Bombing To Surrender: The Contribution Of Air Power To The Collapse Of Italy, 1943

Major Phillip A. Smith

• Publisher: Lucknow Books
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781782897453
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Throughout this first century of air power, military theorists have proposed numerous schemes as the best use of air power. Airmen of many nations tried and tested these theories in wars large and small and they have learned, ignored, or forgotten many lessons. Of the four major coercive mechanisms available to air power-punishment, risk, military denial and decapitation-Robert Pape in Bombing to Win, concludes that military denial is the best use of air power. Furthermore, Pape argues that recent technological advances only enhance the military denial mechanism. In his appendix, Pape categorizes the Italian case as another case of successful military denial.
This study examines the collapse of Italy in 1943 and the contribution of air power to this collapse. Several broad works, often citing Ernest May in "Lessons" from the Past, claim that air power decisively caused the Italian surrender, but do not indisputably argue this point nor do they define the coercive mechanism(s) air power employed to achieve this result. Studies such as the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey or the British Bombing Survey Unit largely ignore Italy or in the case of F. W. Deakin's The Brutal Friendship, cite the coalition politics as the primary cause of Italy's surrender...
In an era of clean conflict, both painless and quick, leaders and airman downplay the psychological effects of air power-with the exception of the questionable negative effects of casualties on the democracies. Operation DESERT STORM typifies both these effects. Furthermore, attrition-based computer wargame simulations largely ignore the human element. The collapse of Italy serves as one example where the psychological effects of air power outweighed the physical damage caused by bombing.

 

Chapter 1 — An Unexamined Victory

During the crisis of August 1990 through January 1991, a long parade of military experts and historians had trudged to Capitol Hill to warn senators and members of Congress that bombing merely stiffened an opponent’s morale. Such obiter dicta took liberties with the historical record, but no one during that tense autumn had much interest in a careful review of the relevant scholarship. — ~ Elliot Cohen, “The Mystique of Airpower”

Before World War II, many enthusiasts promulgated aerial bombing as a war- winning weapon.{1} The Italian general Guilio Douhet believed an independent air force could break the morale of an enemy by destroying its cities through aerial bombardment.{2} British Air Marshal Hugh Trenchard “viewed the disruption of enemy industry as a legitimate means for bringing about the collapse of enemy morale.{3} Many early air leaders in the United States at the Air Corps Tactical School (ACTS) were convinced that attacking an enemy’s vital centers would cripple any industrial nation’s ability to produce war material, thus forcing capitulation.{4} The notion that air power could win wars and avoid the bloody stalemate of the Great War was attractive to civilian and military leaders alike.

During World War II, air power rose to the challenge of its promise in many forms during the test of total war. While the continental powers such as Germany and Russia focused more on the direct support of their ground forces, the western Allied powers attempted to bring about the collapse of their foes through strategic attack. Great Britain, for many reasons, among them the vulnerability and inaccuracy of its bombers, attempted night “morale bombing” against cities and sought to grind its adversaries into submission. The airmen from the United States, entering the war later, still believed their bombers were better armed and more accurate than their British counterparts. These beliefs combined with ACTS teachings, that aerial bombing would destroy the war-making potential of the enemy, led the U.S. Army Air Forces to conduct “daylight precision bombing.” While not without effect, this aerial campaign against Germany and Japan, as recorded by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) and British Bombing Survey Unit (BBSU), did not achieve the level of decisiveness hoped for by pre-war theorists and war-time civilian and military leaders.

Germany and Japan were the major adversaries in the European and Pacific theater, and their defeat was the key to victory in their respective theaters. But Germany and Japan were not the only Axis powers subjected to a strategic air campaign. However, the BBSU and the European Report of the USSBS focused almost totally on Germany, the latter devoting five lines and contributing annotations on two bar graphs in the over-all report, to the operations against Italy:

Africa was cleared. The ‘soft-underbelly’ of the Axis lay open. The triumvirate—land, sea, and air-attacked it at Sicily, Sardinia, and Italy. The airfields of southern Italy were captured and the way opened for long-range bombers to reach over the Alps at southern Germany. In 1943, the emphasis again turned toward the north and the interrupted build-up of our forces in England was resumed.{5}

The emphasis of the European report of the USSBS is the affect of air power on the main opponent-Germany.

