Two Archival Curiosities – Archives as Witnesses of Air Raids on Dubrovnik and Its Surroundings during the Second World War

Abstract

The topic of air raids on Dubrovnik and its surroundings during the Second World War has so far not been systematically examined, except by Marica Karakaš Obradov, who devotes an entire chapter in her book on Anglo-American bombings of Croatia during the Second World War and post-war period to the bombing of Dubrovnik and its surroundings. The reasons for this go back to the period of Yugoslav military historiography, which consciously marginalised the topic of the bombing of Croatia during the Second World War, especially the Allied one. The reasons were multiple – aside from the question of excessive bombing of cities and the destruction of valuable urban and monumental heritage, the issue of war reparations, which could not be addressed to the Western Allied powers, was also sensitive. Moreover, within the dominant narrative of the independent struggle of the Yugoslav National Liberation Army (NOVJ), efforts were made to downplay the significance of Allied air support in partisan military operations. Using available literature, periodicals, and archival sources, particularly those held in the State Archive in Dubrovnik, this paper first reconstructs the sequence of air raids on Dubrovnik and its immediate surroundings in the period from 1941 to 1944. Apart from three raids carried out by Italian air forces during the short April War in 1941, and the German attack in the days of the Italian capitulation in September 1943, all others, from the end of 1943 to October 1944, were conducted by Allied squadrons of the Balkan Air Force, operationally deployed in several airbases on Italian territory. In the further course of the research, the focus is placed on two of the best-known cases of Allied air raids – that on the Excelsior Hotel on 14 August 1944, and on the Imperial Hotel on 27 August of the same year. The analysis of these raids was carried out through critical reading of known and newly discovered sources – offi cial documents, newspaper articles, war reports, war damage claims, photographs, and personal testimonies – resulting in two reconstructions of these events. While the first confirmed the validity of some criticisms, according to which the shelling of the Excelsior Hotel could not have been carried out by the first NOVJ squadron, the second reconstruction of the air raid by the same squadron on 27 August 1944 provided a completely new interpretation of the entire event, opening the possibility for new reflections on Allied relations, intentions, and objectives during the liberation of the southern Dalmatian area in the last quarter of 1944. Finally, the article presents two curiosities from the shelves of the State Archive in Dubrovnik, one of which is a diary record of a dream by the Dubrovnik politician Melko Čingrija, and the other an archival book from 1522 containing a residual shell from the attack carried out on 27 August 1944 – which also served as the incentive for the authors to scientifically investigate the cases of these two bombings.