Naples '44

by Norman Lewis

  Outright panic now started and spread among the American troops left behind. In the belief that our position had been infiltrated by German infantry they began to shoot each other, and there were blood-chilling screams from men hit by the bullets.

  We crouched in our slit trench under the pink, fluttering leaves of the olives, and watched the fires come closer, and the night slowly passed. Then at four o’clock we learned that the Headquarters was to be evacuated after all, and that we were not to be sacrificed. We started up our motor bikes, kept as close as we could to the armoured car that had brought the news, and by God’s mercy avoiding the panic-stricken fire directed from cover at anything that moved, reached this field with its rabble of shocked and demoralised soldiery – officers separated from their men, and men from their officers.

  Official history will in due time set to work to dress up this part of the action at Salerno with what dignity it can. What we saw was ineptitude and cowardice spreading down from the command, and this resulted in chaos. What I shall never understand is what stopped the Germans from finishing us off.

  September 15

  Miraculously Moore, one of the four sergeants sent to Salerno, got back; a hair-raising twelve-mile drive by jeep, round the edge of a battle raging all the way. The FSO had arrived in the town, and we were ordered to leave the motor cycles and do our best to get into the town by any vehicle that might attempt the run and could be persuaded to take us. After much negotiating Dashwood managed to line up a command car, but at the last moment we were told that there was not enough space to take us. Later we saw the command car depart, loaded up with wine. The cannonading has been going on all day but the din is lessening. Confusion is still intense. Many of the men we see wandering about have no idea where their officers are and have not seen them since the German counterattack began.

  September 17

  Attempts by the remaining section members to reach Salerno having been abandoned, I could find nothing to prevent my taking a sightseeing trip. I therefore motor-cycled up to the hill village of Capaccio, which had always been in sight from the beachhead, presiding with cool if distant charm over the raucous confusion below and representing for me all that was most romantic in the landscape of Southern Italy.

  At close quarters its charm was even more pungent; a place of delicately interlocking white masses, and sparkling light. I rode with some caution into a street which could have been almost English, with narrow, picket-fenced front gardens in which grew such recognisable favourites as zinnias and sweet peas. The peace of this place after four days of the racket of warfare was stunning. Two aged women in black gossiped into each other’s ear, and a white-bearded old man, a kind of Italian Father Christmas, spoiled by a crinkling, obsequious smile, sat at a table by his garden gate, selling wine. It was immediately clear that the local belief was that the Germans had gone, never to return, because as soon as he spotted me he held up a notice Vivono gli Alleati. I pulled up, bought a glass of wine which looked and tasted like ink, and asked him whether there were any Germans about, and he put on a hideous smirk. He got up and beckoned to me to follow him into his cottage, where a uniformed man was sprawled, head on his chest, in a deep chair. This was the first German I had seen, and he was dead. Speaking in some local dialect quite inaccessible to me, the old man tried to explain what had happened. He was clearly accepting responsibility for the German’s death, and expected praise and perhaps even a reward. His gestures seemed to claim that he had put poison in the soldier’s wine. I couldn’t decide whether or not this was a piece of sycophantic bluff.

  I pushed him aside and went out. A disgusting old fellow, but a reliable barometer, I suspected, of the Germans’ prospects in this particular theatre of war.

  September 18

  Today in the chow-line we spoke to a paratrooper of the American 509th Parachute Battalion, still numb with resentment following his experiences of the night of the 14th, when he had taken part in the wild and foolish drop of six hundred men sent to disrupt communications in the enemy’s rear. The objective, he said, had been Avellino bridge and tunnel, but some of the planes had made the drop up to twenty-five miles off target, and others had dropped parachutists on the roofs of high buildings in Avellino itself, from which, unable to disentangle themselves from their gear in time, they had fallen to their deaths. Men such as this survivor are bitterly critical of their leadership.

  In the afternoon another cautious excursion a mile or two up to the Battipaglia road. Shortly after crossing the Sele bridge, I saw a number of the German tanks which had almost reached us on the night of the 14th, and had been put out of action by the naval shelling. Several of these lay near, or in tremendous craters. In one case the trapped crew had been broiled in such a way that a puddle of fat had spread from under the tank, and this was quilted with brilliant flies of all descriptions and colours.

  September 20

  We finally got through by jeep to Salerno, but found a battle still going on in the outskirts of the town. German mortar bombs were exploding in the middle of a small square only a hundred yards from Security Headquarters. Here I saw an ugly sight: a British officer interrogating an Italian civilian, and repeatedly hitting him about the head with a chair; treatment which the Italian, his face a mask of blood, suffered with stoicism. At the end of the interrogation, which had not been considered successful, the officer called in a private of the Hampshires and asked him in a pleasant, conversational sort of manner, ‘Would you like to take this man away, and shoot him?’ The private’s reply was to spit on his hands, and say, ‘I don’t mind if I do, sir.’ The most revolting episode I have seen since joining the forces.

