Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation's Treasures from the Nazis Read Online Free Page A

would be no easy way out, especially now, after the Allies had attacked Rome. At that moment, the Italian leader could only think about how his absence during the attacks would be seen by Romans.
    THE FIRST PLANES of the formation appeared over Rome at 11:03 a.m. on a cloudless summer morning. Aircraft soon filled the sky above the Eternal City. An enormous formation of more than five hundred B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators—virtually the entire Northwest African Strategic Air Force (NASAF) of the United States Army—skirted the Vatican to begin their bombing run. From an altitude of more than twenty thousand feet (twenty “angels”—American pilots referred to every one thousand feet of altitude as one “angel”), the bombers released their payload, some two million pounds of explosives targeting the Littorio and Ciampino Airdromes and the railway marshaling yards at Littorio and San Lorenzo. Each bomb took seventy seconds to fall to the earth.
    The risky mission reflected the importance Allied leaders placed on disrupting enemy communications and interdicting the supply of German and Italian forces from Florence and Genoa into Rome. They also wanted to avoid the resupply from Rome to Sicily via Naples farther south. Littorio and Ciampino posed the lesser problems; both were located more than five miles from the city center. But the San Lorenzo rail yards lay less than a mile and a half from Rome’s most famous monument, the Colosseum, and immediately adjacent to one of the Seven Pilgrim Churches of Rome, the Basilica di San Lorenzo fuori le Mura (Basilica of St. Lawrence Outside the Walls).
    Plumes of smoke rising from the southeast disturbed the normally splendid view of the city from the open-air gallery of the Vatican’s Loggia di Raffaello. Even as the sound of nearby antiaircraft fire and distant explosions echoed across the hills, Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, Vatican Deputy Secretary of State for Ordinary Affairs, could not believe that the Allies would bomb Rome. *
    The smoke seen by Montini originated from the San Lorenzo rail yards and the surrounding densely populated neighborhoods. While the raid devastated the marshaling yards, some bombs missed their target and hit adjacent university and hospital buildings, the nearby Verano Cemetery, and the Basilica of San Lorenzo, where the body of Pope Pius IX, the longest-reigning pope in history, had been reinterred in 1881. More than two thousand people lay dead—most were civilians from working-class neighborhoods. A large number of the victims had been packed in streetcars in the piazza facing the church. One woman noted in her diary: “death . . . comes from where we look when we pray to God.”
    The Allies had acted despite numerous pleas by Eugenio Pacelli—Patriarch of the West, Successor of the Chief of the Apostles, Primate of Italy, Vicar of Jesus Christ, but most commonly known as His Holiness, Pope Pius XII—that Rome be spared. Aware of his concerns, President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote the pope on July 10, 1943. Even while Allied forces were landing in Sicily, he restated his previous assurances: “Your Holiness. . . . Churches and religious institutions will, to the extent that it is within our power, be spared the devastations of war during the struggle ahead.”
    The Holy Father’s refusal to publicly criticize Nazi Germany’s devastating bombing of London, Coventry, and other culturally rich European cities made his preoccupation with protecting Rome and the Vatican appear hypocritical to some. Britain’s Minister to the Holy See, Sir Francis D’Arcy Osborne, commented, “The more I think of it, the more I am revolted by Hitler’s massacre of the Jewish Race on the one hand, and . . . the Vatican’s apparently exclusive preoccupation with the . . . possibilities of the bombardments of Rome.” Informed of the raid shortly after it commenced, Churchill replied, “Good! Now also our old Mussolini will understand