Italian air raids on Palestine

Some war chronologies record under 1 July 1940 that the Italian air force began bombing the British Mandate of Palestine. In fact, at the beginning of July the Italian Regia Aeronautica was only gathering its forces for such attacks: on 6 July fourteen Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 bombers of the 41st Group of the 12th Bomber Wing flew in to Gadurrà airfield on Rhodes, and more joined them over the following days. The first raid on Palestine took place on 15 July, and the first to cause heavy loss of life on 24 July. Both were aimed at Haifa, which for months afterwards remained the main target of Italian bombers in the Middle East.

Why Haifa

Until the summer of 1940 the war seemed remote to the inhabitants of Palestine. The country was exhausted by the Arab revolt of 1936–1939, and the British White Paper of May 1939, which restricted Jewish immigration and envisaged a state with an Arab majority, had provoked the anger of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine. Even so, the Jewish leaders sided with Britain. In the autumn of 1939 David Ben-Gurion declared that the Jews would fight Hitler as if there were no White Paper, and the White Paper as if there were no war. Palestine became a rear base for the British army in the Middle East; Australian units, among others, trained in its camps.

The situation was changed by Italy’s entry into the war on 10 June and the fall of France. The Italians had air bases on Rhodes and other islands of the Dodecanese, a few hundred kilometres from the Palestinian coast, while French Syria and Lebanon passed under the authority of a government that had concluded armistices with Germany and Italy. Haifa, moreover, was one of the most important points in Britain’s fuel system in the region. It was the terminus of the pipeline from the Iraqi oilfields at Kirkuk, opened in 1935 by the Iraq Petroleum Company, and on the shore of Haifa Bay stood an oil terminal, storage tanks and a new refinery belonging to Shell and Anglo-Iranian, capable of processing about a million tons of crude a year. Fuel from Haifa supplied the British fleet in the eastern Mediterranean and the troops in Egypt.

According to the historians who have studied the campaign, the raids on Palestine were largely the initiative of the governor of the Italian Aegean Islands, Cesare Maria De Vecchi, one of the founders of the Fascist regime. He wanted his air force to take part in the war and had considerable freedom in choosing targets.

15 July: the first raid

On the morning of 15 July ten SM.79 bombers approached the coast of Palestine in two waves of five aircraft. They were led by Major Ettore Muti, commander of the 41st Group and at the same time, since the autumn of 1939, Secretary of the National Fascist Party, who had left the running of the party to a deputy in order to fly on operations. According to Hebrew sources, the aircraft crossed the coastline north of Atlit, high above the clouds, and at about 9.15 a.m. dropped their bombs on the industrial zone along the bay. Italian reports speak of 120 fifty-kilogram bombs dropped from 5,000 metres. Tanks and installations of the Iraq Petroleum Company and Shell were hit: three oil tanks caught fire, the power station was damaged and the city was left without electricity for a time. The bombs did not reach the residential districts. Several people were wounded; one of them, an Arab worker, later died in hospital. An Italian reconnaissance aircraft that flew over Haifa two days later reported that the fire was still burning.

24 July: a raid with casualties

The second raid, carried out according to Italian historians at the express wish of the Supreme Command in Rome, claimed far more victims. At about nine in the morning on 24 July nine or ten SM.79s, depending on the source, appeared over Haifa. Anti-aircraft fire forced them to change course, and roughly half of their hundred and forty-odd bombs fell into the sea. One of them hit an Arab fishing boat, killing two fishermen. The rest were scattered over the outskirts. The heaviest casualties were at the Shell installations on the eastern edge of the city, where a fire broke out. Two bombs fell in the Jewish district of Hadar HaCarmel. According to various tallies, between 44 and 46 people were killed, most of them workers: according to one count, 28 Arabs, 15 Jews and a British policeman. Several dozen were wounded. The victims were buried the same day, and representatives of the Jewish Agency came to Haifa, among them the head of its political department, Moshe Shertok (Sharett).

Italian propaganda proclaimed a great success, which the British did not deny. The fires at the refinery burned for many days, and according to research by the Israeli historian Nir Arielli its production was halted for almost a month. British fighters from the airfield on Mount Carmel failed to intercept the bombers, which returned to the Dodecanese. After the two raids many Americans employed in the oil industry left Haifa. The Jewish Agency asked for fighters to be sent to defend the city, but the Chief Secretary of the Mandate administration replied that every aircraft in Egypt was needed at the front.

The war reaches Palestine

Further raids on Haifa, on 6 and 27 August and on 6 and 8 September, caused damage but few casualties, because the anti-aircraft defences were now stronger and most bombs fell into the sea. The most tragic day came on 9 September 1940. CANT Z.1007 bombers from Rhodes, driven away from Haifa by British fighters according to the Italian historian Alberto Rosselli, dropped their bombs on Tel Aviv, hitting a residential district. According to most accounts 137 people were killed – 125 according to another tally – most of them Jews queuing for paraffin. It was the bloodiest air raid on Palestine of the entire war. On 21 September bombs fell on the Arab quarter of Haifa, killing about forty people.

After the tragedy in Tel Aviv the British, who did not want to take anti-aircraft guns away from England or the Suez Canal, agreed for the first time to accept Palestinian Jews as anti-aircraft gunners. In the autumn of 1940 the 1st Palestinian Light Anti-Aircraft Battery was formed, in which many members of the Haganah served; its soldiers later went on to the Jewish Brigade. The first series of Italian raids on Haifa ended in late September 1940. In 1941, especially during the fighting in Syria, German bombers, French ones from the Levant and Italian ones again appeared over Palestine, and the last raid on Haifa took place in September 1942.

Place in the war

Militarily, the Italian air campaign against Palestine achieved little. A few dozen bombers operating from several thousand metres could not paralyse Britain’s fuel supply for long, and the Haifa refinery resumed work after every raid. The raids did show, however, that the war Mussolini called “parallel” reached far beyond North Africa and Malta: in October 1940 Italian bombers even attacked the refineries on Bahrain. For the inhabitants of Palestine, Jews and Arabs alike, the July bombing of Haifa was their first direct experience of the war, and for the Yishuv it was also an argument in its dispute with the British over the right to bear arms, which later led to the creation of Jewish units in the British army.