This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Keith Lowe has taken on quite a challenge. The legacy of the wartime memoir written by the late, great travel writer Norman Lewis, is certainly a hard act to follow. Sergeant Lewis, who entered the city for the first time in September 1944, served with the British Army Intelligence Corps. 

In 1978 he published a vivid memoir of all he witnessed, good, bad and terrible during the allied occupation of the southern Italian city. Naples ’44 sits easily alongside the finest wartime publications, certainly as page-turning as my own favourite, From the City, From the Plough, Alexander Baron’s poignant novel based on his own service during the D-Day Landings. 

Lowe’s history of these times succeeds on many levels in offering a new generation fresh insight into the brutal early days of the Italian campaign. The suffering of Naples would act as a precursor of the immense destruction to come, as the allies bludgeoned their slow path up the spine of Italy. An author capable of producing the award-winning narrative on post-war Europe, Savage Continent, brings all his research abilities to this book to make it just as insightful.

Due to its strategic position between Italian campaigning in North Africa and the German occupation of France by the late summer of 1940, the port of Naples was a crucial asset. From mid-1943, when the Axis partnership fell apart, it was occupied by German units and the city endured countless allied air raids. However, bombs from British and American planes intended for military targets soon morphed into mass air raids, killing thousands of the city’s population well before any allied soldier set foot on the Italian mainland. 

Lowe meticulously details just how brutally their new German landlords treated any Neapolitan daring to step out of line as Sicily fell and an allied invasion of the mainland seemed a certainty. Civilians were taken as hostages, dozens shot in reprisal for a single German murdered and thousands of locals forced to watch their execution. 

Such was the barbarity of occupation, that it would spark a local uprising: the “Four Days” in late September 1943, which witnessed public food stores plundered, priceless artifacts looted and Germans seeking to destroy anything of military value to the advancing allies.

Lowe is particularly adept at detailing how the city’s amenities were systematically destroyed by German sapper units; the port was made unusable with the scuttling of over 300 vessels in the harbour and cranes and offices demolished. Landmines were laid everywhere, some on long-delayed timers which would cause havoc in the coming weeks. 

Lowe details a liberated city of hysterical, starving and destitute survivors, acclaiming advancing allied units in almost a daze, as one American divisional commander described: “The sight of a great city like Naples with wrecked buildings, deserted streets and bewildered people was very depressing.” 

Lowe’s descriptions resonated with me deeply as I wrote about the survivors rising out of the sewers and collapsed cellars of the city of Stalingrad which had defeated the German Sixth Army months before Naples would fall. Any captured, destroyed city, offers the same problems for the new owners. 

The city, under its new military governor Lieutenant General Mark W. Clark (Lowe is not a fan), faced critical issues: no water supply, no electricity, hardly any rations, all telecommunications destroyed and roads and bridges into and out of Naples wrecked. 

A military solution was required quickly; the harbour was up and running in a few short weeks, but as Lowe points out time and again, the needs of the military outweighed the fate of the civilian population, just as it had with the German army. 

The needs of the military outweighed the fate of the civilian population

The city’s population would continue to use any means necessary to survive until proper support arrived in the post-war programme of the Marshall Plan. 

Meanwhile, as war waged in the north, Neapolitans resorted to prostitution, child labour, a thriving black market and the settling of old scores between rival political groups, communities and neighbours. 

Lowe does not seek to hang the allied command out to dry for their neglect of the city, but to show that Naples was their first attempt on the European mainland to take successful ownership of a liberated people. 

Such a failure of leadership as displayed in Naples 1944 would not be repeated to so devastating a degree elsewhere. The destruction, however, would continue unabated. A war still had to be won.