Naples '44

A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy

Norman Lewis

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781480433250
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: History

The classic memoir of the Italian city left in chaos by the Nazis is "[a] masterpiece... elegiac and furious, and frequently hilarious" ( The New York Times ). "Vivid, lucid, elegant, often funny, " Naples '44 is the starkly human account of the true cost of war as seen through the eyes of a young, untested man who would never again look at his world the same way ( The New York Times Book Review). With his gift for linguistics, Norman Lewis was assigned to the British Intelligence Corps' Field Security Service, tasked with reforming civil services, dealing with local leaders, and keeping the peace in places World War II had devastated. After a near-disastrous Allied landing at Salerno, Italy, Lewis was stationed in the newly liberated city of Naples. But bringing the city back to life was unlike anything he had been prepared for. Much of the populace was far from grateful, stealing anything they could, not only from each other but also from those sent to help them. Local vendettas and endless feuds made discerning friend from Nazi collaborator practically impossible, and turned attempts at meting out justice into a farce. And as the deprivations grew ever harsher, a proud and vibrant people were forced to survive on a diet of prostitution, corruption, and a desperate belief in miracles, cures, and saviors. But even through the darkness and chaos, Lewis evokes the essential dignity of the Neapolitan people, their traditions of civility, courage, and generosity of spirit, and the indefatigable pride that kept them fighting for life during the greatest calamity in human history. Praised by Graham Greene as "one of the best writers... of our century, " Norman Lewis presents a portrait of Naples that is a "lyrical, ironic and detached account of the tempestuous, byzantine and opaque city in the aftermath of war" (Will Self). His Naples '44 "reads like prose... sings like poetry" ( The Plain Dealer ).

1944

January 1

WE HAVE SUFFERED FROM a plague of telephone-wire cutting, and there has been a case a day to deal with for the past week. Of all the miscellaneous jobs that are thrown at us, this is the most boring and frustrating. The most thankless, too, because we never produce results. In fact the only people so far to have caught wire-cutters are the Special Investigation Branch of the Military Police, and there have been bitter reflections at Army Headquarters on the subject of our comparative efficiency. The Army insists that these wire-cutting cases are deliberate acts of sabotage, whereas we know full well that lengths of cable are cut out purely for the commercial value of the copper, and that like any other article of Allied ownership the copper is offered openly for sale in the Via Forcella.

How is one supposed to begin to put a stop to this? All we can do is to visit the spot where the cutting has taken place and make enquiries — which are always pointless and profitless — from any Italians who happen to live in the neighbourhood. Last week my first on-the-spot investigation of this kind proved to be a perfect introduction to the conspiratorial silence of the South. About fifty yards of thick main cable had been cut, and at about seven in the evening right in the middle of the busy main street of Casoria. I went from house to house and shop to shop questioning people who in three cases out of four claimed to have had business compelling them to be in other parts of the town on the previous evening. Those who remained had seen or heard nothing. The brigadiere (sergeant) in charge of the Carabinieri station was not in the slightest surprised at this lack of success. Omertà — manliness, he explained. ‘They side against us, and they always will do. It’s a tradition.’ I detected pride in his manner.

I reminded him that the Germans shot wire-cutters on the spot. ‘Of course they did,’ he agreed. ‘Thank God, you’re a civilised and humanitarian people, and you liberated us from those barbarians. You’ve taught us what democratic justice is all about and we can’t thank you enough.’ Not a muscle moved in his face to show that he was laughing at me.

Next day there was another case — at Cicciano. This time the man was actually caught red-handed by some British soldiers belonging to a local unit who happened to be passing, and who locked him up in their guardroom. The General, as generals do, wanted an execution. It looked an opportunity to instil terror into the hearts of those damned wogs who were tricking us right left and centre. I saw the prisoner, who looked sincere and produced his plausible story. Of course he had heard the noise of someone using a hatchet to chop into the wire, and naturally he had run out of his house to do what he could, whereupon the thieves had dropped the wire and dashed off. Our friend had felt it his duty as a responsible citizen to pick up the wire and throw it into his garden, where it would be out of harm’s way, while he went off to report the incident to the police. At this point he was picked up.

Although this story was probably a typically Neapolitan cover-up, there was also a chance that it had happened in just this way, so I decided to give the man the benefit of the doubt and to do what I could to save his life. Once again there was a visit to the Carabinieri, and for a moment it was hard to believe that this wasn’t the same brigadiere I’d seen the day before at Casoria. This man called me ‘your honour’ and within minutes found some excuse to congratulate me as the other had done for being the representative of a justice-loving country.