In contrast, several military historians emphasize the decisive contribution of strategic air power to the collapse of Italy. For example, in the official Army Air Force history, historians Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate record that air power partly contributed to the fall of Fascist Italy:

The downfall of Mussolini to which the Allied air raid on Rome on 19 July [1943] had contributed heavily, the accelerated progress of the Sicilian campaign, signs that Italy could not continue to prosecute the war, and that she was about ready to sue for peace {6}

U.S. Army historian Maurice Matloff was even more generous in 1953 when he stated that “The invasion of Sicily, accompanied by heavy bombing on the Italian mainland-especially of the marshaling yards in the Rome area on 19 July [1943]-dealt crushing blows to Italian morale and led directly to the overthrow of the Fascist regime.”{7}

Although those military historians mention the Sicilian campaign as well as the Rome bombing contributed to the fall of Italy, historian F. W. Deakin offers a third hypothesis for the collapse of Italy. In The Brutal Friendship, Mussolini, Hitler and the Fall of Italian Fascism, Deakin closely examined the relationship between these two Fascist leaders and concluded in 1963 that Mussolini’s failure to secure either war material or withdrawal from the war at a meeting with Hitler at Feltre on July 19, 1943, led to his removal by the Fascist Grand Council.{8}

More recently, Ernest May, in “Lessons” from the Past proposed in 1973 that “bombing probably contributed to political settlements” in Italy and Japan and possibly Korea.{9} May writes that King Victor Emmanuel deserted Mussolini because of the bombing, which led to a chain of events that ended in signing an armistice in September. He writes that “according to the King’s closest confidant, General Paolo Puntoni, it was the bombing which precipitated these events.”{10} Many air power detractors and pundits alike often cite this critical conclusion of May.

Ironically, Michael Sherry cited May’s conclusion in The Rise of American Air Power as does Conrad C. Crane in Bombs, Cities, and Civilians in works which largely condemn strategic air power for its lack of efficacy and morality.{11} In contrast, Stephen T. Hosmer, in a 1996 RAND study, cited May in Psychological Effects of U.S. Air Operations in Four Wars 1941-1991 as evidence that aerial bombing favourably contributes to psychological collapse of the enemy.{12} Finally, Steven Harvey, writing in an article in History 70, noted the absence of Italian air campaign from the USSBS and BBSU and concludes that “the defeat of Italy in 1943 provides an almost classic case study for the strategic impact of bombing, and is perhaps the more deserving of study because it was, after all, an Italian general, Giulio Douhet, who first promulgated the doctrine of the strategic use of air power.”{13}

Organization

This study will provide an historical account of the contribution of strategic air power to the collapse of Italy on three levels: Allied grand strategy, the morale effects of Allied bombardment, and the effect of the Rome raid. This writing will not recreate the USSBS’ or BBSU’s depth of analysis for the Italian air campaign, which is an impossible task fifty years after the event. Nor will this writing attempt to resolve any debate concerning the relative contributions of all the factors which led to the collapse of Italy in World War II.

Chapter 2 will examine the contribution of air power to the western Allied grand strategy. This case study first emphasizes how airpower affected Allied coalition decision-making and policy formulation. During the Casablanca, Trident and Algiers conferences the doctrinal debate between civilian political leaders and coalition military leaders concerning the efficacy of night “morale bombing” versus “daylight precision bombing” partly resulted in the focus of Allied bombing efforts to knock Italy out of the war. More important for this discussion, decisions made by the principals at these conferences directly led to the critical Rome bombing of July 19, 1943.

