The Corpo Aereo Italiano over England

On the evening of 24 October 1940 Italian Fiat BR.20 bombers took off from airfields in Belgium. They belonged to the Corpo Aereo Italiano (CAI), the Italian Air Corps, which Benito Mussolini had sent north to fight against Britain alongside the Luftwaffe. Their targets were the port of Harwich in Essex and the seaplane base at Felixstowe on the other side of the estuary of the Stour and the Orwell. It was the first combat sortie of the Italian air force over England, and at the same time a foretaste of what the whole episode would look like: great political expectations, meagre results, and losses caused more by the weather and lack of training than by the enemy’s defences.

A belated corps

The corps had been formed on 10 September, and its transfer to Belgium took more than a month. The bombers of the 13th and 43rd Wings (stormo) reached their bases at Melsbroek (PL) and Chièvres at the end of September, but many crews lost their way over the Alps and Germany. The Fiat G.50 fighters, held up by the weather at Treviso, did not land at Maldegem until 19 October. According to Italian figures, the corps was complete on 22 October.

Meanwhile the Battle of Britain had changed its character. After the great clashes of 15 September Hitler postponed Operation Sea Lion, and on 12 October he put off the invasion until the spring of 1941. The Luftwaffe had largely switched to night raids on London and the industrial cities, sending mainly fighters and fighter-bombers over England by day. The Italians thus entered the fight at a moment when the German command no longer counted on a quick decision in the air. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring’s Luftflotte 2, to which the CAI was subordinated, assigned the Italians a sector on the east coast of England between the Thames estuary and Suffolk – well away from the main German targets.

The night of 24–25 October

Sources differ on the number of aircraft. Italian works speak of sixteen BR.20s, English ones usually of eighteen; one of the more recent online accounts even dates this first night sortie to 23 October. Most authors accept the night of 24–25 October. The bombers flew without escort, since at night it would not have been needed anyway, and the Italian fighters had neither radios nor training for night flying.

The expedition went wrong from the start. According to Italian and English literature, one BR.20 crashed a few minutes after take-off and its entire crew – six airmen, according to some accounts – was killed. About ten crews reported that they had bombed the target, but not all the aircraft even found Harwich and Felixstowe in the darkness and bad weather. On the way back two crews lost their bearings and baled out, abandoning their aircraft, and another bomber made an emergency landing at an airfield near Lille in occupied France. In all, the corps lost three or four aircraft on that one night (depending on whether the machine damaged on landing is counted) – all without any intervention by the British defences.

The effects on the English side were negligible. The anti-aircraft defences of the Harwich area, which covered the ports of Harwich, Felixstowe, Ipswich and Parkeston, were weak at the time – according to British figures only eight heavy guns remained there, the rest having been moved to defend the fighter airfields – but they were not put to the test. British reports recorded no serious damage, and some of the defenders did not even realise that a new enemy had appeared over the coast that night.

Ramsgate, 29 October

The failure of the night raid prompted the Italian command to change tactics: from now on the bombers were to fly by day under a strong fighter escort. On the afternoon of 29 October fifteen BR.20s took off to attack the port of Ramsgate in Kent (Italian sources also mention Margate). According to Italian figures they were escorted by 39 Fiat CR.42 biplanes and 34 G.50 monoplanes, and according to some authors also by a few German Messerschmitt Bf 109s. Some accounts present this raid as Italian retaliation for the British bombing of cities in northern Italy.

Two bombers turned back with mechanical trouble and a third made an emergency landing at Ostend; twelve reached the target and dropped, by British reckoning, about 75 bombs. The British who watched the raid remembered above all how it looked: the bombers came in low, in tight formation wingtip to wingtip, while the open-cockpit biplanes with their fixed undercarriages kept alongside in equally impeccable order. The aircraft wore sand-yellow camouflage with green and brown blotches, better suited to Libya than to the autumn sky over the Channel. Fighter Command’s squadrons did not intercept the raid, but the anti-aircraft guns damaged five bombers; all of them returned to Belgium. According to local British accounts, bombs also fell on Deal, where six men were killed in the Royal Marines barracks, but whether this attack was the work of the Italians is uncertain.

In the last days of October the Italian bombers carried out a few more minor night raids on the ports of eastern England. The Battle of Britain was by then drawing to a close – British official histories take 31 October 1940 as its last day – and the Italian contribution to it was limited to two larger raids that had no influence whatever on its course.

What came next

The real test came on 11 November 1940. Ten BR.20s, escorted by more than forty CR.42s, flew over Harwich by day and were intercepted by Hurricanes of Nos. 46 and 257 Squadrons RAF. According to British and Italian figures, which in this case agree, the Italians lost three bombers and two fighters in the fight; one CR.42 landed on a beach in Suffolk and fell into British hands. The RAF lost no aircraft. The following night British torpedo bombers attacked the Italian fleet at Taranto. After another lost fighter engagement on 23 November the corps confined itself to night raids and patrols, and from January 1941 it returned to Italy, where its aircraft were urgently needed.

According to the Italian tally, the CAI’s bombers flew about 140 combat sorties and lost eleven aircraft, of which only three were shot down; the corps as a whole lost 38 aircraft, most of them in accidents and through mechanical failures. The fighters did not achieve a single confirmed victory.

Place in the war

The first operation of the Corpo Aereo Italiano was above all a political gesture. Mussolini wanted Italian wings to appear over England alongside German ones, and he achieved that. The price was the diversion of several hundred experienced airmen and aircraft that were modern by Italian standards from fronts that were of decisive importance for Italy. A few days later Mussolini decided to attack Greece, while in North Africa Marshal Rodolfo Graziani’s army stood at Sidi Barrani without sufficient air support. The raid on Harwich and Felixstowe thus illustrates the character of Italy’s war in the autumn of 1940: a dispersal of forces in pursuit of prestige, with inadequate training and equipment, which would soon force the Germans to rescue their ally in the Balkans and in Africa.