The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War Over Europe 1940-1945

by Richard Overy

The psychological and physical shock to the Italian population was much greater, as the British had hoped. Secure from the bombing war since the small raids in late 1940, the home front had not developed the infrastructure for civil defense or the mind-set to cope with sudden heavy raiding. Much of the damage was done to residential areas, since these were intended to be area raids. In Turin some 3,230 residential buildings and forty-six schools were destroyed or heavily damaged in the November raids. The local prefect of Turin, whence some 400,000 had fled by December 1942, reported that the demoralized population was “depressed, nervous, irritable and alarmed” not only by the bombing but by a general “sense of exhaustion at the length of the war.”54 Evacuees made their way out to the surrounding countryside or more distant provinces. Iris Origo, an Anglo-American married to an Italian marquis, recorded in her diary the sight of families arriving in Tuscany from Genoa after living for weeks in tunnels under the city “without light, without sufficient water, and in bitter cold,” displaying a “healthy, elementary resentment” against those dropping the bombs but a profound anger at the incompetence and mismanagement of the Fascist system that had exposed them to bombing in the first place.55 The failure to prepare for or to oppose the raids was regarded as a standing indictment of the Mussolini regime. The workers who stayed behind in Turin, according to one report, had calm...