  September 21

  Having spent all night patrolling the streets of Salerno on the watch for German infiltrators, there was a meeting with Captain Cartwright, his face covered with plaster. The Captain told us that much as he regretted to say that our presence at Paestum served no purpose of any kind, the Section was still officially attached to HQ, American Fifth Army, and a token presence there was essential, so that five of us, including myself, would have to drag ourselves back. Thus, under compulsion, we returned to the lotos-eating life of the beachhead at Paestum. Here we studied the strange bright grasshoppers, we bird-watched, read a little poetry, practised our Italian on fugitive soldiers, studied again the details of the temples, and sometimes strolled to the sea’s edge to watch the great parade of ships, and their magnificent and awful retaliation of fire against the few FW 190s which teased and plagued them with their attacks.

  This evening for the first time since the landing we were allowed at last to contribute to the war effort. Someone at Army Headquarters reported suspiciously-flashing lights at night in the village of Castello Castelluccia, and someone else remembered the presence of Intelligence personnel in the camp, so we were sent up to make a stealthy Indian approach through the darkness and catch the supposed spy who was presumed to be signalling to the enemy in the hills. We surrounded the village, waited for the light to begin its flashing and then moved in, only to capture a man with a torch on his way to the single outside latrine, used by the entire village.

  September 28

  Admitted to the American 16th Evacuation Hospital at Paestum with malaria – possibly a recurrence but more likely a re-infection. I was informed by the doctor that the marshes here are still malarial, and the mosquitoes believed to have put paid to the thriving Greek colony of antiquity, as active as ever. Most of the patients have battle wounds, and from several of these I received confirmation of the story I found so hard to believe, that American combat units were ordered by their officers to beat to death Germans who attempted to surrender to them. These men seem very naïve and childlike, but some of them are beginning to question the ethics of this order. One man who surrendered to a German tank crew was simply stripped of his weapons and turned loose because he could not be carried in the tank, and as a result he is naturally a propagandist for what he accepts as the general high standard of
German humanity. Another, more lastingly indoctrinated, has announced his intention of strangling the only wounded German in the ward, an eighteen-year-old Panzer Grenadier, as soon as he, the American, has the strength to get out of bed. However, the Panzer Grenadier, cheerful and chirpy despite a bad wound, and with enough of a command of English to display an unabashed sense of humour, is making friends all round and rapidly consolidating his position.

  This tentful of men – and there must be at least two hundred of them – are a very mixed bag. One, a lay-preacher in civilian life, conducted the nearest possible thing to revivalist prayer meetings in a situation where all members of the congregation were on their backs, and a proportion had tubes feeding into their nostrils or sticking out of the walls of their stomachs. A great deal of hymn-singing went on in competition with bawdy choruses of the Eskimo Nell variety, and there were frequent ecstatic shouts of ‘Bless you, brother, are you saved?’ and ‘Halleluja!’

  A tremendous cannonading by a battery of 105 howitzers in a field a couple of hundred yards away went on through the day, and most of the night. In the end most patients got used to this and were no longer disturbed by the crash of nocturnal salvoes. Yet so finely attuned are the nerves to danger that even in a deep sleep I was awakened instantly by the faint, distant whine of shells from German 88s as they passed high overhead on their way to the ships in the bay.

  October 3

  A gale of the kind no one ever expects of Italy blew down our tent in the middle of the night. Pitch darkness, hammering rain, the suffocating weight of waterlogged canvas over mouth and nostrils, muffled cries from all directions. A lake of water flooded in under the beds, and gradually rose to the level of the bottom of the mattress. It was several hours before we could be rescued. All my kit stowed under the bed was lost, and only my camera and notebooks in the drawer of the bedside table survived. One patient was killed by the main tent-pole falling across his bed.

  October 4

  Discharged from hospital and kitted out temporarily as an American private with bucket helmet, hip-clinging trousers and gaitered boots, I picked up a lift in an American truck going in the direction of Naples, which had fallen three days before, and where I supposed the section would already be installed. At Battipaglia it was all change, with an opportunity for a close-quarters study of the effects of the carpet bombing ordered by General Clark. The General has become the destroying angel of Southern Italy, prone to panic, as at Paestum, and then to violent and vengeful reaction, which occasioned the sacrifice of the village of Altavilla, shelled out of existence because it might have contained Germans. Here in Battipaglia we had an Italian Guernica, a town transformed in a matter of seconds to a heap of rubble. An old man who came to beg said that practically nobody had been left alive, and that the bodies were still under the ruins. From the stench and from the sight of the flies streaming like black smoke into, and out of, the holes in the ground, this was entirely believable. No attempt had even been made to clear the streets of relics of the successful strike. So much so that while standing by the truck talking to the old man I felt something uneven under one foot, shifted my position, and then glancing down realised that what had at first seemed to be a mass of sacking was in fact the charred and flattened corpse of a German soldier.

