ABSTRACT
What Allied leaders, ordinary soldiers and air crews, and journalists covering the Italian campaign thought about civilian bombing victims is the topic of Chapter Five. It draws upon the writings of Vera Brittain, an eloquent critic of the Allied bombing of Axis cities. Her experience as a wartime nurse and the loss of her closest male loved ones in the Great War sealed her commitment to nonviolence, even when confronted by the rise of Italian fascism and German Nazism. This chapter uses Brittain’s writing as a template for what constitutes a humane depiction of the civilian consequences of the bombing of Italy and the subsequent Allied occupation. It reviews a range of materials—statements of political and military leaders, accounts by journalists and novelists (including Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22 who witnessed the Italian campaigns first-hand), and reminiscences and interviews with members of the air crews that dropped the bombs from above and those of Italian victims below. The picture that emerges contains elements of dehumanizing racism as well as empathy and recognition of the common humanity of Italians caught in a war that few of them wanted.
