Bombs on the Vatican

On the evening of 5 November 1943, at about 8.10 p.m., bombs fell on the territory of Vatican City. They were dropped by a single aircraft that had been circling over Rome for more than half an hour. Four charges exploded in the Vatican Gardens and near the buildings around them: one close to the receiving station of Vatican Radio, another by the Governorate Palace, a third struck the mosaic workshop, and a fourth exploded by the residence of the cardinal archpriest of St Peter’s Basilica. No one was killed, but the damage was serious. To this day it has not been established beyond doubt who sent the aircraft.

It is often written that the Italians bombed the Vatican in a failed attempt to destroy the papal radio station. This is the most widely accepted hypothesis today, but it remains only a hypothesis. According to it, the aircraft belonged to the air force of the Fascist Italian Social Republic, and Roberto Farinacci was behind the raid. Other sources of the time pointed to the Germans or to an Allied aircraft, and none of the parties concerned admitted responsibility.

A neutral state in an occupied city

The Vatican City State had existed since 1929, when the Lateran Treaty concluded between the Holy See and Mussolini’s government gave the Pope a small sovereign territory in Rome. Article 24 of the treaty stated that the Vatican would always and in every case be considered neutral and inviolable territory. During the first years of the war Pope Pius XII pressed both sides to spare the whole of Rome. When the American air force carried out the first raid on Rome on 19 July 1943, the bombs fell on working-class districts and railway stations, but not on papal territory. Washington had earlier given assurances that its airmen had been given precise instructions to ensure that no bomb fell on the Vatican. The Allies rejected the Badoglio government’s declaration of Rome as an open city in August 1943.

After Italy’s capitulation in September, the Germans occupied Rome. The Vatican now lay in the very heart of an occupied city. German soldiers stood guard at the edge of St Peter’s Square, the security police of SS Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Kappler operated in Rome, and on 16 October the SS carried out a round-up in the Rome Ghetto and across the city. More than a thousand Jews who were seized were deported to Auschwitz, from which barely a dozen or so returned. Some fugitives – Jews, escaped prisoners of war and anti-fascists in hiding – found shelter in monasteries and convents, in the extraterritorial buildings of the Holy See and in the Vatican itself. Rumours circulated in the city that the Germans might enter papal territory or abduct the Pope.

Living behind the Vatican walls, moreover, were diplomats of countries at war with Germany who were accredited to the Holy See, among them the British minister and the American chargé d’affaires. When their countries went to war with Italy (Britain in June 1940, the United States in December 1941), they had had to move from Rome onto papal territory, and they lived in the Palace of the Tribunals. From the summer of 1943 Germany was represented by a new ambassador to the Holy See, Ernst von Weizsäcker.

Vatican Radio had a special position. The station broadcast in many languages and relayed the Pope’s addresses, and during the war it also transmitted thousands of messages about prisoners of war and missing persons prepared by the Vatican information office. Fascist radicals had long suspected that the radio and the Vatican diplomats were passing military information to the Allies.

The evening of 5 November

The night was fine and cloudless, and the moon gave good visibility. Monsignor Domenico Tardini, one of the Pope’s closest collaborators in the Secretariat of State, recorded in 1944 that an aircraft had circled for a long time over the city, and especially over the Vatican. At about 8.10 p.m., as a formation of Allied aircraft was passing over the Vatican, the machine dropped its load and flew off.

The worst damage was to the mosaic workshop, where for centuries mosaics had been made and conserved for St Peter’s Basilica. Vatican sources speak of the destruction of artistic heritage of great value. The bomb that fell by the Governorate Palace damaged some of the offices, and the blast of another, in the square by Santa Marta, blew out windows at the rear of St Peter’s Basilica and in its dome. Tardini noted that had the bombs fallen only a few metres further on, they would have hit the radio station, the Governorate and the Palace of the Tribunals, where the diplomats lived. He himself, he recalled, survived only because he was in the corridor rather than in his office at the moment of the explosion. According to a subsequent examination by Vatican experts, they were high-explosive bombs weighing 100–150 kilograms. From the fragments found it was impossible to establish whether they had been made in Britain, Germany or Italy. Some later accounts speak of five bombs, one of which failed to explode.

