The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20170627154455/http://naplesldm.com/Naples%20bombing.php
main
index ©
Jeff Matthews
entry Jan 2006
Air Raids on Naples in WWII
Naples
was heavily bombed in WW2. (see this note*)
The city was struck for the first time on November 1,
1940, by RAF and Fleet Air Arm Bristol-Blenheim
twin-engine light bombers (photo, left) flying
out of Malta. It was part of a coordinated British
attack against Naples and Brindisi. In Naples, the
primary targets were the port facilities at the
extreme eastern end of the Port of Naples as well as
the rail, industrial and petroleum facilities in the
eastern part of the city and the steel mill to the
west, in Bagnoli.
The
image below, right, is a cover from
the Toronto Star Weekly magazine,
published between 1910 and 1973. This cover
is from April 25, 1942, titled "RAF
bombs Naples." The magazine featured many
such illustrations on the war effort. The
illustrator for this one (and some others)
was Montague Black (1884-1964), a well-known
British commercial artist of the day. Like
many idealized depictions of warfare., it's
entirely too beautiful and rosy. And
Vesuvius did not erupt in that year. But I
guess it's an historical document.
The
attacks were part of a broader British campaign
against the Italian armed forces in the southern
Mediterranean. Although the British focus in the
summer and autumn of 1940 was primarily on the home
front—the great air war (The "Battle of Britain")
against the Luftwaffe—Britain
had an important second war going in the south. Italy
had declared war on June 10 against Britain and
France; then, Italy invaded Egypt on September 13 from
the Italian colony in Libya, and then invaded Greece
on October 28. A British failure to meet Italian moves
in the Mediterranean might have led to Axis control of
the eastern Mediterranean, including loss of the Suez
Canal and the British air and naval facilities on
Malta and in Egypt.
The
initial air strikes against Naples were strategic and
effective in disrupting the Italian war machinery in
the south. [The strikes against southern Italy
included the bold—and unprecedented—attack on November
11, 1940, against the large Italian naval facility in
Taranto. British Fleet Air
Arm planes from the aircraft carrier Illustrious,
170 miles out in the Ionian sea, successfully attacked
the port, devastating the Italian fleet. That attack
was the first major victory for naval
air power in the history of warfare and has
been called "the blueprint for Pearl Harbor".] The air-raids were
coordinated to assist the British desert war against
Italian forces in North Africa, an offensive that
would begin in December, 1940. British air raids on
Naples were night-time raids that lasted until
November of the following year. These raids were
crucial to the British effort to interrupt Axis
movements of men and material to the war in North
Africa. A report filed to the New York Times on
October 27, 1941, said, in part:
…The bombing of Naples port means that the British are now hammering at both ends as well as the middle of the Axis supply line to Africa. Eighty percent of the Axis supplies reinforcing the troops reaching the Libyan front is sent via Naples…It is through Naples also that German troops, who are now the only really effective fighting force the British need to consider in this wing of the Middle East, are funneled to transports en route to Libya…The two-ton bombs which the R.A.F. is now dropping on Naples are terrible missiles, the most terrible of any the powers have yet developed…
The attacks
trailed off in 1942, when the British
attacked Naples only six times in the entire year.
The air strikes were intended to be against
precise targets and, revisionist historians to the
contrary, can in no way be described as random
"terror" raids against a civilian population, much
less "carpet bombing" of the entire city.
B-24s in
formation
Heavy raids started with the American bombings
on 4 December 1942. They involved great numbers of
four-engine B-24 "Liberator" long-range bombers from
the US 9th Air Force flying from bases in
North Africa (and, later, from Sicily). The initial
attack killed 900 people. The raids were in the
daylight and were massive. The raids lasted until
the armistice with Italy in September, 1943.
photo from larryray.com
Initially,
Naples was not particularly well-prepared for
air-raids. The initial anti-aircraft defense was
from ship-mounted guns at the port. Air-raid
shelters existed only because there was already in
place a vast network of underground train
stations, quarries and caverns (photo, left),
including sections of the old Roman aqueduct. [A
friend, Larry Ray, of Gulfport, Mississippi, has
written and translated so much material about the
vast and strange world beneath the city of Naples
that the city fathers surely owe him an aqueduct
or two. I borrow these lines from his excellent
website:
The honeycomb of caverns and passageways below were converted into air raid shelters under Mussolini's UMPA or civil defense program. Whole families spent weeks below ground, often emerging into daylight to find their homes and entire neighborhoods turned to rubble. . . so they returned to the cavernous shelters to survive. Evidence of DC battery power, showers and crude health and kitchen facilities can still be seen in many of the shelters.
