As most of them travel by air, they are, probably unwittingly, following in the slipstream of Wing Commander George Westlake DSO DFC, who on the Spring equinox of 1945 led Operation Bowler, a daring, low level attack on the Port of Venice, built by the Fascist regime on the edge of the historic city.

In his latest book, Operation Bowler (One World), Jonathan Glancey narrates the story of the remarkably successful raid by a multi-national group of pilots flying an equally multi-national assortment of aircraft. As he explains, the stakes were high. No-one, not even Adolf Hitler, not known for concern about destruction, and certainly not the Allied commanders who had already bombed Rome, Florence and a host of other historic towns in their push north through Italy, relished the potential destruction of Venice. The operation’s name was tongue-in-cheek – the military planners thought that if the destructive force they were going to unleash went even slightly astray, they would be expelled into civilian life, and so forced to wear bowler hats.

Almost incredibly, this was not the first time Venice suffered aerial bombardment. As Glancey shows, that military tactic originated in Venice, as Austro-Hungarian forces under Field Marshal Radetzky – whose triumphant return to Vienna was celebrated with a march by Johann Strauss – launched balloons and dropped incendiaries over the city as part of the process of subduing the insurrection of 1849. They did little damage.

Even less physical damage, but perhaps part of a chain of events that helped to normalise the idea of destroying Venice came in 1910, when Filippo Marinetti, author of the Futurist Manifesto, flooded St Mark’s Square with 80,000 leaflets, also dropped from above (in this case the piazza’s campanile). Called Contro Venezia Passatista (against past-obsessed Venice) the pamphlet advised citizens and tourists to ‘fill the stinking canals with the rubble of the crumbling, leprous old palaces’, to ‘burn the gondolas’ and to shake off the ‘desire to be ever faithful slaves of the past, the filthy gatekeepers of history’s biggest brothel . . . mortally corrupted by the syphilis of sentimentalism’.

Marinetti’s stunt may, suggests Glancey, have been fuel to Le Corbusier’s fire in advocating the destruction of historic parts of cities and replacing them with modernist designs. But such sentiments were not present among the high commands of either World War II side. Both the German commander, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, and his Allied counterpart, Field Marshal Harold Alexander, were cultivated Italianophiles who appreciated its culture and spoke the language well. Both represented an upper- class interest in Venice equally strong in Britain and Germany – the former weaned on Ruskin and Turner, the latter on Goethe and Thomas Mann. In both countries, the artistic and cultural status of Venice became woven into specifically national intellectual fabric.

Against this background Glancey goes into some detail to explain why the raid was considered necessary. This takes up much of the book, the actual story of the raid itself taking no more than a few pages. But what emerges is a horrible inexorability from the complicated history of the Italian campaign that led to the raid being a logical, even necessary action.

In a typically readable way, introducing a great deal of information without ramming it down the reader’s throat, Glancey starts with giving the background to the key players: the personnel, including Westlake and Kesselring, together with some of their colleagues and associates, notably the notorious SS General Wolff in the latter’s case; but also the equipment, aircraft like the Hurricane, the Spitfire (itself the subject of an earlier book by Glancey), the P-40 Kittyhawk, P-47 Thunderbolt, P-51 Mustang, and from the other side the Messerschmidt Bf109, Focke Wulf 190 and the Macchi c.205, in both cases with an extensive supporting cast.

The author, an aficionado of historic aircraft, is particularly informative on the strengths and weaknesses of all of those he describes, giving an insight into why the fighting was so intense and much of the time close to stalemate. Once the American general Mark Clark fragrantly disobeyed orders when breaking out from Anzio to push south to cut off and capture German forces retreating from Monte Cassino, deciding instead to turn north in the hope of gaining the glory of liberating Rome, the ground forces, the Germans skilfully dug in in a series of defensive lines, were also more or less equally matched. Severe winters of 1943-4 and 1944-5 curtailed the Allies capability to attack.

Glancey takes us back to the origin of the allied forces in North Africa (the British Eighth Army from the east and the Americans from the Operation Torch landings in the west) where civilian casualties and destruction of heritage were not major issues. Transferring the fight to Sicily in the summer of 1943 was a different matter, with Palermo suffering significant damage; among the buildings damaged were many historic palazzi, including the family home of Guiseppe di Lampedusa, author of The Leopard.

But it was the destruction of the monastery of Monte Cassino on the mainland north of Naples that proved seminal. It had proved an extraordinarily strong node in the Gustav Line, one of the defensive systems devised by Kesselring to slow the Allied advance. Its historical and cultural significance was well understood by both sides. For some never-wholly-explained reason, the first attack by fighter bombers looking to pierce the walls to enable infantry assaults was followed almost immediately by heavy bombers. This finally succeeded in breaching the line, albeit after massive destruction and much hard fighting on the ground.

With this supposed evidence of the efficacy of destruction in the background, the Allied forces had to work out how to fight alongside each other, difficult and made even more complicated when Italy changed sides, leading to some of the Italian military fighting alongside the Allies, and others remaining with the Germans. They had to adapt to different aircraft, as allied air forces from the UK, Australia and South Africa increasingly used American-made machines. Gradually individual pilots mastered these differences, while their ground support staff came up with new and more effective co-ordinating tactics.

By early 1945, with the allies bogged down by the weather and the Gothic Line (running more or less across Italy from Pisa to Rimini), the Axis air forces were increasingly ineffective but their ground forces successfully resupplied, as Allied reconnaissance showed, through the Port of Venice; both the capability and the need for Operation Bowler took shape.

In this instance, unlike Monte Cassino, the pilots were sufficiently skilled, the tactics sufficiently effective and an element of luck limited destruction to the port, supplies and ships in it. As Glancey notes, Venice, like Wing Commander Westlake (and the other pilots only one of whom was shot down and he was rescued), was lucky. The raid’s success caused a measurable reduction in supplies, meaning the Allies were able to break through the Gothic Line just over two weeks later. General Wolff, with Kesselring’s connivance, opened negotiations with Allen Dulles of the American OSS (and later head of the CIA) to end the war in Italy. That led to Wolff having more lenient treatment for war crimes than Kesselring despite the horrendous treatment of partisans and captured Allied airman at the hands of the SS and Fascist militias.

So Venice survived. Visconti made his films, Benjamin Britten turned Thomas Mann’s novella into an opera, and the art biennale continued, spawning its architectural counterpart in 1980. No literature about Venice could surpass Goethe, Ruskin or Mann, but anyone planning to visit the Biennale, who wants a lighter but still informative read, could do well to turn to Operation Bowler. It may focus on one instance in the history of the city, but puts that in a broad context, of military tactics, technology and politics. It gives a new dimension to the significance of La Serenissima.