Tragic years for Sardinia wounded by bombs dropped by "flying fortresses" which caused mourning and devastation. Cagliari becomes a "dead city". For this extreme sacrifice, which cost her 75 percent destruction and more than a thousand victims, she received the Medal of Military Valor, awarded by decree of 19 May 1950 signed by the President of the Republic Luigi Einaudi. Other towns on the island are being hit hard. A story that is retraced in the film “Bombing Raids. Sardinia at war in the unpublished Combat Films of the US Army Signal Corps 1943-1944" broadcast tonight at 9pm on Videolina. This is a work edited by Alberto and Corrado Monteverde included in the editorial initiative "The Sardinian Union Tells - Heroes and Fallen of the Second World War".

Research

It is the account of the air war in the skies of Sardinia between 1943 and 1944. The work is the result of careful research on original 35 millimeter films made by American combat cameramen, recovered in the National Archives in Washington thanks to a project research of the Cagliari Historical Modeling Club supported by the Region. Among the most significant sequences are those concerning the raid on Cagliari on 13 May 1943, the only ones known to date. But there are also images of the bombings of Carloforte, of the Villacidro airfield and of the cruisers "Trieste" and "Gorizia" at La Maddalena. Also of great impact, due to their historical-documentary value, are the images of General Charles De Gaulle, visiting the bombing groups of the "Free France" deployed on the Villacidro field in 1944. The soundtrack is entrusted to Mauro Palmas. The narrative voice is that of the Cagliari historian Emilio Belli.

The combat cameramen

During the Second World War, US Army combat cameramen documented with rare effectiveness the rise of the Allied armies into invaded Italy. Armed with sturdy Bell & Howell Eyemo or Cineflex cameras and Kodak cameras, the uniformed operators crossed the battlefields, following the units involved in the fighting or on board the bombers during the raids over the skies of the tormented Italian cities. The film, which has a duration of 45 minutes, will be preceded by an introduction by the Videolina news journalist Egidiangela Sechi. It is an opportunity to rediscover, through unpublished sequences, a painful page of Sardinian history that lives on in the memories of the elderly and that the younger generations cannot forget. These are the days of war fury. Francesco Alziator writes: «Those days of anger began in a relentless windy February, in which clouds, wind, showers of rain and the magnificent lightning of a sun that already smelled of spring alternated in an absurd, inconclusive, mocking way. The houses fell one by one, by two, by blocks, by districts, without defense and without logic. The dust covered the moment of collapse in a volatile, impalpable shroud. The city died without litanies and on the corpses of the unburied the breaths of April made pitiful flowers, children of the wind, bloom."

© Riproduzione riservata