I Came, I Saw

by Norman Lewis

  The tragedy of Naples has been overshadowed by the fire and brimstone holocausts of the dries of Germany, of Dresden and Hamburg and Cologne, and the slow strangulation of Leningrad. Naples’ sufferings were less in the world’s eye, but they persisted for months after its liberation. Thousands were buried under the rubble of largely working-class districts destroyed, on 4 August and 6 September, in the carpet-bombing raids preceding our occupation. These brought ordinary civilized life in the city to an immediate standstill with the cutting off of electricity and water supplies, and the loss of food stocks to a point when outright starvation began.

  Twelve of us NCOs plus an officer arrived to deal with the security problems of Naples, while the delayed-action bombs left by the Germans were still exploding all over the city. We had little idea of what was expected of us and neither had our superiors. Never before in the short history of the Corps had one of its sections been confronted with an emergency of this order. Our training had been based on the static simplicities of the First World War. This was chaos, Babel, anarchy; the streaming of a million distraught human ants in their shattered nest.

  We were instantly besieged in our headquarters by innumerable Italians bringing news of the desperate crises that surrounded us. Our allies the Moors were on the rampage, killing, looting and raping in outlying towns. Soldiers wearing our uniforms were breaking into Italian houses. The relations of imprisoned anti-fascists came clamouring to us for their release, and those of vendetta victims wrongfully incarcerated on trumped-up charges of co-operating with the Germans as soon as we entered Naples, now demanded they be set free. Informers of every stamp flocked to us with their denunciations. A sinister priest with a letter from the Vatican applied for permission to carry a gun; a nobleman, head of one of Naples’ most illustrious families, arrived with his aristocratic-looking sister, explaining that she wished to enter an army brothel.

  AMGOT — the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories — largely officered by Americans of Italian origin, stood between us and justice and truth. They had made a start by replacing all fascist-appointed mayors with the nominees of the Mafia, freshly released from gaol. Vito Genovese, ex-head of the American Mafia, now their principal adviser, was ready with his list of names, and soon these sinister ruffians became the real rulers of Southern Italy. The Mafia which Mussolini had come within a hair’s breadth of crushing back in 1923 flourished as it had never done since the days of Garibaldi.

  In theory we were a counter-intelligence force, charged with the frustration of saboteurs and spies, but in reality half the battle was with AMGOT’s black market, into which was diverted one-third of the military supplies unloaded at the port of Naples. Medicines in short supply were sold under the counter of any Neapolitan pharmacist with a connection with Vito Genovese. I went to discuss the theft of penicillin with one of his underlings, who set forth the hopelessness of my position in a conciliatory fashion. ‘Sergeant, I have nothing against you in person, but frankly this will do you no good. Who are you? You are no one. I was dining with a certain colonel last night [this would have been Poletti, head of AMGOT]. If you are tired of life in Naples I can have you sent away.’

  Thus it went on, the weeks and months crammed with bizarre and tragic adventure. In 312 Section every member was obliged to keep a daily ‘log’, for incorporation with the FSO’s reports. Nobody ever asked me for the return of my old notebooks, and they were still lying undisturbed at the bottom of a drawer twenty-four years later when one day I turned them out and began to leaf through them. I was amazed that the episodes recalled by these notes, which had seemed so unexceptional at the time, should now appear so extraordinary. When so many years ago I made some diffident reference to my friends about my aspirations as a writer, there was a general outcry of ‘At least spare us your war memoirs. That’s something nobody wants to hear any more about.’ I took them at their word and wrote fourteen books before the day when I got out the old Naples notebooks and diaries once again. But now it seemed to me that here was a small, obscure corner of history upon which perhaps the time had come to throw a little light, and I put aside whatever I was doing and settled to write Naples ’44.

  On 24 October 1944 an order came through that I was to leave immediately for Taranto, to embark on the Reina del Pacífico where I was to pick up 3000 Russian soldiers who had been fighting with the Germans and gone over to the Italian partisans. These were to be repatriated with evident discretion to the Soviet Union, via the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and Khorramshahr in Iran. Instructions, as usual, were vague to the point of cryptic and there was nothing but Celtic intuition to warn of what awaited me at the port under the heel of Italy.

