GENOA ROCKED

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIX, Issue 21958, 9 May 1941, Page 6

GENOA ROCKED

Hammered By Shells Attack From Air And Sea If I could see no more of the wai‘ than this, I shall have seen one of its great days. Behind us as the fleet steams away, the targets at Genoa, hammered by a thousand shells, he smouldering beneath a pall of smoke. Her great Ansaldo arms works, equivalent to our Vickers Armstrong, are wrecked, her oil tanks are on fire, her main power station is out of action, wrote the "Dally Express” war reporter of the famous raid. Ships Hit Docks, railway yards, and ships in the harbour have all had their share of one of the most concentrated punishments of the war. Further down the coast targets at Leghorn and Pisa have been bombed and set on fire by aircraft of the fleet. All this was done without interference from a single Italian plane, and — which may perhaps surprise every Italian citizen who learns the facts—without inducing their fleet in its northern bases to leave the shelter of its harbours to accept battle in defence of their home coastline. Coming after the fall of Benghazi, no one can judge the effect on Italian moral of this wor our fl ee t_Renown, Malaya, Sheffield, Ark Royal, and the screen of destroyers which earlier, at close range, added the weight of even their small guns to the bombardmentare still within range of Italian airfields and German dive-bombers, with which some of them have been equipped. But still there is no sign of Italy's Battle Fleet. We have waited long enough for it. Now we are on our way back. The Ark Royal’s Task The fleet airmen in the Ark Royal rose at 3.30 this morning, breakfasted, and held last discussions. It was their job to raid Leghorn and Pisa and maintain a fighter patrol of the coast to prevent any attempt by the Italian Air Force to baulk our plans. They took off in darkness and then formed up in the air, section by section, squadron by squadron, before heading for Italy in formation as precise as that expected in daylight exercises. In the half-light before dawn the leaders of one squadron reached Leghorn and discerned the outlines of the Azienda oil-from-coal hydrogenation plant they were going to attack. From the mountains a river flowing past a factory discharged into the sea a finger of white mineral deposit which jutted out from the coastline like the beam of a dim searchlight. They dived down, dropped high explosives, then a shower of incendiaries. A huge green flash leaped up. then fires spread everywhere. Other bombs were dropped on metal works with similar effect. Returning seawards, some pilots threaded their way through the balloon barrage with which the coast is protected, the airfield and the important rail junction of Pisa nearby being attacked at the same time. One pilot said: "It was with great reluctance that I resisted the temptation to drop something near the Leaning Tower, so as to straighten it and ruin the tourist traffic."

About the same time we were firing opening salvos off Genoa. The silence of the city and the hills which enclose it was shattered by the arrival of the broadsides while our ships were at that moment rocking with the recoil of the next salvo.

Strictly Military Objectives Our firing was aimed strictly at military objectives. Loss of life should have been small, because it was too early for the city to have bestirred itself, and, being Sunday the streets of the industrial quarter would probably not* be crowded, as they would have been on an ordinary working day. Spotting through powerful glasses revealed that our firing was remarkably accurate, and that practically nothing had fallen beyond the inner harbour among the white houses of the residential quarter in the narrow terraced streets we could see rising among the foothills. Our attack took the local defenders by surprise, and for the first few minutes we could see that their gunners were firing straight into the air, presumably believing that planes were bombing them. Then, discovering their mistake, they turned Intermittent and inaccurate fire seawards.

Our shells could be seen plunging into dry docks, warehouses and sheds, and dropping with repeated accuracy on the Ansaldo works and their adjoining rail junction up to the valley to the left of the town as we faced it. Tongue of Flame Suddenly, from a row of oil tanks on the mole to the right of the harbour, a tongue of flame leapt high, subsiding after a full minute into a glow of fierce heat. A direct hit on a power plant caused a series of explosions to flash in circuit throughout the town. The blast from our ships of 15-inch shells, which stand forehead-high against the average-sized man, was terrific, and the constant necessity to duck one's head as the thunderous reports struck the eardrums made it difficult to keep the target under uninterrupted observation. It was difficult at least, for an amateur. Between times, however, one could see smoke rising from ships damaged in the harbour. Ansaldo's was now well alight, and the flicker of this and a dozen other fires in different parts of the city was reflected back by the snow-covered Apennine Mountains now a brilliant white in the rays of the,dawn sun. Shortly afterwards we withdrew while the shore guns continued to fire desultorily through the thick, rolling smoke which now covered the burning harbour. Judging from our last view of the battered harbour before it was obscured by smoke, it is now ill-fitted for 1 . ® u JBested use as an embarkation point for the German Army seeking to invade North Africa. When our aircraft returned from Leghorn and Pisa and from the patrols in which, unchallenged, they had dominated more than 80 miles of Italian coastline for more than two horns only one was missing. It was our onlv casualty of any kind whatsoever.