Naples '44: An Intelligence Officer in the Italian Labyrinth
by Norman Lewis
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Norman Lewis's groundbreaking book about Naples in the wake of the Nazi occupation is a spellbinding narrative of triumphs and tragedies in war-torn Italy As a young man assigned to Italy with the British Intelligence Corps in 1944, Norman Lewis witnessed the city's turbulent recovery from the war after its liberation from the Nazi occupation. Lewis writes in striking detail about the Neapolitan people and the effects of World War II on their everyday lives. Devastating, poignant, and show more occasionally humorous, Naples '44 is a captivating read that brings to vivid life the struggles and resilience of one culture-as well as the punishing effects of war. Based on Lewis's diary from that time, the book offers both the passionate rendering of daily life in Naples and an unforgettable look at this uniquely formative time in the history of Italy-and the world. show lessTags
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SnootyBaronet Italian war diaries
by gust
wandering_star Plus ça change... life as a foreign occupier, however friendly, seems to have faced similar challenges in very different environments.
Member Reviews
It would be impossible to publish Naples diaries of Norman Lewis right after the war. The world was busy glorifying and romanticizing the great allied victory, creating myths and heroes of the modern age, thus paving the way for new wars to come.
Lewis takes a different point of view. For him, the war effort, the involvement of the allied armies is a necessary evil. It is necessary but it is evil nevertheless. The actual war events take second stage, are mentioned in passing if mentioned at all; the focus is on people, on individual and collective tragedies, on hunger, on humiliation, on senseless loss of lives.
It is not surprising that the book was eventually published in 1978 after another prolonged military conflict has changed the show more perception of war in public consciousness.
Frankly pacifist attitude of the author, who does not fire a single shot during his military service in Italy, is interesting but not unique. What makes this book special is the style of writing: laconic, subdued, detached. Almost matter-of-fact descriptions of truly terrifying scenes make them stand out even more, creating a cinematic effect. Here are two examples:
"A number of buildings including a bank had been pulverized by a terrific explosion that had clearly just taken place. Bodies were scattered all over the street, but here and there among them stood the living as motionless as statues, and all coated in thick white dust... the silence was total."
"In Pizzo-Falcone a team of roadsweepers were working by lamplight clearing up what looked like a lake of spilled stew where a crowded shelter had received a direct hit."
The format of the diary that initially elevates this book later becomes its most significant drawback. As life slowly normalizes in the South of Italy in 1944, the narration downshifts from strongly disturbing and horrifying events into a series of anecdotes and observations about local customs, stories of love, deception, beliefs, and curiosities. These anecdotes are told with humor and compassion, they are not at all judgmental. Still, the intensity is lower. The book starts with a bang and ends with somewhat of a whimper.
I must share one more quote that does come towards the end of the book. It touches on a point that can be almost identically applied to our times and our newest wars:
"... in their hearts, these people must be thoroughly sick and tired of us. A year ago we liberated them from the Fascist Monster, and they still sit doing their best to smile politely at us, as hungry as ever, more disease-ridden than ever before, in the ruins of their beautiful city where law and order have ceased to exist. And what is the prize that is to be eventually won? The rebirth of democracy. The glorious prospect of being able one day to choose their rulers from a list of powerful men, most of whose corruptions are generally known and accepted with weary resignation. The days of Benito Mussolini must seem like a lost paradise compared with this."
I am looking forward to many more silent conversations with Norman Lewis in various places around the world covered in his books.
Liam, my friend, thank you for this gift! show less
Lewis takes a different point of view. For him, the war effort, the involvement of the allied armies is a necessary evil. It is necessary but it is evil nevertheless. The actual war events take second stage, are mentioned in passing if mentioned at all; the focus is on people, on individual and collective tragedies, on hunger, on humiliation, on senseless loss of lives.
It is not surprising that the book was eventually published in 1978 after another prolonged military conflict has changed the show more perception of war in public consciousness.
