The raids on Sicily and Sardinia

On the night of 21–22 May 1943 British Wellington bombers from a base in North Africa flew over western Sicily and dropped their bombs on four airfields: Castelvetrano, Sciacca, Milo and Bo Rizzo near Trapani. The raid was intended to draw the attention of Italian and German pilots away from an Allied convoy sailing along the island’s coast. The day before, American medium bombers had attacked the airfields of Villacidro and Decimomannu in southern Sardinia, while heavy B-17s had bombed hangars and workshops at Castelvetrano.

Reports like these were repeated day after day at the time. After the surrender of the Axis forces in Africa on 13 May, Allied air power in the Mediterranean turned against the two large islands that lay opposite Tunisia, either of which might be the target of the next landing. Airfields, ports, railway junctions and ferries were bombed, and with them the towns in which these targets lay. On Pantelleria, a small island halfway between Tunisia and Sicily, the Allies set out from 18 May to test whether air power alone could force a garrison to surrender.

The next target

The Allied leaders had decided as early as January 1943, at the Casablanca Conference, that after Africa it would be Sicily’s turn. The invasion of the island, Operation Husky, was to take place in the summer, and its success depended to a large extent on whether the Allies first won command of the air. Sicily had more than a dozen airfields from which aircraft of the Luftwaffe and the Italian Regia Aeronautica could attack the invasion fleet. Sardinia, further north, gave the Axis bases from which it could threaten shipping between Algeria and Tunisia, and it could itself be the target of an Allied landing.

The Allies therefore needed two things at once. They had to destroy the enemy’s air force and its infrastructure before the fleet put to sea, and at the same time not betray where they would really strike. Bombing both Sicily and Sardinia served both purposes: it weakened the defences on each island without making it clear which was the main target. The same uncertainty was fed by Operation Mincemeat, a deception in which fake letters planted in Spain were meant to convince the Germans that the Allies would strike at Sardinia and Greece.

Spaatz’s air forces

The raids were carried out mainly by the Northwest African Air Forces (NAAF), created in February 1943 as part of the reorganisation of the Allied air command after the Casablanca Conference. They were commanded by the American General Carl Spaatz, and above them stood the Mediterranean Air Command of the British Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder. The NAAF combined American and British units on the model developed earlier in Egypt and Libya: the strategic, tactical and coastal air forces each operated separately.

The most important role in May was played by the Northwest African Strategic Air Force (NASAF) under General Jimmy Doolittle, leader of the famous raid on Tokyo in April 1942. It had American B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bombers, B-25 Mitchell and B-26 Marauder medium bombers, P-38 Lightning long-range fighters, and British and South African Wellington night bombers. The tactical forces supporting the ground troops were commanded by the British Air Marshal Arthur Coningham. From the east, from bases in Libya, B-24 Liberator heavy bombers of the US Ninth Air Force and British Liberators struck, aiming mainly at Messina and the far side of the strait.

In mid-May four new B-17 bomb groups arrived in Africa, and once the fighting in Tunisia was over, the whole air force, until then occupied in supporting the troops at the front, could turn to the islands.

Sardinia

Cagliari, Sardinia’s main city and port, had already been bombed earlier. Three raids by American B-17s in February 1943 destroyed much of the city centre and, according to various estimates, killed between more than 400 and about 700 people; after the raid of 28 February between 45,000 and 70,000 inhabitants fled to villages inland. On 13 May, the day the Axis forces in Tunisia surrendered, came the heaviest attack in the city’s history. Some two hundred bombers – B-17s, B-25s, B-26s and, at night, Wellingtons – dropped, according to Italian sources, almost 500 tons of bombs on the port, the railway station, the fuel depots and residential districts (according to American figures the B-17s alone dropped some 400 tons). Because most of the inhabitants had already left the city, there were fewer victims than in February. After the May raids fewer than ten thousand people were living in Cagliari, and according to estimates by Italian researchers four-fifths of its buildings had been destroyed or damaged.