‘Has the man a criminal record?’ I asked.

‘Your honour, his sheet’s as clear as the soul of one of the innocents murdered by Herod.’

‘I’m going to the Pubblica Sicurezza after I’ve done with you. If they give me a different story you’re for it.’

‘Your honour, I swear to you on the mourning worn for my sister who died a virgin — ’

‘Have you ever heard of Omertà?’

‘I’ve heard of it, but surely you can’t imagine it applies in my case? After all, we’re both coppers. God knows, I’d sooner lie to my own father.’

The face remained a bland Neapolitan mask. I wrote, ‘Carabinieri report no convictions,’ and decided not even to bother to visit the PS, whose report was certain to be the same. What was one to expect? Why should these people sacrifice their countrymen to us any more than they had to the Germans? The verdict, so far as I was concerned, had to be insufficient evidence. If the General still wanted to go ahead with his firing squad, that was his responsibility.

January 5

I have been placed in charge of the security of a number of small towns to the north of Naples and within approximately twenty-five miles of the city; of these the largest are Casoria, Afragola, Acerra and Aversa. Although the Army certainly doesn’t realise this, they are all located in the notorious Zona di Camorra. The task is a hopeless one, and it would be demoralising to take it too seriously, but most of the last week has been spent in reconnoitring the area, and finding out what I can about these dismal places.

Seen from the outside through the orchards that surround them, all these towns look attractive enough: tiny versions of Naples itself, clustered round their blue-domed churches. On the inside they are the showcases of poverty and misery. There are signs of a vanished prosperity. A few great houses have been built with arcaded fronts and a tower added here and there as an excuse for the rich landlords of the past to use up spare money, but they are falling into ruins, and squatters have built their shacks in the courtyards. The area is one of great natural fertility. It is from these orchards, fields and vineyards that the wealth was extracted to build the ducal palaces of Naples. A handful of families own all the land, and the peasants who work it have always done so in conditions that come very close to slavery. Nowadays the normal, accepted misery of their condition has been aggravated by the war and the loss of manpower. In some of these towns the whole population is said to be out of work. The new sindacos, the mayors who have been appointed by AMG, the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory, to replace the old Fascist podestàs, are stated in the main to be members of the criminal Camorra. It is common knowledge that these have been appointed through the influence of Vito Genovese, the American gangster who, having obtained employment as an interpreter, has now manoeuvred himself into a position of unassailable power in the military government. Law and order depend on badly equipped and badly armed Carabinieri and Pubblica Sicurezza, who have two or three men apiece in each town — all of them under constant threat of attack by well-armed criminals. When I called yesterday on the Carabinieri at Acerra, I was shown round the town by a brigadiere who walked at my side with pistol drawn and cocked. Last week bandits raided the police station here, killing the NCO on duty, wounding another policeman and taking the few poor obsolete weapons they had. This leaves only two Carabinieri to carry on.

In so far as anyone rules here at all, it is the Camorra. The Brigadiere gave the usual account of it as a secret and permanent resistance that had evolved over the centuries as a system of self-protection against the bullies and the tax-collectors of a succession of foreign governments who had installed themselves in Naples. The people of the Zona di Camorra lived by their own secret laws, recognised only their own secret courts, which imposed only one sentence on the enemy from without or the betrayer from within — death. In the old days, said the Brigadiere, there had been some sort of moral authority, some sort of justice, but now nothing but outright criminality remained. If there was plunder to be taken the Camorrista took it, and shared it out among his friends. The Camorristi were in big-scale organised crime, and they tolerated the police because they kept the small-time criminals in their place. The only man who had ever stood up to them had been Mussolini, who had sent thousands of troops into this area and thrown the Camorristi into gaol after farcical trials, or had simply sent them away for resettlement in other parts of Italy.

The police, here as elsewhere, are corrupt, and how can they be otherwise on the salaries they are expected to live on? The chief of police of every town — usually a strutting peacock of a man, uniformed like a general, although only an NCO, gets the equivalent, through the devaluation of the lira, of £3 a week. The Italian State has always encouraged its police force, by grossly underpaying them, to resort to the spoils system, and now with galloping inflation they are in effect receiving pay that buys between one-fifth and one-tenth of what it did before our arrival. My only incorruptible marshal is the old widower Lo Scalzo of Caivano, who is as grey and as starved-looking as my old friend Lattarullo, and whose appearance is a disgrace to the force. Having no family to worry about, he says, he can get by, or as he puts it — ‘keep enough soup flowing’.

