The renewal of bombing prompted the German authorities to continue the programme of dispersal that had begun in haste in the winter of 1942–3 and been suspended with the armistice. Advantage was taken of the extensive road tunnels and caves available in northern Italy. Work on parts for the Me262 turbo-jet fighter continued in the first months of 1945 in tunnels around Bolzano; the Fiat works moved production to a stretch of tunnel between Riva and Gargnano on the coast of Lake Garda, where 1,300 labourers continued to work until April of that year; Caproni produced parts for the V-weapons and the Me262 in a hydraulic tunnel between the River Adige and Garda. Of the 28 sites chosen for underground dispersal, only 10 actually reached the stage of production.238 From early 1945 onwards, before the final offensive to drive the Germans across the Po Valley towards the Alps, a renewed communications campaign against rail centres and bridges across northern Italy undermined the frantic efforts of the German authorities to extract what they could from the shrunken Italian industrial economy. By February the MAAF targets committee had difficulty finding any targets left in northern Italy that had not already been hit or were regarded as worth the effort of bombing. Nevertheless raids continued to be made until the last days of the conflict. As in Germany, Allied air forces by the end of the war possessed a good deal of excess capacity for which there were no longer suitable objectives.239
The cost of the bombing campaign to the Italian economy is difficult to compute, not least because of the extensive damage done by artillery and battlefront aviation which resembled the consequences of bombing. The effect on German efforts to extract additional war production in northern Italy has been estimated at a loss of 30 per cent in productive performance due to absenteeism and regular alarms. The overall loss of capacity for Italian industry has been estimated at 10 per cent, since most industry was not an object of bombing; the loss for war-related industries was much higher, one-half for naval production, 21 per cent for the metallurgical industries, 12 per cent for machine engineering.240 By contrast, the textile sector lost 0.5 per cent, the electrical industry 4 per cent and the chemical industry 6 per cent of capacity. Damage to housing, though heavy in particular cities, has been estimated at only 6 per cent of total housing stock. The chief target was the Italian transport system where two-fifths of the rail network was destroyed along with half the rolling stock and an estimated 90 per cent of all Italian lorries. The five years of war reduced Italian national income by 1945 to one-half the level of 1938.241 This mainly affected not the German occupiers but a large part of the Italian civil population, which endured widespread losses of housing and possessions, unemployment and food shortages until well after the end of the conflict.
The Italian population was faced in the last two years of war with the bleak prospect of living on a wide and dangerous battlefield, caught between the German occupiers, the new Fascist regime and the slowly advancing Allies. Most of the casualties from bombing occurred in the period after the armistice, since air power was the one thing the Allies could project easily into the occupied zones. The Allied powers recognized the nature of the dilemma facing most Italians who had not yet been liberated, but they also wanted them to undermine the German occupation from within by acts of resistance or sabotage. An OSS report on the situation in Italy in September 1943 suggested a propaganda campaign to make Italians realize ‘that the real people’s war of liberation has started for them’, and to encourage them to make life miserable for the Germans.242 It was also recognized that bombing was likely to be politically counterproductive if it seemed to bring liberation no nearer. The ambassador D’Arcy Osborne warned the Foreign Office in March 1944 that bombing was ‘slowly but surely turning Italian opinion against us’ because of the evident disproportion between civilian damage and military results. The Italians, D’Arcy Osborne continued, were beginning to think that German occupation was a lesser evil ‘than Anglo-Saxon liberation’.243 Eden was sufficiently concerned to ask Sinclair in May to ensure that bombing was carried out with strict precautions against a ‘friendly population’, whose will to resist the Germans was weakened, rather than strengthened, by bombing and who were likely to harbour ‘bitter memories of our method of liberation’.244 The first priority for both Allies was, nevertheless, to defeat Germany rather than inhibit military action from fear of alienating Italian sentiments. When in May 1944 news reached London of the bombing of the village of Sonnino, where 45 people were killed, including 30 children, Churchill complained that the air force should not treat a co-belligerent population the same way as an enemy. Sinclair replied that it was not up to him to tell the air forces in the Mediterranean how to conduct their campaign; the vice chief of air staff, Air Marshal Evill, told Churchill that it was the fault of the Italian population for continuing to live near bombing targets.245 Throughout the campaign the political necessity of defeating Germany overrode any political considerations towards the population held hostage on the battlefield.
