In newly liberated but starving Naples, the American general Mark Clark hosted a banquet. He was served the humanlike flesh of a manatee taken from the municipal aquarium, which disturbingly resembled “a little girl who had been cooked”.
So, at least, runs the version of this often-told anecdote in Curzio Malaparte’s sensational semi-factual novel The Skin. Keith Lowe, however, has found that the aquarium remained open and stocked after the Allies occupied Naples in autumn 1943. It charged 20 lire to soldier-tourists to view the uneaten marine life. For Lowe, Mark Clark’s manatee menu symbolises the process “by which fiction becomes myth, myth becomes recollection, and recollection becomes history”.
During and after the Fascist breakdown and the retreat of German forces, the Italian port suffered more from this slide between fact, memory and legend than almost any other theatre of the second world war. Torrid literary reportage has fixed the image of what journalist Alan Moorehead called “the moral collapse of a people” into anarchy, crime and despair as authority broke down. In The Skin, or Norman Lewis’s celebrated memoir Naples ’44, or John Horne Burns’s novel The Gallery, the city figures as a lurid arena of violent chaos and lawless sleaze.
For sure, Lowe’s meticulous historical sleuthing reveals disorder on a monumental scale, with “theft, prostitution or illegal trading” the sole means of survival for many citizens. But he also recovers the hidden history of a Mediterranean metropolis that freed itself from German domination before the Allies arrived — only to find its dreams for social renewal dashed by the naivety, ignorance and mismanagement of its well-intentioned liberators.
Especially in Savage Continent (2013), Lowe has made a speciality of aftermaths: what happens as conflicts end, and the “dramatic, exhilarating and traumatic” events that follow. On 1 October 1943, the King’s Dragoon Guards drove to cheers and flowers into a joyful city. Soon, Naples became a template for both the sunny and shady sides of post-Nazi life — and an early warning that allowed the blundering Allies to raise their game as social rebuilders later in 1944.
Lowe begins with the mingled hedonism and horror of the months after liberation. The departing Germans had trashed the place — 300 sunk craft choked the harbour — and terrorised the people. “Miracles of reconstruction” with military value (rebuilding the shattered port, quashing a typhus epidemic) coincided with the neglect of civilian needs by an Allied Military Government (AMG) largely staffed by “well-meaning mediocrities”.
Naples turned into “a playground for foreign troops”, often drunk. One-fifth of the US 1st Armored Division contracted a sexually transmitted infection. Breakdowns in rationing and food distribution drove the spread of rampant corruption, “wholesale thievery” and large-scale prostitution: symptoms not of “moral collapse”, but rational behaviour as mass starvation loomed.
Naples 1944 then backtracks to the Fascist era and its finale in the stirring, often spectacularly effective, revolt of the Neapolitans themselves. During the “Four Days” of late September 1943, which “set the entire city alight”, audacious guerrilla exploits hastened the German exit. A closing section argues that Allied mis-steps, above all their eagerness to reinstate old elites, “smothered at birth” local hopes for reform. Lowe explains that foreign stereotypes, with Naples as an idyll of happy-go-lucky pleasure-seekers or “a paradise inhabited by devils”, played their part in blurring the Anglo-American vision.
Admirably, Lowe checks salacious myths against a vast range of Italian sources. He portrays the liberated city not as some grotesque pageant of vice but the stage for innumerable human dramas of heroism or compromise. If he judges the strategic bungles of the AMG harshly, Lowe recognises that exasperated Italian colleagues found officers “kind, patient and reasonable” — but way out of their depth.
“The prosecution of the war”, not civic revival, set their agenda. As this rigorous, but humane and colourful history, shows, that priority let a sclerotic status quo return. US politician Adlai Stevenson, who visited in 1944, warned that after a “total war”, “the peace must also be won”. Further north, the Allies applied that lesson. In Naples, they never did.
Naples 1944: War, Liberation and Chaos by Keith Lowe William Collins £25, 400 pages
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