Bomber Command, which hit both the industrial zone and the city centre, resulted in extensive and random destruction. Over 100 firms indicated some damage, but in important cases the loss was almost total. A radar workshop was ‘entirely destroyed’ along with 90 per cent of its machinery; a firm producing magnetos for aero-engines was almost completely eliminated by just one bomb; a major aircraft repair factory, Aeronautica d’Italia, was burnt out, leaving only one production line still operating. A report on the raids on Genoa on 13–14 and 15–16 November listed damage to rails, electric power lines and tunnels, much of which could be repaired, but at the Marconi radio works production was ‘completely paralysed’ and had to be transferred to a nearby town.151 The threat to Italian production, already suffering from severe shortages of materials and equipment, was immediate. The War Ministry on 15 November circulated to all ministries a warning that war industry would now have to be decentralized and dispersed to areas where it could continue to function without the threat of paralysing air attack.
A few days later the Supreme Command agreed to a comprehensive dispersal programme from the main industrial regions. Firms were to try to find tunnels or underground facilities nearby to prevent too much disruption to work patterns or the loss of workers; where these were not available, decentralization into smaller firms in the locality was recommended; in extreme cases a radical transfer to a different zone was required where inessential plants could be closed down and their labour and factory space used by the evacuated firm.152 For businesses that could not easily be moved – steel production, for example – efforts were at last to be made to supply more anti-aircraft batteries, smoke generators to obscure the zone, and a programme of camouflage. A Special Committee was set up in December 1942 composed of representatives from the defence ministries and the Ministry of Corporations to draw up lists week by week of firms that were ordered to disperse their production. Most went to towns or villages nearby, some into caves or man-made caverns. The dispersal provoked its own problems: shortages of lorries for transport, inadequate rail links, a shortage of skilled workers to assist the transfer, arguments with the Finance Ministry over subsidies and compensation for bombed-out businesses.153 Italian war production continued to decline during 1943 as firms tried to cope with the sudden demand to improvise the transfer of their production or to cope with the continued heavy bombing of the industrial regions. Firms that had chosen to stay put, like Alfa Romeo, were forced by the summer of 1943 to move, in this case to the Grotte di San Rocco, a system of caves where, despite the stale air and high humidity, it was hoped that the workforce would be more productive than had been possible with regular alerts.154
The psychological and physical shock to the Italian population was much greater, as the British had hoped. Secure from the bombing war since the small raids in late 1940, the home front had not developed the infrastructure for civil defence nor the mindset to cope with sudden heavy raiding. Much of the damage was done to residential areas, since these were intended to be area raids. In Turin some 3,230 residential buildings and 46 schools were destroyed or heavily damaged in the November raids. The local prefect of Turin, whence some 400,000 had fled by December 1942, reported that the demoralized population were ‘depressed, nervous, irritable and alarmed’ not only b
y the bombing but by a general ‘sense of exhaustion at the length of the war’.155 Evacuees made their way out to the surrounding countryside or more distant provinces. Iris Origo, an Anglo-American married to an Italian marquis, recorded in her diary the sight of families arriving in Tuscany from Genoa after living for weeks in tunnels under the city ‘without light, without sufficient water, and in bitter cold’, displaying a ‘healthy, elementary resentment’ against those dropping the bombs but a profound anger at the incompetence and mismanagement of the Fascist system which had exposed them to bombing in the first place.156 The failure to prepare for or to oppose the raids was regarded as a standing indictment of the Mussolini regime. The workers who stayed behind in Turin, according to one report, had calmed down after displaying an ‘understandable agitation’ at being bombed; but they remained in a continued state of anxiety largely because Allied aircraft could regularly be seen circling low over the city by day quite undisturbed. According to another report from Varese, north of Milan, the absence of any effective Italian defence against two Allied aircraft casually photographing the area below left the population ‘perplexed and alarmed’.157 Leaflets dropped during the raids in November and December listed major cities slated for future bombing (including the ones already bombed) and an appeal to ‘evacuate the cities’ as soon as possible while casualties were still by comparison ‘very few’. Perhaps to rub the message home, small stickers were dropped printed in red letters with the single word ‘Merda!’ (‘Oh shit!’).158
