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

by Richard Overy

A good case can be made that the sudden intensification of bombing in 1943 provoked a people already tired of war and fearful of its consequences to reject twenty years of Fascism and to hope for peace. The bombing from the winter of 1942–43 was on an unprecedented scale, 1,592 tons in 1942 but 110,474 tons in 1943, twice the tonnage dropped in the Blitz on Britain.84 From modest losses in the early raids, the destruction of housing escalated dramatically, 122,000 buildings by March 1943.85 Most of the operations were now carried out by American air forces that flew high and bombed with poor accuracy. The small town of Grosseto, for example, was largely destroyed when twenty-four B-17s were sent to attack an air force base but hit the residential districts instead, leaving 134 dead. Attacks on the airbase at Foggia, near the east coast, provoked an extraordinary crisis when bombs destroyed the town. After the raid on May 31, some 40 percent of the population fled, leaving shops and factories without manpower and services in disarray. The prefect reported that his city was a spectacle of desolation, “infested by the fumes from putrifying bodies not yet recovered.”86 The ports of the south were heavily bombed in anticipation of the Allied invasion of Sicily: forty-three raids on Palermo; thirty-two on Messina; forty-five on Catania. Naples was struck repeatedly throughout the war, small raids at first from Malta, but from the first heavy raid on December 4, 1942, there were ...