ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 describes the overall British approach to bombing Italy and how the Allied strategy changed when the United States entered the war in 1942, and when the Italians surrendered in September 1943. British aerial war plans for Italy combined two motives. Attacking military-industrial facilities, including aircraft factories, would simultaneously appear legally justified and cause widespread harm to civilians living near the main industrial sites, destroying their homes in a policy known as “dehousing.” Once the Americans joined the war, the bombing raids continued to combine these goals of destroying military targets and terrorizing the population into pressing the government to surrender, including by bombing Rome. With the Armistice of September 1943, the main military goal shifted to expelling the German occupiers and liberating the Italians, now considered friends. Yet the bombing plans focused on lines of communication and transportation nodes typically located in cities, so the civilian death toll exceeded that of the period when Italians were the enemy.