Evacuation was not by 1942 an easy option. In the 1930s evacuating the population from the major cities had been seen as a way of reducing the threat of casualties in the absence of shelters or gas masks. A plan had been distributed to prefects in 1939 designed to halve the city population by encouraging voluntary evacuation where possible and insisting on the compulsory evacuation of children, the elderly and the sick (as well as convicts, a category more difficult to understand). Those who remained were generally obliged to do so because of the nature of their work or responsibilities. In June 1940 the scheme was virtually abandoned. Voluntary evacuation was uncontrolled, and soon led to prefects insisting that people return home. In the absence of persistent or heavy bombing, urban populations generally remained where they were.159 The first raids in October 1942 transformed the situation overnight. In November new regulations governing evacuation were drawn up and circulated to all prefects; once again there were compulsory categories, help for voluntary evacuees, and provision for a new category of ‘evening evacuees’ who worked in the city during the day and returned in the evening to families in nearby suburban or rural areas. On 2 December Mussolini publicly endorsed the new wave of evacuations as a ‘duty’ to the community.160 The mass exodus in November and December was largely unorganized, though Fascist Party workers, mainly youths and women, helped provide food and find accommodation. Since many Italian city-dwellers had family or friends in nearby rural areas (an estimated 40 per cent in Turin), the social problems were less severe than they might have been, but the problem of overcrowding, the difficulty of organizing regular transport for the ‘evening’ evacuees, and shortages of food soon made themselves felt. Protests from the prefects in March 1943 led to a reversal of policy and evacuees were encouraged instead to return home and run the risk of being bombed. The appeal had little effect. Half of the population of Turin remained away from the city at night, 55 per cent in the hinterland, 45 per cent in other provinces. A second wave of evacuation occurred in the summer of 1943, reaching two-thirds of the city population, many of the newcomers sleeping in woods and fields in conditions of deteriorating hygiene and widespread hunger.161
The crisis induced by bombing was more severe than anything experienced in Britain or Germany. As intelligence information filtered through to the Allies, the idea of bombing Italy out of the war suddenly became less fanciful. Sinclair told Churchill in late 1942 that Fascist morale would be badly rocked by bombing war industry and transport but that a final flamboyant attack on Rome ‘might bring the Fascist state toppling down’.162 An intelligence report to the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in April 1943 from Lisbon claimed that the Italian ambassador ‘expects revolt within a month’. A second report a few weeks later passed on news that Pope Pius XII was unhappy about the bombings and now hoped that the generals might seize power and take Italy over to the side of the Allies.163 As a result the political war on Italy was stepped up in the first months of 1943. American aircraft of the Ninth Air Force, which joined the campaign in December 1942, interspersed the bombing of Italian cities from North African bases with massive leaflet drops, 64 million items in the first eight months of the year. Their purpose, according to the Psychological Warfare Branch, was to ‘harden Italian opposition to Mussolini, to Germany and the war’. Bombing strengthened the message. There was, the PWB claimed, a special connection between air power and propaganda.164 The leaflets explained that bombing was necessary as long as Italy fought at Germany’s side. ‘Why We Bomb You’, dropped in late 1942, challenged the Italian people ‘to refuse to fight the war of Hitler and Mussolini’, but warned them that the innocent would suffer if they did not.165 This propaganda effort did not go unopposed. Side by side with the leaflets, the Allies were accused by the Italian authorities of dropping explosive pencils to kill Italian children: ‘in one hand a hypocritical lying message,’ wrote the Gazzetta del Popolo, ‘in the other a vile death trap’.166 The Fascist press issued its own leaflet accusing the Americans of using black airmen, ‘the worst men … the new tribes of savages’.167 A number of Allied leaflets were sent to Mussolini in July 1943 by his Interior Ministry with the assurance that Italians who read them remained calm and unaffected. Allied propaganda, so it was claimed, ‘has not produced any effect on public order’.168
