Our host introduced the book very briefly, skipping the customary preamble on the author’s biographical details. He explained that this book had grabbed his interest through the writings of Max Hastings the British journalist and military historian. The Anglo-American liberation of southern Italy is a part of WW2 that few of us had read about, neglected by popular history-writers, almost ignored by newspapers of the time, yet very costly in lives.
The book is a war memoir written from diaries 30 years after the event by Norman Lewis, an intelligence officer in the newly-formed branch of the British Army known as the Field Security Service. He and 11 others were sent to Naples in late 1943 following the fall of Mussolini and the Armistice between Britain and Italy. The book is harrowing, with searing images of poverty, despair, chaos, corruption and famine. Yet the prose is beautiful – the book is Lewis’s masterpiece. The memoir was written from his diary; not verbatim but developed and perhaps embroidered from his reflections.
Was the recruitment of intelligence officers really so lax? Only blue-eyed men from red-brick universities with a foreign language were chosen in a dubious interview process. Were the duties really so vague? No definition was given of the mission, and there was an almost complete absence of orders from London headquarters. Little linkage or sharing of information with the American allies is evident. It was a shambles; how did the British ever win the war?
The author travelled with the US 5th Army to Salerno as part of the invasion convoy in the Dutchess of Bedford, arriving on September 1st 1943. The briefing lecture by an intelligence officer revealed little; Lewis says the lecture could have been summed up in a single sentence ‘we know nothing’. Then a few days later, they landed at Paestum on a beautiful beach which he describes as one of the ‘fabled shores of antiquity’. All seemed tranquil, yet what the author would experience in the coming weeks and months in Naples would be hellish.
The book is a first-hand and detailed account of the war-torn city and the desperate state of its people. The male population resorted to theft and black-market trading whilst for the women, prostitution was the principal source of income. The soldiers from USA and Canada behaved very badly indeed. Is it always thus in war? Lewis describes the state of affairs in a matter-of-fact way with great precision. Some of his accounts are horrific, some very touching – demonstrating that human compassion occasionally exists even when circumstances are dire. The southern Italian character comes across strongly – the importance of family, the region, religion, the sense of pride too. But there are no heroes.
We all liked the book, even those who confessed to avoiding books about war. We have read several war books and we made comparison between this and Nella Last’s War – a very different book but like this one, a haunting account based on diaries. We also read Geoffrey Wellum’s First Light – the diary of a WW2 RAF fighter pilot. As in this book, we noted the shambolic recruitment process, and again we wondered how the British had managed to win the war. It is strange that some of our generation, raised in peacetime, are so obsessed with war; perhaps because war is so often glorified. There is no glorification in Lewis’s book, yet if one looks for old newsreel accounts of the war in Naples the story was quite different – see for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IytTr99paJ8
In this Pathé movie we British and our North American friends are the heroes who rescue and liberate the grateful Italian populace.
There are moments of beauty: the coming of spring and the appearance in the street of the broad bean seller; the view of Naples from afar; the description of a trip to Capri with Frazer (from Peebles) and the two girls in fox-fur; the account of an eruption of Vesuvius on March 19th – evoking Pliny’s description of the AD 79 event. However, these moments are rare. Nor is there much humour; irony, yes. One has the impression that Lewis is a ‘good chap’ able to empathise with the ordinary people yet not capable of doing much about their plight.
Was his personal war effort of any use? Not that we could discern, except that he did intervene in an attempt to send twenty venereal-diseased prostitutes to the north for the purpose of infecting German soldiers. His routine contributions were well-intentioned – for example – trying to bring black-marketeers to justice and doing his best to stop soldiers marrying local girls. He seems to have behaved well towards the locals, making friends, but towards the end he began to lose their trust by refusing gifts which he thought were disguised bribes. Was the entire southern Italy campaign any use in the War effort? The Americans never wanted it in the first place; it was Churchill’s project to attack ‘the soft underbelly’ of Europe. What Max Hastings wrote in the April 2008 New York Review was:
“Worst of all, it became perceived as a place of failure, where each small territorial gain was achieved at such cost that talk of victory became choked in ashes. Salerno, the Rapido, Anzio, Cassino were names inscribed in blood and grief in the annals of the American and British armies. When the breakthrough to Rome belatedly came in June 1944, it was promptly eclipsed in the world’s attention by D-day in Normandy”.
Some of us told our own stories about Naples. One member had a connection through the Italian-Scot family of Crolla, famed in Scotland for bringing Italian wine and food to our northern shores. I hope to read something about this in “Dear Alfonso” by Mary Contini, a Director of the famous delicatessen and wine merchant, Valvona & Crolla.
Although we all enjoyed the book, there were some quibbles. One of our members challenged our assumption that diary-based accounts were to be relied upon to tell the truth. ‘Look at autobiographies’ he said in support of his position, and we agreed that he had a point. Two other members noted a degree of disjunction in the book– which at one level is a sporadic narrative, jumping in a series of short chapters from one scene to another. Others joined in, saying they preferred novels because only in the novel can the proper development of character emerge. ‘You learn more from a novel than a diary’ someone said. And, ‘if this were a novel you might not believe that events could turn out so dire as this’.
As often occurs, the conversation turned to football. The excuse this time was that Diego Maradona had died the day before our meeting, and there had been great mourning in Naples (he scored 81 goals in 188 games for Napoli according to Wikipedia). There ensued a conversation about who was the greatest footballer in modern times. I had previously discovered that Messi and Pele have a far better average and now it falls to me to make a spreadsheet of goal averages and trophies gained (Maradona, Pele, Messi, Best..and Alan Shearer is in the running too).
We have become accustomed to meeting via Zoom. Attendance is higher, although the conversation doesn’t flow quite so freely. Nor does the wine; it’s a different experience by Zoom and the meeting ends sooner – perhaps after less than two hours.
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