The raid on Genoa

On the night of 22–23 October 1942 Britain’s RAF Bomber Command resumed its raids on Italy. To Genoa, the country’s largest port and one corner of its “industrial triangle”, it sent 112 Avro Lancaster heavy bombers of No. 5 Group, led by crews of the target-marking formation, the Pathfinder Force. It was the first area raid on an Italian city in which, following the pattern of the raids on Germany, incendiary bombs were used on a massive scale. Bombs fell on the old centre, the port, the shipyards and the eastern districts. Genova Brignole station, the Pammatone hospital, churches and historic palaces in the heart of the city were damaged. According to preliminary figures 39 people were killed and about 200 injured.

Why Italy

The British had been bombing northern Italy since the first days of the war with her. On the night of 11–12 June 1940 bombers from England flew to Turin, and in February 1941 Genoa was shelled by the ships of Force H. Until 1942, however, these were few and ineffective raids. Long flights over the Alps required aircraft of great range and load-carrying capacity, and Bomber Command needed all its strength against the Reich. The new four-engined bombers changed the situation, especially the Lancasters, which could cross France and the Alps without difficulty.

The timing of the renewed raids was no accident. According to the Bomber Command operations record, the campaign against Italy was begun so as to coincide with the British Eighth Army’s offensive at El Alamein, the attack being set for the evening of 23 October. The British were also preparing a landing in North Africa, scheduled for early November. Striking the industrial cities of Liguria, Piedmont and Lombardy was meant to hamper the supply of Axis forces in Africa, force the Italians to keep fighters and anti-aircraft guns at home and, above all, break the morale of a population that believed less and less in Benito Mussolini’s war. London regarded Italy as the weaker link of the Axis, where even small raids could bring political results out of all proportion to the forces committed. The commander of Bomber Command, Air Marshal Arthur Harris, who since February had been waging a night area offensive against German cities and in September had destroyed much of Düsseldorf, could now turn its methods on the second member of the Axis.

A night over Genoa

The night of 22–23 October was cloudless and bright with moonlight. According to the British operations record the Pathfinders marked the target “quickly and accurately”, and the bombing by this relatively small force, carrying only about 180 tons of bombs, “could hardly have been carried out in better conditions”. According to Italian tallies about a hundred aircraft reached the city. The aiming point was the Piazza De Ferrari in the very centre of Genoa. Not a single Lancaster was shot down, and the Italian anti-aircraft defences and fighters were unable to interfere with the attack.

By Italian standards the effects were unprecedented. The incendiaries started dozens of fires, some of which were still burning a day later. The medieval arcades of Sottoripa by the harbour, the Palazzo San Giorgio, the Doge’s Palace and the Palazzo Spinola suffered, as did the churches of Santa Maria in Passione and Sant’Agostino. In the morning King Victor Emmanuel III visited the city and walked through the worst-hit districts, while Queen Elena visited the wounded in hospital. The British admitted that their information on the damage was imprecise but stressed the raid’s “serious effect” on the morale of the inhabitants.

It is sometimes said that the bombers destroyed the airfield and hit the city centre, residential districts, hospitals and churches; this is only partly accurate. The available British and Italian sources confirm damage in the centre, in residential districts, at the Pammatone hospital and in churches, but make no mention of the destruction of an airfield. The target of the raid was not aviation installations but the city itself, and the losses resulted from the nature of area bombing rather than from missing a military target.

A mistake over Savona and a tragedy in the tunnel

The following night, 23–24 October, Bomber Command sent 122 aircraft of Nos. 3 and 4 Groups to Genoa: 53 Halifaxes, 51 Stirlings and 18 Wellingtons. This time the target lay under cloud. Many of the crews dropped their bombs on Savona, some tens of kilometres further west along the coast, where according to Italian figures 55 people were killed. Some aircraft bombed Vado Ligure or Turin. Only part of the force reached Genoa, where material damage was slight, although the Teatro Paganini was destroyed and never rebuilt. The British lost three aircraft and judged the raid a failure.

