For most of the 20th Century following the end of the Second World War, military historians affirmed that the American nuclear program was far in advance of similar research undertaken anywhere else in the world, particularly by German scientists, who never came close to developing, let alone deploying an atomic weapon of their own. But the continuing release of hitherto neglected documents and eyewitness accounts from the final years of that conflict are beginning to reveal some altogether different conclusions.
It now appears certain that the Axis powers, including Italy, outstripped the Allies’ nuclear research in almost all respects. For example, Italian nuclear physicists were ahead of their foreign colleagues in the years immediately prior to World War Two. By 1936, Enrico Fermi and Franco Rosetti belonged to Europe’s foremost atomic research program. Their team, however, was divided with the anti-Semitic legislation that became law in Italy two years later, because some of the scientists, including Fermi, had Jewish wives.2
They relocated to the United States, where their work led to America’s atomic bomb, which further divided their ranks, because men like Rosetti staunchly opposed the application of nuclear power for military purposes. Addressing Fermi and the others, he told them unequivocally, “you have disgraced your profession and stained your hands with blood no amount of time can cleanse”. Rosetti was so appalled by their “betrayal of humanitarian science” in building an atomic bomb, he turned his back on nuclear physics to embrace an entirely different science: paleontology.3
His colleagues who remained behind in Italy, however, had no such moral misgivings. On the eve of hostilities, in 1939, scientists at the University of Milan issued the first international patent for an atomic reactor. Its potential for the creation of an explosive device without destructive parallel was immediately recognized, given the war-fever of the times, and state allocations were provided for expanding practical laboratory investigation into a potentially new arms technology. Fermi and the others who had migrated to America did not take all University results with them. They knew as much or less about creating a nuclear bomb than their colleagues back in Milan before the reactor patent was issued.
Atomic research in Italy proceeded slowly, if deliberately for months after Mussolini’s declaration of war against the Western Allies in June 1940, but virtually came to a stand-still by year’s end, due to severe shortages in essential resources requisitioned by the Esercito and Regia Marina for conventional weapons’ production. The University of Milan physicists were further compromised by that venerable institution’s inadequate facilities and out-dated equipment. Their complaints did not go unheard, however, because they found in the Duce an ardent admirer of their research. During May 1942, he transferred the lot of them to the Third Reich, where some of its superior, state-of-the-art laboratories had already been set aside for that nation’s own nuclear development.
The Italians found conditions entirely satisfactory, and enthusiastically shared their own atomic reactor information with German colleagues. Moving the physicists to the Reich proved inadvertently fortuitous after the Allied invasion of southern Italy made relocating men and material to Mussolini’s Salo Republic, in the north, increasingly difficult from mid-1944 onwards. By then, however, all nuclear research, of which the Italians were part, had come under the purview of the SS, primarily for reasons of security. Little is known about the Italian contribution at this time, although several high-ranking officers in the Duce’s new armed forces allegedly witnessed German atomic testing, suggesting they were involved in its development at the highest levels of security.
Occasionally, Mussolini himself implied the deployment of nuclear weapons in the near future. As his situation in northern Italy became more desperate, he dropped hints with greater frequency, always in an air of self-confidence. As late as 21 April 1945, he told his Chief of Staff, General Graziani, “It is necessary to resist for another month. I have enough in my hand to win the peace.”4
There is no doubt he was referring specifically to the impending availability of atom bombs, because the very next day he wrote in his Political Testament, “The wonder weapons are our hope. It is laughable and senseless for us to threaten anybody at this moment without a basis in reality for these threats. The well-known mass-destruction bombs are nearly ready. In only a few days, with the utmost meticulous intelligence, Hitler will probably execute this fearful blow, because he will have full confidence. It appears that there are three bombs, and each has an astonishing operation. The construction of each unit is fearfully complex, and of a lengthy time of completion.”5 Conventional historians claim he had been duped by Hitler’s promises. Yet, Mussolini’s statements fit perfectly into the context of the times.
