The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
“Naples has been taken by our troops,” Clark radioed Alexander. “City quiet. No indications of disease or disorder.” The delirious welcome buoyed Clark’s spirits, and to Renie he wrote, “I give you Naples for your birthday. I love you. Wayne.”
It proved an odd gift, neither quiet nor lacking in disease and disorder. Insurrection had flared in Naples on September 26, two weeks after Kesselring’s troops occupied the city and began conscripting young men into labor battalions. A reign of German terror that featured public executions for minor infractions led first to gunplay by Italian snipers reportedly as young as nine, and then to pitched battles in the railroad station and Piazza Carlo III. Rebels manhandled streetcars to build barricades, and fought with shotguns, swords, ancient muskets, and roofing tiles. An estimated three hundred locals died in the brawling, and the OSS believed that Neapolitan fury had forced German troops to quit the city two days sooner than planned.
“There were still Germans fighting in spots,” Gavin later told his diary, “but worse the Italians were fighting each other, accusing friends and foes alike of being Fascists or tedeschi.” Teenagers in tin helmets roamed the streets, armed with kitchen knives, tire irons, and German Lugers; red Italian grenades dangled from their belts. Robert Capa photographed a schoolhouse converted into a morgue with twenty boys arrayed in twenty crude coffins shouldered by men in black fedoras; keening women blotted their eyes and held up photographs of their dead children. George Biddle took his sketchbook into the Ospedale degli Incurabili, where he found 150 dead civilians on stretchers and window shutters, slips of paper with their names and addresses tucked into their folded hands. There were no trucks to haul them to graveyards, nor was there water to wash their blood from the hospital floor. Families carrying clean shirts and white undergarments to dress the dead “wandered about the corridor in the semi-darkness, holding mufflers or handkerchefs over their faces,” and peering at each body in dread of finding a familiar face.
Naples itself—“the most beautiful city in the universe,” in Stendahl’s judgment—had been mutilated. German vengeance at Italy’s betrayal foreshadowed the spasmodic violence that European towns large and small could expect as the price of liberation. Half of the city’s one million residents had remained through the German occupation, but none now had running water: Wehrmacht sappers had blown up the main aqueduct in seven places and drained municipal reservoirs. Dynamite dropped down manholes wrecked at least forty sewer lines. Explosives also demolished the long-distance telephone exchange, three-quarters of the city’s bridges, and electrical generators and substations. Among the gutted industrial plants—about fifty in all—were a steelworks, an oil refinery, breweries, tanneries, and canneries; others were wired for demolition though they had been not fired. Saboteurs wrecked city trams, repair barns, and even street cleaners. A railroad tunnel into Naples was blocked by crashing two trains head-on. Coal stockpiles were ignited, and for weeks served as beacons for Luftwaffe bombers. The Germans had extorted ransom from Italian fishermen for their boats—a small skiff was worth one gold watch—and then burned the fleet anyway. Even the stairwells in barracks and apartment buildings were dynamited to make the upper floors inaccessible.
The opportunities for cultural atrocity were boundless in a city so rich in culture. A German battalion burst into the library of the Italian Royal Society, soaked the shelves with kerosene, and fired the place with grenades, shooting guards who resisted and keeping firemen at bay. The city archives and fifty thousand volumes at the University of Naples, where Thomas Aquinas once taught, got the same treatment, leaving the place “stinking of burned old leather and petrol.” Another eighty thousand precious books and manuscripts stored in Nola were reduced to ashes, along with paintings, ceramics, and ivories.
Worse yet was the sabotage around the great port, which compounded grievous damage inflicted by months of Allied bombing. Half a mile inland, the city’s commercial districts remained mostly intact, although looters had rifled the Singer Sewing Machine showroom and the Kodak shop on Via Roma. But along the esplanade—where the corpse of the beautiful Siren Parthenope was said to have washed ashore after Odysseus spurned her “high, thrilling song”—all was shambles. Bombs had battered the Castel Nuovo, the National Library, and the Palazzo Reale, where every window was broken, the roof punctured, and the chapel demolished by a detonation beneath the ceiling beams. Grand hotels—the Excelsior, the Vesuvio, the Continental—had been gutted by bombs or by German vandals who torched the rooms and ignited the bedding in courtyard bonfires. An American port battalion stevedore, Paul W. Brown, described waterside buildings that had been
sliced in half, leaving the remaining halves showing exposed rooms with furniture intact or half hanging out, pictures on a wall, a brass bed slanting down toward the street, bed linen still in place. From the open side of a third-story room the legs of a corpse dangled.