  Thereafter on through Salerno and across the base of the Sorrento peninsula in a second truck. This is a region on which all the guidebooks exhaust their superlatives, and the war had singed and scorched it here and there, and littered the green and golden landscape with the wreckage of guns and tanks, but happily no town had been large enough to warrant the General’s calling in his Flying Fortresses. The only visible damage to most villages had been the inevitable sack of the post office by the vanguard of the advancing troops, who seem to have been philatelists to a man. Presently we were in the outskirts of Naples, which took the form of a number of grimy, war-husked towns: Torre Annunziata, Torre del Greco, Resina and Portici, which have grown together to form twelve miles of dismal suburb along the seafront. We made slow progress through shattered streets, past landslides of rubble from bombed buildings. People stood in their doorways, faces the colour of pumice, to wave mechanically to the victors, the apathetic Fascist salute of last week having been converted to the apathetic V-sign of today, but on the whole the civilian mood seemed one of stunned indifference.

  Somewhere a few miles short of Naples proper, the road widened into something like a square, dominated by a vast semi-derelict public building, plastered with notices and with every window blown in. Here several trucks had drawn up and our driver pulled in to the kerb and stopped too. One of the trucks was carrying American Army supplies, and soldiers, immediately joined by several from our truck, were crowding round this and helping themselves to whatever they could lay hands on. Thereafter, crunching through the broken glass that littered the pavement, each of them carrying a tin of rations, they were streaming into the municipal building.

  I followed them and found myself in a vast room crowded with jostling soldiery, with much pushing forward and ribald encouragement on the part of those in the rear, but a calmer and more thoughtful atmosphere by the time one reached the front of the crowd. Here a row of ladies sat at intervals of about a yard with their backs to the wall. These women were dressed in their street clothes, and had the ordinary well-washed respectable shopping and gossiping faces of working-class housewives. By the side of each woman stood a small pile of tins, and it soon became clear that it was possible to make love to any one of them in this very public place by adding another tin to the pile. The women kept absolutely still, they said nothing, and their faces were as empty of expression as graven images. They might have been selling fish, except that this place lacked the excitement of a fish market. There was no soliciting, no suggestion, no enticement, not even the discreetest and most accidental display of flesh. The boldest of the soldiers had pushed themselves, tins in hand, to the front, but now, faced with these matter-of-fact family-providers driven here by empty larders, they seemed to flag. Once again reality had betrayed the dream, and the air fell limp. There was some sheepish laughter, jokes that fell flat, and a visible tendency to slip quietly away. One soldier, a little tipsy, and egged on constantly by his friends, finally put down his tin of rations at a woman’s side, unbuttoned and lowered himself on her. A perfunctory jogging of the haunches began and came quickly to an end. A moment later he was on his feet and buttoning up again. It had been something to get over as soon as possible. He might have been submitting to field punishment rather than the act of love.

  Five minutes later we were on our way again. The tins collected by my fellow travellers were thrown to passers-by who scrambled wildly after them. None of the soldiers travelling on my truck had felt inclined to join actively in the fun.

  October 6

  The city of Naples smells of charred wood, with ruins everywhere, sometimes completely blocking the streets, bomb craters and abandoned trams. The main problem is water. Two tremendous air-raids on August 4 and September 6 smashed up all the services, and there has been no proper water supply since the first of these. To complete the Allies’ work of destruction, German demolition squads have gone round blowing up anything of value to the city that still worked. Such has been the great public thirst of the past few days that we are told that people have experimented with sea-water in their cooking, and families have been seen squatting along the seashore round weird contraptions with which they hope to distil sea-water for drinking purposes.

  The Section has fallen on its feet. I arrived to find that we had been installed in the Palace of the Princes of Satriano at the end of Naples’s impressive seafront, the Riviera di Chiaia, in the Piazza Vittoria. The four-storey building is in the Neapolitan version of Spanish baroque, and we occupy its principal floor at the head of a sweep of marble staircase, with high ceilings, decorated with mouldings, glittering chandeliers, enormous wall-mirrors, and opulent gilded furniture in vaguely French-Empire style. There are ei
ght majestic rooms, but no bathroom, and the lavatory is in a cupboard in the kitchen. The view across the square is of clustered palms, much statuary, and the Bay of Naples. The FSO has done very well by us.

  At first sight Naples, with the kind of work it is likely to involve, seemed unglamorous compared with North Africa. Gone for ever were the days of forays into the mountains of Kabylie for meetings with the scheming Caïds and the holy men who controlled the tribes, and the secret discussions in the rose arbour in the Palace Gardens of Tunis. Life here, by comparison, promised to be hard-working, sometimes prosaic, and fraught with routines. There were military units by the dozen all round Naples who wished to employ Italian civilians and all of these had to be vetted by us as security risks. Nothing could have been easier than this operation. The Fascist police state kept close tabs on the activities of all its citizens, and we inherited their extensive archives on the top floor of the Questura – the central police office. Ninety-nine per cent of the information recorded there was numbingly unimportant, and revealed as a whole that most Italians lead political lives of utter neutrality, although prone to sexual adventures. In all, the unending chronicles of empty lives. A little more thought and effort would have to be devoted to the investigation of those few hundreds of persons remaining in the city who had been energetic Fascists, and whom – largely depending on our reports – it might be thought necessary to intern.