The second bombing of the Vatican

On 1 March 1944, less than four months after the first air raid on the Vatican, bombs again fell on papal buildings in Rome. A single aircraft dropped six small-calibre bombs right next to the walls of the Vatican, by the Piazza del Sant’Uffizio. Splinters killed a workman who was out in the open and wounded a Dutch friar of the Augustinian order living in the nearby College of St Monica. The Palace of the Holy Office was damaged, as were the seat of the Oratory of St Peter and the Collegium Urbanum de Propaganda Fide (today the Pontifical Urban University) on the nearby Janiculum hill.

It is usually said that the Allies bombed the Vatican for a second time. Two qualifications are needed. First, this time the bombs did not fall deep inside the papal state, as in November 1943, but on its edge, just outside the wall: the buildings that suffered belonged to the Holy See but lay on the boundary of Vatican territory or beyond it, on the Janiculum. Second, this was not a planned attack but the accidental release of a bomb load by a single aircraft during a raid on Rome. The British Air Ministry privately admitted that the bombs had been dropped by mistake by a Royal Air Force aircraft taking part in a raid on the city. Publicly no one accepted responsibility, and other versions of events also circulated in Rome.

Rome under the bombs

At the beginning of 1944 Rome was a city under German occupation. The Germans had entered it in September 1943, after the Italian armistice, and seized the capital even though Badoglio’s government had declared it an open city on 14 August 1943. The Allies never recognised that declaration. In their view Rome remained a communications hub through which supplies flowed to the German troops at the front, and from January 1944 this mattered especially. After the landing at Anzio on 22 January the Allied beachhead lay only a few dozen kilometres south of the city, and the roads and railways running through Rome fed both the German units surrounding the beachhead and the defenders of the Gustav Line at Cassino.

The Allied airmen’s targets were above all Rome’s marshalling yards and railway junctions. Yet bombs also fell on the surrounding residential districts, as they had during the first raid on Rome on 19 July 1943, when the working-class district of San Lorenzo was destroyed. According to a chronicle kept by the Roman resistance, in March 1944 alone Allied aircraft bombed the city many times: on 3 March the districts of Tiburtino and Ostiense, where more than 600 people are said to have died; on 7 March Ostiense again, Garbatella and the marshalling yard in Trastevere; on 8 March the area around the Verano cemetery and Porta Furba; and on 14 March the Prenestino, Nomentano and Italia districts, where according to the same source some 800 people were killed. These figures come from local chronicles and have not been precisely established.

At the same time the raids were claiming the lives of refugees who had sought shelter on papal property outside the Vatican. On 10 February 1944 Allied bombers attacking German supply routes in the Alban Hills hit the Propaganda Fide college and the Villa Barberini at Castel Gandolfo, part of the extraterritorial complex of the popes’ summer residence, where thousands of inhabitants of the surrounding towns had crowded in. The municipality of Castel Gandolfo later gave a figure of 211 dead among its own residents, while Emilio Bonomelli, then the administrator of the papal villas, spoke of more than 500 victims. The true number was never established.

Bombs by the Holy Office

The bombs of 1 March fell in an area where the Vatican boundary runs right next to the colonnade of St Peter’s Square. There stands the Palace of the Holy Office, the seat of the Roman Curia congregation that guards the doctrine of the faith (today the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith), and next to it the little church of San Pietro in Borgo, which housed the Oratory of St Peter, a pastoral centre for Roman youth. Under the Lateran Treaty of 1929 the Palace of the Holy Office, like the Propaganda Fide college on the Janiculum, belonged to the Holy See and enjoyed extraterritorial status, although it lay outside the borders of the Vatican state itself.

The bombs were light and brought down no building, but their splinters and blast shattered almost every window in the Palace of the Holy Office and pockmarked the walls of the neighbouring buildings. Father Giulio Barbetta of the Oratory of St Peter later described how, after the explosion, he and others opened the gate and a few steps further on found a passer-by lying on the ground, mortally struck by a splinter. He gave him absolution and ran to fetch the holy oils. According to his account, the same “mysterious, though not so very mysterious” aircraft had been circling near Vatican Radio on several evenings beforehand. The Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano wrote in 2011 that the dead man was a workman.

