The first bombing of Rome

On 19 July 1943, nine days after the Allied landing in Sicily, American aircraft bombed Rome for the first time. For three years of war the Italian capital – the seat of the Pope and a city that both sides treated as a symbol – had remained off the list of targets. That day several hundred American bombers dropped more than a thousand tons of bombs on the marshalling yards in the east of the city and on the Ciampino airfields. Bombs also fell on the densely built-up working-class district of San Lorenzo. Between about 1,500 and about 3,000 people were killed, depending on the source, and several thousand were wounded. Among the buildings destroyed was the Basilica of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura (St Lawrence outside the Walls), one of the five great patriarchal basilicas of Rome.

The raid coincided with the last meeting between Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler before the fall of Fascism. The two leaders were holding talks that morning at a villa near Feltre in the Veneto, and it was there that the news reached Mussolini that bombs were falling on Rome. Although his generals had hoped he would tell Hitler that Italy had to leave the war, the Duce remained virtually silent throughout the meeting. Six days later he was no longer in power.

A city spared for three years

From June 1940, when Italy entered the war, the question of Rome came up in Allied discussions many times. The British, whose country had been attacked by Italian aircraft alongside the Luftwaffe in the autumn of 1940, were inclined to strike at Rome, and part of British public opinion demanded it. The Americans hesitated. Millions of Catholics were serving in the US armed forces, and at home the influential Catholic press and the Church hierarchy warned against an attack on the Pope’s city. General Henry H. Arnold, commander of the US Army Air Forces, called the Vatican a “hot potato”.

Yet the capital was very much a military target. It housed the government, the ministries, the Comando Supremo and the headquarters of all the armed services, and most rail traffic from the north of the country to the south passed through the stations of Roma Tiburtina, San Lorenzo, Prenestina and Littorio. Once the Allies had landed in Sicily, every train carrying troops, fuel and ammunition for the Italian and German forces on the island and in Calabria had to pass through the Rome junction. As early as May and June Allied aircraft had been bombing the ports and airfields of Sicily and Sardinia, and since December 1942 American bombers had been attacking Naples. Rome was the next, obvious target.

Pope Pius XII tried to prevent this. On 18 May 1943 he wrote to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, asking that Rome and its churches be spared “as far as possible”. Roosevelt replied on 16 June that attacks on Italy were confined to military targets, and that if the air forces had to operate over Rome, the crews would be given precise instructions to ensure that no bomb fell on the Vatican. Talks on recognising Rome as an open city, pursued by the Holy See since 1940, came to nothing: Mussolini’s government had no intention of moving the headquarters out of the capital or giving up its railway junction.

The raid of 19 July

The decision was taken after the start of the invasion of Sicily. The Allied air command in North Africa, headed by General Carl Spaatz, designated as targets the San Lorenzo and Littorio marshalling yards in Rome and the airfields around the city from which the aircraft defending Sicily were operating. The main striking force was provided by the Northwest African Strategic Air Force of General James Doolittle, joined by bombers of the Ninth Air Force from Libya. On the night of 18–19 July British Wellingtons dropped more than 800,000 leaflets over Rome warning the inhabitants of a raid on military targets and laying the responsibility on Mussolini’s government.

The first aircraft appeared over the city shortly after 11 a.m. According to the official history of the US Army Air Forces, some 150 B-17s bombed the San Lorenzo yards, more than a hundred B-24s attacked the Littorio station and the nearby airfield, and in the afternoon B-25 and B-26 medium bombers struck Ciampino. They were escorted by P-38 fighters. American communiqués at the time spoke of more than 500 bombers and about a thousand tons of bombs, and some later tallies give a total of around 690 aircraft. The Italian anti-aircraft defences and the few fighters of the Regia Aeronautica were unable to stop the raid. The morning waves came over for roughly two hours, and more followed in the afternoon.

The military targets were hit. Rail traffic through Rome was paralysed for a time, and many aircraft were destroyed on the ground at Ciampino. Bombs dropped from high altitude in close formation, however, scattered over the residential quarters surrounding the stations. The worst affected was the San Lorenzo district, home to railwaymen and labourers, but bombs also fell on Tiburtino, Prenestino, Tuscolano and Nomentano. The Policlinico Umberto I hospital, the university campus and the Verano cemetery were damaged. At the Basilica of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura the bombs destroyed the portico and façade and part of the roof, damaging medieval frescoes. General Azolino Hazon, commander of the Carabinieri, was killed during the rescue operation.

The number of victims has never been established precisely. Many of the dead were refugees from the south who were not registered in the city, and the records of the first days were incomplete. The figure most often given is about 1,500 killed, but Italian historians also cite figures close to 3,000 killed and more than 10,000 wounded. Thousands of families lost their homes.