Seven months before, a Luftwaffe flak rocket expert flying “from Ludwigslust (south of Luebeck), about twelve to fifteen kilometers from an atomic bomb test station … noticed a strong, bright illumination of the whole atmosphere, lasting about two seconds. The clearly visible pressure wave escaped the approaching and following cloud formed by the explosion. This wave had a diameter of about one kilometer when it became visible and the color of the cloud changed frequently … The diameter of the still-visible pressure wave was at least 9,000 meters while remaining visible for at least fifteen seconds. The combustion was lightly felt from my observation plane in the form of pulling and pushing. About one hour later, I started with an He 111 from the A/D24 at Ludwigslust and flew in an easterly direction. Shortly after the start, I passed through the almost complete overcast (between 3,000-4,000-meter altitude). A cloud shaped like a mushroom with turbulent, billowing sections (at about 7,000-meter altitude) stood, without any seeming connections, over the spot where the explosion took place.”
“Strong electrical disturbances and the impossibility to continue radio communication as by lightning, turned up. Because of the P-38s operating in the area Wittenberg-Mersburg, I had to turn to the north, but observed a better visibility at the bottom of the cloud where the explosion occurred (sic).”6
Doubtless, the pilot saw the explosion of history’s first atomic bomb. Among its better known witnesses was Dr. Josef Goebbels. Immediately after the early October 1944 blast, the Reich Propaganda Minister reported in a national broadcast that he had just seen a test of Germany’s latest military technology, “the awesome power of which made me catch my breath and stopped my heartbeat.”7 Such “weapons of mass-destruction”, he assured his listeners, were far beyond anything imagined by the enemy, and capable of annihilation on an unprecedented scale. Historians assume he was referring exclusively to V-2 rockets then being mass-produced in Germany’s underground factories. But the ballistic missiles had already been raining on London for more than a month by the time Dr. Goebbels made his radio appearance. Moreover, it was only at this same moment that Hitler finally authorized production of an atomic bomb. Hitherto, he had been unwilling to allocate military spending on an expensive, unproven theory. But the successful Luebeck experiment changed his mind. Almost immediately after receiving the Führer’s authorization, his scientists proceeded with a second nuclear test during the night of 11 October at Ruegen, Germany’s largest island in the Baltic. This event is particularly cogent to our discussion, because the only foreigner allowed to witness it was an Italian Army officer. His attendance was all the more remarkable, in that security was so tight, only a handful of select observers from the Wehrmacht and Nazi Party was given clearance. Indeed, even any knowledge of the experiment had been restricted to just a dozen individuals outside the physicists. One of those privileged persons was Benito Mussolini.
Hitler had notified him the previous month of the upcoming test. It was then that 27-year-old Luigi Romersa was summoned to the Duce residing at his Salo headquarters. “I want to know more about these weapons,” he told the veteran Italian Army officer, now a war-correspondent for Milan’s Corriere della Sera. “I asked Hitler about them, but he was less than forthcoming.”8 Armed with letters of introduction to both Dr. Goebbels and the Führer himself, Mussolini’s personal envoy flew non-stop to Berlin, where he was immediately taken in charge by SS guards. The following night, they drove him for two hours through a constant downpour to the coast of northern Germany. There, they accompanied Romersa aboard a swift motorboat that took them to the shores of the Baltic island of Ruegen.
On 12 October 1944, he and a few other men–high-ranking members of the German Army, SS and Nazi Party–were conducted by several physicists to a model village of ordinary dwellings surrounded by tall trees and populated exclusively by sheep. After a cursory inspection, the guests walked about one kilometer away to a concrete bunker fitted with a few, small observation ports of very thick glass. Even so, Romersa and company were instructed to wear darkly tinted goggles for what an official described would be “a test of the disintegration bomb. It is the most powerful explosive that has yet been developed. Nothing can withstand it.”9 A series of warning sirens and flashing, red lights announced the imminent detonation, which occurred as “a sudden, blinding flash” followed by “a thick cloud of smoke” that “took the shape of a column, and then that of a big flower,” as a tremor went through the concrete bunker.10 No one was allowed to leave for several hours, until the lingering effects of the explosion had dissipated.
