On Tuesday 30 April, 80 years will have passed since the first and, in terms of number of victims, most tragic bombing that hit the city of Alessandria in the Second World War. April 30, 1944 fell on a Sunday, the rite of the Holy Mass was celebrated in all the churches of the Christian faith, it was a clear sunny day and many people were outside their homes, but, shortly after midday, Alessandria suffered, completely unprepared, its terrible”baptism of blood”.
The incursion of the American bombers had as its main objective the large railway shunting, but a good part of the bombs fell on the city and hit, in particular, the Cristo district and the Borgo Littorio, the current Pista, popular neighborhoods inhabited, mainly, by railway workers, workers and employees. With successive intervals and waves, the attack ended after 2pm. The confirmed victims were 239, mostly housewives (75), children and students (45), railway workers, workers and artisans (59). The deceased soldiers (12) were part of the Cabanette barracks. The numerous American bombers dropped tons of bombs escorted by fighter planes which, diving down, strafed streets and squares crowded with people.
The factories of Mino and of Borsalino suffered significant damage. But several public buildings and churches in the center were also seriously damaged: the Duomo, the church of S. Alessandro, the Palazzo Trotti Bentivogliothe historical library of the Risorgimento (50 thousand volumes), the picture gallery Trottithe House Michael in the Gardens, the Palazzo dei Commercianti and the headquarters of the Red Cross.
The scale of the attack carried out on the city clearly did not only have the task of destroying the station and the railway yard, but of terrorizing the civilian population, inducing them to react to the Nazi-fascist occupation. That first bombing on the carpet it highlighted, beyond the selflessness of the volunteers and firefighters, the disorganization and lack of means with which the city authorities faced those dramatic events. On the night of Monday 1st May the city, just over 24 hours after the first attack, was bombed again by the English with incendiary devices dropped on the entire town. Hit by an incendiary bomb, the eighteenth-century Municipal Theater collapsed into ruins and countless houses and the Borsalino. On that same day those who had saved themselves, and were in a position to do so, abandoned Alexandria and became one displaced.
The military reasons for that bombing, like the subsequent ones, can be found in the difficulties encountered by the Allies in moving up the peninsula. This had stopped for many months below the Gustav line finding in the fortifications built by the German troops an obstacle difficult to overcome. To overcome these difficulties, the Allies relied on aviation, aiming to interrupt, upstream, the flows of supplies destined for the numerous divisions deployed south of Rome. It was
to constantly and continuously strike the entire railway and road network and the main targets were bridges, viaducts, stations and railway yards. The operation that took the name of Strangle it spread to the most important shunting yards of the main northern cities which were flooded with hundreds of freight wagons loaded with supplies. Among the railway nodes that the Wehrmacht considered most interesting for connecting its troops, Alessandria was included together with those of Bologna, Genoa and Verona.
To frame the historical context of those tragic events, in the first ten days of that month of April 1944, on the slopes of the Ligurian Apennines, there had been an imposing Nazi-fascist roundup which had gathered around Capanne di Marcarolo, where a large group of partisans and young draft dodgers. Captured in the vicinity of the Cascina Benedicta 147 were shot on the spot and buried in mass graves. The remaining 400 were deported to Nazi concentration camps, from which only a few would return.
The bombings continued throughout 1944 and until a few days after the Liberation on 25 April 1945. In total there were 559 deaths. This figure places Alessandria in second place among the Piedmontese capitals, immediately after Turin (with 2069 deaths), and far above Cuneo and Asti (56 and 54 victims respectively) as well as Vercelli (31 deaths) and Novara (only one victim). If we calculate the ratio between the overall size of the population and the number of deaths caused by the bombings, we can see that Alexandria has the highest percentage incidence of human losses. And how the extent of the destruction of housing stock is almost unparalleled in the Region as a whole.
On the 70th anniversary of the Liberation, on 30 April 2015, in partial compensation for the silence of the institutions and the city’s forgetfulness towards the 559 people who died due to the Allied bombings, the Municipal Administration of Alessandria inaugurated in one of the rooms of the Town Hall an’Memorial‘ dedicated to them. A large canvas by the artist Massimo Orsi which reports, in alphabetical order, the complete list of victims.
At the end of the conflict, Alessandria, together with the 559 victims of the bombings, counted 45 young people sacrificed in the Liberation struggle and 36 deported to extermination camps. And he had to deal with the complete destruction of 4445 rooms of houses, 3349 rooms partially destroyed and 4609 damaged.
Renzo Penna
Alexandria, 27 April 2024
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