Not a single vessel remained afloat in the port, a drowned forest of charred booms, masts, and funnels. Thirty major wrecks could be seen, and ten times that number lay submerged. All tugs and harbor craft had been sunk; all grain elevators and warehouses demolished; all three hundred cranes sabotaged or toppled into the water. Vessels had been scuttled at fifty-eight of sixty-one berths, often one atop another. An Axis ship with seven thousand tons of ammunition had blown up at Pier F, wrecking four adjacent city blocks, and fires still smoldered on October 2. At Mole H, slips were blocked by a dozen rail cars and a pair of ninety-ton cranes shoved off the pier. Quayside buildings were dynamited so that their rubble tumbled like scree across the docks. To complicate salvage, German demolitionists had seeded the harbor with ammunition, oxygen tanks, and mines.
Only rats still inhabited the waterfront, and hungry urchins with knife-edge shoulder blades who reminded Paul Brown of “small, aged animals.” Although U.S. Army engineers reported that the sabotage had been conducted “by a man who knew his business,” a closer inspection revealed that the Germans “planned their demolitions for revenge, to wreck the economy of Naples, rather than to prevent Allied use of the port.” As the Allies learned from each campaign, so did the Germans, and they would be less sentimental and more comprehensive when the time came to undo Marseilles and Cherbourg.
Still, the damage was monstrous. To sustain an army of half a million men—and Fifth Army would be half that size within weeks—required the monthly cargo equivalent of sixty-eight Liberty ships. Only Naples—sad, scuttled, big-shouldered Naples—could handle such commerce. There was nothing for it but to get to work, and to bring the Siren back from the dead.
The capture of Naples gave Clark time to take stock of a campaign that grew bigger and dirtier by the day. Rommel’s genteel Krieg ohne Hass—“war without hate”—was but a hazy memory from North Africa. The brutality of total war had long been felt on the Eastern Front, but as the Second World War entered its fifth year the stain spread throughout western Europe.
Contrary to Clark’s hopes, the Italian army contributed little to the Allied cause after Rome’s capitulation. Twenty-nine Italian divisions in the Balkans and five more in France mostly surrendered to the Germans, sometimes duped by forged orders and sometimes reduced by force. “Every bomb is chipping a little piece off my heart,” the Italian garrison commander on Rhodes radioed during a Luftwaffe attack. Those defending Italia proper proved just as impotent.
Brave souls—and there were some—faced barbaric reprisals. On the rocky Greek island of Cephalonia, in the Ionian Sea, the 12,000-man Italian army garrison fought for five days at a cost of 1,250 combat deaths before surrendering on September 22. On orders from Berlin, more than 6,000 prisoners were promptly shot, including orderlies with Red Cross brassards, wounded men dragged to the wall from their hospital beds, and officers, executed in batches of eight and twelve. An Italian commander ripped off the Iron Cross given him by Hitler personally and flung it at his firing squad. The dead were ballasted on rafts and sunk at sea or burned in huge pyres that blackened the Ionia
“The only Italian army that will not be treacherous is one that does not exist,” said Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, the German chief of staff. Soon 600,000 Italian soldiers were en route to Germany in cattle cars, not as prisoners of war but as “military internees” to be used for slave labor in factories and mines. Ten thousand German railway workers poured into Italy to ensure that the trains still ran on time.
Three improbable escapes marked the early campaign in Italy. The first had occurred as Clark’s forces came ashore at Salerno before dawn on September 9, when much of the Italian battle fleet fled La Spezia, in northern Italy, for Malta. A German radio intercept detected clandestine sailing preparations, but too late to prevent a sudden sortie for the open sea. The unfortunate battleship Roma would be sunk by the new radio-controlled glide bomb, and captains who, unable to flee La Spezia, scuttled their ships were summarily executed. But by September 21 five other battleships, eight cruisers, thirty-three destroyers, one hundred merchant ships, and many lesser tubs had found refuge in Allied waters, some flying surrender flags said to be “the size of a tennis court.” German forces managed to impound hundreds of smaller naval and merchant vessels, part of a vast catalogue of booty seized in Italy: 1.3 million rifles, 38,000 machine guns, 10,000 artillery tubes, 67,000 horses and mules, 9,000 tons of tobacco, 13,000 tons of quinine, 551,000 overcoats, 2.5 million blankets, 3.3 million pairs of shoes, and, in Rome alone, 60,000 motor vehicles.
