Savoia-Marchetti S.M.82 Marsupiale

The S.M.82 was named for what it could swallow. Marsupiale means marsupial, and the name had already been used for the S.M.75 civil transport from which Alessandro Marchetti developed it — the S.M.82 being the same idea with a fuselage made both longer and deeper, first flown in 1939. It was a cantilever mid-wing monoplane on three Alfa Romeo 128 R.C.21 radials of about 950 hp apiece, with a retractable tailwheel undercarriage and a hold that ran most of the length of the aeroplane.

What went into that hold is the reason the type matters. It would take forty men and their equipment; it would take an L3/35 tankette; and, with special fittings, it would take a complete CR.42 fighter with the wings removed. No other Axis aircraft of 1940 could move a vehicle or an airframe by air as a matter of routine, and Italy — fighting a war across a sea, in Africa and the Aegean and the Balkans — needed exactly that.

Early on 19 October 1940 four S.M.82s took off from Gadurrà, on Rhodes, having staged there from Rome-Ciampino under Tenente Colonnello Ettore Muti. They flew the length of the Arabian peninsula and bombed the oil refineries at Manama, in the British protectorate of Bahrain, and the installations at Dhahran in Saudi Arabia. Each aircraft carried 1,500 kg of bombs. The surprise was complete and the damage was slight.

The distance is what made it. The flight covered 4,200 km in about fifteen hours at a cruise near 270 km/h, and it is worth correcting the way it is usually told: this was not a return trip. The S.M.82’s standard range was 2,100 km, and the raid was flown one way on auxiliary tanks — the four aircraft came down at Zula, in Eritrea, and never went back to Rhodes. It was the longest bombing mission flown to that date without staging, and it touched three continents in a single sortie.

The aeroplane was built the way a country short of light alloy builds aeroplanes. The fuselage was a welded steel-tube framework, skinned in metal only at the front and in plywood and fabric everywhere behind it. The wings were almost entirely wood, plywood-skinned and fabric-covered, on an aircraft with a span of 29.68 m and a maximum take-off weight approaching 18 tonnes.

It worked, and it cost. Mixed construction let SIAI build a very large aeroplane without competing for aluminium against the fighter programmes, and it made the type repairable at forward strips by men with woodworking tools. The price was paid in performance: 347 km/h flat out and a cruise of 250 km/h at 3,000 m, in a sky where the Beaufighters and Hurricanes hunting the African supply routes did half as much again.

From 1940 the S.M.82 flew the shuttle that kept the Italian and later the German armies in North Africa supplied — fuel, ammunition, spare parts, replacement men, and out again with the wounded. It was slow, it was almost unarmed by the standards of the aircraft sent to intercept it, and there was no alternative to sending it.

The bill came due at the end. Between November 1942 and April 1943, as Tunisia was supplied by air and then abandoned, more than a hundred S.M.82s were lost — shot down over the sea by Allied fighters that now had the range and the numbers, or destroyed on their own airfields by bombing. The transport fleet that had carried the campaign was consumed in the campaign’s last six months.

It had been designed to bomb as well as carry, and in August 1940 it surprised the British by doing so. Carrying up to 4,000 kg, S.M.82s flew night raids against Gibraltar and Alexandria from Italian bases, using the one advantage a slow aeroplane has, which is darkness. The dedicated S.M.82bis added flame-damping exhausts so the engines would not give the aircraft away.

The armament tells you how the role was understood. One 12.7 mm Breda-SAFAT and four 7.7 mm guns is a defensive fit for an aeroplane expected not to be found rather than expected to fight, and the bombing was always a secondary use of a transport rather than the reason for building one.

The Luftwaffe wanted the aeroplane before it took the country. Germany had nothing between the Ju 52 and the enormous Me 323, and the S.M.82 sat in the gap: it carried roughly twice a Ju 52’s load over a longer distance, and it could be had from an ally’s production line.

From 1942 a German unit, FliegerTransportGruppe “Savoia”, operated about 100 of them, flown by German crews in German markings while Italy was still in the war. The arrangement is easy to miss and it matters: the S.M.82 was already a Luftwaffe transport type eighteen months before the armistice made the rest of them German by seizure.

The armistice of 8 September 1943 put 200 S.M.82s into German hands at a stroke. That was not the significant number. SIAI’s works lay inside the occupied zone, and the line kept running: 299 more aircraft were built and delivered to the Luftwaffe after the armistice — half again as many as had been captured.

The production record makes the point without commentary. Deliveries ran at about 100 aircraft in 1940 and again in 1941, doubled to 200 in 1942, and reached almost 300 in 1944. The S.M.82’s best production year was the year it was building for the army occupying the country that designed it, and those aircraft served on the Eastern Front and in northern Germany until the end.

Total production came to 726 aircraft and the prototype — 727 — across ten series numbered I to X, built between 1939 and 1944. Against the roughly ten thousand C-47s the United States produced, it is a small number; among Axis transports it was the type that could do what the others could not, which is why the Luftwaffe ended up operating more S.M.82s than any other foreign aircraft it flew in the whole war.

About thirty survived into the post-war Aeronautica Militare, some re-engined with American radials as the S.82PW, and many of them were still flying in the early 1960s — more than twenty years after the prototype, and a decade and a half after the air force that ordered them had ceased to exist.

• Giorgio Apostolo & Giorgio Bignozzi, Aerei Italiani nella Seconda Guerra Mondiale (Intergest).
• Nico Sgarlato, Savoia-Marchetti S.M.82 (Delta Editrice, Aerei nella Storia).
• Chris Dunning, Courage Alone: The Italian Air Force 1940–1943 (Hikoki Publications).
• Jonathan W. Thompson, Italian Civil and Military Aircraft 1930–1945 (Aero Publishers).