By Dominic Green

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.

Naples became the first city where the Allies discovered that they were conquerors. A preconquest primer for the Stars and Stripes newspaper, written by a sergeant who had never seen Naples, introduced it as "one of the original 'pleasure cities' of Europe," where the people "go fishing and sailing and drink their vino." The article's title inverted Goethe's advice to the tourist ("See Naples and die") into the soldier's priority: "See Naples and Live." The real Naples was historically poor, crowded and violent. It was more than usually unmanageable after the collapse of the Fascist government in July 1943, the arrival of a German garrison in September and an anti-German uprising at the end of that month, an overlooked episode that Mr. Lowe brings to vivid life.

In the first of many missteps, Mark Clark, the "notoriously vain" and inexperienced American commander, stage-managed his entry parade at Piazza Garibaldi in the east of the city, only to find, he later wrote, the streets "practically empty of civilians." The crowds were massing on the other side of the city, where Naples usually received its conquerors.

Clark planned to make Naples's port the supply hub for the Italian campaign and the city a resort for troops on their way to and from the front line. His ingenious engineers took only days to set up distribution stations and temporary piping for drinking water. Rather than tow away the wrecks, they got the port working by building walkways on top of them. Within a month of liberation, 80% of Naples's sewers were fixed. The port was "handling more tonnage than New York," a "brilliant example," Mr. Lowe writes, "of what could be achieved through Anglo-American cooperation." But the civilian administrators of the Allied Military Government $(AMG)$ were "unprepared . . . under-staffed, under-financed and under-equipped." According to one AMG officer, its men were "well-meaning mediocrities with no political experience, no clear plan and no proper direction." Most of them did not arrive in Naples until December. Many of them lost their typewriters on the way.

Bombed by the Allies, then brutalized by the Germans, the Neapolitans now found themselves "caught beneath the wheels of the military juggernaut" and dependent on the mercy of the administrators who came in its wake for survival. The occupiers poured "phenomenal" resources and 10 tons of DDT into successfully heading off a typhus outbreak, but they "never properly understood, and never got to grips with" the civilian housing crisis that had contributed to the epidemic. The exponential increase in prostitution forced the Allies to deploy the second of their "miracle substances," penicillin, not to restore public morality but to reduce the number of soldiers incapacitated by venereal disease.

The AMG was reactive and weak, but the "worst problems," we are told, were caused by the soldiers. Fresh from the front and facing death and disfigurement on their return, the Allied armies pampered their soldiers with hot showers, hot food and dance bands in the requisitioned hotels. The soldiers, on a short furlough from hard fighting that they knew was likely to kill or maim them, wanted to get drunk and have sex while they could. Allied military police were unable to keep the infantry from invading the dark labyrinth of medieval backstreets known as the Spanish Quarter. The soldiers turned Naples into a vast brothel. Most of their criminality went unpunished.

Mr. Lowe argues that "the history of the city, the region, and indeed the whole country might have been very different" had the people of Naples "been left at this point to organize their own affairs." The detailed evidence of his indictment suggests otherwise. Naples was always notorious for poverty, crime, prostitution and civic dysfunction. These historic tendencies ran amok when the Germans left. The Allies prioritized fighting Germany over fixing Italy, so the speed of their response depended upon the military implications of civilian problems. The result, as Mr. Lowe's well-researched and often disturbing account shows, was that the strong did as they wanted and the weak suffered because they were not needed.

--Mr. Green is a Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

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April 11, 2025 10:43 ET (14:43 GMT)

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