When the Allies liberated Naples in 1943 they though it would be a paradise, Keith Lowe writes. But for the devastated city, there were dire consequences, in part caused by the liberators.
Naples is a city of dreams.
When the Allies first arrived here at the end of 1943, they came with romantic notions of a tourist paradise where, for a while at least, the violence and squalor of war could be left behind.
It was a fairyland of silver and gold and great happiness,” wrote Fred Majdalany, who fought throughout the Italian campaign. “In Naples you could buy things in the shops; you could get drunk; you could have a woman; you could hear music.” For some of his fellow soldiers it became “a fixation”, a light at the end of the tunnel.
What the Allies actually found when they entered the city was very different. Naples had been comprehensively destroyed in 1943 – first by the Allied bombs, and then by the scorched earth policy of the retreating German Army.
“At the time of our arrival,” wrote Colonel Edgar Erskine Hume, the first Allied governor of Naples, “the city was in darkness. There was no electric power, gas, sewage disposal, means of collecting refuse, facilities to bury the dead, air raid signals, telephones, ambulance service, fire protection, telegraphs, postal service, street cars, buses, taxis, funiculars, railways, or regular water supply. Police organization had broken down and after days of terror there was almost a state of anarchy… Despair was everywhere.”
Over the course of the next year, a series of catastrophes hit the city. First there was a water crisis: the departing Germans had blown up all the water mains and sewers, leaving hundreds of thousands of Neapolitans without anything to drink.
Next came a food crisis. The countryside around Naples might be some of the most fertile farmland in the world; but all of the transport systems had been smashed, and without any way of transporting food from the countryside into the city, people began to starve. This in turn created an economic crisis.
Food prices went through the roof, and families all over the city were forced to sell all of their possessions just to survive. Women everywhere began to sell their bodies: according to one British intelligence report in 1944 around one in seven women between 16 and 50 were prostituting themselves.
As if this were not enough, a typhus epidemic hit the city at the end of 1943; and three months later, Vesuvius erupted. And all the while, just 30 or 40 miles away, the war continued.
The people tasked with dealing with this pile up of emergencies were the men and women of a brand-new Allied Military Government in Naples. From the very beginning they found themselves completely out of their depth. They were hopelessly understaffed: at one point, a single officer found himself administering an area covering 27 communes, with a combined population of half a million people.
They were also underequipped: some departments found themselves without transport or other basic equipment such as pens and paper; others stopped submitting reports to Allied Forces HQ, because they did not even have access to a typewriter. But worst of all, they lacked the proper training.
None of them had any experience of Italian administration, and few spoke more than a word of two of Italian. They were obliged to lean heavily on local officials, but they had no way of telling which officials were trustworthy or competent.
Postwar interviews carried out with former Allied Military Government officers sometimes make painful listening.
According to Theodore Shannon, the problems he encountered in Italy went far beyond anything his training had prepared him for: indeed, most of his training had been nothing but “pie in the sky”. Thomas Fisher, who saw every level of the Allied administration in Italy, claimed that Naples in particular “was probably the worst-governed city in the Western world.”
The consequences for the people of Naples were dire. During the period after the Allies took control, crime levels soared. The black market raged out of control. In many areas, law and order were completely non-existent.
In his memoir of the war, Australian reporter Alan Moorehead spoke eloquently about how bad things became in the city. “Army cigarettes and chocolates were stolen by the hundredweight and resold at fantastic prices. Vehicles were stolen at the rate of something like sixty or seventy a night (not always by the Italians)…
“Knifing skirmishes in the back streets became a nightly affair. In the whole list of sordid human vices none I think were overlooked in Naples during those first few months.”
As Moorehead hinted, some of the worst offenders in this crime wave were the Allies themselves. It was Allied port workers and drivers who fuelled the black market: at the beginning of 1944 almost a third of all military supplies in the port were stolen and sold on to local mobsters.
It was Allied soldiers and sailors who also fuelled the market in prostitution, and even child prostitution. Some of the brothels offered up girls as young as ten or twelve, and several Allied soldiers admit to taking advantage of such offers in their private diaries and memoirs.
But the vast bulk of anti-social behaviour that plagued Naples in 1944 was caused by ordinary young men on leave, looking for a good time before they were sent back to the violence and squalor of the front line. They had been promised a tourist paradise, and were determined to experience it whether or not it really existed. So they took day trips to Capri and Pompeii, but then they got drunk and made passes at the local girls.
When the city’s meagre attempt to entertain them became disappointing, they started fights with local people, each other, and the policemen who came to arrest them.
One group of soldiers hijacked the mayor’s car and forced the driver to ferry them about Naples like a tour guide for several hours while they carried on drinking in the back.
Behaviour like this left bitter-sweet memories in Naples after the war was over. On the one hand the Allies had rescued Italy from the Germans, whose atrocities were widespread and brutal. Most Neapolitans recognised that the hearts of British and American soldiers were in the right place, and that the vast majority of them genuinely wanted to help the city get back on its feet.
But a significant minority treated Naples like the venue for a giant stag party. Their headlong pursuit of pleasure, at a time when such daydreams were neither appropriate nor possible, caused local resentments that were often difficult to forget.
Naples 1944 by Keith Lowe is published on 26 September, 2024.
Read more about this book.
Keith is also the author of The Fear and the Freedom: Why the Second World War Still Matters, which was shortlisted for the HWA Non-fiction Crown in 2018, and Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II and Inferno: The Devastation of Hamburg, 1943.
Don’t mention the war! is Keith’s Historia feature about the lasting legacy of the Second World War and the myths and misconceptions that cluster around it.
Other related features include:
Family memories of Italy in World War Two by Cristina Loggia
From Taranto to Pearl Harbor – spies and inspiration by Alan Bardos
Mussolini meets the World’s Fair by Anika Scott
Images:
- Napoli, via Marina dopo i bombardamenti degli alleati (Naples, via Marina, after the Allied bombings), 1943: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Liberazione di Napoli. Macerie in via Chiaia (Liberation of Naples. Rubble in via Chiaia), 1943: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Two American sailors taking a photo with Neapolitan “signorine” (prostitutes), 1945: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Naples at the height of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, 1944, by Melvin C Shaffer: DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, via Wikimedia (no known copyright restrictions exist)
- Little girl selling beans from Children In Naples, Italy by Lieutenant Wayne Miller, July 1944: US
National Archives via Wikimedia (public domain) - Napoli, famigia davanti al basso (family in front of a basso, street-level housing of the poorest people), by Wayne Miller, 1944: Wikimedia (public domain)