“The bomb gives off deathly rays of utmost toxicity,” they were told. Before being allowed to leave the bunker, scientists and guests had to don white, coarse, fibrous cloaks of asbestos with thick, glass eye-holes. Thus covered, they returned to the blast site, and were appalled at what they saw. The grass was now the color of leather, and “trees around had been turned to carbon. No leaves. Nothing alive.” The sheep were “burnt to cinders.” The sturdy houses visited just a few hours earlier “had disappeared, broken into little pebbles of debris.”11
Romersa returned at once to Italy, where he briefed Mussolini on his experience. The Duce reacted, not with joy, but dark concern, saying nothing more than sternly warning the Milan journalist to regard his visit to Ruegen as a state secret of the utmost priority. True to this command, he said nothing of the October 1944 nuclear test until two years after the war, in a newspaper article. But when “everyone said I was mad”, Romersa published a fuller account in Oggi magazine, during the 1950s.12
What Romersa left out of his account was nonetheless obvious enough; namely, that he was one of the very few observers allowed to witness the Ruegen exercise only because Italian physicists were an integral part of atomic research. Had they not been vital to the supremely classified Axis program, the SS would have never cleared a foreign newspaper correspondent (of all people!), no matter how politically impressive the source of his credentials, to Germany’s most clandestine weapon, especially so late in the war, when the Third Reich’s options for victory were rapidly diminishing. Romersa’s chief task was to report on progress made by the Italo-German scientific team and to inform Mussolini that he could expect an operational nuclear device by spring the following year. This only explains the Duce’s statements in late April 1945, regarding the imminent availability of a ‘disintegration bomb’ and the need ‘to resist for another month’.
Like Mussolini, Hitler initially evinced a similar lack of enthusiasm for atomic weaponry. As far back as 1941, when Carl von Weizsäcker, one of the leaders of Germany’s nuclear research team, filed a draft patent application for a plutonium bomb, the Führer expressed his skepticism in a private conversation with Otto Skorzeny. He was the same SS commando-leader who, two years later, would rescue the Duce from Gran Sasso. “This device, if their description of it proves to be correct,” Hitler concluded, “will have very little tactical value, because rarely are enemy concentrations large and dense enough, either on land or at sea, to be effectively targeted in a 1.5 kilometer blast-radius, except for industrial cities, which conventional air-strikes are presently quite capable of destroying, as this war has already shown.
“Their atomic bomb is actually a strategic weapon designed to kill large numbers of civilian populations confined in urban centers, thereby brow-beating a people into surrender. As such, it has less military utility than propaganda value as an instrument of terror. By the very nature of its destructiveness, it has an automatic, built-in circuit-breaker: If we were to cause a plutonium explosion over London, it would only be a matter of time before the British did the same thing to Berlin.
“Identical reasoning has prevented the use by all sides, even the Soviets, of poison gas in this conflict. Everyone knows the consequences. Von Weizsäcker and his colleagues should nevertheless continue their research. How wonderful if they could come up with an atomic-powered U-boat or transport-plane! Those I would gladly fund. But they will not get many Reichsmarks from me for a weapon whose only efficacy, so far, is the propagandistically detrimental, militarily useless incineration of non-combatants.”13
While his armies were victorious on every front, Hitler could afford such views. But as hundreds of thousands of German civilians were being consumed in the flames of Anglo-American carpet-bombing, he reversed his original disdain for an atomic bomb, especially after the Allied landings at Normandy, in June 1944. The paired nuclear test five months later, although successful, was a relatively small affair, and a final experiment with a substantially larger discharge was necessary before military application could take place.
This occurred at the troop parade ground and barracks at Orhdruf, in south-central Thuringia, when two uranium devices were detonated on 4 March 1945. Both were observed by Soviet spies, who radioed the Kremlin that the Orhdruf explosions produced a “highly radioactive effect.”14 As part of their experiment, the SS officers, who supervised the dual test, confined captured Red Army commissars from the nearby Buchenwald concentration camp to barracks at the center of the blast.
