Italian Bomber attacks On Iraq, SA in 1940?

[ralph124c]

I was just reading the late Wallace Stegner's interesting book "Discovery-The Search for Saudi Arabian Oil". For those of you unfamiliar, the book deals with the SOCAL guys who found oil in Saudi Arabia, in the late 1930's-the company became ARAMCO. Anyway, in 1940, one night, a flight of long rane Italian bombers actually dropped bombs upon oilf facilities in Iraq and SA. The raids did little damage (about 500 50 lb. bombs were dropped). Stegner wrote that the Italian planes came from the Dodecanes islands 9off Greece), and continued on to Eritrea, on the Red Sea.
I didn't know that the Italian AF posessed any such long range bombers in 1940-were the Savoia-Marchetti 3-engine bombers capable of such a long range. It was actually quite an amazing feat of navigation-as the Italian had no radar.
Anyone know more about this.

[Captain Amazing]

It looks like the raid used SM.82 "Marsupials". Here's the story, from the July-August, 1976 edition of Aramco's company magazine:

http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issu...d.a.sequel.htm