This site describes an unknown war episode, happened in the
war-torn Italy of 1944.
On 31 July 1944
the little town of Dogliani in Piedmont,
a northern region of Italy, was bombed by a lone airplane, causing 28 deaths,
many more wounded and major material damages.
Up to now
no clear responsible has been found for this action: depending on the researcher
the responsibility was in turn given to the Germans, who governed Italy in
1943-45 through the fascist puppet state RSI (Repubblica Sociale Italiana), or
to the Allies, who were slowly taking possess of the Italian peninsula starting
from Sicily, and who were carrying out daily attacks and bombing missions
against the cities of northern Italy.
The
Dogliani bomb attack has therefore been a mistery until very recently, when a
new search was started on the basis of a novel theory, which was then confirmed
by new documents found following the assumptions made.
After a
thorough and detailed search Waldi von Dachsbauten has indeed arrived to the conclusion that the
bombing was carried out by an Italian airplane, and that the responsibilities
were to be distributed in different degrees among many subjects, all acting in
the northern Italian territory.
Germans, Italian partisan groups of different belonging, RSI
fascist air force and RSI fascist paramilitary forces were among said subjects.
The
sequence of events started on 24 July 1944 with the kidnapping
of two women, mother and daughter, by a partisan band of Dogliani.
The mother, deemed a spy, was shooted shortly afterwards, while
the daughter was freed in August 1944,
after a prisony of a month .
The daughter was however the girlfriend of a fascist air
force officer, who in turn was a relative of the captain of a German-controlled fascist antipartisan
force, which operated in the surroundings of Dogliani.
The name of
the Milan-based fascist unit, to which the antipartisan force belonged, was
Legione Muti.
The Legione Muti had available two little Italian civil
airplanes.
These airplanes were impressed by the Germans on the day of
the fall of fascist Italy, 8 September 1943, and where subsequently given on
request to the Legione Muti in March 1944, because they were useless for the
German war scopes.
The airplanes were two De Havilland DH80A Puss Moth, only
one of them being in flying conditions, while the other laid totally disassembled
and stored in boxes.
The Italian
air force officer belonged to the aeronautical engineers corps of the ANR
(Aeronautica Nazionale Repubblicana) and his relative was in an high post in
the Muti hierarchy with the possibility of speaking directly to the Muti
commander, col. Francesco Colombo.
On learning about the kidnap of the two women the Italian
air force officer and his relative developed instantly the idea of a quick
revenge by using the airplane belonging to Legione Muti.
This was accomplished in an easy way, as the air force
officer simply asked his top brass about the technical possibility of modifying
the aircraft, and his relative asked the Muti commander about the possibility
of modifying the airplane with the technical help of the regular fascist air
force and afterwards use it for an anti-partisan attack in Dogliani.
It is in
fact doubtful whether or not the Muti captain informed his commander about the
real, quite private scope of the bombing; it appears more plausible that he
presented col. Colombo with a brilliant new idea to improve the work of his
antipartisan force in the surroundings of
Dogliani, obtaining from him green light for the modification.
Be it as it
may, in the space of a week (24 to
31 July 1944), the Muti Puss Moth was modified to a light bomber by the ANR
engineers who mounted the racks for two Italian 50 kg bombs and a 12.7 mm
Breda-Safat machine gun on the side, to be employed from the passenger
seat.
On 31 July
1944 Dogliani was therefore bombed by the Muti Puss Moth, triggering a strong
reaction on Germans' side.
The Germans did not indeed know anything about what was
going on, and were utterly surprised by the bombing action.
Since the aircraft carried German insignia, what appeared to
the public was that they, the Germans, bombed the town.
They reacted therefore immediately, impressing again the
aircraft and censoring everywhere the notice of the Dogliani bombing.
No German
or Italian official source on the Dogliani bombing existed at the time nor
exists today; this bombing is only known because after the war the witnesses
wrote down in various newspapers and books their experience.
A detailed description of the unfolding of these events and
of the involved persons and military institutions can be found in the 200+
pages book "Dogliani 1944 - il bombardamento ed il ricatto",
obtainable at the moment only in Italian language by writing to the email
dogliani1944@libero.it
A translation into English of said book is envisaged; in
case of interest a message may be sent to the abovementioned email in order to
obtain further informations.
