The Italian air raid on Tel Aviv

On the afternoon of 9 September 1940, a week after the first anniversary of the outbreak of war in Europe, Italian bombers appeared over Tel Aviv. The bombs fell not on the port or on any military installation, but on crowded residential and shopping streets in the centre of the city. Popular chronologies give 137 dead. That is the figure most often cited, but not the only one: tallies from the time and later studies speak of 107, 117, 125, 130 or 132 killed. Whatever the discrepancies, it was the bloodiest air raid on Palestine of the entire Second World War and the greatest tragedy in the city’s history up to that time.

War comes from the Dodecanese

From the moment Mussolini declared war on France and Britain, the British Mandate of Palestine lay within range of Italian aircraft. The bombers of the Regia Aeronautica were based on Rhodes and Leros, islands of the Dodecanese administered by the governor Cesare Maria De Vecchi, one of the former leaders of the March on Rome, an ambitious man eager to show that his air force was taking part in the war. From mid-July Italian aircraft had been attacking Haifa, the terminus of the oil pipeline from Iraq and the site of a refinery that supplied the British fleet. In early September they appeared over Haifa regularly – on 6 and 8 September – but the city’s anti-aircraft defences were by then stronger, and most of the bombs fell into the sea.

Tel Aviv, then a city of about 150,000 and the largest Jewish city in Palestine, was not a military target and had almost no defences. No fighters or anti-aircraft batteries were stationed there, and the warning system was primitive. The inhabitants had grown used to the war being fought elsewhere and treated air-raid alerts as exercises.

The afternoon of 9 September

According to Hebrew sources the bombs began to fall at about 4.12 p.m. Accounts differ over how many aircraft took part in the raid and of what type. Italian studies, cited among others by the writer and historian Alberto Rosselli, speak of CANT Z.1007bis bombers from Rhodes and Leros – six according to some tallies, ten according to others – which dropped a total of about four tons of bombs. Some Israeli publications, on the other hand, write of five machines, and some of Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 aircraft from the same 41st Group that had bombed Haifa.

The bombs struck a densely built-up strip running south from Bograshov Street: Trumpeldor, Pinsker and Kalischer Streets, King George Street near Ben Zion Boulevard, and the area around the Neve Sha’anan district. A direct hit destroyed the house at 57 Pinsker Street. Most people died in King George Street, where a long queue, mostly of women and children, had formed outside a kerosene outlet – kerosene being scarce in wartime and essential for cooking and lighting homes; according to accounts, some forty people were killed in that one spot. Some of the bombs fell outside the city, on the Arab village of Sumayl on its north-eastern edge. The sirens sounded, but many people did not manage to reach the shelters, of which there were few in any case. Several dozen buildings were destroyed.

The rescue work fell to the municipal fire brigade, civil defence and the inhabitants themselves. There were too few ambulances, so the wounded were driven in private cars to the Hadassah and Assuta hospitals, and the Carmel school was turned into a makeshift hospital. One of the bombers failed to return to base.

Error or intent

To this day it is not known for certain why the bombs fell on Tel Aviv. Rosselli maintains that the aircraft were heading for Haifa, were intercepted by British fighters and turned back, and were then ordered to bomb the port of Tel Aviv or neighbouring Jaffa; fleeing their pursuers, they dropped their loads on residential districts. This version is supported by what De Vecchi reported to Rome: his airmen were said to have bombed port installations and warehouses in Jaffa. Rome radio announced that the Italian air force had “heavily bombed the port of Jaffa” and started fires there. A British military communiqué, on the contrary, stated that the bombs had been dropped “indiscriminately, far from any military objectives”, partly on the Jewish city and partly on an Arab village. The version of a botched attack on a secondary target, carried out in haste and from high altitude, is the one most widely accepted, but it cannot be fully confirmed: the Italian command admitted neither to attacking the city nor to an error, and its official communiqués spoke only of the port.

The victims

The first British communiqué spoke of “more than fifty” dead, most of them Jews, with five Arab children among the victims. Over the following days, as the seriously wounded died, the number rose rapidly. The figure most often given is 137 killed; one detailed tally gives 125 victims – 117 Jews, seven Arabs from Sumayl and one Australian soldier – and other accounts 107, 130 or 132. The wounded numbered several hundred, about 240 according to Hebrew sources. Among the dead were many children, women and elderly people. Most of the Jewish victims were buried in a common grave in the Nahalat Yitzhak cemetery, in what is now Givatayim, and the funeral procession through the centre of the city was watched by tens of thousands.

Reactions

The mayor of Tel Aviv, Yisrael Rokach, set up municipal emergency teams and issued an appeal in which he called Tel Aviv a city of peace and labour and urged the inhabitants, despite their grief, to return calmly to their work. The city opened a fund for the victims, and the British Mandate authorities supported reconstruction with compensation. The High Commissioner, Harold MacMichael, came to Tel Aviv to offer his condolences. Rokach sent telegrams of protest to Jewish leaders and communities around the world, including President Roosevelt. According to Israeli studies, those who sent condolences included Winston Churchill, who called the raid an act of “senseless cruelty” that could only strengthen the common will to fight. A few days later the RAF attacked the bases in the Dodecanese; Reuters quoted a pilot as saying that the airmen had flown to Rhodes and Leros more willingly than usual, because that was where the aircraft that had bombed Tel Aviv had come from.

For the Yishuv, the Jewish community of Palestine, the raid was a shock: the war, which until then had meant above all news of the fate of the Jews in occupied Europe, had come to its largest city. Arguments flared over the lack of shelters and the state of civil defence, but the anger was directed at the Axis powers, not at the British, even though relations with the Mandate authorities remained strained over the restrictions on immigration. The Jewish Agency had been demanding for months the right to form Jewish units and an anti-aircraft defence. On 13 September the British informed it confidentially that several dozen Jews would be accepted into the army as anti-aircraft gunners; in the autumn the 1st Palestinian Light Anti-Aircraft Battery was formed, manned mainly by members of the Haganah.

Arab attitudes were more divided. Italy had been courting Arab sympathy for years: the Arabic-language broadcasts of Radio Bari, on the air since 1934, presented Mussolini – who in 1937, in Libya, had had himself styled the protector of Islam – as an opponent of British rule and of Zionism, and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, then living in Baghdad, was seeking Axis support. Among some Arab nationalists, embittered after the suppression of the revolt of 1936–1939, Italian successes raised hopes of an end to the Mandate. But the bombs did not choose their victims: inhabitants of Sumayl were killed too, and on 21 September a raid on Haifa killed some forty Arabs in the eastern part of the city. Such events blunted the effect of Italian propaganda among the Arab population.

Its place in the war

Militarily the raid was of no significance – it destroyed nothing that served the British war machine. It did show, however, that Palestine, the rear base of the British army in the Middle East, lay within reach of Axis aircraft, and it hastened decisions the British had previously avoided: strengthening the anti-aircraft defences and accepting Palestinian Jews for service in the artillery. From those first units later came soldiers of the Jewish Brigade, formed in 1944.

Tel Aviv was bombed once more, on the night of 11–12 June 1941, during the fighting between the British and Free French and the Vichy forces in Syria and Lebanon. A bomb hit a home for invalids on Marmorek Street, killing thirteen people. Israeli sources attribute this raid to the Vichy French air force, others to German or Italian aircraft. No later attack, however, matched the death toll of the raid of 9 September 1940. In 1995, on the 55th anniversary, a memorial bearing the names of the victims of both raids was unveiled at the junction of King George Street and Ben Zion Boulevard, not far from where the kerosene queue had stood.