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 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.

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 9^th 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 50^th 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 9^th 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.

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*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.

 ^return to text

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:

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."