Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation's Treasures from the Nazis by Robert M. Edsel Read Free Book Online Page B

drops and radio warnings. But this was a footnote to the larger directive. The Allies wanted Italy to surrender. Any target that might help achieve that objective would be considered.
    Several days earlier, Churchill had written Eisenhower: “We have not bombed Northern Italy for the last two days because we wanted to give them a taste of relief but unless they formally ask for an armistice in the immediate future, we intend to give them all manner of hell.” On August 1, Churchill was even more specific. In a memo to his Foreign Secretary, responding to yet another appeal from the Holy See that Rome not be subjected to further bombing, Churchill wrote: “I cannot see any reason why, if Milan, Turin and Genoa are to be bombed, Rome should be specially exempted.”
    Although the British and the Americans operated under a unified command structure, there existed a significant divergence of opinions about the role of precision bombing versus area bombing. Britain’s head of Bomber Command, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, and the commander of the U.S. Eighth Air Force, Lieutenant General Ira Eaker, each held distinct views. General Eaker believed in precision bombing, normally limited to daylight operations for greater visibility. Bomber pilots received orders to aim for military targets, including industrial plants, railroad marshaling yards, and airfields. This generally precluded the use of incendiaries, or firebombs. Civilian casualities were to be avoided.
    The July 19 daylight raid on the Littorio and San Lorenzo Airdromes and marshaling yards in Rome by the U.S. Air Forces provided a perfect illustration of the American approach. Allied leaders knew the decision to bomb Rome posed an enormous risk. Damaging or destroying the city’s great treasures—St. Peter’s Basilica, the Pantheon, the Colosseum—wouldn’t just be exploited by the Nazi and Fascist propaganda machines. The destroyers would also face the judgment of history. Roosevelt’s repeated assurances to the pope were, in part, tacit acknowledgment of that fact.
    Extraordinary measures were taken to avoid damaging the highest-profile monuments in Rome. The pre-mission orientation of pilots was extensive. “I never briefed [air]crews quite as carefully and flew a bombing run through flak as meticulously as on this raid,” one commander later wrote. The night before the bombing, RAF Wellingtons dropped some 864,000 leaflets warning Romans of an impending attack and urging them to seek shelter or evacuate the city. PWB also aired radio messages before the raid to intensify fear and chaos among citizens. While the Basilica of San Lorenzo did sustain damage, the bombing mission successfully destroyed the intended targets and avoided the restricted areas.
    In contrast to General Eaker, British Air Chief Marshal Harris believed in the use of area bombing, not precision bombing. By bombing at night, British aircrews were at less risk from antiaircraft flak and enemy fighters. Harris and his commanders understood that greater safety for their pilots and preservation of precious aircraft by definition meant a far higher degree of imprecision in the results. In order to ensure that targets were hit, vast areas, often entire cities, were bombed in massive raids. “It should be emphasized that the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing, are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories.” According to the U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain, John Winant, Churchill said, “Night bombing does not lend itself to accurate bombing. . . . It would not be honest to state that bombing would be confined to military objectives only.”
    The basis for their differing perspectives was rooted in the ways England and the United