There is no doubt that the long experience of bombing did strain Italian support for their imminent liberation. Iris Origo noted in her diary in the summer of 1944 how much British propaganda was resented with its ‘bland assumption that peace at any price will be welcomed by the Italians’.246 Corrado di Pompeo, a ministry official in Rome, recorded in his diary in February 1944 that at first his heart rejoiced ‘when American aircraft passed overhead’, but after regular raiding and the routine sight of blood-smeared corpses, he changed his mind: ‘Americans are zero; they only know how to destroy and how to kill the defenceless.’247 Nevertheless, the prospects for widespread rebellion against the authority of the Salò Republic or the German armed forces were unrealistic and throughout the period acts of violent resistance were met by the Germans with atrocious reprisals.248 Under these circumstances rumour and superstition increased in importance as a mechanism for coping with the real dilemmas of occupation. The most remarkable was the claim, widely repeated, that Padre Pio, the Apulian monk (and now a saint), had safeguarded the region where he lived by rising in the air to the level of the bombers and staring the pilots in the eye until they turned back to base, their bombloads still on board.249 In numerous cases, appeals were made to city saints or Madonnas to safeguard buildings and family from bomb damage. The Catholic Church also encouraged a mood of consolation and resignation. When he visited the damaged area of San Giovanni in Rome on 15 August 1943, the Pope told the crowd ‘Follow the path of virtue and faith in God.’250 Priests in Tuscany, writing of the bombing in 1944, talked of a ‘Calvary’, or ‘our hour has come’, or ‘for us the hour of trial’, as they prepared themselves and their congregations to endure the cruelties of air war.251 By 1945, with the authority of the Salò republic collapsing in northern Italy, the Church came to play an increasingly important part in the daily lives of many ordinary Italians confronted with the continuous hardships imposed by bombing.
More important in terms of survival was the expansion of civil defence facilities and the widespread flight from the cities. For those who remained in urban areas, air-raid alerts became an almost daily occurrence. In Bologna province, for example, there were 94 air raids from July 1943 to April 1945, which killed an estimated 2,481 people, injured another 2,000 and destroyed 13 per cent of Bologna’s buildings. In 1942 there was one alert lasting 1 hour 29 minutes; in 1943 the alerts lasted for 115 hours, in 1944 for 285 hours, and in 1945, 77 hours.252 In Bologna, as in many other cities, the provision of shelter spaces had expanded rapidly with the onset of regular bombing. In October 1943 there had been spaces for 26,000 people out of a population of more than 600,000; by spring 1945 it was estimated that the 84 bombproof shelters, 15 trenches and 25 tunnels could accommodate 100,000.253 In Milan, where trenches, school shelters and public shelters could hold 177,000 by October 1942, plans were begun to build a further 179 shelters to house another 38,000 people, while 8,000 domestic shelters were in the process of being overhauled to meet shelter standards.254 Since most raids occurred during the day from 1943 onwards, i
t was important that there was adequate temporary shelter in inner-city areas for daytime workers. In many cases the shelters provided little protection from bomb blast and suffered from poor ventilation and overcrowding. In two cases overcrowding caused heavy casualties, one in Genoa’s Le Grazie tunnel, where 354 people died, and one at Porta San Gennaro in Naples, where 286 perished. There was wide distrust of shelter provision and with the onset of bombing, millions of Italians either left for the nearby countryside or found refuge in a local cellar or basement.255 The Prefect of Palermo reported in May 1943 that all the public shelters hit had collapsed, leaving the population with ‘no faith in the remaining ones’. The Inspector of Air Raid Protection in Rome, reporting on the raids in July and August 1943, found that no signs had been put up indicating where the shelters were, and that there was no list of domestic shelters, making it impossible to know where their entombed occupants might be.256