In the following days the targets were above all the airfields: Elmas near Cagliari, Decimomannu and Villacidro in the south, and Alghero and Olbia in the north. Wellingtons bombed them by night and medium bombers by day, while P-38 fighters roamed over the island strafing trains, stations and ships in harbour. On 24 May dozens of aircraft simultaneously attacked the port of Carloforte, hangars and fuel depots at Alghero, the seaplane base at Porto Conte, the railway bridge at Arbatax, the Macomer area and the harbour on the island of La Maddalena. P-38s also attacked power stations, the dam on the river Tirso and the mines of the Iglesias district. The aim was to paralyse communications on the island so that its defenders could not move troops or supplies quickly.

Sicily

On Sicily the heaviest blow fell on Palermo. On 9 May more than two hundred American bombers dropped over 300 tons of bombs on the port and the marshalling yard. Many of them fell on the built-up areas of the city; according to Italian figures 373 civilians were killed. It was the heaviest raid Palermo suffered during the war. On 11 May B-17s, B-25s and B-26s bombed Marsala – the port, warehouses, railway station and the town itself – and on the following nights Wellingtons attacked Marsala, Trapani and Mazara del Vallo.

Messina was a special target. Supplies for the whole island passed through its port and the train ferries across the Strait of Messina, so Liberators from Libya repeatedly attacked the ferry terminal, the station and the ships, as well as Reggio di Calabria and Villa San Giovanni on the Calabrian side of the strait. The port of Augusta, an Italian naval base on the east coast, was also bombed.

As the month went on, the airfields became increasingly important. In addition to those in the west of the island, on 26 May bombers also attacked the airfields in the south-east – Comiso, Biscari and Ponte Olivo near Gela. It was on this coast that American troops were to land six weeks later.

Pantelleria – a test of air power

Pantelleria, a rocky island lying some 110 kilometres south-west of Sicily, stood in the Allies’ way between Tunisia and Sicily. From 1937 Benito Mussolini had had it fortified, hoping it would become an Italian counterpart to Malta. Underground hangars for fighters were cut into the rock, and radar allowed early detection of aircraft taking off from Africa and Malta. In May 1943, however, many of the planned coastal batteries stood in open emplacements. The garrison numbered, according to various figures, between about 11,000 and 12,000 men under Admiral Gino Pavesi; the island also had more than 10,000 civilian inhabitants, for whom there were not enough shelters, and food for a few weeks.

The first raids on Pantelleria were carried out between 8 and 10 May, to prevent the island from being used in an evacuation of Axis forces from Tunisia. On 18 May the NAAF began a regular air offensive combined with a naval blockade: more than 80 medium bombers escorted by P-38s attacked the port and the airfield. From then on bombers and fighter-bombers returned over the island almost every day, and from 29 May they dropped flares at night to prevent the defenders from making repairs. The cruiser HMS Orion shelled the island on the night of 12–13 May and again on 31 May. Bombs destroyed the water supply, and at the end of May the Germans withdrew their soldiers and radar equipment, further undermining the morale of the Italian garrison.

At the beginning of June the raids intensified still further. According to Allied figures, between mid-May and 11 June some 6,400 tons of bombs were dropped on the island in more than five thousand sorties. On 11 June, when the landing craft of the British 1st Infantry Division appeared offshore, Pavesi surrendered (Operation Corkscrew); the following day Lampedusa also surrendered. Advocates of air power saw this as proof that bombing could capture territory on its own. Later surveys of the ruins showed, however, that fewer guns had been destroyed than reported, and that the surrender had been decided rather by exhaustion, lack of water and the collapse of the defenders’ spirit.

Naples and the mainland

The islands were not the only targets. American bombers reached ever further into the Italian peninsula to destroy the ports through which supplies passed to Sicily and Sardinia, and the airfields to which the Luftwaffe withdrew aircraft threatened on the islands. Naples, bombed by the Americans since December 1942, had been attacked almost daily since January 1943, and on the night of 12–13 May Wellingtons bombed its station, marshalling yard and docks.

