Seventeen Years for Eighty Thousand Pounds

There is a tunnel below the walled town on Monte Titano with a blue and white electric railcar standing in it. Eight hundred metres of track were relaid in 2012 and the car was restored to the livery it wore when the line was working, which it was for twelve years. The Rimini–San Marino railway opened in 1932, ran 31.5 kilometres up from the Adriatic through seventeen tunnels, and stopped on 26 June 1944, when aircraft of the RAF's Desert Air Force bombed the republic in the belief that the Germans were moving weapons along it. Sixty-three people were killed. The line was never reopened, and San Marino has had no railway since.

The country was neutral. It had said so, repeatedly and in writing, and by that summer it was sheltering more than a hundred thousand refugees from the fighting in Romagna — against its own population of about fifteen thousand. They were put up in palaces, in churches, and in the tunnels of the railway. The same seventeen tunnels that were the best civilian shelter in the region were also the reason someone in an operations room decided the place was a military target.

The fascist state that declared itself neutral

The neutrality was real but it was not innocent, and San Marino does not pretend otherwise. The Sammarinese Fascist Party took control in 1923 and governed for twenty years, in open sympathy with the regime that surrounded the country on every side. What ended it was not an invasion. Three days after Mussolini fell, a demonstration on 28 July 1943 forced the party's dissolution and new elections; the date is now a public holiday, the Anniversary of the Fall of Fascism and Freedom Day. The government that followed spent the next year trying to get the republic's neutrality recognised by belligerents who had every practical reason to ignore it, and largely did.

A hundred thousand people

What the new government could do, it did on a scale that is hard to picture. A hundred thousand people is roughly seven times the entire population of the state. Feeding them for months in a country of sixty-one square kilometres with no port, no airfield and one narrow-gauge railway was an administrative problem of a kind small governments are not built for, and the republic has never been shy about the figure because it is the strongest thing in its twentieth-century record. Among those it took in were Jews escaping deportation. The refugees came because the Gothic Line — the German defensive belt across the peninsula — ran a short distance south of the Sammarinese border, and because a neutral state was the nearest thing to somewhere the war was supposed not to reach.

The tunnels sheltered the refugees and condemned the country in the same breath. Neutrality was a legal status, and legal status does not show up on a reconnaissance photograph.

Occupied anyway

The bombing did not settle the question of whether San Marino would stay out of the war; it simply proved it could not. In late August 1944 the Allies launched Operation Olive against the eastern end of the Gothic Line, aiming through Rimini, and San Marino sat immediately inland of the axis of attack. In September the German 278th Infantry Division moved onto the republic's territory. From 17 to 20 September troops of the British Eighth Army's V Corps attacked and took the country after three days of fighting. A state that had declared itself outside the war was occupied by one army and then fought over by another inside a single month, and neither asked.

The claim

In October 1945 the government of the republic presented His Majesty's Government with a claim for 732 million lire in compensation for the bombing. This was not a request for aid. It was a bill, from a sovereign state to another sovereign state, for damage done to neutral territory. The British position was awkward in a way that had nothing to do with the arithmetic: the two countries had never been at war, so nothing could be paid as reparations, and paying anything as compensation would concede that the raid had been unlawful. The Foreign Office proposed £26,000 as a voluntary payment. San Marino refused it and kept the file open.

Seventeen years

The matter was finally settled by an exchange of notes on 7 July 1961, when Britain paid £80,000. The wording of the settlement is the interesting part, and it was clearly drafted to be quoted: the money was offered as a gesture of sympathy for the sufferings of the people of San Marino as a result of the bombing of 26 June 1944, and as a token of regret that it should have been Allied Forces under a British commander which were obliged by the harsh exigencies of war to inflict damage on the territory of San Marino. Every clause does work. Sympathy, not liability. Regret, not apology. Obliged by the harsh exigencies of war, which concedes the damage while denying there was a choice about it. Sixteen years of correspondence produced a sum, and a sentence engineered to admit nothing.

San Marino could not compel Britain to pay and both sides knew it. What a claim like that buys a state with no army and no leverage is the record — an official file, a stated figure, and eventually a signed instrument in which a great power puts its regret in writing. That is the currency small sovereignties deal in, and this one has been dealing in it since 1463, when the Treaty of Fossombrone fixed borders that have not moved since; the claim to be the oldest surviving republic rests less on the traditional founding date of 301 than on that unbroken line of documents. The railway itself was never rebuilt, for economic rather than sentimental reasons — by the 1950s the road up from Rimini was doing the job. What survives is a fragment: the Montale tunnel, the restored railcar, and eight hundred metres of track that go nowhere. It is presented as an industrial heritage site, which it is, and the panels tell you about the electrification and the gradients. They are quieter about the fact that the tunnel is also a shelter that held people who had nowhere else to go, and that the line above it was destroyed by the country that was, on paper, coming to liberate the region. Both facts are true at once, which is roughly what neutrality was worth in Romagna in 1944.