Piazza dei Martiri
A wartime
press is censored and, obviously, tries to put
the best spin on how the war is going. In the pages of
il Mattino, the large Neapolitan daily, the
features on the inside pages in early 1943 aim at
putting the enemy in a bad light, but are not that bad
to read: for example, the great apostle of peace,
Mahatma Ghandi, is near death from fasting in protest
of the British occupation of his nation; or even
amusing—American women have petitioned the US
government to forbid their G.I. boyfriends from
marrying English women, and the editor of the Chicago
Tribune has suggested the annexation of the British
empire by the United States. The pages are full of
praise for the great German partners: Hermann Goering
celebrates his 50th birthday; the Führer addresses
his people; and there is a straw-grasping report that
the new German bomber, the Heinkel 177, has the
capability to fly the Atlantic, bomb New York and
return. [Actually, that airplane was a poorly designed
dog, so prone to fire that German air crews, who
despised it, called it a Feuerzeug (lighter) instead of Flugzeug
(airplane).]
Port section of
Naples
News
from the war, is serious stuff, however, and
is on the front-page: German advances in Russia,
the Italian and German gains in North Africa, the
bombing of London. The US bombings of Naples are
usually reported beneath the headline, "Battle in
the skies above Naples" with the focus always on
the large number of enemy bombers shot down and on
the "negligible" losses to the city. (That's a sad
way to put it; one laconic report says, simply,
"...four bombers downed, no relevant losses in the
city... some collapsed buildings, 23 dead, 65
injured.") Yet, the inside pages carry some lists
of civilian casualties, pictures of bombed out
churches and columns of praise for the valiant
people of the city in the face of the "brutal
ferocity" of enemy "vandals" intent on destroying
churches and killing civilians.
Capodichino airport
in Naples
(photo: H. Chanowitz)
The largest raid was on August 4, 1943 when 400 planes of
the US Mediterranean Bomber Command dropped bombs for
one and one-half hours, an attack that destroyed the
famous church of Santa Chiara. Again,
some people who write about this claim that they were
random raids on no specific targets, meant simply to
terrorize the population and destroy the city. I don't
believe a word of that. Here's something else I don't
believe a word of. From Breve
Storia della città di Napoli (Short History of
the City of Naples) by Giuseppe Campolieti,
(Mondadori Editore, 2004): "They say that in
those days, bombing Naples and other Italian cities
had become a kind of very exciting sport for American
pilots, to the point where the pilots' gracious wives
would accompany their husbands on flights and thus
taste the thrill of the atrocious entertainment." (My
translation.) That's right, the 9th Air
Force flew in wives from Omaha and Hoboken so they
could get in on the fun. Even as a "They say-"
anecdote, anyone who lends credence to a fairy-tale
like that is giving gullibility a bad name.
Courtyard
of Santa Chiara.
(The
church, itself, was totally destroyed.)
After
the Allied invasion of North Africa in
November, 1942, it became evident that Italy,
itself, would have to be invaded. Naples
was an important node of Axis naval and land
communication and there was a large and very
potent German military presence in southern Italy.
It was crucial for the Allies to disrupt—destroy,
if possible—Axis supply lines in and around
marshalling points such as Rome, Naples, Foggia,
Bari, Manfredonia—those places that kept German
and Italian war machinery moving up and down the
boot of Italy. Naples was, quite simply, a target.
Can you aim for a rail line, factory or electrical
sub-station from 20,000 feet and hit a hospital or
church instead? Of course you can. The San Loreto
hospital, for example, was obliterated—but that
hospital was 100 yards from the port. Estimates of
civilian air-raid casualties in Naples run to
about 20,000 killed (although that estimate may be
too high. See note, below.) I have read one
estimate that says 10,000 homes were destroyed.
Herman
Chanowitz, veteran of the Italian campaign and
long-time resident of Naples [and the source of some WW2 oral history pages in
this encyclopedia] reminds me that even after Naples
fell to US and British Forces at the beginning of
October, 1943, shortly after
the invasion of Salerno, the bombing didn't stop; it
continued for weeks as the retreating Germans tried to
destroy what they had missed in their "scorched earth"
retreat from the city. German demolition teams had
removed or destroyed all communications,
transportation, water, and power grids; they mined
buildings, blew bridges and tore up railroad tracks.
Ships in the harbor were sunk, adding to those already
destroyed. Amazingly, the
Allies had the port of Naples open to traffic again
within a week of its capture.
The
greatest symbol of the rebirth of Naples
after WW2 was surely the rebuilding of the church
of Santa Chiara.