The most difficult thing for the Allies to judge was the right moment to bomb Rome. The idea of bombing the Italian capital went back to the start of the war but was postponed again and again on political, cultural and religious grounds. When bombers were based in Malta in the autumn of 1940 the practical possibility of hitting the capital was hard to resist. On 28 October 1940, following the Italian invasion of Greece, the British Air Ministry immediately ordered the bombing of Rome in retaliation, but the following day the instruction was cancelled. Churchill was happy to order the bombing of Rome (‘let them have a good dose’) but only when the time seemed appropriate.169 In the spring of 1941 the Air Ministry told the RAF headquarters in the Middle East that Rome could be bombed at once, without further authorization, if Italian aircraft bombed the centre of Athens or Cairo. When an Italian aircraft eventually dropped bombs on an army depot at Abbassia on the outskirts of Cairo in September 1941, the RAF Command in the Middle East wanted to bomb Rome without delay, hitting Mussolini’s official residence in the Palazzo Venezia and the central railway station, but again the War Cabinet demurred from fear of heavy reprisals against the Egyptian capital.170 ‘The selection of the right moment to bomb Rome,’ wrote Portal to the Foreign Office, ‘is clearly a matter of some delicacy.’171
The arguments about bombing Rome rested in the end on its exceptional symbolic status. Rome was the heart of the Catholic world, home to the neutral Vatican City, whose neutrality had to be respected or risk worldwide condemnation from Catholic communities. It was the heart of the classical Roman Empire, taught to generations of British public schoolboys, including those who now commanded the wartime RAF, as a model for the greater British Empire. It was also a primary centre of European culture, packed with treasures from the classical world to the age of the High Baroque. ‘Liberal opinion,’ complained Sinclair to Churchill in December 1942, ‘regards Rome as one of the shrines of European civilization. This liberal opinion is a bit sticky about bombing …’172 Portal told Sinclair that reluctance could even be found among Bomber Command crews to bombing not only Rome but also Florence or Venice. Sinclair, though a Liberal politician himself, had no cultural scruples – ‘we must not hedge our a
irmen round with meticulous restrictions’, he scribbled at the side of a memorandum on bombing Rome – but he could see that there were political risks in damaging ‘churches, works of art, Cardinals and priests’ until the moment when a sudden blow might produce political dividends that outweighed the disadvantages.173 Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, was strongly opposed to bombing Rome except as a last resort; he resisted several offers from Arthur Harris to use 617 Squadron (the ‘Dambusters’) for bombing Mussolini’s official residence, the Palazzo Venezia, or his private Villa Torlonia, on the grounds that the attacks were unlikely to kill him and more likely to reverse the decline in popular support for the dictator.174
The long hesitation over whether or when to bomb Rome was finally ended in June 1943 as the Allies prepared to invade Sicily after final victory in North Africa on 13 May. To prevent German reinforcement, Eisenhower’s headquarters in Algiers favoured bombing two important rail marshalling yards at Littorio and San Lorenzo, the second close to the ancient basilica of the same name. Churchill wrote to Roosevelt on 10 June asking whether he approved the raid, and a week later Roosevelt replied that he was ‘wholly in agreement’ as long as the crews were given the strictest instructions to avoid dropping bombs on the Vatican or on Papal property in Rome.175 This did not end the political arguments. At the Combined Chiefs of Staff meeting a few days later the prospect of damaging Rome’s monuments and churches was discussed again. General Marshall, the US Army chief of staff, endorsed the raid on the ground that after the bombing of St Paul’s, Westminster Abbey and the churches on Malta, the United States would ‘have no qualms about Rome’, and the chiefs sent Eisenhower their approval.176 In early July the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, wrote to Sinclair asking for assurance that the ancient and medieval centres of Rome, Florence and Venice would be excluded from the risk of attack. The Air Ministry told Sinclair that the lives of Allied soldiers should not be placed in jeopardy for the sake of a sacred edifice – ‘are we to place the monuments of the past before the hopes for the future?’ – and two days before the operation to attack the marshalling yards Sinclair told Archbishop Temple that the Allies could not refrain from bombing a military objective even if it was near old or beautiful buildings.177
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