Naples ’44

"Strictly speaking it’s not a book about the postwar period as it’s about Naples in 1944 rather than in 1945 or 1946, but I chose it because it shows what life was like immediately after the liberation of the south of Italy. This was the first area of Europe to be liberated so it was the first sight the Allies had of what they were dealing with, which was pretty chaotic. Naples in 1944 was a city in meltdown. First and foremost, there was no food at all. Children would dig up grass from the roadside to take home to eat. Even the fish at the city’s aquarium mysteriously disappeared one night. People would do anything to get hold of some food – literally anything. Norman Lewis repeatedly had men approach him trying to press the favours of their wives and their daughters upon him in return for a hot meal. So prostitution was rife; the black market was rife; people resorted to banditry; the mafia started running all sorts of black market operations – the whole moral atmosphere in Naples all revolved around the fact that there wasn’t enough food to go round and anybody would do anything to get hold of some. It was like descending into one of Dante’s circles of hell. Yes. He’s there as a military governor of one area of Naples. He’s the person people came to when there were problems. Well, you could argue that it’s still not functioning properly. The mafia is still there. The mafia was, to a degree, reinstated by the Allies when they arrived. They needed somebody to be in charge and they didn’t know who the right people were. They wanted to avoid complete chaos so they installed people who looked like they had authority. In some cases that meant keeping the fascists on board, in other cases it meant reinstalling the mafia people who the fascists had got rid of years earlier. The chaos that existed immediately after the war wasn’t really solved, and the problems that were created trying to solve it are still there today. “The mafia was, to a degree, reinstated by the Allies when they arrived.” When the Allies arrived they were like gods. They had unlimited access to food, money and cigarettes and all the things that the local people were craving. So if you were an Allied soldier, it didn’t matter how junior your rank, you could do anything – and get away with anything. The corruption that brought with it was every bit as bad as the home-grown corruption. Some of the stories of Allied soldiers lining up with tins of food to hand over to women they are going to sleep with are quite chilling."