Frankly pacifist attitude of the author, who does not fire a single shot during his military service in Italy, is interesting but not unique. What makes this book special is the style of writing: laconic, subdued, detached. Almost matter-of-fact descriptions of truly terrifying scenes make them stand out even more, creating a cinematic effect. Here are two examples:
"A number of buildings including a bank had been pulverized by a terrific explosion that had clearly just taken place. Bodies were scattered all over the street, but here and there among them stood the living as motionless as statues, and all coated in thick white dust... the silence was total."
"In Pizzo-Falcone a team of roadsweepers were working by lamplight clearing up what looked like a lake of spilled stew where a crowded shelter had received a direct hit."
The format of the diary that initially elevates this book later becomes its most significant drawback. As life slowly normalizes in the South of Italy in 1944, the narration downshifts from strongly disturbing and horrifying events into a series of anecdotes and observations about local customs, stories of love, deception, beliefs, and curiosities. These anecdotes are told with humor and compassion, they are not at all judgmental. Still, the intensity is lower. The book starts with a bang and ends with somewhat of a whimper.
I must share one more quote that does come towards the end of the book. It touches on a point that can be almost identically applied to our times and our newest wars:
"... in their hearts, these people must be thoroughly sick and tired of us. A year ago we liberated them from the Fascist Monster, and they still sit doing their best to smile politely at us, as hungry as ever, more disease-ridden than ever before, in the ruins of their beautiful city where law and order have ceased to exist. And what is the prize that is to be eventually won? The rebirth of democracy. The glorious prospect of being able one day to choose their rulers from a list of powerful men, most of whose corruptions are generally known and accepted with weary resignation. The days of Benito Mussolini must seem like a lost paradise compared with this."
I am looking forward to many more silent conversations with Norman Lewis in various places around the world covered in his books.
Liam, my friend, thank you for this gift! show less
A diary by a British officer seconded to the Americans, detailing horrifying injustices, crimes and even atrocities perpetrated by the Americans, British, and Canadians (the Canadians in his area were a small group of usually drunken cowboys from Saskatchewan, apparently, who went in for crimes more than atrocities and didn't have the power to do injustices). In Ronciglione, north of Rome, they have the walls of a church destroyed by American bombs preserved as a memorial site and parents (whose own grandparents were children at the time the bombs fell) take their children to play there and tell them -- and random foreign visitors like me -- "They bombed us when we were their allies, for no reason; there was no military target anywhere show more near us". Naples and Sorrento have a lot more to complain about. I wonder what memories were passed on by the few survivors from the various small cities in the region which were utterly reduced to rubble by American carpet bombing at the instigation of a paranoid general who ordered bombing runs every time he heard another unreliable rumour. show less
This is an interesting account written by Norman Lewis, a former British Intelligence officer, of the several months that he spent in southern Italy in the immediate aftermath of the Allied invasion. Lewis has a good eye for the dissonant and the dramatic, the small details that tell a bigger story: dead cattle lying, their rigid legs in the air, in front of Classical temples; weeping blind orphan girls, drawn into a restaurant by hunger, and ignored by the diners all around them.
Yet I’m quite sure that there are times when Lewis was exaggerating or inventing in the interests of greater drama. Were there villages around Naples—“medieval” places where the inhabitants had “Neolithic faces”—where women were still forced to show more submit to droit de seigneur, as the author claims? Well, no: droit de seigneur is a myth with no basis in historical fact. And while Lewis does at times express empathy towards the women and girls who were sexually assaulted or forced into sex work because of the war, there’s an “oh she was lying about it being rape” story and at least one moment when he says that peasant women are just used to rape, which is such absolute bullshit. I never warmed to Lewis as a result, and while this had interest for me as a historical piece, it didn’t grab me in the way it seems to have done for others. show less
Yet I’m quite sure that there are times when Lewis was exaggerating or inventing in the interests of greater drama. Were there villages around Naples—“medieval” places where the inhabitants had “Neolithic faces”—where women were still forced to show more submit to droit de seigneur, as the author claims? Well, no: droit de seigneur is a myth with no basis in historical fact. And while Lewis does at times express empathy towards the women and girls who were sexually assaulted or forced into sex work because of the war, there’s an “oh she was lying about it being rape” story and at least one moment when he says that peasant women are just used to rape, which is such absolute bullshit. I never warmed to Lewis as a result, and while this had interest for me as a historical piece, it didn’t grab me in the way it seems to have done for others. show less
This brilliant book is based on the diary of the author, which he kept whilst posted in Naples and the surrounding area as an intelligence officer with a British Army Field Security unit in 1943-44.