  At Taranto a major saw me at Movement Control. He wore no Intelligence green flash, but the faint aroma of lunacy and the fierce but vague eyes identified him almost certainly as a member of the Intelligence Corps. ‘They’re all shits,’ he said. ‘Absolute bastards. My orders are these: if any man so much as attempts to escape, you personally will shoot him.’ I remonstrated gently with him, pointing out that this was an illegal order, and he quickly simmered down. ‘Well, anyway,’ he said. ‘They may try to commit suicide [several of the Russians had already done so in the camp]. If they do, just let them, and a bloody good riddance.’

  The Reina del Pacífico provided stark accommodation for troops and ‘third-class families’ and, going below to inspect the prisoners, I found a dispirited rabble in rumpled German uniforms. Up to this point they had been treated as prisoners of war, being among other things fed on the reduced scale of rations supplied to the captured enemy. Most of the documents that should have accompanied them, including the nominal roll, had been lost, but sufficient proof remained to show that these men had fought against the Germans before their surrender to the partisans. I discussed this matter with the OC Troops commanding the infantry company acting as escort, following which he telephoned AFHQ and it was agreed that the Russians’ status should be changed, and that British uniforms should be issued to them as soon as we reached Port Said.

  This was done and I next persuaded the OC Troops to allow the Russian senior lieutenant commanding the battalion, and his two junior officers, to put up badges of rank. In this way they were able to restore discipline, and within a few days parties of ex-prisoners were allowed up on deck where they were drilled by their NCOs and subjected to morale-building speeches by their officers. Hope was restored, and attempted suicides ceased.

  My Russian at this time was fair only, although it rapidly improved in the course of the voyage. I was assisted by three British Army interpreters, all of them Jews of Russian origin, and interrogation where necessary was assisted by the fact that many of the Russians spoke some German. With three or four exceptions, including the battalion commander, Ivan Golik, a Muscovite of strikingly English appearance, all these men were Asians. They had been members of the 162nd Turkoman Infantry Division, composed of Uzbeks, Khirgiz, Kazakhs and other Muslim racial groups which had fought in Northern Italy under the command of Lt-General von Heygendorff. The Turkoman Division had fought well under German officers but, committed to battle in July 1944 against American armour, it began to disintegrate, and after a bad mauling near Mass Maritima many of the Asians changed sides. They were terrified, they said, of falling into the hands of the Americans who, as they had been told, believed them to be Japanese auxiliaries under German command, and — as the rumour went — ran over such prisoners with their tanks. For this reason they took care to surrender only to the partisans, and it was to the partisans that most of the 3000 in my charge had given themselves up on 13 September after shooting their way out of encirclement by German troops who already had reason to suspect their loyalty.

  Starvation, the most atrocious treatment in German PoW camps, and the knowledge that the alternative facing them was certain death, had induced these men to serve in the German Army. I spent many hours listening to these ultimate survivors’ experiences and came to know that for every Ru
ssian who had come through the fiery furnace of the PoW camps, a hundred had found a miserable death.

  The Germans had captured whole armies intact in a series of pincer movements as they streamed eastwards into Russia and were faced with vast human surpluses — amounting to many millions of men — to be cleared as speedily and economically as possible. A Tadjik herdsman taken at the age of nineteen within days of joining the Army had been among those rounded up by soldiers in unfamiliar uniforms he had not at first even realized were Germans, and taken to an enormous barbed-wire enclosure. Here he and his comrades remained for three days without food or water, before a body of Germans arrived, accompanied by one who addressed them in Russian through a loud-hailer. The Tadjik remembered him as short, bespectacled and mild in his manner. ‘There are far more of you than we expected,’ he explained. ‘We have food for 1000 and there are 10,000 here, so you must draw your own conclusions.’

