The Italian air raid on Bahrain

In the early hours of 19 October 1940 aircraft that nobody expected appeared over Bahrain, a British protectorate in the Persian Gulf. They were four Italian Savoia-Marchetti SM.82s that had taken off from Rhodes the previous evening. Three of them dropped their bombs on the area of a refinery owned by American capital; the fourth, which had lost the formation, mistakenly bombed American oil installations at Dhahran in neutral Saudi Arabia. The damage was slight, but the flight itself – from Europe over Asia and on to Africa – was one of the longest bombing raids of the entire war.

Oil within reach of the bombers

Since Italy’s entry into the war in June 1940 the Regia Aeronautica had been trying to strike at Britain’s oil supplies in the Middle East. From July bombers based on the islands of the Dodecanese had been attacking Haifa, where the pipeline from Iraq ended and a refinery supplying the fleet was at work, and on 9 September their bombs fell on Tel Aviv. At the beginning of October the Italian air command concluded that the target at Haifa had been largely put out of action and proposed reaching further: to the refinery in Bahrain, some 2,500 kilometres from the nearest Italian airfields.

Oil had been discovered on Bahrain in 1932. It was extracted and refined by the Bahrain Petroleum Company (BAPCO), a subsidiary of the American Standard Oil of California (today’s Chevron), which from 1936 operated jointly with Texaco. Its refinery at Sitra, south of Manama, was one of the important sources of fuel for the British fleet and air force in the East. A few dozen kilometres away, on the Saudi coast at Dhahran, the same American group, under the name California Arabian Standard Oil Company, had struck the first commercially viable Saudi oilfield in 1938 and in 1939 had dispatched the first tanker of Saudi crude. Bahrain was considered so remote from the enemy that it had no anti-aircraft defences at all, nor even a blackout.

The plan of Muti and Moci

The idea found a champion in Lieutenant Colonel Ettore Muti, who since October 1939 had been secretary of the National Fascist Party while also flying combat missions as commander of the XLI Bomber Group of the 12th Wing on Rhodes. At his request the feasibility of the raid was examined by Captain Paolo Moci, formerly a test pilot at the research centre at Guidonia. Moci concluded that the SM.79 bombers with which the group was equipped lacked the necessary range. He proposed using SM.82s – three-engined transport aircraft that had recently also been adapted for bombing – with additional fuel tanks, landing after the attack not on Rhodes but in Italian East Africa. According to Italian accounts, the chief of the air staff, General Francesco Pricolo, had doubts about whether the party secretary should risk his life on so dangerous an expedition; the dispute was settled by Benito Mussolini, who approved both the raid and Muti’s part in it.

The four aircraft were prepared at Guidonia, and the crews were trained at Ciampino airfield near Rome. The aircraft were commanded by Muti (with Moci as second pilot), Lieutenant Colonel Fortunato Federigi, Captain Mayer and Captain Antonio Zannetti. A fifth SM.82 fitted with a direction finder waited at Massawa in Eritrea, ready to search for any crew forced to make an emergency landing in the desert. On 14 October the aircraft flew to Gadurrà airfield on Rhodes, but for several days a strong wind made it impossible for the overloaded machines to take off. With trial take-offs at ever greater loads, Moci finally proved that it was possible to take off in the direction that required a turn just above the island’s hills.

A flight across three continents

The four SM.82s took off from Gadurrà at 5.10 p.m. on 18 October, each carrying about one and a half tonnes of bombs and an enormous reserve of fuel. According to the participants’ accounts recorded in Italian works, the aircraft climbed above the storm clouds, passed Cyprus, flew over Beirut at about 8 p.m. and soon afterwards over Damascus, and then set off across the Syrian Desert and northern Arabia. Thickening haze made it difficult to keep formation; Muti’s aircraft, which led the formation, transmitted short radio signals so that the others could home in on it. After midnight the aircraft reached the coast of the Persian Gulf and descended so as not to lose sight of the ground. It was then that Lieutenant Colonel Federigi’s aircraft lost the formation.

At about two in the morning the three remaining aircraft sighted Bahrain. The refinery and the town were brightly lit, and the airfield, hearing the approaching aircraft, reportedly switched on its runway lights, taking them for friendly machines. The Italians dropped their bombs on the burning gas flares and the refinery buildings; many small 15-kilogram bombs had deliberately been chosen instead of a few heavy ones, so as to spread the damage over a wider area. According to Italian figures, 132 such bombs were dropped. Federigi’s aircraft, meanwhile, mistook the lights of Dhahran, a few dozen kilometres to the west, for the target in Bahrain and dropped its load there.