Naples had just been liberated, and was under the control of the Allied armies. It should be remembered, though, that the liberation of Italy from fascism between 1943 and 1945 was not just achieved by the Allied armies. Italian anti-fascist partisan fighters in the Resistance and striking workers also played a big part. Before the Allied armies reached Naples, the city had been liberated by a popular uprising against the Nazis in the “Four Days of Naples”, which Lewis briefly refers to.
Naples was in a mess when Lewis arrived. It had show more suffered massive bombing by the Allies, and now, after Italy’s surrender, it was being bombed by the Germans. There was also starvation. Lewis describes how this led to thousands of women resorting to prostitution in order to feed their families. It also led to a widespread black market, mainly in US military supplies. There was at one point even a black market in penicillin – which reminded me of the film “The Third Man”.
The other things that Lewis’s diary tells us about include: the influence of the Mafia and Camorra on the Allied Military Government; war crimes committed by Allied troops (though not on the scale of those committed by the fascists/Nazis, of course); a gunfight with bandits (in which Lewis wanted “…to avoid killing or getting killed.”); visits to the magnificent ancient temples at Paestum and to the Sibyl’s cavern at Cumae; and the eruption of Vesuvius in March 1944.
Overall, the book paints a vivid picture of the horrors and tragedies of war, but also of its confusion and absurdities. There is quite a lot of cynical humour in the book. In fact, at times, for example in the description of the rivalries between different intelligence agencies and police forces, the tone reminds me of the cynicism of the fictional intelligence officer in Len Deighton’s “The Ipcress File”. show less
Naples had just been liberated, and was under the control of the Allied armies. It should be remembered, though, that the liberation of Italy from fascism between 1943 and 1945 was not just achieved by the Allied armies. Italian anti-fascist partisan fighters in the Resistance and striking workers also played a big part. Before the Allied armies reached Naples, the city had been liberated by a popular uprising against the Nazis in the “Four Days of Naples”, which Lewis briefly refers to.
Naples was in a mess when Lewis arrived. It had show more suffered massive bombing by the Allies, and now, after Italy’s surrender, it was being bombed by the Germans. There was also starvation. Lewis describes how this led to thousands of women resorting to prostitution in order to feed their families. It also led to a widespread black market, mainly in US military supplies. There was at one point even a black market in penicillin – which reminded me of the film “The Third Man”.
The other things that Lewis’s diary tells us about include: the influence of the Mafia and Camorra on the Allied Military Government; war crimes committed by Allied troops (though not on the scale of those committed by the fascists/Nazis, of course); a gunfight with bandits (in which Lewis wanted “…to avoid killing or getting killed.”); visits to the magnificent ancient temples at Paestum and to the Sibyl’s cavern at Cumae; and the eruption of Vesuvius in March 1944.
Overall, the book paints a vivid picture of the horrors and tragedies of war, but also of its confusion and absurdities. There is quite a lot of cynical humour in the book. In fact, at times, for example in the description of the rivalries between different intelligence agencies and police forces, the tone reminds me of the cynicism of the fictional intelligence officer in Len Deighton’s “The Ipcress File”. show less
Brilliant memories of a Brit dropped in the middle of mafia land, and a mafia land that had just finished being ruled by fascists and occupied by national-socialists (or as one of the Italians in the book put it by "barbarians").
