Operation Bowler: The Audacious Allied Bombing of Venice

by Jonathan Glancey

21st March 1945. 1530 hours. Bursting through a hazy sky, dozens of Allied fighters and bombers sweep down over German-occupied Venice. Their mission – destroy Germany’s strategic outposts nestled along the port, while leaving the floating city unscathed.

As bombs rained down upon Europe, flattening city after city, Venice – La Serenissima; home of Titian and Veronese; immortalised in the serene landscapes of Canaletto – remained sacrosanct. Its artistic and architectural treasure too considerable, too precious to risk destruction.

But, as the push up through Italy reached its final, gruelling months, the Allies were confronted with a terrible dilemma. The ancient city of Venice was now closer and closer to the line of fire. As casualties mounted, the value of art, of history seemed diminished – just a month earlier Allied bombers had reduced the ancient hilltop abbey of Monte Cassino to a stony husk.

In a gripping tale, bestselling author Jonathan Glancey reveals the thrilling history of ‘Operation Bowler’. Joining audacious Wing Commander George Westlake DFC and his elite team, Operation Bowler explores how a ragtag squad of pilots executed one of the most meticulous and complex air raids of the Second World War, sparing not only Venice, but its people.

400 pages, Hardcover

First published April 22, 2025

Reviews

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

interesting book looking at the Italian campaign and the bombing of Venice in 1945

[Cropredy · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is astonishingly awful. I've read a lot of history and it simply escapes me that the author chose to write this book in the way he did. Initially, I thought it was his first book and the editor was asleep at the switch but no, it was his eleventh book.

The book title's promise - an audacious bombing raid on Venice, Operation Bowler. I had never heard of this and thought I would get a deep dive into some operation filled with drama.

But oh no, Operation Bowler consists of only of a few pages towards the end of the book. The rest of it is a disorienting series of tangents, non sequiturs, and total irrelevancies.

Basically, Operation Bowler was one raid of many across Northern Italy from 1944-45. It was only notable because it involved Venice. So, given this thin subject, Glancey inflates the text with a history of Venice, connections to English tourists, connections to Germans (which leads to a long aside about Albrecht Durer, a 16th century painter that in turn leads to an aside about the Second Crusade), and countless other off-piste sections. It wasn't long before I was skimming the pages.

Virtually no chapter is told chronologically as when a personage is introduced (like Kesselring, overall German commander in Italy), we wander off into people said personage had met in years past that leads to discussions of Hollywood movies or Tintoretto or whatever association comes to mind that Glancey finds interesting. Thus, the text whipsaws back and forth over years, decades, and even centuries.

I liken this book to one where the author's note cards of research were thrown up in the air and the resulting strewn pile is reassembled in random order to create a chapter. OK, I'm being hyperbolic here but even the earliest AI models wouldn't generate such a disjointed narrative.

And speaking of research, there's not much. The list of sources is thin and I think Glancey decided that given he had access to the log book of one of the RAF commanders (George Westlake) who flew the mission, he decided to use that log book as scaffolding for a discursion into futurism, the end of the Venetian Republic, Italian partisans, Doge palaces, the performance characteristics of P-40 Kittyhawks, General Balbo (who was dead in 1940), and virtually anything else where one place, event, or person could be the springboard for a few paragraphs of some subsidiary topic to fill up the pages.

There are many example of books on air raids that Glancey could have used as a model, a couple that come to mind are Mosquito by Rowland White or Ploesti by James Dugan.

But, sorry to say, no successful pattern of writing was followed. 100% jumbled. Thoroughly uninteresting. I skipped the middle chapters which were all about the general campaign in Italy where Westlake makes cameo appearances.

No notes, no sources in Italian or German. A few photos and two maps. It helps if you've been to Venice to understand the scattered paragraphs about the city and its history. But ultimately, you won't care.

I'm sorry my local library spent $$ to acquire this book.

[Askatasuno · Rating 4 out of 5]

Per explicar una missió aèrea de finals de la SGM, que acaba ocupant mitja dotzena de pàgines, l'autor fa una espiral encadenant temes que retrata amb molta resolució la SGM al front africà. És a parts iguals un llibre d'avions, d'art, d'arquitectura, d'Història i d'històries. Molt recomanable.

[Troglodette · Rating 2 out of 5]

Vaguely entertaining for WW2 nerds like me, but overall poorly written. Only a few chapters are dedicated to Venice and Operation Bowler proper, the rest of the book being mostly disjointed accounts of the Italian front.