August 27th, 1940
Manama, Bahrain - On the shores of the Persian Gulf, the war seems far away for the staff of the oil companies, installed in comfortable bungalows. The threats here are scorpions and heatstroke - because the temperatures reach 50°C in the shade... Fortunately, the night brings a very relative freshness.
At 3 o'clock in the morning, brilliant explosions disturb the calm of the desert and make the ground tremble. Three SM.82s attack! As Major Raina, the bombing officer of the Italian raid, would later explain: "The target was easily spotted, because the wells and refineries were lit up as if in broad daylight. The British were even kind enough to turn on the searchlights of the nearby airstrip, I guess they didn't think for a moment that approaching planes could belong to the enemy!"
The fourth SM.82 loses contact with the leader and drops its ton and a half of bombs on the installations of Dhahran, 45 km to the west, in Saudi territory.
Awakened by the explosion, the civilian and military officials give the alert... without knowing exactly the nature of the attackers. German privateers or Italian submariners, parachute commandos or meharists, the Fifth Column (the Germans have been trying for a long time to turn the natives against the British presence), all the hypotheses are considered and all the available forces are put on alert and the sector is searched.
For lack of anything better, the flak opens fire blindly and goes wild for several minutes, the red tracers streak the night in a frightful noise.
At daybreak, it becomes clear that this was an aerial bombardment by a small number of aircraft. The projectiles caused little damage, as the Italian pilots had been ordered to target the flares for the evacuation of the waste gases, easily recognizable by their bright orange color. But they were unaware that the flares had been moved away from the installations a few days earlier.
As soon as the first explosions occur, the SM.82s head for their landing point, Asmara, in Italian East Africa. The crews relax, proud to have reached their target.
A few more hours of flight over Arabia and it's all over: after nearly 16 hours and 4,000 km of flight, the exhausted crews put down their three engines, whose tanks are almost dry, on the runway at Asmara. They are all the more warmly welcomed as they bring a few kilos of supplies (notably medicines) as well as a few bags of mail for the fighters. The Duke of Aosta himself comes to congratulate Ettore Muti for his exploit.
The announcement of the success of the raid will somewhat raise the morale of the AOI troops and of the whole of Italy... for a few days. For Mussolini, the propaganda operation is perfectly successful; he can parade as on the screens of the Italian cinematographic newsreels and multiply the ronflant speeches, evoking even the provisioning of the planes by submarines! The warning to the United States could not be clearer...
The protests of the Allies and of Washington are to remain without effect. The oil concessions of Bahrain, an independent state, are certainly granted to the Texas Corporation and to Standard Oil of California, American companies (as well as most of their personnel). But the Italian government will be happy to point out that Standard Oil is controlled by British capital and that Bahrain is a protectorate of His Majesty.
Muti and his men return to Rhodes a few days later... just in time for the beginning of the Franco-British operations in the Dodecanese. They return to Italy as soon as possible with their far too vulnerable SM.82, dropping in the process a few bombs on the installations in Port Sudan.
In Manama, after the first panic, the British repair the damage in less than a week. For the Axis, the most positive result is the obligation for the Allies to reinforce the air and ground defences of the oil installations by redeploying a fighter squadron, two infantry battalions and some anti-aircraft batteries.