Discussing with Major Pecorella, CO of the Naples Carabinieri, this problem of corruption in the force, he put forward the rueful viewpoint that even a corrupt police force was better than no police at all. The main thing was to keep police rapacity within acceptable bounds. This interview was the result of many complaints from Resina, where it would appear that the Carabinieri have settled down to batten on the huge numbers of black-marketeers in the area. Last week they rounded up a band of contrabandisti and then freed them on payment of 15,000 lire per head. Another less affluent band got off with a total payment of 30,000 lire. The crunch came when they ‘requisitioned’ a lorry-load of leather belonging to the Consiglio di Economia, and held it at their barracks until a ransom of 20,000 lire was paid. Pecorella agreed that this was scandalous. Yet what was to be done? If he sacked the men they couldn’t be replaced, and his force is only one-quarter of its regular strength.

The fact is that with all their shortcomings, the police manage to keep the walking corpse of law and order alive and on its feet, and some get themselves killed doing so. They tolerate the big racketeers of the Camorra because there is nothing they can do about them, and they gratefully accept whatever they are given in the way of protection money, but they are relentless in the war they wage on petty thieves, and for this, at least, the public is grateful.

January 7

Today I made my first contact in the Zona di Camorra, outside the police, when Lo Scalzo took me up to see Donna Maria Fidora, otherwise known as La Pitonessa (the Pythoness), who lives on her estate near Caivano, and is the richest landowner in this locality. Donna Maria was originally a circus performer who specialised in wrestling with a python, and in this way attracted the fascinated attention of Don Francisco Fidora, an intellectual who was writing a book on the circus, and who immediately proposed marriage and was accepted. A man twenty years her senior, and of delicate constitution, he was said by Lo Scalzo to have died of a heart attack either in the act of the marriage’s consummation, or shortly after.

All this happened a decade ago, since which time the Marshal said Donna Maria had run the estate with professional efficiency. I found her a soft, well-rounded woman with a dreaming smile, no longer showing any signs of what must have been the impressive musculature of her youth. We drank fizzy wine from the estate, chewed on hard biscuits, and complained of the times we lived in. Later Lo Scalzo mentioned that Donna Maria employed her own private army to keep order on her land, for which reason it was an oasis of discipline and calm in the general anarchy of its environment. No one could pull the wool over her eyes, he said. She knew just as much about what went on behind the scenes as did the Sindaco himself, but — as the Camorra did not admit women to its membership — she was a far more dependable source of information from my point of view.

January 12

The epidemic of wire-cutting continues with the General’s threats rumbling in the background and a great drive by the MPs. As usual the small people who cut the wire bear the brunt of the offensive, but no attempt is made to track down the traders who buy and sell the copper.

There is plenty of muddle and tragedy in this tiny corner of our war effort. Yesterday Antonio Priore, scrap-merchant, age unknown but thought to be about seventy, was pushing his hand-cart through the streets of Afragola when he was stopped by an MP patrol who went through his load of scrap and found severed lengths of wire. Priore seemed at first to be under the impression that they were interested in buying the wire, and explained through the interpreter that there was plenty more where that came from. He was astonished to be arrested, contending that the wire was German; he claimed that Italians had been urged in Allied broadcasts during the German occupation to do just what he had done.

This was clearly the MP’s pigeon, but for some reason I was dragged in and sent to see Priore in Poggio Reale, where I found him shivering and shaking in his cell. He was very old and decrepit, and if not positively halfwitted, certainly far from bright. The old man was clearly bewildered to be in Poggio Reale. He had always understood, he said, that the Allies had promised to reward Italians like himself who worked for their cause, and what better proof was there of the patriotic work he had undertaken than the possession of quantities of German wire? So far there had been no talk of rewarding him in any way, and all the thanks he had received was to be hauled off and thrown into prison. ‘So the Allies won, eh? And good luck to them,’ he said. ‘I certainly did what little I could.’ He clearly thought I had come to take him out. ‘Be nice to get back home to the old woman,’ he said. ‘I didn’t like to think of her in that house all on her own last night. Can’t get about too well any more.’ He had old, red, runny eyes that looked as though they were full of tears when I arrived, so it was difficult to decide whether or not he was weeping when I left.

In the afternoon I drove out to Afragola through cold, pitiless rain, and had great difficulty in finding the Priore shack in the waterlogged fields. Inside, hideous, stinking poverty; an old lady shrivelled as a mummy lying fully dressed under a pile of rags in a bed. Starving cats, rats, leaking roof, a suffocating smell of excrement. Not the slightest sign of food anywhere. Nearest house two hundred yards away.

