Naples '44 Book

I have a GR virtual bookshelf for "WWII" and this is the 39th book to be added to it. None of the other 38 are anything like this. A journal written at the time with the author's immediate impressions, and providing a view of the conflict that I personally hadn't encountered before.

The account starts with the landings at Salerno, and from the author's perspective the event was one of confusion, widespread panic, deaths from "friendly fire", and all round ineptitude, with results that varied from the comic to the tragic. The narrative then moves on to the Allied occupation of Naples. The author's Italian language skills led him to be posted to something called"The Field Security Service". It seems to have been a sort of frontline version of M.I.5, responsible for rooting out enemy agents, saboteurs etc, although Mr Lewis seems to have spent much of his time checking on the background of Italian women seeking to marry British servicemen.

When the Allied troops arrived in Naples the population was starving, and a large proportion of the female population was forced into at least part time prostitution, simply to obtain food. The author also describes how the population quickly organised mass theft of supplies from the Allied Army, to the extent that military hospitals were sometimes so short of medicines that they had to buy them back from those who stole them. The author's sympathies lay entirely with the civilian population, and he was very much of the view that senior commanders/staff of the Allied Military Government were involved in racketeering.

It's probably the case that the author saw Naples through the telescope of his job in Field Security, but that job, and his language skills, allowed him something of a window into a section of Neapolitan society, and the reader is treated to images that range from the astonishing to the horrifying. Overall though, the author describes being an outsider - a cog in a machine trying, and largely failing, to govern a society with social norms the occupiers did not understand.

A fascinating account of a society under extreme stress.