---------------------------------------------
*note/update: August 2011:
The original entry read "Naples was the most heavily bombed Italian city in WWII." By one reckoning, that is a true statement, but it conceals an important—and often overlooked—detail about the war in Italy: on September 8, 1943, the nation of Italy, Germany's Axis partner in WWII, surrendered to the Allies. At that point, WWII between Italy and the Allies ended. Hostilities in Italy did not end, however. German forces continued their agonizing and very costly retreat up the boot of Italy from Naples through Monte Cassino, Anzio, Rome and to the north before finally leaving Italy in early May of 1945. During that period of 20 months, residual Fascist forces in Italy set up the so-called Italian Social Republic (essentially a German client state) in northern Italy and waged what amounted to a civil war against that part of Italy now reconstituted as part of the Allies. That civil war was bitter and costly.
Thus, "Naples was the most heavily bombed Italian city in WWII" is true if we use Sept. 8, 1943 as the cut-off date. Storia Illustrata (October 1964, no. 10, year VIII, Arnoldo Mondadori editor) in an article entitled "Allied Bombings of Italy" reports that between the first bombardments in November, 1940 until September 9, '43, Naples was bombed 76 times, more than any other Italian city. (Sources vary greatly on citing the number of air raids; presumably this is because some sources count separate waves in a single day of bombing as separate raids while others list them as a single raid.) When the whole nation of Italy was at war with the Allies (that is, until Sept. '43), cities farther north, such as Rome, Milan and Torino were struck 2, 13 and 24 times, respectively. During that period, the same source says that almost 21,000 Italians (18,000 civilians and 3,000 military) died in air-raids in all of Italy (which makes the above-cited estimate of 20,000 for Naples too high). But—and here is the oft-forgotten fact—after the armistice of Sept. '43, air-raids continued in central and northern Italy against the Fascist Italian Social Republic and produced 43,000 deaths (!), only 2,000 of which were military personnel.
"Heavily bombed" is also vague. It may refer to the number of air raids, but it may also refer to the bomb load—how much ordnance was actually dropped. By that measure, the heaviest single air-raid in Italy from June 1940 until the end of WWII (May 1945) was the British bombing of Milan, a night raid on August 13, 1943, in which 400 British aircraft dropped 1900 tons of bombs. By comparison, the heaviest raid on Naples, as noted in the text, was in August 1943, when two separate waves of US planes dropped 590 tons of bombs.
Precise statistics do not seem to be available on the additional German bombings of Naples that occurred after they pulled out of the city and headed north towards Monte Cassino in late September, 1943. At least one source (see the link, below, -- 'other entries on WW2' - then --->WW2 Oral History 1) says that it was significant.
added June 2016 -
More on "additional German bombing" (this, from the final paragraph, above).
Readers should note that although the city of Naples was in Allied hands by the beginning of October 1943, the emphasis for a number of weeks was on securing the city. The main push north to pursue the retreating German forces towards Monte Cassino and Rome had not yet really started. This gave the Germans the opportunity to conduct air-strikes (from still German-held airfields farther north) against the city of Naples. (They had already left a considerable number of booby-traps in the city, which continued to go off well after they had left Naples). I still have not found precise numbers, but at least for a while, German air-raids on Allied-held Naples continued to be "significant" and certainly more than just harassment. This is evident in the following comments kindly shared with me by Mr. Elwin Green of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who writes:
other entries on WW2:I have recently come into possession of a diary kept by my father [T/5* Illinois Green], who served in the U.S. Army in WWII... It includes this entry for October 11, 1943:
[*Technician 5th class,
corresponded to corporal]
"Arrived in Naples about 5:00 PM."His style is laconic; the diary contains no wealth of detail. But after discovering and briefly perusing your web page on WWII air raids on Naples (for which I am thankful), I thought you might find this of interest, from October 21, 1943:"Dispatched and fixed a flat tire on truck 4182779, hauled for 550 ration dump. German planes raid Napales (sic) and droped (sic) many bombs, raid lasted about one hour."
Then, on October 23: "Drove a new trk No. 547. An air raid."On November 1, he lists items that he washed in his laundry, and a change of address to "O.M. Co. 58th O.B. Bn (Mobile), then ends the entry with: "An air raid."(On a purely personal note, November 3, 1943 has "Birthday in Naples." He was 29.)November 5: "An air raid that night, but no damage in our area."November 6: "Went on night dispatch drove 437, shrapenal (sic) from a bomb hit my helmet."November 9: "Went on dispatch. Went to 553 ration dump. Drove blackout...Enemy air raid about 3:50 a.m. but not much damage was done. First time going in an air raid shelter for security."Things seem to quiet down for a couple of weeks, until November 26: "Air raid no harm done in area."