“In many cases, their bodies were completely destroyed,” according to the spies, who added that such a weapon could “slow down our offensive”.15 Kremlin officials deemed their report so important, Josef Stalin himself received one of the four copies stamped ‘Urgent Priority’. But if he was alarmed, Hitler was overjoyed. On 9 March, Dr. Goebbels told a large audience at Goerlitz, “Just the day before yesterday [three days after Thuringia’s two nuclear bombs were successfully detonated], he told me, ‘I believe so firmly that we will master this crisis, and I believe so firmly that when we throw our armies into the new offensive, we will beat the enemy and drive him back, and I believe so firmly that we will someday add victory to our banners, as firmly as I have ever believed anything in my life’.”16
The Führer’s late-hour elation was remarkably similar in tone to Mussolini’s April 21st statement that he had enough in his hand “to win the peace”, because both leaders hoped that Hitler’s Siegeswaffe would be ready to turn the tables on the Allies “one minute before midnight”. But by the time the SS completed final nuclear testing at Orhdruf, the military situation had surpassed even the power of an atomic bomb to reverse.
Preparations for deployment of nuclear arms may have begun in Italy almost a year before the Luebeck blast witnessed by Hans Zinsser, when a specimen of the Regia Aeronautica’s only four-engine heavy bomber appears to have been specifically modified to accommodate such a weapon. The Piaggio P.133 was an advanced version of the P.108B, unique not only because a single example was produced, but due to its unusual streamlining. The standard crew of ten men was reduced to just two–pilot and navigator/ bombardier–while both its armor-plating and defensive machine-guns were stripped to afford a heavier payload.
The quartet of 1,500-hp Piaggio P.XIIRC.35 eighteen-cylinder radial engines was upgraded for improved power, and the bomb-bay enlarged. Although the lone P.133 was never officially designated an ‘atomic bomber’, extraordinarily high security surrounding its manufacture, together with the suggestive features of its design alterations, left some post-war historians wondering if the big Piaggio was intended to drop a nuclear bomb amid the Allied fleets massing for the invasion of the Italian mainland after the fall of Sicily. The P.133 might have been ready to participate in such a mission, but, clearly, no such device was yet available.
The Piaggio had to be modified for its unique task by Mussolini’s air force technicians, because Italy’s only purpose-built nuclear bomber fell into Allied hands after the Badoglio armistice of September 1943. Although officially known as a ‘transport’, the Savoia-Marchetti S.M.95 was ordered by the Regia Aeronautica at a period in the war when such a model was not needed, even senseless, which alone casts serious doubts on the real intention of its designers. Powered by four Alfa Romeo engines, it was twenty-three meters long, with a thirty-five-meter-wing span, which afforded it a tremendous lifting capacity. But the monster’s outstanding feature was its prodigious range of 12,005 kilometers. The S.M.95’s ability to carry a heavy payload over great distances suggest to some aviation historians that the ‘transport’ was actually intended to deliver a heavy bomb to cities along America’s Eastern Seaboard.
The idea for an aerial assault on New York originated with Piaggio’s chief test pilot, Nicolo Lana, in April 1942. He volunteered to fly a stripped-down P.23R, a tri-motor that had established several long-distance records before the war, dropping a single 1,000-kg. bomb on the city center, then ditching near the Nantucket Lighthouse, where he and his flight engineer would be picked up by a waiting submarine. His simple scheme offered every prospect of success. U.S. coastal defenses during the first half of 1942, when German U-boats prowling off America’s eastern shores scored some of their greatest successes, were appallingly weak. Unfortunately for Lana’s plan, the only P.23R in existence was destroyed in a landing accident near Albenga, and no other Italian plane had the Piaggio’s outstanding range.
Had the mission been carried out, damage to New York would have been inconsequential, but the effect on Allied morale at a time when the war was not going well for the Western powers would have made a powerful impact, resulting in a triumph for Axis propaganda. Strategically, the consequences could have been no less significant, as the Americans would have doubtlessly diverted much-needed resources and manpower to protecting North America from further attack.