The next day the propaganda of both sides went on the attack. The Fascist Stefani agency blamed “Anglo-American” airmen, services of thanksgiving were held in Roman churches for the Pope’s deliverance from a “barbarous attack” by the Allies, and the Republican Fascist radio station in Munich even claimed that the dome of the basilica and the obelisk in the square were in danger of collapse. Farinacci’s newspaper Il Regime Fascista searched the raid for “Bolshevik” threads. According to chroniclers of the time, Romans did not believe the story of Allied guilt and suspected the Germans or the Italian Fascists instead.

Who dropped the bombs

The Secretariat of State set up a commission to assess the damage and sent notes to the representatives of Germany, Britain and the United States demanding explanations and strict bans on flights over papal territory. All three governments gave assurances that their airmen had had nothing to do with the raid. The command of General Dwight Eisenhower established that no Allied aircraft had been operating over Rome itself that evening, and that six light bombers had attacked targets near Castelnuovo di Porto, 28 kilometres north of the city. The British, aware that the fragments might come from British-made bombs, stressed that this proved nothing, since the enemy could have used captured munitions.

At headquarters in Algiers, however, the matter was far from clear. On 8 November the British Minister Resident, Harold Macmillan, cabled the Foreign Office: “I think we probably bombed the Vatican.” He had in mind one of seven Boston bombers which, because of engine trouble, had jettisoned its load blind through the clouds. In London, however, it was noted that the sky over Rome had been cloudless, and a confidential inquiry by the Air Ministry showed that the damaged aircraft had dropped its bombs over Arce, some 80 kilometres south-east of Rome. Meanwhile an American priest in the Secretariat of State, Monsignor Walter Carroll, passed on to Cardinal Luigi Maglione confidential information from the American command that the culprit was most probably a stray American pilot, since another airman had seen an Allied aircraft dropping bombs on the Vatican. For a time Tardini accepted this version.

From the outset, however, people in Rome talked of Farinacci, the most anticlerical of the leading Fascists, and of the airfield at Viterbo north of the city. This rumour was noted by the German diplomat in Rome Eitel Friedrich Moellhausen, who wrote after the war that Farinacci never denied his responsibility. The British historian Owen Chadwick considered this version “very improbable”. In 2010 Augusto Ferrara argued in his book 1943 Bombe sul Vaticano that Farinacci had organised the raid with a Roman pilot who took off from Viterbo in a Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 bomber, and that the aim was to put Vatican Radio out of action. Ferrara relied among other things on the record of a telephone conversation of 8 November 1943 intercepted by Italian intelligence, in which a priest just back from the Viterbo airfield told the Jesuit Pietro Tacchi Venturi what he had heard from a witness to the preparations. According to this version, the American pilot whose account Carroll cited may have mistaken the three-engined Sparviero, seen from a distance, for an American Martin Baltimore bomber of similar silhouette. Yet as late as 2011 the Vatican daily L’Osservatore Romano wrote that the identity of the perpetrators had never been fully established, and some Italian authors still point to the Allied air forces.

Significance

The raid of 5 November had no military significance whatsoever. Vatican Radio carried on broadcasting, and the Pope did not change his policy. It did show, however, how fragile was the neutrality of a tiny state surrounded by an occupied city in which the Germans, the Fascists of Mussolini’s republic and the Allied air forces were all active. According to the Vatican’s own news service, Vatican News, which draws on Ferrara’s findings, Pius XII, ultimately convinced that this had been an unauthorised act by Fascist radicals rather than a decision by any government, preferred that the matter should not be publicised further. The Holy See publicly accused no one.

It was not the last such incident. On 1 March 1944, during an Allied raid on Rome, bombs fell on the edge of Vatican territory by the wall, near the Palace of the Holy Office. A workman was killed, a Dutch friar was wounded, and the Palace of the Holy Office and the Urban College on the Janiculum were damaged. This time the British Air Ministry admitted in confidence that one of its aircraft had dropped its load by mistake, although here too there were versions blaming an Italian machine. Rome remained under German occupation until 4 June 1944, when the American Fifth Army entered the city. Farinacci, who never answered the accusations over the raid, was shot by partisans on 28 April 1945, the same day as Mussolini.

In the history of the war the bombing of the Vatican remained an episode, but a telling one. To this day it illustrates how, in occupied Rome, the propaganda of every side immediately blamed the enemy before anyone had examined the facts.