The response to rising danger in the cities was a widespread wave of largely uncoordinated evacuation from all the threatened cities and towns, accompanied by compulsory evacuation insisted on by the German authorities from major combat zones and the Italian littoral.257 As in Germany, the Fascist Party used evacuation as a way to try to tie the refugees more closely to the systems for party welfare and assistance, but the often spontaneous and large-scale evacuations were difficult to control, and were often followed by reverse evacuations as people returned to the risks of the city from poorly resourced rural retreats or realized that bombing could happen anywhere there was a railway. Most evacuees found temporary accommodation in nearby villages and small towns. In Turin province the population of nearby towns grew by up to 150 per cent as 165,000 people abandoned the city.258 By May 1944 the number of evacuees in the main northern provinces had reached 646,000, of which 426,000 came from the main industrial cities of Milan, Turin and Genoa.259 The total number of evacuees and refugees was estimated at 2.28 million by the spring of 1944, spread out among 51 separate Italian provinces.260 The crowds of evacuees were distrusted by the authorities as a potential source of social protest and closely monitored, but for most the chief issue was to find enough food to survive on. Italy by 1944 was a very mobile society as people sought to find areas of greater safety, or were forced to move from military zones, or tried to return to the liberated south.261
Even in southern Italy safety was not guaranteed, for German aircraft bombed southern towns on occasion, including six raids on the already heavily bombed port of Naples. On the evening of 2 December 1943 a small raid by 35 German aircraft on the crowded dock at Bari led to widespread devastation and, unknown to the local population, the release of a toxic mix of oil and liquid mustard gas. The presence of this deadly mixture was suppressed by British authorities in the post-raid communiqué but was evident on the wounded men taken from the water and tended in the local hospital, where the staff were only notified that gas burns were to be expected when the symptoms were already well-established and patients dying.262 Unknown to the Italian population, the Allies held large stocks of chemical weapons in Italy, ready to be used at a moment’s notice. Since Mussolini had been responsible for using gas in Italy’s war in Ethiopia, the prospect of a desperate act by the enemy in Italy was not entirely out of the question, but Allied chemical resources in Italy dwarfed the quantities used by Italians in Africa. By 1945, American forces had over 10 million lbs of mustard gas and 3 million lbs of other gases in the theatre, to be used principally by the air forces, which had 110,000 gas bombs in store.263 The air force was ordered to keep on hand sufficient weapons to be able to carry out at least 45 days of continuous gas warfare from the air, aimed at enemy ports and military installations. In the event of a chemical attack by German or Italian forces in Italy, the Mediterranean Tactical Air Forces were ordered to use gas weapons in the immediate battle area without restriction, and to drop gas bombs on other military targets away from ‘heavily populated areas’ but, by implication, on areas which were nevertheless populated. Stocks of gas weapons were held in store in the area around Foggia, which explains the ship at Bari whose contents were destined to boost existing supplies in southern Italy.264
Throughout the peninsula, air-raid protection for the cultural sites threatened by widespread bombing assumed a fresh urgency. In November 1942 the education minister, Giuseppe Bottai, issued directives to intensify the work of protecting cultural buildings and churches, but it proved impossible to provide adequate physical covering that would withstand a direct hit or the effects of large-scale conflagrations. In Naples the destruction of the church of Santa Chiara by fire was only intensified by the protective covering outside, which increased the internal temperature.265 After Rome tried to claim status as an ‘open city’, so other cities followed suit to avoid damage to their historic centres and collections of books and pictures. Padua, attacked 40 times, finally submitted its request on 1 February 1945, by which time the damage had been done. With the advancing battlefront it was also decided that much of the movable art and book collections stored in depositories in the countryside were in danger from air warfare and the retreating German armed forces, and the order was issued in October 1943 to bring the collections back to the cities where local art superintendents could safeguard them as best they could in underground storage facilities.266 In the end the survival or otherwise of cultural treasures was arbitrary, dependent on where the bombs were strewn, or the intelligence of the curators who guarded them, or the attitude of the local German officials of the Kunstschutz (Art Protection) organization. In Turin some 13 churches had protected status, but only six survived relatively unscathed. In the convent of Santa Maria della Grazie in Milan, Leonardo’s fresco of The Last Supper survived a direct hit by a miracle, as the rest of the refectory which housed it was demolished.267 Among the other providential survivals was Botticelli’s Primavera, spotted by two journalists sent to interview Indian soldiers in a villa outside Florence in sight of German tanks, the painting unboxed on the floor among the men brewing tea.268 The strenuous efforts made meant that in the end much was saved, but a good deal of an invaluable patrimony was also destroyed or stolen.