Despite the P.23R’s mishap, Air Staff commanders had been intrigued by Lana’s proposal, but realized the Regia Aeronautica did not possess another plane that could fly the distance to New York without stopping en route for refuelling by a submarine-tanker, an overly complex operation made all the more hazardous by increasingly effective Allied counter-measures. A new aircraft conceived specifically for such a mission needed to be designed and built. Hence, the Savoia-Marchetti S.M.95. Under cover as a ‘transport’, its first prototype flew on 8 May 1943. Performance was very good, military modifications were made, and flight-testing began on 2 September. Six days later, the Badoglio government switched sides, and the imminent mission was scrubbed. When the lone SM.95 was seized by Badoglio’s government authorities, RSI planners were forced to modify the conventional Piaggio for the same purpose supposed to have been fulfilled by the four-engined Savoia-Marchetti.
Underscoring the probability of Regia Marina preparations for a specially redesigned aircraft able to carry an atomic bomb was the German Luftwaffe’s simultaneous modification of its own heavy bomber, the Heinkel He. 177 Greif, or ‘Vulture’. According to military air historian, David Mondey, work on a Greif at the Letov plant, in Prague, was intended “to provide an enlarged bomb-bay to accommodate the planned German atomic bomb”.17 The conversion began in late 1943, just when the Piaggio was being redressed in Italy. Not coincidentally, some of the German nuclear research was at that time being carried out in Czechoslovakia, where the Heinkel bomber was also converted to carry an atomic device. It would appear then, that both German and Italian Air Force officials anticipated the availability of atomic bombs sometime in late 1943.
One may only surmise that the contemporary political upheaval and de facto civil war that afflicted Italy with the arrest of Mussolini and subsequent turmoil in the wake of Badoglio’s September armistice prevented transportation of the delicate, top secret, fissionable materials and valuable equipment from reaching the Piaggio’s airstrip. The bomb intended for its sortie against the Allied invasion fleet may have been, moreover, a hastily packaged contingency than a real finished product, and the Italo-German physicists welcomed Italy’s temporarily stabilized military situation as a necessary breathing-space to properly finalize their many years of work in the creation and deployment of a true weapon less encumbered by the potentially disastrous uncertainties inherent in incomplete research.
While tactical use of a nuclear weapon against the Anglo-American invasion of Italy may have been the most practical option envisioned for it by the Commando Supremo, the propaganda value of such a device would not have been missed by Mussolini or men like Julio Valerio Borghese. Borghese was Commander of the X Light Flotilla, whose human-torpedoes had scored spectacular successes against British ships at Alexandria and Gibraltar. With America’s entry into the war on 9 December 1941, he believed these unconventional submersibles represented Italy’s best hope for striking the U.S. mainland. Borghese recalled later, “the psychological effect on the Americans, who had not yet undergone any war offensive on their own soil, would, in our opinion, far outweigh the material damage which might be inflicted. And ours was the only practical plan, so far as I am aware, ever made to carry the war into the United States.”18
Beyond its obvious propaganda value, such an attack would sink several valuable freighters, and New York’s important harbor might be sufficiently damaged, as was the port of Alexandria, to close it for lengthy repairs. Far more significantly, following the attack, the Americans could be counted upon to divert substantial effort, materials and weapons from their war effort for the reinforced defense of not only New York, but the entire eastern seaboard, just as the Japanese withdrew many of their forces to protect Tokyo after it had received unimportant damage from 1942’s Doolittle raid. German V-1 missile attacks against London two years later prompted a similar reaction from the British. As the Doolittle raid raised American morale after months of uninterrupted bad news, Borghese’s New York operation would have an identical impact on Italian spirits. Potential repercussions–strategically, economically and psychologically–would certainly pay high military dividends on a meager investment in men and materiel.
The Duce and Commando Supremo heartily approved the scheme in late January 1942, and Borghese got to work on it immediately. The operation was set to take place in mid-December, when daylight would have been minimal and the extended darkness allowed his crews maximum time to carry out the operation. After dark, their vessel was to be delivered into the waters off Fort Hamilton. From there, it would cruise up the Hudson River to the merchant shipping docks along West Street, where ‘frogmen’ in scuba-gear would attach explosive charges to five or six freighters. After scuttling their submersible, the crews could choose to either surrender or go into hiding. Several thousand U.S. dollars were, in fact, provided each man, in the event he chose to avoid capture.