Next, as necessary background Chapter 3 will describe the politics and major players in fascist Italy during early World War II who attempted to cope with the pressures of war, which included Allied strategic bombing. Mussolini failed to cope with the twin dilemmas of a domestic political and coalition management crises under the threat of increasingly powerful Allied military operations. He could not hold at bay the influences and desires of the Pope, the King, the Fascist Party and senior military leaders without invoking a vengeful occupation by Germany. Thus a doubly besieged Mussolini faced either simultaneous ground and air assault by the British and American “empires” or brutal occupation by its former alliance partner.

Chapter 4 describes the critical events in Rome from 19 July to 25 July 1943. On the 19th of July the two Fascist leaders met in a critical conference at the small village of Feltre. While being lectured by Hitler to not expect aid, Il Duce received a note that Rome was under heavy air attack by over 500 Allied bombers. These events created a crisis which culminated with a meeting of the Fascist Grand Council meeting which deposed Mussolini and led to Il Duce’s subsequent house arrest by King Victor Emmanuel on 25 July 1943.

Chapter 5 brings events and details forward from 26 July through 9 September. During this period air power continued to play a role in forcing the interim Badoglio government to surrender. Despite the dangers of German occupation of most of the Italian peninsula, a second raid precipitated several events which precipitated the Italian armistice.

Chapter 6 will examine the lessons learned by senior leaders and summarizes the Italian case drawing general conclusions and implications about what the contributions of strategic attack by air power might mean for the modern practitioners of air power. Regardless of these implications and conclusions, the contribution of air power to collapse of Italy in 1943 deserves further analysis.

Chapter 2 — When Giants Walked the Earth

On October 28 [1940], the day of the second encouraging clue that Hitler had no immediate plans to invade Britain, Mussolini’s forces invaded Greece, and Italian aircraft bombed Athens. ‘Then we must bomb Rome,’ was Churchill’s immediate response, in a note to the new Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Charles Portal. — from Martin Gilbert’s biography, Churchill, A Life

The first contribution of air power to the collapse of Italy was its effect on Allied grand strategy.{14} Many of the grand strategy deliberations revolved around the appropriate military strategy for defeating the Axis powers in Europe, competing British and American strategic bombing doctrines, and the efficacy of air power to eliminate Germany and Italy through strategic bombing.

After the successful invasion of North Africa in Operation TORCH on 11 November 1942, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill first suggested a post-Tunisian strategy that would be the British position for much of the next twelve months. In a cable to President Roosevelt, dated 18 November 1942,

Mr. Churchill declared that after North Africa had been conquered ‘the paramount task’ before the Allies would be that of “using the bases on the African shore to strike at the under-belly of the Axis in effective strength and in the shortest time.” The statement might be considered as implying an invasion and a subsequent operation by land on the Italian mainland; but at the moment Mr. Churchill appeared to be concerned only with an air offensive, for he followed the statement by a discussion of air strategy against Italy… “All the [Italian] industrial centers should be attacked in an intense fashion, every effort being made to render them uninhabitable and to terrorize and paralise [sic] the population”{15} [author’s emphasis added]

Although Churchill mentioned “industrial centers” in this cable, it is obvious he was referring to population centers and an air strategy which was more commonly known as “city busting.” Moreover, as early as December 1942, the American press echoed this opinion stating that “the low state of Italian morale continue[s] to suggest that the proper kind of psychological and military attack would bring about open revolt.”{16}

The President referred this cable to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) with instructions to prepare a reply to the Prime Minister. The JCS could not choose a common response and cho...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• Illustrations
• Tables
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Abstract
• Chapter 1 - An Unexamined Victory
• Chapter 2 - When Giants Walked the Earth
• Chapter 3
• A Tale of Two Tigers
• Chapter 4 - When in Rome
• Chapter 5 - The Denouement of Defeat
• Chapter 6 - No Crowing for a New Dawn
• Appendix A - Precision Bombing Littorio Marshalling Yard (chart)
• Appendix B - Target and sensitive Area in Rome Map)
• Appendix C - Enlargement of Central Rome (Map)
• Bibliography