The Allies in Naples

On the morning of 1 October 1943 the first Allied armoured cars drove into Naples. Italy’s third-largest city and the biggest port in the south of the country passed into Allied hands without a fight: the Germans had pulled out during the night of 30 September to 1 October, after four days of street fighting with the inhabitants. It is often said that the Neapolitans “ended the uprising and liberated the city from German occupation”. That is a simplification. The Four Days of Naples put a stop to the round-ups and saved part of the city from destruction, but what decided the German departure was the approach of the Fifth Army from Salerno and the decision of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring to fall back to the line of the Volturno. The insurgents prepared the ground, but it was the Allies who took the city – and it was they who from then on had to deal with what the Germans had left behind.

Entering the city

The road to Naples had been opened by the victory in the Salerno beachhead, where General Mark Clark’s Fifth Army had landed on 9 September. After the crisis of mid-September, when German counter-attacks nearly drove the Allies back into the sea, the Battle of Salerno ended with a German withdrawal northwards. The British X Corps still had to fight its way through the passes of the Sorrento Peninsula and at Nocera, which guarded the approaches to the Campanian plain.

The first into the city were the cavalrymen of the British King’s Dragoon Guards, followed by the Royal Scots Greys and paratroopers of General Matthew Ridgway’s US 82nd Airborne Division. Clark drove into Naples the same day. Ridgway’s division took over garrison duties in the city, while the front-line units pressed on northwards towards the Volturno, where the Germans were already preparing their next line of defence.

The welcome was mixed. In the districts that had fought in the preceding days the soldiers were greeted by crowds, flowers and wine. Elsewhere people emerged warily from the caves and shelters in which they had hidden from the air raids and the German round-ups. Many were, above all, hungry.

A city without water or a port

The Naples the Allies took over was a ruin. Since 1940 it had endured – depending on the tally – anything from over a hundred to about two hundred air raids, first British and later American as well, in which, according to Italian estimates, more than 20,000 civilians had been killed. To the damage of war was added the systematic destruction carried out by the departing Germans. Under Kesselring’s order to leave the Allies nothing they could use, sappers blew up the quays, cranes and port warehouses, and sank dozens of ships, barges and floating docks in the basins and at the harbour entrance. They destroyed power stations, telephone exchanges, railway stations and factories. They cut the aqueduct that brought water into the city and disabled the pumps and reservoirs, leaving hundreds of thousands of people without drinking water or sewerage. As early as 12 September, in reprisal for the first acts of resistance, they had set fire to the university building.

Reconstruction began with the port, on which the army’s entire supply depended. American and British engineers and naval salvage crews raised the wrecks or built makeshift piers on top of them, so that ships could moor directly alongside the sunken hulls. The first vessels were unloaded in October, and within a few weeks Naples was handling shipments on a large scale. Engineers also restored the water supply – first from tankers and individual sources, then from the repaired aqueduct – and at least partly brought the electricity network back into service.

Delayed-action mines

The Germans left behind not only destruction but also traps. In many public buildings their sappers had planted charges with time fuses set to go off after days or weeks. On 7 October explosions shook the monumental Central Post Office in the city centre, where people made homeless by the bombing had taken shelter. Casualty figures vary: Italian sources speak of 30 killed and 84 wounded, American accounts of more than a hundred dead, including women, children and soldiers of the 82nd Division. The photographer Robert Capa was on the spot and photographed the wrecked building and the dead. The charges are usually attributed to the Germans; some American accounts at the time spoke of Italian Fascists acting on their behalf.

On the morning of 10 October an explosion destroyed the artillery barracks in which American engineers were quartered. According to these units’ own records, some 45 men of B Company, 307th Airborne Engineer Battalion, and H Company, 36th Engineer Regiment, were killed and several dozen wounded. From then on every large building was searched before it was occupied, and fear of further explosions hung over the city for a long time.

Under Allied rule

Authority in the city passed to the Allied Military Government (AMG, initially known as AMGOT), which had been administering Sicily since July. In the Fifth Army’s sector it was headed by an American army doctor, Brigadier General Edgar Erskine Hume. The first task was to feed the city: Naples had been living on starvation rations for months, and the Campanian countryside, plundered by the retreating army, could not supply it. The Allies brought in flour by sea, got the bakeries working again and set bread rations, but these long remained meagre.

Hunger and unemployment gave rise to phenomena that for years defined the image of wartime Naples in the eyes of soldiers and correspondents. The black market flourished: almost anything that leaked out of the Allied depots and the port was up for sale, from cigarettes and tinned food to tyres, medicines and whole lorry-loads. Soldiers, officials and a resurgent Camorra all took part in the theft and trade. According to contemporary accounts and later research, one of the most efficient organisers of illegal trade in the region was the American gangster Vito Genovese, who managed to become an interpreter for, and collaborator of, the military administration. Prostitution spread, and with it venereal disease. Norman Lewis, a British intelligence officer who spent that year in the city, described it all in a diary later published as Naples ’44 – one of the most frequently cited testimonies of the Allied occupation.

Typhus and DDT

The wrecked water supply, overcrowded shelters and malnutrition created ideal conditions for lice, and with them for epidemic typhus. The first cases appeared in the autumn of 1943, and by winter the disease had reached epidemic proportions. The response was a delousing campaign on an unprecedented scale. From 9 December 1943 it was run by the health commission of the Rockefeller Foundation, and from 3 January 1944 by the United States of America Typhus Commission. At delousing stations and out in the streets people were dusted with powder containing a new insecticide, DDT, without undressing, using blowers pushed under their clothes. According to Allied figures more than a million such treatments were given, and by February 1944 the epidemic had been brought under control. The success at Naples – it was stressed that this was the first time a typhus epidemic had been halted in the middle of winter – became a showcase for DDT. Historians of medicine point out, however, that the powder was only one element of the campaign, alongside vaccination, the isolation of the sick and quarantine.

Place in the war

The capture of Naples closed the first stage of the Italian campaign. The Allies at last had a large port on the mainland, and the airfields of the Campanian plain allowed their air forces to reach further north. Naples became the main supply base of the Allied armies in Italy: from then on troops, ammunition, fuel and food for the front passed over its quays, and in January 1944 part of the Anzio landing force, among others, sailed from its harbour. It did not, however, bring a swift march on Rome. Within days the troops that had entered the city on 1 October were standing on the Volturno, and beyond it lay further German defensive lines – Kesselring intended to hold out south of Rome, in the mountains, rain and mud, throughout the winter.

For the city itself, 1 October did not mean the end of the war but the start of a new chapter of it. Naples remained an important target for German air raids, and in March 1944 it was also struck by an eruption of Vesuvius, which destroyed surrounding villages and several dozen American bombers at a nearby airfield. At the same time it was in liberated Naples and its surroundings that Italian political life revived: the Neapolitan philosopher Benedetto Croce, one of the leading figures of the anti-Fascist opposition, was living in nearby Sorrento, and the parties united in the committees of national liberation began to argue over the future of the monarchy and of Marshal Pietro Badoglio’s government. The four-day uprising and the hard year of Allied administration long shaped the city’s memory of the war: pride in a rising it had carried out on its own, and bitter recollection of the hunger, poverty and exploitation that followed.