Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation's Treasures from the Nazis (7 page)

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“BOMBS AND WORDS”

LATE JULY–AUGUST 21, 1943

P
rime Minister Winston Churchill, long the champion of an invasion of Italy, began strategizing the next phase of the campaign even before the battle in Sicily had been won. He wrote to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Commander-in-Chief, Allied Forces in North Africa, expressing his determination to turn the Italian population against “the German intruders” who had caused Italy such misery: “We should stimulate this process in order that the new liberated anti-fascist Italy shall afford us at the earliest moment a safe and friendly area on which we can base the whole forward air attack upon South and Central Germany . . . the surrender of, to quote the President, ‘the head devil [Mussolini] together with his partners in crime’ must be considered an eminent object.”

“Stimulating the process” became the responsibility of the Psychological Warfare Branch (PWB), which developed a campaign informally referred to as “bombs and words,” based on the premise that the morale of Italy’s citizens could be broken through a combination of forceful propaganda and punishing bombing. The plan called for targeting those cities containing the better-educated populations and greatest number of industrial workers. The resulting misery and fear caused by these attacks would eventually lead to a series of demonstrations and strikes designed to embarrass Marshal Pietro Badoglio and his new government and force them to capitulate and join the Allies.

On July 29, General Eisenhower delivered the “words” to the Italian populace through a radio address translated into Italian: “We are coming to you as liberators. Your part is to cease immediately any assistance to the German military forces in your country. If you do this we will rid you of the Germans and deliver you from the horrors of war.”

Many Italians believed that Mussolini’s removal from power had signaled that the war in Italy would soon be over. The Allies’ temporary suspension of the bombing of Italy’s northern cities only added to that mistaken confidence. Without new bombings, the Badoglio government felt a diminished sense of urgency to finalize a surrender agreement. This dithering frustrated Allied leaders. Three days later, another Allied broadcast criticized the Badoglio government, noting that it had “played for time and thus helped the Germans.” A blunt warning followed: “The respite is over. The bombing of military objectives will resume.”

PWB compiled a list of bombing targets—including Rome, Milan, Turin, Genoa, Bologna, Naples, and Florence. Precautionary language noted that “. . . [Allied command] should attack the cultural centres always bearing in mind that accidental destruction of cultural monuments may have an adverse effect on our campaign.” PWB also recommended advance notice of bombings by leaflet drops and radio warnings. But this was a footnote to the larger directive. The Allies wanted Italy to surrender. Any target that might help achieve that objective would be considered.

Several days earlier, Churchill had written Eisenhower: “We have not bombed Northern Italy for the last two days because we wanted to give them a taste of relief but unless they formally ask for an armistice in the immediate future, we intend to give them all manner of hell.” On August 1, Churchill was even more specific. In a memo to his Foreign Secretary, responding to yet another appeal from the Holy See that Rome not be subjected to further bombing, Churchill wrote: “I cannot see any reason why, if Milan, Turin and Genoa are to be bombed, Rome should be specially exempted.”

Although the British and the Americans operated under a unified command structure, there existed a significant divergence of opinions about the role of precision bombing versus area bombing. Britain’s head of Bomber Command, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, and the commander of the U.S. Eighth Air Force, Lieutenant General Ira Eaker, each held distinct views. General Eaker believed in precision bombing, normally limited to daylight operations for greater visibility. Bomber pilots received orders to aim for military targets, including industrial plants, railroad marshaling yards, and airfields. This generally precluded the use of incendiaries, or firebombs. Civilian casualities were to be avoided.

The July 19 daylight raid on the Littorio and San Lorenzo Airdromes and marshaling yards in Rome by the U.S. Air Forces provided a perfect illustration of the American approach. Allied leaders knew the decision to bomb Rome posed an enormous risk. Damaging or destroying the city’s great treasures—St. Peter’s Basilica, the Pantheon, the Colosseum—wouldn’t just be exploited by the Nazi and Fascist propaganda machines. The destroyers would also face the judgment of history. Roosevelt’s repeated assurances to the pope were, in part, tacit acknowledgment of that fact.

Extraordinary measures were taken to avoid damaging the highest-profile monuments in Rome. The pre-mission orientation of pilots was extensive. “I never briefed [air]crews quite as carefully and flew a bombing run through flak as meticulously as on this raid,” one commander later wrote. The night before the bombing, RAF Wellingtons dropped some 864,000 leaflets warning Romans of an impending attack and urging them to seek shelter or evacuate the city. PWB also aired radio messages before the raid to intensify fear and chaos among citizens. While the Basilica of San Lorenzo did sustain damage, the bombing mission successfully destroyed the intended targets and avoided the restricted areas.

In contrast to General Eaker, British Air Chief Marshal Harris believed in the use of area bombing, not precision bombing. By bombing at night, British aircrews were at less risk from antiaircraft flak and enemy fighters. Harris and his commanders understood that greater safety for their pilots and preservation of precious aircraft by definition meant a far higher degree of imprecision in the results. In order to ensure that targets were hit, vast areas, often entire cities, were bombed in massive raids. “It should be emphasized that the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing, are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories.” According to the U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain, John Winant, Churchill said, “Night bombing does not lend itself to accurate bombing. . . . It would not be honest to state that bombing would be confined to military objectives only.”

The basis for their differing perspectives was rooted in the ways England and the United States had each entered World War II. Hitler’s relentless bombardment of England during the Blitz, from September 1940 to May 1941, claimed the lives of thirty thousand Londoners alone. Marshal Harris, commonly referred to as “Bomber Harris,” had witnessed its devastating consequences. Standing on the roof of the British Air Ministry building during one of the worst nights of the Blitz, he looked out over London: “The old city [was] in flames. . . . St. Paul’s [Cathedral] standing out in the midst of an ocean of fire—an incredible sight. One could hear the German bombers arriving in a stream and the swish of the incendiaries falling into the fire below.”

