The Four Days of Naples

On 28 September 1943 the fighting in Naples grew into a rising of the whole city. Its inhabitants, who for weeks had heard the thunder of the guns at Salerno and knew that the Allies were not far away, took up arms against the German garrison. The fighting had begun in earnest a day earlier, on 27 September, and lasted until 30 September; it went down in history as the Four Days of Naples (Quattro giornate di Napoli). It was a spontaneous rising of the city’s districts, not an operation planned by the underground – without a common command, using weapons seized from barracks and depots. When the first Allied patrols drove into the city on 1 October, the Germans were already gone.

The city after the capitulation

In 1943 Naples was one of the hardest-hit cities in Italy. The largest port in the south and a base for shipping to North Africa, it had been a target of air raids since 1940 – British at first and, from December 1942, also American. Italian estimates put the number of civilians killed in the bombing at more than 20,000; the raid of 4 August 1943 alone killed more than 3,000 people. The city was hungry, battered and weary of war.

News of the Italian capitulation, announced on 8 September, was greeted here with joy, but with no orders. The military commanders in Naples, Generals Riccardo Pentimalli and Ettore Del Tetto, did not fight – Del Tetto handed the city over to the Germans, banned gatherings and left Naples in civilian clothes. The Italian units in Campania disintegrated within a few days, and the Germans, as part of Operation Achse, disarmed them and sent the soldiers to camps in the Reich. Isolated clashes were already taking place: on 10 September in Piazza del Plebiscito Neapolitans stopped several German vehicles, and in reprisal the occupiers set fire to the National Library and fired on the crowd gathered in front of it.

Meanwhile, on 9 September, General Mark Clark’s US Fifth Army had landed at Salerno, only a few dozen kilometres to the south. For the Germans, Naples thus became a rear area of the front and soon a city that would have to be abandoned. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring intended to leave it to the Allies in as useless a state as possible: the port was to be blown up, and everything and everyone that might be of use to the Reich was to be removed from the city. According to Italian accounts, Hitler wanted Naples to be reduced to “ash and mud” before the withdrawal.

The rule of Colonel Schöll

On 12 September the Germans killed dozens of Italian soldiers in the streets of Naples and deported some 4,000 servicemen and civilians for forced labour. That same day Colonel Walter Schöll (Scholl in some sources) took command of the city. The next day his proclamation appeared on the walls: a state of siege, a curfew from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m., the surrender of all weapons within 24 hours on pain of death, and for every German soldier killed or wounded, a “hundredfold” revenge. The threats were not empty: on 12 September a sailor had been shot on the steps of the university, with thousands of passers-by rounded up to watch the execution; in nearby Teverola 14 Carabinieri who had defended the telephone exchange against German engineers were shot.

Further decrees struck the whole city. On 23 September Schöll ordered a 300-metre-deep strip along the coast to be evacuated within a matter of hours – by Italian calculations about 240,000 people had to leave their homes. The “military security zone” looked like preparation for the destruction of the port. At the same time the prefect announced compulsory labour service for men aged 18 to 33 (other age limits are sometimes given), which in practice meant deportation to labour camps in northern Italy and in Germany. Of the roughly 30,000 men the call-up was meant to cover, reportedly only 150 reported. German patrols therefore began round-ups: men were dragged from their homes and off the streets, and evasion was punishable by death.

It was the round-ups, not news from the front, that proved the last straw. On 26 September an unarmed crowd in the streets freed some of those detained. Soldiers of the disbanded army, who had been hiding in flats since 8 September, came out of hiding, and the inhabitants of the Vomero district had already seized ammunition from an abandoned artillery battery and rifles from a school store.

Four days

On 27 September the Germans detained several thousand men in sweeps (Italian sources speak of about 8,000). They were answered with gunfire. On the Vomero an armed group stopped a German car and killed the driver; Lieutenant Enzo Stimolo led some 200 men against the arsenal in the Castel Sant’Elmo, which by evening was in the insurgents’ hands. That same night the arms stores in the barracks on Via Foria and Via San Giovanni a Carbonara were broken into.

