RAF raids in November 1942

On the night of 18–19 November 1942 the British RAF Bomber Command sent heavy bombers over Turin, the capital of the Italian motor and aircraft industry. According to Italian records, 71 aircraft reached the city and dropped 121 tons of bombs. They hit the FIAT works, the Westinghouse factory and the Nebiolo foundry; 42 people were killed and 72 injured. The British lost no aircraft that night. It was the beginning of a series of raids on Turin which by mid-December had made it the hardest-hit city in northern Italy.

The version found in some chronologies, according to which on 18 November the RAF carried out a heavy raid on Berlin with light losses, is not borne out by the sources. Bomber Command did not attack the Reich capital in November, nor indeed at any time in 1942. The last large raid on Berlin had taken place on the night of 7–8 November 1941 and ended in disaster: of the 169 aircraft sent to the city, 20 failed to return, and only a small fraction reached the target. After that night the British gave up long-range flights to Berlin for more than a year, and in the whole of 1942 only nine air-raid alerts were sounded in the city, none of them serious. The bombers returned to the Reich capital only on the night of 16–17 January 1943. In November 1942 the main weight of the raids fell on Italy, and among German cities on Hamburg and Stuttgart.

Bombers in the service of Mediterranean strategy

The autumn of 1942 was a period in which Bomber Command’s operations were subordinated to the land campaign as never before. In the summer and early autumn Arthur Harris’s command had been conducting raids on western Germany, including the Ruhr and the North Sea ports, but in the second half of October part of its strength was turned against Italy. On the night of 22–23 October the Lancasters of No. 5 Group bombed Genoa, and on 24 October, in a rare daylight raid, Milan. The campaign was meant to support the Eighth Army’s offensive at El Alamein and the Allied landings in North Africa: strikes on the ports and factories of northern Italy were to hamper the supply of Axis forces in Africa, force Rome to keep fighters and anti-aircraft guns at home and undermine the Italians’ will to go on with the war.

In November this line was continued. On the night of 7–8 November, as the Operation Torch convoys were approaching the shores of Morocco and Algeria, 175 bombers set out for Genoa. According to Italian figures, 143 of them dropped 237 tons of bombs on the shipyards and the eastern districts of the city; 23 people were killed, and the British lost six aircraft. It was the heaviest raid on an Italian city up to that time. Genoa was attacked again on the nights of 13–14 November (70 aircraft over the target, ten killed) and 15–16 November (68 aircraft, five killed). The death toll was small in relation to the damage, because the inhabitants sheltered in the many tunnels under the city’s hills.

Turin

From 18 November the main target became Turin, home of the FIAT concern, which produced cars, lorries, tanks, engines and aircraft for the Italian armed forces. The first raid showed that the city was almost defenceless: Italian anti-aircraft artillery was sparse and obsolete, and the Regia Aeronautica had no real night-fighter force. Two nights later, on 20–21 November, Bomber Command sent 232 aircraft to Turin. According to Italian sources, 198 of them dropped 211 tons of bombs, including some 120,000 incendiaries, and three were shot down. The FIAT and SNIA works, the municipal power station, a hospital, theatres and the synagogue were hit. 177 people were killed and 120 injured; it was the heaviest raid yet suffered by an Italian city. After that night a mass exodus of the population from Turin to the countryside and the surrounding small towns began.

The next blow came on the night of 28–29 November. 228 bombers were sent to Turin, of which, according to Italian figures, 194 dropped 371 tons of bombs, including, for the first time in Italy, 8,000-pound high-explosive bombs. 67 people were killed. That night the pilot of a Short Stirling of No. 149 Squadron, the Australian Rawdon Middleton, made three low runs over the target to locate the FIAT works. On the final run an anti-aircraft shell badly wounded him and his second pilot. Middleton, his jaw shattered, flew the damaged aircraft back over the Alps to the English coast, let five of his crew bail out over land and turned back over the Channel so as not to crash the aircraft onto houses. He died together with the two airmen who had remained aboard. For this flight he was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross. The following night a small force killed another 16 people in Turin.

Hamburg and Stuttgart

The Reich was not spared in November, but the raids on it were less frequent and less successful. On the night of 9–10 November 213 aircraft were sent to Hamburg. Strong winds and cloud scattered the bombs outside the city; according to figures cited from German documents, 26 fires broke out and three people were killed, while the British lost 15 aircraft, or 7 per cent of the force. On the night of 22–23 November 222 bombers, including 97 Lancasters, flew to Stuttgart. The city was covered by cloud, and the crews of the target-marking force (the Pathfinder Force) could not find its centre. The bombs fell mainly on the southern districts, where they destroyed 88 houses and badly damaged 334; 28 people were killed. The weather, the long nights and the needs of the Mediterranean front made November a month of transition for the offensive against Germany. Bomber Command was still waiting to be fully equipped with new navigational aids, and the number of heavy four-engined bombers was only just beginning to grow rapidly.

Part of Harris’s force was in fact working directly for Operation Torch: aircraft laid mines off the French coast and in the Bay of Biscay, while day after day the American Flying Fortresses of the Eighth Air Force flew over the U-boat bases at Saint-Nazaire, Lorient and La Pallice. Their missions were a further test of the doctrine of daylight precision bombing at the heart of the Anglo-American dispute. The concrete U-boat pens proved practically bomb-proof, and the German fighter pilots, who in November began attacking the American formations head-on, inflicted ever heavier losses on them.

The echo in Italy

The raids on Turin and Genoa struck Italy at the moment of its deepest crisis since the start of the war. Within two weeks Rommel had retreated from El Alamein, the Allies had landed in Morocco and Algeria, and in the second half of November a Soviet counter-offensive began on the Don in which much of the Italian army in Russia would soon perish. For two years Fascist propaganda had assured the country that it was safe, and now hundreds of thousands of people were fleeing the great cities of the north, often spending their nights in the fields and in nearby villages. The authorities, who at first condemned the flight as defeatism, soon began organising the evacuation themselves.

The British deliberately exploited this weakness. In a broadcast on 29 November Winston Churchill announced that once the Axis forces had been driven out of Africa, the whole of southern Italy, its naval bases, munitions factories and other military targets would be subjected to “prolonged, scientific and shattering” air attack. “It is for the Italian people, forty millions of them, to say whether they want this terrible thing to happen to their country or not,” he said. The aim was to separate the Italians from the regime and from Germany. Benito Mussolini replied on 2 December with a speech to the Chamber of Fasces and Corporations in which he spoke of the destruction in the cities of the north and of the need to evacuate part of their population. To many listeners this was an admission that the state could not protect them.

Place in the war

The November raids did not decide the outcome of the war, but they were part of the pressure under which Italy’s will to fight collapsed over the following months. In December Bomber Command attacked Turin three more times; on the night of 8–9 December more than 200 people were killed there, several dozen of them in a collapsed shelter. Then the weight of the raids returned to the Reich. In January 1943, at the Casablanca Conference, the Allies adopted the programme of the Combined Bomber Offensive, in which the Americans were to attack by day and the British by night, and in March Harris opened the Battle of the Ruhr. Berlin, which some chronologies mention, became Bomber Command’s main target only in November 1943. Italian cities continued to be bombed in 1943, now with the participation of American aircraft from bases in Africa, and the raids, together with the defeats in Africa and on the Don, contributed to Mussolini’s fall in July 1943.