The second escape evoked unhappy memories of the Axis getaway from Messina a month earlier. Hitler on September 12 had ordered the evacuation of German forces on Corsica, including thousands who had crossed to the island from nearby Sardinia. As French troops stormed ashore at one end of Corsica, German soldiers decamped from the other end, crossing sixty miles of deep water to northern Italy in transport planes and a cockleshell fleet of ferries. Mostly unmolested by Allied naval or air forces, which pleaded a preoccupation with Salerno, more then thirty thousand enemy troops with their arms and vehicles reached safety by early October. Given the absence of Axis shore batteries or other defenses, the evacuation was “even more astonishing” than Messina had been, as the official U.S. Navy history later conceded. Surely it was every bit as disheartening.
The third escape was the most flamboyant. Since his arrest in late July, Benito Mussolini had been shuttled from cell to whitewashed cell in the islands off Italy’s west coast, spending his days—including his sixtieth birthday—reading Ricciotti’s Life of Jesus and underscoring the passages on betrayal and martyrdom. Hitler’s search for his erstwhile ally included consultation with various occultists and astrologers, among them a certain “Master of the Sidereal Pendulum,” as well as more conventional intelligence clairvoyants. In late August, the Duce was moved to the Hotel Albergo-Rifugio, a vacated ski resort atop the Gran Sasso peaks in the Apennines, accessible only by funicular and guarded by 250 carabinieri. To his daily regimen the prisoner added card games, strolls across the bleak heath, and endless carping about his ulcer. Gray stubble sprouted from his unshaved pate. When Mussolini vowed never to be taken alive, jailers removed all sharp objects, including his razor. “To redeem oneself,” he told his diary, “one must suffer.”
Soon enough his whereabouts leaked. Hitler entrusted the Duce’s rescue to Captain Otto Skorzeny, a six-foot, three-inch Viennese commando whose badly scarred visage attested to the fourteen duels he had supposedly fought as a student. At one P.M. on September 12—just as conditions at Salerno turned grievous—Skorzeny packed 108 men into gliders and took off for the Gran Sasso, carving a hole in the canvas floor of his craft through which to watch for navigational landmarks. Mussolini was sitting at his open bedroom window, arms folded in his iconic pose, when gliders began skittering across the cobbled ground directly outside. Skorzeny bolted up a staircase three steps at a time, flung open the door to room 201, and announced, “Duce, the Führer has sent me to set you free.” Off they went, wedged into a tiny Storch airplane and saluted by the carabinieri guards. After a giddy reunion with Hitler, Mussolini was installed in an Alpine town as the puppet head of a puppet regime called the Italian Social Republic. Even the Germans, rarely celebrated for ironic sensibilities, recognized the pathos. “The Führer now realizes that Italy never was a power, is no power today, and won’t be a power in the future,” Joseph Goebbels told his diary.
Whatever Mussolini’s shortcomings as a world-historical figure, he had kept the Nazi reaper at bay by refusing to allow the deportation of Jews. That moratorium had now ended. On September 16 the first consignment of two dozen Jews was shipped from a town in northern Italy to Auschwitz. Among them was a six-year-old child, who was gassed upon arrival.
The liberation of Naples grew sanguinary again at 2:10 P.M. on Thursday, October 7, when the first German time bomb exploded in the southwest corner of the main post office on Via Monteoliveto. “The first two floors were blown completely away,” a witness reported. “Chunks of steel and marble were thrown as far as 100 yards.” The blast ripped apart an Army work detail and Neapolitans begging for food along a mess line. A soldier, Robert H. Welker, described the carnage in a letter home:
From the huge smoke pall still hanging in the street staggered a sergeant in fatigues, bloody about the face, barely conscious…. The sergeant’s head was rolling from side to side, and all he could mutter was, “What was it? What was it?”