  The Russians were then lined up, and the order was given for officers, communists and Jews to step out of line, but no one moved. All the prisoners had by now torn off their badges of rank. The bespectacled German then invited any prisoner who wished to do so to denounce any of his comrades belonging to these categories. He promised that those who co-operated in this way would receive favoured treatment, including all the food they could eat, and after some urging and more promises and threats on the German’s part a number of men stepped forward and the betrayal began. Those selected in this way were marched off to a separate enclosure, and at this point the bespectacled German said that a further problem had arisen through a shortage of ammunition. The men who had betrayed their comrades were given cudgels, and ordered on pain of instant death to use these to carry out the executions.

  The Germans on the whole contrived to have Russians kill Russians. There were not enough SS ‘special squads’ to go round, and it was found that regular army soldiers were reluctant to engage in mass murder.

  In the disorder of those early days of the German push to the East, I learned from my informants that the method of selecting Jews for elimination was both rapid and unscientific. Prisoners, as soon as taken, were ordered to drop their trousers, and those found to be circumcised were shot on the spot. As all the Muslims composing the Asian units were also circumcised, these too were butchered en masse.

  Between four and five million Russian soldiers died in these camps, most of them of starvation, but for those men of iron resistance who were determined to survive come what might, the first hurdle to be cleared was an aversion to cannibalism, and I learnt that all the men on the ship had eaten human flesh. The majority admitted to this without hesitation, often, surprisingly — as if the confession provided psychological release — with a kind of eagerness. Squatting in the fetid twilight below deck they would describe, as if relating some grim old Asian fable, the screaming, clawing scrambles that sometimes happened when a man died and the prisoners fought like ravenous dogs to gorge themselves on the corpse before the Germans could drag it away. It was commonplace for a man too weak from starvation to defend himself to be smuggled away to a quiet corner, knocked on the head and then eaten. One of the Asian Russians I interviewed displayed the cavity in the back of his leg where half his calf had been gnawed away while in a coma.

  Cruellest of the camps, from which my informants had sought any way of escape, was at Salsk in the Kalmuk steppes, on the railway between Stalingrad and Krasnodar. Here prisoners were prepared for what was to come by seven days of total starvation. When bread finally arrived they were forced to crawl on their hands and knees to reach it under the fire of German soldiers who were being trained as marksmen. Jews were buried alive by their non-Jewish comrades, force-fed with excrement, and very commonly drowned in the latrines. There were spectacles here from the dementia of the Roman empire in its death throes, when naked prisoners were compelled to fight each other to the death with their bare hands, while their captors stood by, urging them on and taking photographs.

  At Port Said the Russians were kitted out as promised as British soldiers, were transferred to the Devonshire, with some accommodation for ‘second-class families’, and their spirits continued to rise. Many of these Asian tribesmen were poets. They wrote verse in their native language in a vein of tender surrealism, which Golik working with one or two literate NCOs translated into Russian, and I did my best to render into English. Alas, all this work came to be lost. Most of the soldiers were excellent musicians too. They had been able to dismantle simple musical instruments, and carried these in their rectums. There was a British Army issue of things like zinc water bottles, mess cans, toothbrushes, nailbrushes and combs, and these they dismantled, pierced, spliced, and amalgamated in such a way that in the first concert they gave when we were a day past Suez they had a full-scale orchestra of thirty or forty varieties of miniature musical instruments; of strange little antique-looking fiddles, lutes, pipes and rebecks; and the bowels of the ship quivered with the wild skirl of oriental music. Somehow costumes were improvised from such unlikely basic materials as camouflage netting and gas capes, and supreme theatrical art transformed a man who had tasted human flesh into a tender princess, stripping the petals from a lily while a suitor quavered a love song, oblivious of the drumming of hoofs (as the men pounded on the deck with their heels) of a Mongol horde on their way to sack the town.

  Ten days later we tied up in Khorramshahr. I looked down over a glum prospect of marshalling yards under the soft rain. All was greyness, befitting the occasion. In the middle distance the strangest of trains came into sight, an endless succession of pygmy trucks, like those used in the West to transport cattle, but a quarter their size. It was drawn by three engines, the leader of which gave a sad derisive whistle as it drew level with us. It stopped, and this was the signal for a grey cohort of Soviet infantry to come on stage and go through a routine of changing formation on the march, before deploying to form a line between us and the train.