Due to the limited range of the Maiale human-torpedoes which attacked the British Fleet at Alexandria, Borghese envisioned using one of the Regia Marina’s pocket-submarines then operating with good success in the Black Sea against the Soviet Navy. But these ‘midgets’ were still too large for accommodation aboard a standard ocean-going submarine on a transatlantic mission from Europe to North America. Instead, he resurrected an earlier two-man submersible known as the Goeta-Caproni Project (after the inventor, Vincenzo Goeta, and its parent company), inaugurated in 1936.
Following extensive redesign, especially for silent running, two examples of the craft, which had been stored and almost forgotten for the previous six years, were tested under conditions of extreme secrecy in secluded Lake Iseo, later the site of another top secret undertaking, Churchill’s alleged Allied-Axis alliance against the Soviet Union. One of the submersibles sank irretrievably to the bottom of the lake, but the other achieved an operational range of 113 kilometers while cruising beneath the surface at six knots, performing admirably at forty-five-meter depths.
Renamed CA 2, it was ready for action by mid-summer 1942, when Borghese contacted Admiral Karl Dönitz. The commander of the German U-boat arm was intrigued by the project’s innovative audacity, but expressed his regret that he simply could not spare a single Milchkuh, or ‘Milk Cow’ submarine-refueller as a carrier for the CA-2 until late fall. Borghese knew that would not leave him enough time to make the necessary modifications, install the submersible, or test and train with it, so he visited the Italians’ Atlantic submarine headquarters at Bordeaux. Rear-Admiral Romolo Polacchini, the base commander, was enthusiastically taken with the proposal, for which only the Regia Marina’s best submarine was good enough, in his opinion.
Lieutenant Gianfranco Priaroggia’s Leonardo Da Vinci had just returned on 1 July after sinking 20,000 tons of Allied merchant shipping in the course of a single patrol, and both commander and submarine seemed ideally suited for the New York operation. The capacious Marconi class vessel could easily accommodate the CA 2, after its forward deck-gun and mounting were replaced by a cradle between the resistant hull and superstructure. Two large cranes on either side of the cradle lifted the pocket-submarine in or out of its cradle in which it rested, its upper one-forth exposed above decks. Both cranes folded away automatically into their own watertight compartments. “The operation against New York,” Borghese stated, “had passed out of the planning stage into that of practical operation.”19
The complicated remodeling went under way with thorough but unusual haste, allowing extensive sea trials to begin on 9 September. The equipment and procedures required some adjustments, but the CA 2 with its two crew members was consistently released and recovered without difficulty, even in somewhat rough seas. Before month’s end, Lieutenant Priaroggia announced both his Leonardo Da Vinci and the midget-submersible were ready to undertake their mission. Borghese proudly notified his superiors in Rome, informing them that he would sail for New York on 19 December. The attack was scheduled to commence during the Winter Solstice. But too his shock and dismay, the Supermarina responded that the mission must be postponed for another year.
“New technological developments” then still in the making would render the operation far more effective than if it were attempted in 1942. Since such a surprise attack was a singular undertaking that could not be repeated, its maximum destructive potential had to be assured. No further explanation was given, although Borghese agreed that if the CA 2 could be eventually provided with more powerful explosive charges, as implied in the Supermarina communication, the long wait would be worthwhile. In the meantime, he pulled military strings to have additional pocket-submarines built and tested.
The Leonardo Da Vinci had her deck-gun restored after the CA 2 was removed, but all other modifications for the submersible were undisturbed in preparation for the rescheduled 1943 mission, as Priaroggia was promoted to Lieutenant Commander “for outstanding service in war” on 6 May. But seventeen days later, his submarine was depth-charged by the British frigate, Ness, and a destroyer, HMS Active, just off Cape Finestrelle. There were no survivors. By this time, the war in the Atlantic had drastically shifted against all Axis vessels, both under and on the sea, but Borghese was undeterred in his determination to hold the Supermarina to its word: New York must be attacked during the next Winter Solstice.