Some war chronologies date a B-17 raid on Naples to 31 May. According to the American air force chronology, the large Flying Fortress strike on the Naples area took place on 30 May: B-17s then bombed the aircraft works and landing ground at Pomigliano d’Arco, as well as Capodichino airfield and the marshalling yard on the outskirts of the city. On 31 May, by contrast, B-17s attacked the airfield and station at Foggia in Apulia, and on 28 May the port, refinery and shipyards at Livorno. Italian authors note that after 30 May the daily raids on Naples began to slacken – but only briefly, for in the summer the city was to suffer the heaviest bombing in its history.

Where would the Allies strike?

For the Axis command the bombing gave no clear answer to the most important question: where the landing would come. The German commander in the south, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, and part of the Italian command regarded Sicily as the most likely target – the island lay closest to Tunisia, within range of Allied fighters from Malta and Africa. Adolf Hitler, however, leaned towards the belief that the Allies would strike at Sardinia and the Balkans. He was confirmed in this by the documents from the briefcase of the fictitious Major Martin, which reached Berlin in May and were accepted as genuine.

The result was a dispersal of forces. Hitler ordered Greece, Sardinia and Corsica to be defended “at all costs”, and a panzer division was transferred from France to Greece. On Sardinia the German garrison was reinforced, and in the summer it became the 90th Panzergrenadier Division (PL). Sicily also received reinforcements – the German division there was renamed the 15th Panzergrenadier Division, and in June the Hermann Göring Panzer Division was sent to the island – but the burden of the defence rested on Italian divisions, often poorly armed. What happened in the air was just as important: the Axis air forces, obliged to defend Sicily, Sardinia, Pantelleria and southern Italy at the same time, suffered heavy losses on the ground and in combat with the bomber escorts, and equipment and fuel were replaced with ever greater difficulty.

The civilian population

The bombs fell on ports and airfields, but the ports lay in the middle of the cities. High-altitude bombing in 1943 was not very precise, and some of the attacks on stations and docks took in the surrounding districts from the outset. In Palermo, Cagliari, Marsala, Trapani, Messina and Naples it was above all civilians who died. Tens of thousands of people left the cities and sought refuge in the surrounding villages, and supplies of water, electricity and food broke down. For Naples alone, Italian researchers estimate the total number of victims of air raids over the whole war at 20,000–25,000, and for Cagliari at least a thousand – according to other estimates more than two thousand.

The Allies hoped that the raids would break not only the defences of the islands but also the will of the Italians to go on fighting alongside the Germans. Already earlier in 1943 the mood in Italy had been growing steadily worse: prices were rising, food was short, and the regime’s propaganda could not explain the defeats in Russia and Africa. The bombing, against which the state was unable to protect its citizens, deepened the sense that the war was lost.

Place in the war

The May raids opened the air campaign that prepared the first Allied landing on Italian soil. On 11 June 1943 Pantelleria surrendered, and in the following days Lampedusa and the rest of the Pelagie Islands. At the turn of June and July the bombers concentrated on the Sicilian airfields; when American and British troops landed in Sicily on the night of 9–10 July, the Axis air forces were able to oppose the invasion fleet with only part of their strength. The Allies never attacked Sardinia at all – after Italy’s capitulation in September 1943 the Germans themselves withdrew their troops from it to Corsica and then to the mainland.

The bombing also had political consequences. On 19 July 1943 American bombers attacked Rome for the first time, and six days later the Fascist Grand Council and the King removed Mussolini from power. The raids alone did not bring down the dictator, but the defeats on the islands and the helplessness of Italian cities in the face of the bombers hastened the disintegration of his regime. For the Allies, May 1943 was also a lesson: the success at Pantelleria showed the power of air forces, but Sicily and Italy could not be conquered from the air. A long and bloody land campaign was still needed, and the cities of southern Italy, Naples foremost among them, paid a high price for it.