Happy 82nd anniversary of the day conclusive proof of the existence of the Loch Ness Monster was printed in a respected journal.
![p.7, weekly Australian newspaper The World’s News, November 22 1941. Headline: Italian says he bombed Loch Ness Monster! By an American in London. The text is accompanied by cartoons of a man in a biplane dropping bombs, and a sea monster in a loch, apparently laughing at bombs being dropped into the water and missing it. Some of the text reads: “London has had a good laugh at the claim by Popolo d’Italia, official Fascist organ, that an Italian bomber blitzed the Lock Ness monster! [cont]](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1162/format:webp/1*7_DnmbVPcTzaCNmIzuopdQ.png)
Or, at any rate, the now defunct Australian newspaper The World’s News said that an unverified claim by the Italian air force to have killed Nessie in a bombing raid wasn’t true because someone had seen it since — which is much the same thing in my book.
As any regular readers will have gathered, I like the weirder, stupider bits of history, so when I read that WWII propaganda had reported a Nessie assassination, I wanted to know more.
So, I set off on a quest, and… well: that Australian newspaper has been digitised (which is how I came by the full page of the paper at the top), which means we can enjoy the full details of the story, such as the putative
survivor of a prehistoric past, millions of years ago
being
killed by the latest unnatural horror, a monster mechanical bird that dropped eggs of death
They go on to say that this filthy fascist claim to have murdered a lost plesiosaur was debunked when the Daily Mail reported on a sighting of the monster by
Mr. J. MacFarlan-Barrow and three of his children … out in a dinghy
But is it possible to trace the original story in Mussolini’s very own wartime propaganda sheet, Il Popolo d’Italia? Or the Daily Mail’s monster reports? Well, if there was a sighting, it must have happened between the start of the war on 1 September 1939 and the date on the article, 22 November 1941, but none is recorded between 1938 and 1954 — and if the relevant editions of Il Popolo d’Italia and the Daily Mail are available anywhere, I’m buggered if I’ve found them. Then, in the third column of the World’s News story, it turns out their source is a mysterious letter…
“From an old friend whose name is omitted”? Hmmm. There was a real Goffredo Pantaleoni, who resigned from the Italian information bureau in New York in 1940, but there is a certain whiff emanating from this letter.
![My Dear Goffredo, I am writing to tell you about a most fantastic coincidence. First let me say, however, that I have your letter in which you denounce Fascism ... I was shocked … … I understand you have become an American citizen. But about the coincidence I mentioned …You will recall you told me about visiting Scotland … , I have not only seen the Loch Ness monster at which I once scoffed, but I have bombed and perhaps killed him… [cont]](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1132/format:webp/1*JkqP1VsaYpzQ-czWRCxkOA.png)
The sudden segue from “I’m shocked you’re no longer a Fascist” to “Oh, by the way, remember those stories about Scotland that I didn’t believe” doesn’t ring true, never mind “I saw the monster and killed it”.
Italian planes were involved in the Blitz, but the Corpo Aereo Italiano played a subsidiary role to that of the Luftwaffe, and almost exclusively hit sites in East Anglia. Why would an unreported Italian plane visit Scotland? Let’s see how the letter continues…
Well, that checks out. But — wouldn’t you know it — quite by chance, this is where the mission goes awry…
![Everything went according to plan until we were almost in sight of Ipswich when suddenly there was a deadly screen of anti-aircraft fire thrown up between us and our objectives. I turned about and headed north, without having dropped a bomb. Gigi, my navigator, had considerable difficulty with the instruments and when he finally took our bearings he placed us as somewhere in Scotland. I spotted a large lake, lying still and peaceful in the moonlight and I headed for it… [cont]](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1346/format:webp/1*LDnhQ2gwMq4KogomQGNbpQ.png)
Coming upon that large body of water was a stroke of luck, wasn’t it? And just at that moment — WELL, GOOD LORD, WHAT ARE THE ODDS? — the navigator sees something…
So, they did what any right-thinking person provided with proof of a prehistoric creature living in a body of Scottish water in the 20th century would: decide this “was as good a place as any” to drop their payload, and bomb the shit out of it.
At the very end, the article suggests “the whole mystery of the monster might be a combination of hoax and illusion”, which I think we can safely say is code for ‘we made this shit up for a laugh’. Not just the Italian newspaper claim and the letter, but the Daily Mail bit, too.
The whole thing’s not propaganda, but a spoof story in a weekly tabloid which has been half-remembered, distorted and reproduced on various websites, not necessarily as fact, but not exactly as fiction, either. Whoever wrote the original story had done some research, though.
The real Goffredo Pantaleoni appeared the previous year before the House of Representatives subcommittee of the special committee to investigate un-American activities.
…and the address and biographical details he gives in the record are identical to those in the article. Someone presumably read about the committee, and went to at least some effort to give this pure invention a veneer of plausibility.
One of the websites this story appears on suggests that the Italian attempt to murder a prized Scottish water beast followed a denunciation of the very idea of the Loch Ness Monster written by Joseph Goebbels himself.
I tried to track that down as well, and found the only trace of it in James Thurber’s 1957 essay, There’s something out there! — so that seems to be complete balls, too.
So, in the end, this is the 82nd anniversary of a wartime newspaper printing some nonsense to entertain a beleaguered public. Ah, well. As a reward for anyone who’s ploughed through all this drivel, here are two adverts that appeared the same day.
Ah, the joys of being alive in 1941.