England was fighting for its survival in a war it did not start. In Harris’s view, “The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naïve theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.” The late July 1943 bombings of Hamburg, which deliberately created a firestorm through the combined use of incendiary and high-explosive bombs, aided by ideal weather conditions, fulfilled Harris’s promise: forty-six thousand people lay dead and the city was destroyed.

The hundreds of tons of high explosives carried by a bomber fleet could inflict severe damage on a city and everything in it, but nothing on the scale of what occurred when such ordnance was dropped in conjunction with incendiaries. These cylinders contained highly flammable material that acted like kindling on a fire, providing an extended source of fuel. “The [4,000-pound blockbuster] bomb could crash through three or four floors with its weight, then ignite on the wooden floors. All that was missing was a draft. After the [bomb] blew away all the roofs and windows for miles around, the buildings became chimneys, and the incendiaries dropped in.”

The result was horrifying. “Small fires united into conflagrations in the shortest time and these in turn led to fire storms. . . . the overheated air stormed through the street with immense force taking along not only sparks but burning timber and roof beams, so spreading the fire farther and farther, developing in a short time into a fire typhoon such as was never before witnessed, against which every human resistance was quite useless.”

Ensuring target destruction held greater priority than limiting collateral damage. In Harris’s words, “The idea was to keep on at small targets for their strategic importance but, to put it crudely, not to mind when we missed them, or at any rate to regard a miss as useful provided that it disturbed morale.” British military leaders accepted the grave consequences that followed—civilian deaths, destruction of cultural monuments, and entire cities engulfed by “fire typhoons”—although not without criticism.

The first bombs dropped on Italy had landed in Turin on June 11, 1940, the day after Italy declared war on Britain and France. From the beginning, the British believed “the Italian ‘psychology’ was considered ‘not suited for war.’
 
” By applying “maximum political and military pressure” on local populations, Allied leaders hoped that the people would revolt against their government.

By autumn 1942, the British increased the frequency and intensity of bombings on the industrial centers of northern Italy. Bombs fell on Genoa six times; on Turin seven. An October 24 daylight raid on Milan caused thirty large fires and killed 171 citizens. Mussolini’s order for evening civilian evacuations only increased the anxiety of those living in northern Italy. After his removal from office in late July 1943, “the Milanese ignored martial law and posted anti-war posters and freed political prisoners, as thousands of armament factory workers went on strike. The trams got so crowded they could not circulate and people shouted, ‘Peace, Peace, Badoglio will give us peace!’ Ironically, an angry crowd of Milanese even attacked German anti-aircraft gun crews.”

Allied leaders believed that stepping up bombing attacks on Milan and other northern cities would be instrumental in forcing an Italian surrender. By August, the “bombs and words” campaign culminated in punishing RAF bombings—including the use of incendiaries—in northern Italy. Harris had once said that “the aim of the Combined Bomber Offensive . . . should be unambiguously stated [as] the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilized life throughout Germany.” But did this policy cross a moral divide by unleashing the Allies’ anti-Nazi fury against Fascist Italy, especially after Mussolini had already been removed? If so, did it warrant targeting the center of art-rich cities such as Milan?

On August 8 at 1:10 a.m., the first of four near-successive nights of attacks commenced. The raids provided no time for citizens and military installments to recover. Targets included the Breda armaments facilities and several train stations, but the primary objective was the city center of Milan.

As Churchill had promised, Milan suffered “all manner of hell.” By mid-August, it had become an inferno. Damage to its water mains left the city burning for a week. Citizens of the Swiss city of Lugano could see the glow of the fires and hear the explosions some thirty-five miles away. While the wall supporting
The
Last Supper
still stood, many other renowned buildings suffered damage, few more famous than Milan’s opera house, La Scala. Embers from a nearby incendiary bomb ignited its roof; soon the “building was gutted by fire.”

Milan’s two principal art museums—which before their evacuation contained hundreds of masterpieces by Leonardo, Raphael, Mantegna, and many other revered Old Masters—were pummeled. The Brera Picture Gallery, a seven-minute walk north of La Scala, had burned, leaving only its brick walls and stone columns. The Ambrosiana Picture Gallery, home to Caravaggio’s stunning still life
Basket of Fruit
and Raphael’s drawing for the epic
School of Athens
fresco (which he later painted on the wall of the Stanza della Segnatura at the Vatican), was severely damaged by fire.

The British strategy hadn’t targeted the city’s monuments and museums, but no one in Bomber Command could credibly express surprise that these central landmarks—historic buildings including the Duomo, Palazzo Reale, and Castello Sforzesco—had been damaged. In all, the raid killed more than seven hundred Milanese; forty churches, ninety-nine schools, and 3,200 homes were “razed to the ground [or] badly damaged.”

In early 1941, Mussolini had told his countrymen that “the hardships, suffering, and sacrifices that are faced with exemplary courage and dignity by the Italian people will have their day of compensation when all the enemy forces are crushed on the battlefields by the heroism of our soldiers.” By August 1943, the rapid success of the Allied invasion of Sicily and the devastation of Milan and other northern cities had confirmed just the opposite. The
Regia Aeronautica
, the air force of the Kingdom of Italy, had proven feckless.
*
Allied bombing raids had exposed gaping holes in Italy’s defenses. Civil preparations were laughable. Too few antiaircraft batteries, a near-absence of radar warning, and air-raid sirens that sounded
after
casualties began arriving at the hospitals exposed shortcomings in Fascist organization. The great industrialist and Fiat heir, Gianni Agnelli, later observed that he had witnessed “public services in disarray, the responsible members of the [Fascist] Party incapable of establishing order amongst the rank and file.”