On 28 September the rising spread to further districts. In Materdei residents besieged for many hours a German patrol that had taken refuge in an apartment building; at Porta Capuana forty armed men built a barricade, killed six Germans and took four prisoner. There was fighting at the Maschio Angioino, in Vasto and in Monteoliveto. A group of sailors prevented German engineers from blowing up the Ponte della Sanità, which linked the northern districts with the centre. On the Vomero the Germans herded detainees into the stadium; Stimolo’s unit set out to free them.

The insurgents had no common command. The Antifascist National Front, the nucleus of the committees of national liberation, failed to establish contact with the fighting districts, so each had its own leaders: officers of the disbanded army, doctors, teachers, workers. Among the fighters were women and scugnizzi – the street boys of Naples, who by Italian calculations made up about a tenth of the insurgents. The youngest symbol of the rising became the eleven-year-old Gennaro Capuozzo, killed in street fighting on 29 September; he was posthumously awarded the Gold Medal of Military Valour.

29 September saw the heaviest fighting. In Piazza Mazzini the Germans, supported by tanks, attacked about 50 insurgents, twelve of whom were killed. The working-class district of Ponticelli was shelled by artillery, and German troops murdered civilians there. There was fighting near Capodichino airfield. That same day, at the German headquarters on Corso Vittorio Emanuele, which the insurgents had attacked repeatedly, Schöll held talks with Stimolo: in exchange for the release of the hostages from the stadium, the Germans were granted free passage out of the city.

On 30 September the German units were already withdrawing north. A secondary-school teacher, Antonio Tarsia in Curia, proclaimed himself leader of the insurgents at the Liceo Sannazaro and assumed civil and military authority in the city – he even issued decrees on shop opening hours. All day German guns on the Capodimonte hills shelled the centre. The departing occupiers burned and destroyed: the holdings of the State Archives of Naples, earlier moved for safety to a villa near Nola, went up in flames, and the port, factories and water mains were blown up. A few days later a charge left in the main post office building exploded.

The Allied entry and the toll

On the morning of 1 October 1943 British armoured cars of the King’s Dragoon Guards drove into Naples, followed by the Royal Scots Greys and paratroopers of the US 82nd Airborne Division. The soldiers, who had fought their way from Salerno across the passes of the Sorrento Peninsula after the crisis on the beachhead, found a city in ruins, hungry and without water – but free of Germans. Kesselring regarded the withdrawal to the line of the Volturno as a success.

The casualty figures for the rising are uncertain. Some authors give 168 insurgents killed and 159 civilians dead; the post-war ministerial commission for the recognition of partisans counted 155 killed, and the registers of the Poggioreale cemetery list 562 deaths in those days. Officially, 1,589 participants in the fighting were recognised. German losses cannot be determined precisely. For those days Naples was awarded the Gold Medal of Military Valour.

Generals Pentimalli and Del Tetto, who had fled in civilian clothes, were sentenced after the liberation by the High Court of Justice to 20 years’ military imprisonment for collaborating with the occupier.

Place in the war

The Four Days of Naples did not decide the capture of the city – that was settled by Salerno and the German withdrawal to the Volturno. The rising nevertheless had real consequences: it put an end to the round-ups and the announced deportation of tens of thousands of men, saved some bridges and buildings from demolition, and prevented the Germans from turning the city into a strongpoint. Although civilians had fought the Germans alongside soldiers in Rome as early as 9 and 10 September, it was in Naples that an entire great city first rose against the occupier.

For Italians it was one of the founding moments. After the collapse of the state and the army on 8 September, the Neapolitans showed that Italians could fight the Germans not on orders but of their own free will. Soon an organised Italian resistance movement emerged in the north of the country, occupied by the Germans and ruled by Mussolini’s puppet state, while liberated Naples became the Allies’ main supply base in the Italian campaign. Despite the destruction, the port was partly back in operation within a few weeks.

The memory of the rising was preserved in Nanni Loy’s 1962 film The Four Days of Naples, and on the Riviera di Chiaia a monument was erected to the scugnizzo – the street boy who became the symbol of those days.