The raid on Pisa

At lunchtime on 31 August 1943 some 150 four-engined B-17 bombers of the American strategic air force in North Africa appeared over Pisa. In seven minutes, between 1.00 and 1.07 p.m., they dropped more than 400 tons of bombs on the marshalling yard, the industrial plants and the Porta a Mare district on the south bank of the Arno. The railway junction was badly damaged, but bombs also fell on homes. According to official figures 952 of the city’s inhabitants were killed; other estimates put the toll as high as 2,500. It was the heaviest single blow the war ever dealt Pisa. The famous monuments of the Piazza del Duomo, the Leaning Tower foremost among them, came through the raid unscathed.

The raids on the Italian railways

In the summer of 1943 Allied air forces were waging two linked campaigns over Italy. The first was meant to put pressure on the government of Marshal Pietro Badoglio, which after the fall of Mussolini was publicly promising to fight on while secretly looking for a way to surrender. The second, purely military, was preparing the ground for the invasion of the mainland. Just as before the landing in Sicily, when the bombers had spent weeks attacking Sicily and Sardinia, the targets now were ports, airfields and above all the railway junctions through which the Germans moved troops and supplies to the south of the peninsula. After the raid on Rome on 19 July it was the turn of Naples, Foggia, Bologna, Milan and Turin. In August, as more German divisions entered Italy over the Alps, cutting the north–south railway arteries took on added importance.

Pisa was one of the most important junctions in central Italy. Here the line running along the Tyrrhenian coast from Turin and Genoa to Rome and Naples crossed the line from Livorno to Florence. The Pisa Centrale station, with its extensive marshalling yard and locomotive workshops, handled several dozen trains a day. The city had factories working for the armed forces, including the Piaggio aircraft works, and in the industrial district of Porta a Mare, among others, the Saint-Gobain glassworks, while Italian air force planes were based at the nearby San Giusto airfield.

The raid was carried out by the Northwest African Strategic Air Force, commanded by General Jimmy Doolittle and subordinate to General Carl Spaatz. Its bombers flew from airfields in Tunisia, and Pisa lay much further north than the targets attacked in the preceding weeks.

Seven minutes

The air-raid sirens sounded in Pisa around noon. The city had heard them many times in the preceding months, and almost always it had ended in nothing worse than fright, so many inhabitants decided it was another false alarm and carried on with their lunch. Shelters were in any case scarce: according to Italian researchers there was room in them for at most one inhabitant in four. At 1.01 p.m. the first wave of bombers arrived over the power station in Porta a Mare. The aircraft bombed from altitudes of between about 5,500 and more than 7,000 metres. Two groups aimed at the marshalling yard, two at the industrial district.

Several hundred bombs fell on the Saint-Gobain glassworks, killing 56 workers caught during their lunch break. The Piaggio works and the railway station were badly damaged, and some bombs fell on San Giusto airfield. A great many, however, hit the housing around the tracks and across the whole south bank of the Arno. The Porta a Mare district was virtually razed to the ground. German 88 mm and Italian 90 mm guns opened fire, and several Italian Macchi fighters took off from the nearby airfield, but they could not disrupt the attack. According to some sources four bombers were shot down; according to others the Americans lost none.

Casualties and destruction

The official count was 952 dead and about a thousand wounded. Some Italian authors consider these figures too low and estimate the number of victims at as many as 2,500. Some 2,500 houses were destroyed or damaged. Monuments on the south side of the river also suffered, among them the Romanesque church of San Paolo a Ripa d’Arno, the church of Sant’Antonio Abate and the Palazzo Pretorio. Thousands of people lost the roof over their heads, and many inhabitants left the city to seek shelter in the countryside.

The group of monuments on the Piazza del Duomo – the cathedral, the baptistery, the Leaning Tower and the Camposanto cemetery – lay in the northern part of the city, far from the main targets, and the raid spared it. For the inhabitants that was small comfort: Pisa, neither a capital nor a great industrial centre, suffered losses that day comparable to the victims of the July raid on Rome.

For the Italians the raid was all the more painful because it came at a moment when Badoglio’s government was already talking to the Allies about surrender. That same day General Giuseppe Castellano flew to Cassibile in Sicily for further talks with the envoys of General Dwight Eisenhower. The Allies, however, had no intention of halting the raids until an armistice was signed. On the contrary, the bombing was meant to push the Italians into a quick decision.

Place in the war

Three days later, on 3 September, the armistice was signed at Cassibile; it was announced on 8 September. On 9 September the Allies landed at Salerno, and the Germans, following a plan prepared since the summer, occupied central and northern Italy. Pisa found itself in the zone of German occupation and remained an important target for the Allies. In the months that followed, American and British aircraft attacked its station and airfield many more times – in September, October and December 1943 and in January and February 1944 – each time killing more civilians.

In the summer of 1944 the war came to Pisa on the ground. At the end of July Allied troops reached the south bank of the Arno, while the Germans, having blown the bridges, held the north bank to cover the construction of the Gothic Line in the Apennines. For more than a month the city lay on the front line, under the artillery fire of both sides. On 27 July 1944 an Allied shell set fire to the Camposanto Monumentale cemetery. The wooden roof burned, molten lead ran down the walls, and most of the medieval frescoes were destroyed. Saving and conserving them took decades. Pisa was liberated on 2 September 1944. By then almost half of the city’s residential buildings had been destroyed, and according to official Italian tallies the air raids and shelling had claimed more than 1,700 civilian lives in all; the higher estimates for the raid of 31 August 1943 alone would raise that figure.

The raid of 31 August 1943 was one of many similar attacks on Italian communications on the eve of the invasion of the mainland. It shows the price that the population of a country which was itself seeking a way out of the war paid for the bombing strategy. Bombers dropping their loads from several kilometres up on targets in the middle of densely built-up cities could not spare the houses standing next to the tracks.