The B-24 Liberator bombers that took off from Castelluccio airport in Foggia had as their objective the industrial warehouses of Alfa Romeo, Breda, Isotta Fraschini and also Pirelli (which had decentralized production). That October 20, 1944, the war mission seemed simple for the American aviators, thanks also to the cloudless sky and without the presence of interceptor fighters. Instead, the four-engine planes of the 451st, 461st and 484th squadrons of the 15th American Air Force did not hit war targets, but destroyed a school in Gorla, on the outskirts of Milan, during lessons. Technical errors and a carelessness that leads to the criminal act of a massacre of innocents in the attack on a town.
The “pregnant cow” on a mission on a day when everything goes wrong
The B-24 is nicknamed “pregnant cow” by pilots due to its ungainly shape due to a belly large enough for bombs. It is a robust plane, a good cashier, but that day it did not need to defend itself from anyone because the skies were not crossed by Messerschmitt fighters of the Luftwaffe nor by the Macchi of the Republican Air Force. In theory there are all the conditions to carry out that mission in peace, aim, release and go back. Instead everything goes wrong. A squadron of Liberators, near Saronno, had miscalculated and dropped the 500-pound bombs (about 250 kg of explosives) in the countryside; the other two had managed to locate the Breda of Sesto San Giovanni but also in this case the bombing trajectory had been set badly and there would have been no possibility of retracing it to capture the objective. And so, in order not to waste the burden of death, since it was impossible to land with the bombs on board, it was decided to hit a civilian target, a tactical target, one of the many of that period where the fallback rule of the “target of opportunity”. At the release signal, everything under the Liberator’s gaping belly has no escape.
A bomb lands in the stairwell of the “Crispi” elementary school
On the ground the air raid alarm went off. The small one, which indicates approaching bombers, rang out at 11.14. The children aged 6 to 11 who attend the “Francesco Crispi” primary school do what the teachers have told them and repeated many times, and so do the parents at home, but already at 11.24 the sinister long alarm rings out, announcing the attack. imminent. Three minutes later all hell breaks loose on Gorla. Despite the teachers’ exhortations to hurry, there was no time to reach the air raid shelters. Then fate intervened. Among the hundreds of bombs dropped by the B-24s, one takes a trajectory that sends it straight into the stairwell of the school. Then the resulting explosion. Nothing remains of the building, and in the deadly embrace of the rubble and ruins remain the children, the teachers, the janitors, the parents who rushed to bring their children home and other children who were with them. When the US Air Force squadrons move away from that place they have devastated, the rescue and fire brigade teams intervene, as do the civilians who want to help dig in pursuit of the illusion of hope. For three days, where the “Francesco Crispi” was, the men swarmed as they moved bricks, beams and rubble with their bare hands and rummaged through that mountain of horror to tear the devastated little bodies of 184 schoolchildren from the ground, 18 children aged from twelve months to 13 years of age, of the director, of the teachers, of the auxiliary staff, of men and women who rushed to collect their children.
Bare hands among the rubble to save four children. The only survivors
The bodies were dismembered by the explosions and collapses, burned and burned by the flames of the fires. A horrifying scenario, which is broken just four times, when three boys and a still-living girl are pulled out of the carnage. A kind of miracle there where there was no grace for everyone. The Precotto school was also canceled by that crazy bombing, but in that case it had been possible for the pupils and their companions to reach the refuge in time and no one had lost their lives. When the victims in the towns of Gorla, Precotto and Turla are counted, the total amounts to 635 people registered, to which must be added those passing through and those whose bodies it had not been possible to find. There are probably more than 700 dead, and hundreds are injured and maimed. Gorla enters the collective imagination as a symbol of the blind brutality of war, «Here is the war – 20-X-1944» is inscribed on the monument of the sculptor Remo Brioschi which has stood in Piazza dei Piccoli martiri in Gorla since 1952, with the ossuary that it stands where the “Francesco Crispi” elementary school was, a perennial reminder of pity for the innocent and the cruelty of men.