Naples 1944 The devil's paradise at war

Review by Booklist Review

Within days of Italy's declaration of war in June 1940, the British began bombing Naples, Italy, a bombardment that was escalated by the U.S. Historian Lowe recounts in detail the Neapolitans' civil defense until the German army violently took over upon the Italian armistice in September 1943. Reigning by terror, the Germans demolished the city's port, surrounding infrastructure, and much cultural heritage. Retreating mostly because of the Allies' landing in nearby Salerno but also because of an insurrection by the Neapolitan populace, German forces bequeathed a gigantic problem of civil governance to the Allies. Lowe emphasizes that the Allies' priority for Naples was supporting front-line combat. Imperative for military operations was restoration of port operations, water, sewers, and electricity. Successful though these efforts were (including defeat of a typhoid epidemic), less laudatory, in Lowe's view, was the Allied Military Government's basic misunderstanding of Italian society and its focus on rest and relaxation, primarily intoxication and prostitution, for soldiers. Lowe delivers a vivid and searing account of a famous European city, one of hundreds, traumatized by World War II.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

---

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this trenchant study, historian Lowe (Savage Continent) investigates Naples's descent into chaos following its liberation by Allied troops in September 1943. Withdrawing Germans--who had perpetrated massacres and shipped off thousands of Neapolitans to work camps--had demolished much of the city before they were driven out by an uprising. Allied engineers accomplished miraculous feats in restoring the city's electricity and water service, Lowe notes, and efficiently snuffed out a lice-borne typhus epidemic by dusting the populace with insecticide. But Allied authorities, he contends, prioritized shipping military supplies to the front over provisioning the city; to feed their families, thousands of Neapolitan women and girls became prostitutes servicing Allied soldiers. Allied authorities also kept fascist officials in power out of expediency, and allowed black markets to run rampant, all of which Lowe argues left a legacy of corruption in southern Italy for decades afterward. Lowe sets his narrative against a sharp meditation on the social forces behind Naples's centuries-old reputation as both a charming city and a cesspool of vice ("a paradise... inhabited by devils"), and his squalid portrait of wartime Naples, though punctuated by occasional heroism, is dominated by infernal imagery, with whole neighborhoods residing underground in caves to escape Allied bombing and an eruption of Mount Vesuvius blanketing the region in ash. The result is a scorching tour of a seldom explored circle of hell. (Mar.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

---

Review by Library Journal Review

Lowe (Inferno: The Devastation of Hamburg 1943) examines the plight of Naples, Italy, near the end of World War II. The city in Italy's neglected southern region has been overlooked in many World War II chronicles, an omission Lowe aims to rectify with a detailed, expertly written portrait of Naples before, during, and after its liberation by Allied forces. In three parts--"Beautiful Monster," "Uprising," and "Compromise Betrayals"--Lowe describes a city with rampant starvation and poverty even before Mussolini. During the war, there was no electricity, gas, firefighting, train service, or sewage system, nor were there any provisions for burying the dead. Naples's port, a major source of income, was heavily bombed by Allied forces and became a center of the black market. Adding to the troubles were the 1944 typhus epidemic and eruption of Vesuvius. Lowe draws on primary sources to provide insight into efforts to rebuild and the resiliency of the Neapolitan people. VERDICT A well-researched, meticulous account of life for the people of Naples during and immediately after the war, for readers interested in Italian and World War II history.--Jacqueline Parascandola

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

---