The Pope in San Lorenzo

According to eyewitnesses, Pius XII watched the raid from the windows of the Apostolic Palace. In the afternoon, while the district was still burning, he left the Vatican – something he had rarely done since the outbreak of war – and, accompanied by the Substitute of the Secretariat of State, Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, went to San Lorenzo. In front of the ruined basilica he prayed with the crowd for the dead, blessed the people and ordered money and aid to be distributed among those affected. Photographs of the Pope with his arms outstretched amid the ruins, his white cassock stained, so it was said, with the blood of the wounded, went round Italy and became one of the best-known images of the war in that country. The next day the Pope wrote a letter to the Vicar of Rome, Cardinal Francesco Marchetti Selvaggiani, protesting against the destruction of churches and the deaths of civilians.

Other visitors were received differently. King Victor Emmanuel III, who visited the devastated districts, met, according to many accounts, with coldness and in places open hostility from the inhabitants. For the Romans the raid was proof that the regime that had been promising them greatness for twenty years could not even defend the capital. In the days that followed, the political police reported a sharp fall in morale and openly voiced grievances against Mussolini and the King.

Silence at Feltre

While the bombs were falling on Rome, Mussolini was more than 500 kilometres to the north. Hitler, worried by the attitude of the Italians after the loss of Tunisia and Pantelleria and by the rapid Allied advance in Sicily, had demanded an urgent meeting. The two dictators held talks on the morning of 19 July at the villa of Senator Achille Gaggia at San Fermo near Belluno, a meeting known to history as the Feltre conference. On the Italian side were also the Chief of the General Staff, General Vittorio Ambrosio, and the Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Giuseppe Bastianini. Before the meeting Ambrosio had told Mussolini bluntly that it was his duty to take Italy out of the war within the next two weeks.

Hitler delivered a monologue lasting about two hours. He reproached the Italians for the weakness of their army and the disorder behind the lines, demanded draconian measures and tougher leadership, and spoke of new weapons and of the need to fight the war to the end. In the middle of his discourse an Italian aide brought Mussolini the news that Rome was being bombed at that very moment. The Duce passed it on to those present but did not take up the subject. During a break Ambrosio and Bastianini urged him to tell Hitler that Italy needed a political way out of the war. Mussolini replied that this dilemma had been tormenting him for months, but he could not bring himself to speak frankly to Hitler. He merely asked for more aircraft and troops, and the Germans promised reinforcements, while in reality intending above all to secure northern and central Italy. The meeting was cut short, and that same day Mussolini flew back to Rome. From the aircraft he could see smoke over the eastern districts of the city.

The failure at Feltre and the raid on Rome accelerated a crisis that had been ripening since the Klessheim meeting in April. On the evening of 19 July Dino Grandi left Bologna for Rome with a draft resolution for the Grand Council of Fascism. The next day Ambrosio, disappointed by Mussolini’s attitude, offered his resignation and, together with the King’s circle, began preparing the dictator’s removal.

Reactions around the world

Fascist propaganda presented the raid as a crime by “air gangsters” against the cradle of Christianity, and the German press gave wide coverage to photographs of the destroyed basilica. The American command stressed that only military targets had been struck, that the airmen had been forbidden to drop bombs on the Vatican and the historic centre, and that no bomb had fallen on the territory of the Holy See. In the United States most of the press accepted the raid as a military necessity, although some Catholic newspapers condemned it. In Britain, which had known air raids on its own cities since 1940, there was little criticism.

Significance for the rest of the war

The raid of 19 July was not the last. Six days later the Grand Council of Fascism and the King removed Mussolini from power, and the bombing of Rome, together with the defeat in Sicily and the fiasco at Feltre, was one of the immediate triggers of this turning point. The new government of Marshal Pietro Badoglio tried to protect the capital from further attacks. After the second large raid, on 13 August 1943, it unilaterally declared Rome an open city on 14 August. The Allies did not recognise this, since headquarters and the railway junction were still operating in the city.

After the Italian surrender in September 1943 the Germans occupied Rome, and Allied aircraft bombed the city’s stations and airfields many more times, especially during the fighting at Anzio and Monte Cassino. Bombs also fell twice on Vatican territory, in November 1943 and in March 1944. The city was liberated by the American Fifth Army on 4 June 1944. In the memory of Romans, 19 July 1943 remained the most tragic day of the war in the city, and the figure of Pius XII amid the ruins of San Lorenzo became an enduring part of the image of the Pope as “defender of the city”. The bombing of Rome also showed that the Allies, although they spared historic monuments when they could, were prepared to strike at any communications hub the enemy needed, even in the heart of the Catholic world.