The blast killed and wounded seventy people, half of them soldiers. Rescuers shimmied into the post office basement to dig for survivors, while medical details shoveled up heads and limbs. Welker’s first sergeant called the unit roll that night, reading out names by flashlight. “I shout a word, and live,” Welker wrote. “Another cannot give the word, and is accounted dead…. Here, now, was mortal danger for us all.”
Three days later, on Sunday morning, Clark, Ridgway, and several thousand troops were attending a mass of thanksgiving in the Duomo beneath the vivid frescoes of Paradise when another muffled roar sent them hurrying to a nearby barracks. That blast, in the Corso Orientale, killed twenty-three combat engineers who had fought with Darby’s Rangers at Chiunzi Pass. The two generals helped extricate broken bodies—“sacks of burlap,” in one paratrooper’s description—as well as survivors. “Nice work, boys, thanks,” said a soldier who was pulled from the rubble and hoisted to his feet before falling over, dead. “It makes us all the more determined to crush them completely,” Clark wrote Renie that evening. A bomb squad “delousing” a different wing in the Prince of Piedmont Barracks later found nearly a ton of explosives in stacked boxes with a ticking German fuse set to detonate at seven A.M. on Tuesday, October 19.
Bombs would continue to explode for three weeks. Norman Lewis, a British intelligence officer in Fifth Army, described one demolished apartment building along Via Nazario Sauro in which survivors stood “as motionless as statues, and all coated in thick white dust…. A woman stood like Lot’s wife turned to salt.” Others, in fetal curls, reminded Lewis of “bodies overcome by the ash at Pompeii.” Frantic sappers ultimately searched hundreds of buildings, disarming explosives in seventeen of them. An official “list of suspicious noises” grew to 150 entries. Maledictions on the German fiend grew proportionately fervent, although rarely was it mentioned that Allied planes were dropping thousands of bombs with delay fuses.
Fears that more hidden bombs would be triggered when electricity again surged through the repaired power grid led to a mass evacuation of western Naples in late October. Lewis watched “men carrying their old parents on their backs” and wounded soldiers being wheeled from hospitals. Any loud noise sent women and children stampeding in panic, “leaving trails of urine.” Another British officer, Malcolm Muggeridge, described the evacuees as “a vast concourse gathered on the hills around the city, like a vision of the Last Day, when all the dead arise.” The lights winked on without incident, and t
Neapolitan life after liberation remained brutish for weeks. “There are 57 varieties of grief, but only about 7 of that number that some flour would not cure,” an American officer told his superiors. “These people are hungry.” All the tropical fish in the municipal aquarium were devoured, and the city’s cat population was said to have thinned dramatically. Brackish watering holes and even broken sewer mains drew thousands of parched residents “with buckets, bottles, barrels, cauldrons, [and] coffee pots,” George Biddle noted. Army engineers soon set up two dozen faucets but soldiers with bayonets were needed to quell the rioting.
Twenty-six thousand tons of wheat would be sent from North Africa and the Middle East, but even famine relief had to compete with war matériel for scarce shipping space. The port’s ruin complicated the task, and a third of the food in the initial shipments was stolen. Prices spiraled, sometimes quadrupling overnight. A spectacular black market flourished. Frank Gervasi catalogued the apparently limitless cupboard of luxury goods available even as Neapolitans grew gaunt and the first cases of typhus appeared in October: “silver fox capes in furriers’ windows…ladies’ hats, shoes, gloves…Venetian lace…perfume by weight.” Citizens joked bitterly that “when the Germans were here we ate once a day. Now the Americans have come we eat once a week.”
Reconstruction had begun on Neapolitan roads and railways on October 2, and an engineer team entered the harbor from the sea at noon on the same day to take soundings. Bulldozers, minesweepers, and salvage ships soon resembled “an army of ants eating their way into the wreckage,” in one admiral’s description. Divers pumped compressed air into sunken wrecks to create buoyancy and tugs then dragged the hulks from the harbor with huge slings. Dynamite periodically scared off the Italian workforce, and only three berths were opened in the first weeks; but within three months Naples would claim more tonnage handled than New York harbor. Potable water began flowing on October 13; Italian submarines provided power for pumping stations, hospitals, and flour mills, and the sewers would be fixed by mid-December.