A review of the new book “Naples 1944” by Keith Lowe
My Italian mother was born in Naples in 1920 and lived there until she married my British father – an RAF fighter pilot – in 1946. So she lived through all the events described in this fascinating book. She died in 1999 and how I would have loved to discuss with her the contents of this history published in 2024. However, she barely talked about her time in Naples.
Lowe is a British historian who, over some 400 pages, provides a meticulously researched, well-written and balanced account of a theatre of war relatively neglected by English-language works.
Most books about war take a military perspective and concentrate on battles against the enemy, but Lowe’s work focuses on civilians and explores how they coped in the face of the many deprivations occasioned by war. His subject is Naples in World War Two, at the time the most populous city and the largest port in wartime Italy and the first European city to be liberated by the Allies.
The time period is predominately 1944, but he provides useful background information from before and during the war and takes the story up to the early post-war experience. Indeed, if there is a criticism to be made of this impressive and moving book, it is that it might have been better to adopt a more strictly chronological approach to the narrative.
In the years before the Allies entered Naples, the city had suffered “eight decades of political and economic neglect by the Italian state”, “twenty years of repression by the Fascists”, and “three years of continual bombing by the Allies”. When Mussolini was overthrown and Italy suddenly switched sides, the Germans stripped the city of absolutely everything before withdrawing and then started their own bombing campaign.
The Neapolitans themselves liberated the city in an uprising known as ‘The Forty-Five Days’ and then the Allies marched in on 2 October 1943. In the days, weeks and months that followed, the local population suffered an initial absence of water and electricity, a sustained shortage of food and housing, rampant inflation and a huge black market, a huge lack infrastructure and jobs, widespread hunger and prostitution, serious crime and ubiquitous corruption plus – could there really be more? – an epidemic of typhoid and the eruption of Vesuvius.
For each of these tribulations, Lowe provides the raw statistics and the personal testimonies in a grim catalogue that seems never-ending.
The central lesson of the book is that, in a war of liberation, the invaders have to plan for the period after the conquest – what contemporary media call ‘the day after’. How difficult it is to allocate the necessary attention to peace-building during a total war is recognised by Lowe: “All resources had to be directed at one thing only – the prosecution of the war.”
But it is a lesson that has been forgotten time after time, including the US invasion of Iraq and the Israeli attack on Gaza.