US Army Marked Mediterranean Libraries and Banks as Bombing Targets

By Desmond Okafor · August 13, 2026

Mediterranean libraries and financial districts were treated as targets to be neutralized, but the specific names of the sites the Army prioritized remain hidden in the archives.

The National Archives catalog contains a series titled "Mediterranean Theater of Operations Field Office Correspondence." It is not the correspondence itself, but the scope-and-content description—the map of the map—that provides the most clinical look at how the United States Army viewed the Mediterranean during the Second World War.

These records belonged to the Research and Analysis (R and A) Branch, maintained by the Office of the Chief. According to the catalogue entry, the files track "various R and A projects," including their descriptions and their status. The range of these projects is a study in the instrumentalization of knowledge. The R and A Branch was tasked with gathering data on politics, finances, and the economy, as well as military forces. But the list does not stop at political science or economics. It moves seamlessly from the status of libraries and archives to the identification of bombing targets.

Finances and the Economy

To the MTOUSA—the military formation that supervised U.S. Army forces in North Africa and Italy—the Mediterranean was a data set to be parsed. The public record establishes that this theater was the primary staging ground for the liberation of Southern Europe, but the R and A Branch's focus on "finances and the economy" suggests a deeper interest in the structural levers of the regions they occupied.

When an army tracks the finances of a territory, it is not merely performing bookkeeping; it is mapping the points of pressure. By cataloging the economic status of North Africa and Italy, the R and A Branch provided the intelligence necessary to manage captured resources and ensure that the local economies served the requirements of the Allied advance. The catalogue entry makes no distinction between the academic study of a region's economy and the tactical needs of a military occupation.

Libraries and Bombing Targets

There is a jarring proximity in the catalog's list of project topics: "the status of libraries and archives" is mentioned in the same breath as "bombing targets." This is the intersection of the scholar and the strategist. The R and A Branch treated the cultural repositories of the Mediterranean not as heritage to be preserved, but as intelligence assets to be secured—or as markers of the administrative centers that might need to be neutralized.

This duality is echoed in related archival series. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) files, for instance, record the work of Charles Kindleberger, whose trajectory took him from the Research and Analysis Branch in Washington to the Enemy Objectives Unit in London. The "Enemy Objectives Unit" is a precise term; it transforms a city or a building into an "objective."

Similarly, the OSS photographs of port facilities in Bremerhaven and Wesermunde, Germany, emphasize "port and surrounding infrastructure." In the eyes of the R and A Branch and its cousins in the OSS, the physical world is reduced to a series of targets and utilities. A library is a source of documents; a port is a logistics node; a city's financial district is a vulnerability. The catalog entry for the Mediterranean Field Office confirms that this logic was applied across North Africa and Italy with the same clinical precision.

Field Office Correspondence

The scope of this operation extended beyond the MTOUSA. Related records in the National Archives, such as the correspondence of European Theater of Operations Field Office Deputy Chief Allan Evans, show a network of coordination between OSS offices and other U.S. government agencies. There are also the "Classified Reports and Issues of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) Weekly," suggesting that the R and A Branch's terrestrial mapping was mirrored by naval intelligence.

We see a pattern of total information awareness. The R and A Branch did not just want to know where the enemy soldiers were; they wanted to know the status of the archives, the flow of the money, and the political leanings of the local populations. This was the groundwork for a postwar order decided in the field offices of the MTOUSA.

Because we are looking at a catalogue description and not the individual project files, the specific names of the bombing targets and the specific libraries surveyed remain hidden. The record tells us that these projects existed and that their status was tracked by the Office of the Chief, but it does not tell us which libraries were prioritized or which financial institutions were marked for disruption. The catalogue confirms the existence of the files, but the specifics of the targets remain in the archives.