At the Carabinieri Station I found the Brigadiere in a state of shock, sitting at his desk staring into space. He was suffering from daily gunfights between rival gangs, bandits, pillaging army deserters, vendettas, kidnappings, mysterious disappearances, reported cases of typhus, the non-arrival of his pay and the shortage of supplies of every kind, including ammunition, and it flabbergasted him that it was possible for anyone to be concerned about the fate of one abandoned old woman. ‘If it worries you so much,’ he said, ‘why not just let the old man go?’

From Afragola I went to the MP’s HQ to take away samples of wire, and then on to Signals for expert examination. ‘Of course it’s German wire,’ the Captain said, ‘but half the wire we use is. It’s our wire now. Surely it all depends when the cutting took place?’ He studied the copper where it had been chopped into. ‘Looks quite bright, doesn’t it?’

Back at HQ I recommended Priore’s release, and was told that the recommendation was out of order. Priore was held in Poggio Reale at the disposition of the Military Police, noted for their stubborn defence of their territorial rights. So Priore would be brought to trial in a week’s time — or maybe two weeks, or even three weeks, depending on pressure of business in the courts. Meanwhile the wife would die alone in their shack. There was nothing whatever to be done.

January 14

Rumours are the standby — the bread and butter — of any security section, and in a section like this where a daily report is insisted upon, and material has to be raked up to fill it from one source or another, they are avidly snatched up for use as space-fillers. It is said that in some sections, less worthy than ours, they are unscrupulously manufactured by section members themselves. At all events, whether true or — as in most cases — false, they are rarely of the slightest importance.

This morning’s rumour, picked from my report by the FSO, proved to be the rare exception, and in reading it he fairly bounded from his chair and within minutes was on his way to Army Headquarters. The rumour was that an invasion was planned at Anzio, just south of Rome, and would take place next week. An hour or two later the FSO was back, frothing with excitement. In this case the rumour was fact. The invasion was on, and I was ordered forthwith to track down the source of the leak which might necessitate having to call the whole operation off.

A ticklish business indeed, because the information came from the Gemellis with whom I dined last night. Since the time of the arrest of their next-door neighbour Signora Esposito-Lau, I had struck up a friendship with both Norah and her husband Alberto, and it was a friendship of the kind that I hoped would outlast the war. Whenever I found myself at a loose end of an evening it had become my habit to run up to the Via Filippo Palizzi and spend it with my friends chatting about life in general, or listening to readings of poetry by Norah, usually from Dante or Leopardi. Through the Gemellis I had made a network of friendships, and now being told that I was obliged to go back to these people and browbeat them if necessary, to obtain further information, meant the certain loss of their confidence and their affection.

I saw Norah and did the best I could to explain the predicament I was in. The fact that she was only half Italian and had either inherited or believed she had inherited emotional attitudes from her Irish mother, clearly helped. She clung to a sentimental fictional view of our basic rectitude as a nation. I was Welsh, too, which was halfway to being Irish. We were all Celts together, united in our little Camorra against the big Camorra of Naples, the Americans and other foreigners in general. The upshot was I got the name of an Ingeniere Crespi, at whose house at a dinner-party attended by the Gemellis the thing had started, and Norah went off to see Signora Crespi and prepare her for my visit.

Fortunately the honoured and terrible tradition of Omertà is gradually dying out in the Neapolitan upper classes. Had the sweet and smiling little Signora Crespi and her family inhabited a basso in Sant’ Antonio Abate, stronghold in Naples of all the ancient and mysterious traditions, one of which raises the guest to the dignity and sanctity of a member of a family, she would not have talked. She would have ducked and dodged, and in the end produced the inevitable trump card: ‘I made it all up, I was lying to impress my friends, so do what you like about it.’ But Signora Crespi lived in a Via dei Mille block of flats with a uniformed porter, and a lift that would work again one day, and her husband was a successful man and her son went to the university, and all these things had had their civilising and their taming effect. The Signora talked, describing the occasion at another dinner-party when a British civilian technician employed by the Navy had become a little tipsy and boastful, reacting to the general contention that the war had reached a state of stalemate by brandishing the news of the impending invasion.

This was a textbook case of a breach of security, of the kind described at the Matlock course. One had heard of this kind of thing, but never believed that it could really happen. The fateful news of the landing might as well have ...