13-04-2025
- General
- Wall Street Journal
‘Naples 1944' Review: The Cost of Conquering
When British and American troops entered Naples on Oct. 1, 1943, they became the new rulers of hundreds of thousands of half-starved civilians and a broken city. Before withdrawing, the German occupiers had conducted a punctilious three-week campaign of sabotage and theft. They looted all the food and fuel. They blew up the city's gas, water and sewage piping. They destroyed its port facilities and much of the adjoining neighborhood and scuttled more than 300 ships in the harbor. They destroyed 75% of the major bridges, stole nearly 90% of the city's trucks, buses and trams, demolished railroad tracks and tunnels, and left mines and booby traps everywhere.
Naples fell into anarchy. The police, fire, ambulance, mail, telegraph and telephone services stopped working. The banks, schools and courts were closed. The Allies came to wage war but became responsible for ruling a defeated people and rebuilding the rubble. Already Italy's most-bombed city, Naples suffered further torments in what was supposed to be its first six months of freedom: an economic crisis, mass starvation, a typhus outbreak, a wave of murder, theft and Mafia activity—a moral collapse in which husbands prostituted their wives and mothers prostituted their daughters to Allied soldiers, and then, in March 1944, the eruption of nearby Mount Vesuvius.
The war's apocalyptic aftermath at Naples produced three striking works of literature. 'Naples '44' (1978), by the British intelligence officer and travel writer Norman Lewis, was an impressionistic report of a society collapsing as it was conquered. 'The Gallery,' a 1947 novel by the ex-U.S. intelligence officer John Horne Burns, described the tedium, fear and casual depravities of an army at rest in a city where civilization 'was already dead.' 'The Skin,' a 1949 novel by the Fascist-turned-Communist writer Curzio Malaparte, was a nightmare of the Allied occupation, in which degradation flourishes amid 'the frightful stench that emanated from the countless hundreds of corpses buried beneath the ruins.'
Keith Lowe's 'Naples 1944' is the first comprehensive English-language history of life in Naples under the German and Allied occupations. Mr. Lowe, whose previous books include studies of the immediate and long-term effects of World War II in Europe, uses Allied military records and Italian accounts to show how Allied victory in the field led to an ethical defeat rooted in failures of imagination and, this being modern warfare, logistics.