The Allied hope that the bombing offensive might encourage Italian resistance to German exploitation, theft and savagery was as ambiguous as the early ambition to unseat Mussolini by bombing Rome. Opposition to the German occupiers certainly did not need bombing as a spur. Indeed, some case can be made to show that bombing actually harmed the prospects for the resistance and alienated potential supporters of the Allied cause. This was not the case with strike movement in northern Italy, which was linked to the onset of repeated and heavy raids from the autumn of 1943 onwards. Strikers at the Fiat works in November 1943 cited bombing as one of the reasons for running the risk of German intervention and Fascist brutality. The risks were substantial. In Turin a German deputy, sent to calm down the social protests, executed the protest leaders and deported 1,000 workers to Germany.269 In the summer of 1944 further large-scale protests against dispersal plans brought so many workers out on strike that the German authorities were unable to cope. In December 1944 a strike crippled Milan’s factories. Among these workers were those who risked acts of sabotage to accompany the bombing, while many workers who refused to be deported to work in Germany disappeared into the mountains to join the partisans. The partisan movement had close contacts with the Allies from 1944, and used these channels to explain that the poor accuracy, high-flying and inadvertent damage caused by Allied bombing alienated potential resisters, particularly as many of the areas hit were working class and anti-Fascist.270 Partisan protests in late 1944 highlighted many examples where tactical bombing hit neither the Germans nor an evident military target, making a ‘tragic situation’ for the population all the harder. For the Allies this ran the risk, as intelligence information made clear, that the population might turn to supporting Soviet communism rather than continue to identify with the forces responsible for killing them. D’Arcy Osborne, in one of his despatches fro
m Vatican City, pointed out that many Italians contrasted the Western Allies unkindly with the Red Army, which was ‘the only one that gets results by fair military means’, unlike Anglo-American forces who ‘compensate their military inferiority by murder and destructive bombing’.271 In this sense bombing had a much greater social and political impact in Italy than it did in the bombing of Britain or Germany, and one that fitted imperfectly with the ‘liberating’ image that Allied propaganda sought to convey. Communism continued to thrive in post-war Italy in cities where the housing losses, food shortages and unemployment compromised the achievements of peace.
The human costs of the bombing war in Italy are difficult to compute, because Sicily and the Italian Peninsula were the sites of two years of harsh warfare that raked its way slowly across the whole territory. Deaths, damage to buildings and the loss of artworks were caused by artillery fire, rockets, fighter aircraft, and some of it by naval fire along Italy’s coastline, and from both sides, Allied and Axis. The 8,549 deaths in Sicily, for example, before the armistice were the result of all forms of military action whereas the 7,000 in Rome were due almost entirely to bombing.272 The post-war statistical record drawn up to show the cause of deaths as a result of the war indicated a very precise total of 59,796, though other categories of ‘poorly specified’ or ‘poorly defined’ or ‘various acts of war’ count a further 27,762, some of whom were almost certainly bombing victims.273 The total number of seriously injured has not been recorded. In cases where urban records provide a list of injured – for example in Bologna – the number is around the same as those killed, in this case 2,000. The number of those injured, whether severely or lightly, is not likely to be less than the figure of around 60,000 killed. Of the number of dead, about 32,000 were men, 27,000 women, a reflection of the extent of female evacuation and the compulsory requirement for men to carry on working in the cities on German orders or to help with post-raid rescue and clearance. The fact that the level of casualty was not much higher, given that the weight of bombs was almost six times the weight dropped on Britain, may owe something to the fact that many of the objectives for the tactical bombing attacks in 1943–5 were against rural or small-town targets rather than major cities. The Allied view was that Mussolini had brought this destruction on Italy’s head by daring to attack Britain side by side with Germany in 1940: ‘He insisted in participating in the bombing of England,’ claimed one British propaganda leaflet, ‘and so doing sowed the wind and condemned [Italians] to harvest the tempest.’ In another leaflet, produced in July 1943, the British Political Warfare Executive (PWE) reminded Italian readers that ‘the bombardment of the civil population is an official Fascist theory’.274 In the war of words and bombs, Douhet, in the end, came home to roost.
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