After the attack the formation turned south-west across the Arabian Peninsula. The Saudis later heard aircraft over the small town of Layla in central Arabia and over Abha in the Asir mountains. Over the Red Sea it turned out that Massawa was under attack by British aircraft at that very moment, so the crews diverted to the nearby airfield of Zula and landed there at about 8.45 a.m., with fuel in their tanks for roughly half an hour’s flying. The expedition had lasted more than fifteen and a half hours; accounts estimate its length at 4,100–4,200 kilometres. At the airfield the crews were welcomed by the Viceroy of Ethiopia, Amedeo, Duke of Aosta. On 23 October the aircraft set off on the return journey: on the way they bombed Port Sudan, then landed at Benina near Benghazi, and on 24 October at Ciampino.

How much was destroyed

The assessment of the results depends on whose sources one reads. Italian propaganda proclaimed a great success and a distance record; Rome claimed that the aircraft had flown three thousand miles one way, which was an exaggeration, and the American weekly Time repeated Italian assurances that the bombers had refuelled from submarines on the way – in reality they had simply carried an enormous reserve of fuel. Italian authors write of several wells and tanks set on fire. British and local sources speak of negligible damage. A communiqué of the Bahrain government of 19 October stated that the aircraft had dropped about forty bombs, which fell outside the refinery grounds, roughly half a mile away, killing no one. The airmen had aimed at the glaring flares of burning gas, which a few days before the raid had been moved further away from the installations and the workers’ housing.

At Dhahran the results were similar. The Saudi government announced that on the night of 18–19 October unknown aircraft had dropped about twenty-three small bombs on the installations of the American company, causing minor damage; one bomb cut a water main, another pierced an oil pipeline, and the rest exploded in the sand. Illuminating flares with Italian markings were found on the spot, leaving no doubt as to who was responsible. Emir Faisal, son of Abdulaziz ibn Saud and Saudi foreign minister, passed on to the British in Jeddah reports of the aircraft flying over Arabia. For a neutral kingdom that maintained relations with Rome this was a painful affront, but the available sources confirm neither a formal protest in Rome nor an apology or compensation from Italy. The American company quietly sent its employees’ wives and children home.

Cairo and the double date

Some war chronologies record the Italian attack on Bahrain twice: on 19 October and again on 20 October, together with the bombing of Cairo. There was only one raid on Bahrain – on the night of 18–19 October – and the second date probably corresponds to the day on which news of it, together with the Italian communiqués, went round the world’s press. The mention of Cairo is harder to verify. Some accounts state that Italian aircraft bombed the Egyptian capital on 19 October, at a time when the Italian army, after entering Egypt, had halted near Sidi Barrani. The details of such a raid, however, cannot be established, and the British official history, describing the autumn of 1940, mentions no serious attack on the cities of the Nile Delta – it notes only that, had such attacks taken place, the lack of co-operation from the Egyptian authorities on air defence could have had grave consequences. If bombs did fall near Cairo in those days, then, it was an isolated attack of little significance, not to be compared with the raid on Bahrain.

Place in the war

Militarily the raid changed nothing: the refinery kept working and oil deliveries from Bahrain did not stop. Its effects were psychological and organisational. The British, convinced that the Persian Gulf lay beyond the enemy’s reach, spent several days sending aircraft on patrols in search of Italian submarines or seaplanes, which they took to be the likely culprits. They also had to move to the defence of Bahrain and the Gulf anti-aircraft guns and other resources that were in short supply on other fronts. As the historian Massimiliano Fiore observed, the raid demonstrated the ingenuity of the Italian air force, which had turned a transport aircraft into a long-range bomber, but it was at the same time proof of its weakness: a grand expedition by four aircraft achieved no lasting effect, like most Italian air raids in 1940.

The raid was also a reminder of how important oil from the Persian Gulf had become, and that from distant Bahrain to the Saudi oilfields British and American interests were by now intertwined. The following years brought the struggle for Iraq in 1941, growing American involvement in Saudi Arabia, which in 1943 was made eligible for Lend-Lease aid, and after the war the construction of an American air base at Dhahran. Ettore Muti, decorated for the raid, was killed in August 1943 in unclear circumstances, shortly after Mussolini’s fall.