Yet the greatest loss of life in Genoa came not from this raid but from the fear of it. On the evening of 23 October, when after a night of fires the sirens sounded again, thousands of people rushed for the shelter in the former Galleria delle Grazie railway tunnel, reached by a steep stairway of about 150 steps near the Porta Soprana. A few people fell on the steps, others tumbled over them, and the crowd pressing from behind did not know what was happening below. According to the official count 354 people were trampled or suffocated in the crush; some estimates put the figure at more than five hundred. In Genoa the victims of the panic far outnumbered those killed by the bombs themselves the previous night.

By day over Milan

On 24 October Harris resorted to a rarely used measure: a daylight raid by heavy bombers. Eighty-eight Lancasters of No. 5 Group flew individually across France, using cloud cover, to a rendezvous over Lake Annecy, and from there in formation over the Alps to Milan. The attack took the city completely by surprise. According to the British operations record, 135 tons of bombs fell in 18 minutes, including tens of thousands of incendiaries, and some 30 large fires broke out. A total of 441 buildings were hit, among them San Vittore prison, two railway stations, the Monumental Cemetery and the Caproni aircraft works. At least 171 people were killed and about 300 injured. According to their own record the British lost three Lancasters, and a fourth crashed in England. The aiming point was Milan Cathedral. It was not hit on that occasion, but the choice of the city’s greatest church as the centre of the raid drew criticism from some British MPs and from Harris’s superior, the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Charles Portal.

The following night 71 aircraft of Nos. 1 and 3 Groups were to repeat the attack on Milan. Storms scattered the force, some crews strayed over Switzerland, and only 39 aircraft reached the target. The damage was slight, but the British lost six aircraft, or 8.5 per cent of the force. Even so, the raid hastened the flight of thousands of inhabitants from the city.

The weakness of Italian defences

The first night and daylight raids of autumn 1942 laid bare the weakness of the defences of Italian cities. The Regia Aeronautica had no real night-fighter force, and the anti-aircraft artillery was sparse, obsolete and without radar. Most of the modern equipment and the best fighter squadrons were fighting in Africa, over Malta and in Russia. Civil defence was poorly prepared too: many shelters were makeshift, and people were not used to night-time alerts. Genoa was saved to some extent by its many tunnels and galleries under the hills, where thousands could take cover, which explains why the number killed by the bombing itself was relatively small compared with the destruction. From early 1943 German anti-aircraft batteries reinforced the Italian defences, but this did not fundamentally change the situation.

The bombers also began to erode morale. Inhabitants of the great northern cities, who for two years had regarded the war as something distant, left in large numbers for the countryside and smaller towns. The Fascist authorities, who had assured people that the country was safe, lost their trust, and the evacuation of the cities, at first spontaneous, soon became official policy.

Place in the war

The raid on Genoa opened the first concentrated bombing campaign against Italy. On the evening of 23 October the Eighth Army began the Second Battle of El Alamein, and on the night of 7–8 November the Allies landed in Morocco and Algeria. At the same time Bomber Command returned to northern Italy. Genoa was bombed four more times in November, including on the night of 7–8 November, in the heaviest raid on an Italian city up to that time, when 143 of the 175 aircraft dispatched attacked the centre and the Ansaldo shipyards. According to Italian tallies the six autumn raids destroyed or badly damaged about 1,250 buildings in Genoa and killed 451 people. From 18 November the target became Turin with its FIAT works; on the night of 20–21 November 177 people were killed there, and a mass exodus from the city began.

The raid of 22–23 October did not decide the outcome of the war, but it set in motion a process that over the following months undermined Italians’ confidence in the regime. By the spring of 1943 the bombing, the defeats in Africa and the disaster suffered by the Italian army on the Don had made the war deeply unpopular in the country. Further, much heavier raids in 1943, including the first American raid on Rome on 19 July, accompanied the regime’s collapse: on 25 July 1943 the Fascist Grand Council turned against Mussolini, and the king had him arrested. Genoa was bombed until 1945, and its historic centre, devastated in those first autumn nights of 1942, was rebuilt over the decades after the war.