He turned from submarines to aircraft as the alternative delivery system for his CA 2. The specimen he chose was one of the outstanding airplanes of the war, a maritime reconnaissance model with exceptional flight characteristics. The CANT 511 was originally designed in September 1937, as the world’s largest double-pontoon hydroplane, intended for civilian flights carrying mail, cargo and sixteen passengers between Rome and Latin America. The thirty-four-ton aircraft was powered to a cruising speed of 405 km/hr by four 1,350-hp Piaggio PXII C. 35 radial engines. At the time of its maiden flight, in October 1940, five months after Italy’s entry into the war, the 511 was converted into a military role. Final testing took place between late February and early March 1942, when test pilot Mario Stoppani succeeded in taking off and landing the fully loaded CANT in rough seas with three-meter waves and winds gusting between fifty and sixty-five km/hr.
This extraordinarily rugged stability and the hydroplane’s exceptional range of 5,000 kilometers seemed ideally suited for special, unconventional missions, including plans to free fifty Italian pilots and soldiers imprisoned in far-off Jeddah with a commando raid. Using the CANT to bomb Bathumi and Poti, Soviet Black Sea ports, or Baku, on the Caspian Sea, and the Persian Gulf’s oil facilities at Bahrain, were seriously considered. But Borghese laid claim to the only pair of 511s before these schemes could be sanctioned, and had the machines transported to Lake Treviso for modification.
Seating arrangements and cargo areas were torn out to make room for a pair of human-torpedoes. Ezo Grossi, who had since replaced Rear-Admiral Romolo Polacchini as the Italian base commander at Bordeaux, provided a large, ocean-going submarine-tanker to rendezvous at prearranged coordinates with the giant hydro-planes on two separate occasions–once coming and going across the Atlantic Ocean–to refuel the sea-planes en route to the target.
While such air-sea refuelling stops had been undertaken by Italian crews earlier in the war, none, of course, were conducted over such immense distances made especially perilous by Allied supremacy at and over the sea. Even so, renovation of the 511 began in June 1943, and proceeded with determination until the air frame suffered some damage during a low-level run by USAAF fighters. Repairs commenced at once, but before they could be completed the Italian armistice was announced on 8 September, and the project abandoned. At sixty tons, however, the CA 2 was too heavy to be carried by any aircraft, so Borghese returned to the Maiale for his New York attack.
As intriguing as the operation itself was its sudden postponement in late 1942, when men and equipment were ready to carry out their mission. The suspension occurred just as Piaggio’s alleged ‘atomic bomber’ was waiting for a nuclear device to be installed in its specially modified bomb-bay. Did the Supermarina delay the New York attack by twelve months because Mussolini expected to have an atomic bomb at his disposal by late fall or early winter 1943? His overthrow in mid-summer of that year rendered that project mute, at least until he could assert his new political base in Salo. Certainly, by April 1945, he talked as though such a weapon were about to fall into his hands.
Whatever documentation may have specified an Italian nuclear device must, of necessity, have been highly restricted. If such documentation did exist, it may still lie buried in the undisclosed archives of British intelligence. Naturally, such information would have been classified as the most secret of all and restricted to only very few supreme officials on a strictly need-to-know basis. The paper trail left by a weapon with the potential to reverse the course of history must have been necessarily scant and thoroughly covered up by the authorities. Abundant, if circumstantial evidence nonetheless suggests that the Italians were on their way to building an atomic bomb in the late 1930s. From 1942, they combined their efforts with German physicists in a joint attempt to deliver an operable device in time to win the war for the Axis. Hence, the Duce’s urgent appeal to his forces to “hold out for another month”.
As early as fall 1942, his scientists may have informed him that the bomb would be ready by late the following year, when the singular Piaggio P.133 stood by to receive its unique payload, and Borghese’s human-torpedoes would have been ready to attack New York with something more than a few explosive charges magnetically fixed to the hulls of freighters tied up at the West Street dock. Political upheavals, however, intervened to prevent the deployment of such advanced weaponry.
Someday future investigators probing the declassified files of British intelligence may find wartime documents outlining the extent of nuclear research undertaken by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Perhaps when such important papers come to light they could reveal that New York City missed becoming history’s first victim of a nuclear holocaust by margins too narrow to contemplate.