Barbetta also recorded a detail that became, for local people, the most important memory of that day. The glass protecting an image of the Virgin Mary, placed between the Palace of the Holy Office and the entrance to the oratory, remained intact, although splinters had riddled the wall all around it. This was taken as a sign of Mary’s protection. At the initiative of the nuncio to Italy, Archbishop Francesco Borgongini Duca, statues of two angels bearing shields were placed on either side of the image, with the Latin inscription AB ANGELIS DEFENSA KAL. MART. A.D. MCMXLIV (“Defended by angels, 1 March in the year of Our Lord 1944”) beneath it.

Whose aircraft?

Unlike the raid of 5 November 1943, whose perpetrators have still not been established beyond all doubt, historians have fewer doubts about 1 March. The British Air Ministry admitted, at least in confidential correspondence, that one of the aircraft taking part in the raid on Rome had mistakenly dropped six bombs too close to the Vatican wall. That admission, however, was not made public, and no one in the occupied city knew of it.

Another version is still repeated today. According to it, the culprit was an Italian aircraft that struck an obstacle, perhaps a tree on the Janiculum, jettisoned its load and crashed, clipping a house in Via del Gelsomino with its wing. An elderly woman living there is said to have been killed, and the Italian authorities quickly removed the wreck and the pilot’s body. This version has not been confirmed by documents. Even the details given in contemporary chronicles differ: the Roman resistance chronicle noted under 1 March that an “English aircraft” had hit the Vatican Gardens with three bombs, whereas Vatican accounts speak of six bombs by the Piazza del Sant’Uffizio. In occupied Rome, where the press was controlled by the Germans and the Fascists of the Italian Social Republic, any such incident immediately became a propaganda weapon against the Allies – just as, after the November raid, popular opinion in Rome had blamed the Germans and the Fascists instead.

The Pope and the “open city”

From the start of the war Pius XII had pressed both sides to spare Rome. In 1943 he wrote on the matter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who replied with assurances that American airmen knew where the Vatican was and had explicit orders that no bomb should fall on its territory. In the spring of 1944 the Pope found himself in an even more difficult position. The raid on Castel Gandolfo and the destruction of the abbey of Monte Cassino on 15 February had shown that the Allies would not hesitate to strike places associated with the Church if they judged it militarily necessary. On the other hand the Germans, who professed to respect Rome’s status, in fact used its roads, railways and barracks, while the occupation authorities and the Fascist police carried out round-ups and executions in the city.

On 12 March 1944, the fifth anniversary of his coronation, Pius XII addressed the crowd gathered in St Peter’s Square. He called on the warring sides to spare the Eternal City from destruction. According to the Roman resistance chronicle, after the speech some young Catholics turned the gathering into a demonstration against the war and the occupiers. The appeal, however, changed nothing in the conduct of either side. The Allied plan for the air campaign against the railways and roads of central Italy, launched on 19 March under the code name Operation Strangle, called for further attacks on communications hubs, and the Germans had no intention of giving up the roads leading through Rome to the fronts at Anzio and Cassino.

Significance

The second raid on the Vatican had no military significance whatever and has remained in the record of the war an episode even smaller than the incident of November 1943. One man was killed, while in the districts of Rome lying along the railway lines hundreds died in March alone. The event nonetheless captures well the position of the neutral papal state in the spring of 1944. The Vatican was surrounded by a city occupied by the Germans, in which the Fascists of Mussolini’s republic were active, Allied prisoners of war, Jews and underground leaders were in hiding, and over which Allied bombers flew almost daily. Neither of the warring sides wanted openly to violate the neutrality of the Holy See, but neither was able to guarantee it.

On the same day a general strike against the German occupation and the Fascists broke out in northern Italy. Rome still faced three more months of occupation: on 23 March partisans of the GAP attacked a column of German police in Via Rasella, and in reprisal the Germans murdered 335 people in the Ardeatine Caves on 24 March. The order passed through the command of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring and was carried out by the Rome office of the SS Security Police. The raids on Rome’s railway junctions continued until May. On 4 June 1944 General Mark Clark’s US Fifth Army entered Rome, and for the first time since September 1943 the Vatican found itself in a city free of Germans. The inscription about the angels who defended the image of the Virgin Mary on 1 March 1944 still hangs by the Piazza del Sant’Uffizio.