The bombing of San Marino

At the end of June 1944 Allied bombers attacked San Marino – a tiny republic on the slopes of Monte Titano that had declared its neutrality from the outbreak of the war. The bombs fell on the railway linking San Marino with Rimini and on the town itself. The attack rested on the belief that the Germans were using the republic’s territory and railway to move troops and supplies; that belief proved mistaken. Some chronologies give the date as 27 June, but the main raid took place a day earlier, on 26 June 1944 – the date given by Sammarinese sources and most studies, and the one commemorated in San Marino as the anniversary of the tragedy.

A neutral island in Italy

San Marino, regarded as the oldest surviving republic in the world, had some 14,500 inhabitants in 1939. From 1923 it was governed by local Fascists closely tied to the regime of Benito Mussolini, and the republic maintained close economic and transport links with Italy – not least through the electric railway to Rimini, opened in 1932. Even so, San Marino did not enter the war and declared itself neutral. In the summer of 1943, after Mussolini’s fall, Fascist rule in the republic came to an end.

San Marino’s status was, however, unclear to both sides. The British Foreign Office observed in 1944 that Britain had never declared war on the republic but had never formally recognised its neutrality either – and that it would regard military action on its territory as justified if Axis forces were making use of it. The Germans, for their part, falling back northwards after the Allied entry into Rome, were building the fortifications of the Gothic Line a short distance south of the republic’s borders; the line’s eastern end rested on the Adriatic coast south of Rimini. San Marino thus lay just behind the future front line.

The raid of 26 June

The attack was carried out by the tactical air force supporting the Eighth Army – the Desert Air Force, which included British and Dominion squadrons, among them South African ones. According to tallies based on Sammarinese research, some 40 Martin B-26 Marauder and Baltimore medium bombers appeared over the republic and, in three waves between roughly 11 a.m. and 12.40 p.m., dropped 263 bombs. The main target was the railway – the station, the tracks and the installations of the line to Rimini – but bombs also fell on houses and public buildings in the town and its surroundings.

Casualty figures vary. The number most often cited is 63 dead, of whom 37 were citizens of San Marino and the rest Italians, including refugees who had sought shelter from the war in the neutral republic. Some studies, counting all the raids of 1944 together, speak of around a hundred victims. The material damage was considerable for so small a state.

Why San Marino?

The official justification was an intelligence report according to which the Germans were using the Sammarinese railway to transport troops and weapons and had stockpiled supplies on the republic’s territory. Another version long circulated in San Marino: the Allies had supposedly hoped to hit Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, who was said to be staying in the republic at the time. This version was never confirmed, but it captures well the inhabitants’ sense that the raid made no sense. It later emerged that the information on which the republic had been attacked was false – something that, according to Sammarinese and Italian studies, Winston Churchill himself acknowledged.

The raid of 26 June was the largest but not the only one. According to Sammarinese research, bombs fell on the republic’s territory several more times up to the end of August 1944 – eight attacks in all are mentioned, the last of which, on 29 August, again hit the railway. The line to Rimini was never returned to service; it was finally dismantled after the war.

Refugees and neutrality

At the beginning of July the government of San Marino reaffirmed the republic’s full neutrality and announced that the German command had put up signs on its borders forbidding German units to enter its territory. In mid-August German troops were ordered to respect its neutrality, although the right of transit for supplies and wounded was reserved.

At the same time thousands of refugees were pouring into San Marino from the coastal strip of Romagna, which was being bombed by Allied aircraft and cleared of its inhabitants by the Germans building the Gothic Line. In the summer and autumn of 1944, according to Sammarinese estimates, as many as some 100,000 people took refuge in the republic – many times its own population – including a large part of the inhabitants of Rimini. Many of them lived in the tunnels of the now disused railway.

September 1944 and compensation

Neutrality, respected on paper by both sides, did not survive the approach of the front. At the end of August 1944 the Eighth Army attacked the Gothic Line from the Adriatic side, and the fighting for the passes and hills around Rimini moved right up to the republic’s borders. In mid-September German troops entered San Marino to make use of its hills and roads, and on 17–20 September the Battle of San Marino was fought there: units of the 4th Indian Infantry Division drove out the Germans and occupied the republic. For a short time San Marino remained under Allied occupation, although – in view of its neutrality – no Allied military government was set up there; only a liaison officer was sent. In the autumn the republic was struck by a typhoid epidemic which, together with cases among refugees returning to Rimini, cost 93 lives.

After the war San Marino claimed 732 million lire in compensation from Britain for war damage. London rejected responsibility for the September fighting, arguing that the Germans had been the first to violate the republic’s neutrality, but offered a voluntary payment for the June bombing – first £26,000, and eventually £80,000. According to Sammarinese and Italian sources, the matter was not closed until July 1961. The House of Commons acknowledged at the time that San Marino had faithfully observed its traditional neutrality during the war.

Place in the war

On the scale of the war, the bombing of San Marino was a minor but telling episode. It showed how hard it was to preserve the neutrality of a small state lying in the middle of embattled Italy, how easily a mistaken intelligence report turned into a death sentence for civilians, and how broadly “communications” targets were understood in tactical air raids in 1944. At the same time San Marino became that summer one of the largest refuges in the region for civilians fleeing the front – a role it kept until the autumn, when the war reached Monte Titano too. The front, which in June was moving through Umbria – as at the capture of Perugia – and Tuscany, later came to a halt for long months in the Apennines, and in the autumn of 1944 Romagna, between Rimini and Bologna, became the scene of some of the heaviest fighting of the Italian campaign.