, which is adorned with a sculpture of
Elijah in his fiery chariot
Vatican City maintained an official
policy of neutrality during the war. Both Allied and Axis bombers made some effort not to attack the Vatican when bombing Rome. However, Vatican City was bombed on at least two occasions during the war, once on November 5, 1943, and once on March 1, 1944. There are varying accounts regarding which side was responsible for both incidents. Both Vatican bombings occurred while Rome was under German occupation.
Bombing of 5 November 1943 On November 5, 1943, a single plane dropped four bombs on the Vatican, destroying a mosaic studio near the
Vatican railway station and breaking the windows of the high cupola of St. Peter's, and nearly destroying
Vatican Radio. There were no fatalities. The German and British authorities gave similar assurances regarding aircraft of their countries. Aware that the bombs used were British, the British pointed out that this proved nothing as they could have been taken from captured ordnance, and used for precisely that purpose.
Publications in the 21st century Augusto Ferrara's 2010 book
1943 Bombe sul Vaticano, declares that the attack was orchestrated by leading Italian Fascist politician and anti-clericalist
Roberto Farinacci. The aim was to knock out
Vatican Radio, which was suspected of sending coded messages to the Allies. The aircraft that delivered the bombs was a
SIAI Marchetti S.M.79, a three-engined Italian medium bomber known as the "Sparviero", which had taken off from
Viterbo, some 80 kilometres north of Rome. One piece of evidence on which Ferrara bases his account of the responsibility of Farinacci was a telephone call from a priest called Giuseppe to the Jesuit
Pietro Tacchi Venturi. In fact, a note on page 705 of volume 7 of the
Actes et documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la seconde guerre mondiale cites Eitel Friederich Moellhausen as stating that rumours in Rome immediately blamed Farinacci and spoke of Viterbo as the base from which the plane must have flown. Tardini's note quoted above also says that, from the start, it was the general opinion that the Italian Republican Fascists were to blame, a view that Tardini himself discounted on the basis of the information given by Monsignor Carroll.
Owen Chadwick also reported that Farinacci was rumoured in Rome to have arranged the raid from the Viterbo airfield, something that Farinacci, who was killed together with Mussolini on 28 April 1945, never denied, but Chadwick considered the story "very unlikely". In Ferrara's account, five bombs were dropped, of which one did not explode. According to the
Actes et documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la seconde guerre mondiale, the report of an examination carried out by Vatican authorities after the event spoke only of fragments that made it difficult to determine whether the high-explosive bombs, which had been of 100–150 kg weight and produced small craters over a wide range, were of British, German or Italian manufacture. The 2007 book
Venti angeli sopra Roma by Cesare De Simone speaks of a supposed admission of responsibility by the
RAF in the postwar period. Throughout 1943 the Italian Intelligence Service routinely intercepted and recorded telephone conversations to and from the Vatican. On November 8, 1943 Ugo Guspini, one of the intelligence agents involved, recorded the conversation between Fr. Giuseppe and the Jesuit Pietro Tacchi Venturi. In this verbatim account Fr. Giuseppe informed the Jesuit that he had just returned from the Viterbo Air Force base, north of Rome, where he had been told by someone who was present throughout the entire operation that the bombing was undertaken by Roberto Farinacci and a Roman pilot in an Italian Savoia-Marchetti aircraft with five bombs on board destined to knock out the Vatican Radio station because Farinacci believed it was transmitting military information to the Allies. This confirms the account given by Augusto Ferrara above and is further corroborated by Eitel Möllhausen, at the time ''chargé d'affaires'' at the German Embassy, Rome, who in his post-war memoir claimed that Farinacci was responsible and that Farinacci never denied it. The report by Monsignor Walter S. Carroll (see above), who had just returned from Allied headquarters in Algeria, that he had been informed "very confidentially" that the bombing was due to an American pilot who had lost his way and that another American pilot had reported seeing an Allied plane dropping its load on the Vatican, correctly represented opinion at Allied headquarters, Algeria, at the time. On November 8, 1943,
Harold Macmillan, the then resident British Minister in Algiers, informed the British Foreign Office in a "Most Secret" telegram: "I think we probably did bomb the Vatican." On the night in question one of seven British
Boston bombers, which had been in operation just north of Rome at the time the Vatican was bombed, developed engine trouble and dropped its bombs through clouds over an unknown location in order to lighten its load and return to base. These it was thought must have been the bombs which fell on the Vatican. But at the Foreign Office it was noted that it had been a clear and cloudless night over Rome when the Vatican was bombed. And a subsequent confidential Air Ministry investigation into the incident established that the impaired Boston had actually dropped its bombs over
Arce, some fifty miles southeast of Rome, and that neither it nor any other British aircraft in operation that night was responsible. The American pilot who witnessed the bombing probably saw the Savoia-Marchetti aircraft which, from a distance, is not dissimilar to the
Martin Baltimore light bomber frequently used over Italy, and mistook it for an Allied aircraft.
Bombing of 1 March 1944 There is less debate about the identity of the British plane that dropped bombs on the edge of Vatican City on 1 March 1944 as this was explicitly acknowledged, at least in private, by the British Air Ministry as an accidental bombing when one of its aircraft on a bombing raid over Rome dropped six bombs too close to the Vatican wall. The bombing, which affected only the outer margin of the city, was on 1 March 1944 and killed one person and injured another. A workman who was in the open was killed and a Dutch
Augustinian in the College of Saint Monica was injured. The low-yield bombs also caused damage to the
Palace of the Holy Office, to the Oratory of Saint Peter, and to the
Pontifical Urbanian College on the nearby
Janiculum Hill. Claims persist, nevertheless, that this was an Italian plane which was seen to strike an obstacle, perhaps a tree on the Janiculum, after which it jettisoned its bombs, but crashed after hitting a house on Via del Gelsomino with its wing killing an elderly woman who lived inside. The Italian authorities quickly removed the wreckage and the dead pilot. Monsignor Giulio Barbetta, who recounts his experience of this bombing, says that, while almost all the windows of the Holy Office building were shattered, the glass covering an image of
Our Lady between it and the entrance to the Oratory of Saint Peter remained intact and the oratory itself suffered no more than the effects of shrapnel against its wall. This led to the placing of sculptures of two shield-bearing angels to right and left of the image above an inscription that states:
AB ANGELIS DEFENSA KAL. MART. A.D. MCMXLIV (Protected by angels, 1 March 1944 AD). ==See also==