  The escort party and the returning Russians now disembarked, and there was more ceremonial shuffling of men, slapping of rifle stocks and stamping of boots. The OC Troops and the Soviet commander then strutted towards each other, saluted, shook hands, exchanged documents formalizing the completion of the handover, and the thing was at an end.

  One of the interpreters came back. ‘No problems?’ I asked.

  ‘None at all.’

  ‘Any idea what’s to be done with them?’

  ‘Probably be shot,’ the interpreter said, ‘most of them anyway. I had a chat with the major. Turned out to be quite a character. Full of jokes. Took a great fancy to Golik’s coat.’ (As part of the morale-boosting programme I had given Ivan Golik permission to have a superb greatcoat made from two Australian blankets, Red Army-style.)

  ‘“Whatever happens,” the major said, “I must see to it that they don’t spoil that.” It may have been just his sense of humour, but I don’t think it was.’

  The mission to Khorramshahr was seen at Intelligence Corps headquarters at Castellammare di Stabia as a heavy responsibility to be undertaken by an NCO. A mention was made of the likelihood that I should be commissioned on my return before a posting for liaison duties with the Russians on the Eastern front. Back in Naples in December, this move was announced to be imminent, and I was told to prepare myself for a winter to be spent in a cold climate.

  Weeks and months followed in tedium and inactivity, with no more news of the expected posting, and at the beginning of April I was sent to headquarters to join a highly secret course for British and American personnel for the study of an elaborate security plan worked out for the occupation of Germany. Put simply, it was proposed to encircle the whole country with radar-equipped strong-points joined by a fence. Behind this the population, both military and civilian, would be contained in something like a vast concentration camp, while Alpine redoubts and any other such pockets of resistance were demolished and a huge Anglo-American security task force, in which I was to be included, worked at their leisure to sort o
ut the German sheep from the goats.

  Armed with this impressive information I joined forces with a Sergeant Hopper, also roped in for the operation, took over a lorry, and set out for the north of Italy to await the German collapse. Hopper’s military career had been a remarkable one, for he had been sent to Canada by mistake, and there lost, and after various interim adventures had finally ended up in Trinidad where he spent three years boarding and carrying out a nominal search of the same small ship used to transport tropical fruits between one port and another. He was a PhD and had been a lecturer in Hellenic Studies at Aberystwyth University, and with the outbreak of the communist revolt in Greece and the consequent rush to find Greek speakers, his name had been unearthed in the files. Hopper spoke only the classical version of the language, and knew little of the happenings in the country after its eclipse by Rome in the first century AD. Needless to say, by the time he reached Europe on his way to Athens, the emergency had been at an end for some two months. ‘What the hell are we going to do with you? Whatever induced you to come here?’ the selection officer at Castellammare wanted to know. A week or so later he was to find himself on his way to Austria.

  The operation we were supposed to join proved one of the most spectacular farces of the war. All the thousands of pages of secret material did not produce even the proverbial mouse, and the electrical fences, and the strong-points scanning the countryside with their radar beams, existed only in the imaginations of their planners. In due course the German resistance caved in and Hopper and I drove our lorry (laden with trenching tools, camouflage nets, anti-gas equipment, and so forth) over the Brenner Pass into Austria, forced sometimes to reduce speed to a walking pace by the hordes of Austrians and Germans streaming towards us over the pass into Italy. We established ourselves at Köflach near Klagenfurt, where we were joined by a charming but confused officer who refused to be persuaded that the long war was really at an end and insisted on taking precautionary measures against surprise attack. We were supposed to be there to look for war criminals and for high-ranking German officers, who were automatically arrestable, and this we did in a desultory fashion, but found not a single one. The men with dark secrets on their consciences had long since gone to earth, or were on their way to South America, and those we rounded up for investigation proved nothing but small fry. By the purest chance I ran into a man with a knowledge of atomic secrets, and whatever he might or might not have done as a member of the Gestapo, he was happy to co-operate, and too useful to prosecute. Perhaps it had always been intended that this was the way it should be.