And in this case, saying a Brit is pretty much saying a protestant-values-infused northern European who is also a realist and adapts to the daily work with the Mediterranean spirit, that crazy half catholic, half moor, and half rundown-aristocratic blend that produces people seemingly pre-prepared for the hardships of wartimes but at the same time makes building any semblance of a society ruled by law&order extremely hard.
Again, the author is brilliant at writing the vignettes (orphan kids fighting for survival, show more the various approaches to sex for pay, the rarity of a good meal, ...) paint that quaint society pushed to the limits of survival, and how the efforts to police it could only go so far. show less
And in this case, saying a Brit is pretty much saying a protestant-values-infused northern European who is also a realist and adapts to the daily work with the Mediterranean spirit, that crazy half catholic, half moor, and half rundown-aristocratic blend that produces people seemingly pre-prepared for the hardships of wartimes but at the same time makes building any semblance of a society ruled by law&order extremely hard.
Again, the author is brilliant at writing the vignettes (orphan kids fighting for survival, show more the various approaches to sex for pay, the rarity of a good meal, ...) paint that quaint society pushed to the limits of survival, and how the efforts to police it could only go so far. show less
This is a diary (edited/reconstructed later) of just over a year in Naples, from September 1943 to October 1944. Norman Lewis arrives in Naples from war work with the Field Security Service in North Africa. Over the course of the year, he feels compassion for the dire poverty and deprivation around him, amazement at the sexual habits of the Neapolitans (which he periodically has to interpret for one British lover), growing disillusionment with the way the occupying forces crack down on petty theft of Allied army property while doing nothing at all about the dealers and profiteers who buy what they have stolen (he believes the black market is largely run by Vito Genovese, New York mafioso turned advisor to the American Military show more Government).
He and his colleagues are supposed to be investigating Nazi collaborators, but find themselves bombarded with allegations - some true, some based on dislike of a neighbour, some intended to get rid of a rival (in legitimate or illegitimate business). He comes to love Italy, although it's clear that far from all of his colleagues share his attempts to understand the place or to behave respectably.
This is wonderfully written, whether Lewis is describing an air-raid ("The windows blew in, the blackout screens flapping like enormous bats across the room") or the eruption of Vesuvius: The lava was moving at a rate of only a few yards an hour, and it had covered half the town to a depth of perhaps thirty feet. A complete, undamaged cupola of a church, severed from the submerged building, jogged slowly towards us on its bed of cinders. The whole process was strangely quiet. The black slagheap shook, trembled and jerked a little and cinders rattled down its slope. A house, cautiously encircled and then overwhelmed, disappeared from sight intact, and a faint, distant grinding sound followed as the lava began its digestion.
But it's more than just a travel book with an unusual angle. I couldn't help thinking that its portrait of life as a foreign occupier - friendly but out of one's depth in the local society - has a lot of resonance with more current situations. show less
He and his colleagues are supposed to be investigating Nazi collaborators, but find themselves bombarded with allegations - some true, some based on dislike of a neighbour, some intended to get rid of a rival (in legitimate or illegitimate business). He comes to love Italy, although it's clear that far from all of his colleagues share his attempts to understand the place or to behave respectably.
This is wonderfully written, whether Lewis is describing an air-raid ("The windows blew in, the blackout screens flapping like enormous bats across the room") or the eruption of Vesuvius: The lava was moving at a rate of only a few yards an hour, and it had covered half the town to a depth of perhaps thirty feet. A complete, undamaged cupola of a church, severed from the submerged building, jogged slowly towards us on its bed of cinders. The whole process was strangely quiet. The black slagheap shook, trembled and jerked a little and cinders rattled down its slope. A house, cautiously encircled and then overwhelmed, disappeared from sight intact, and a faint, distant grinding sound followed as the lava began its digestion.
But it's more than just a travel book with an unusual angle. I couldn't help thinking that its portrait of life as a foreign occupier - friendly but out of one's depth in the local society - has a lot of resonance with more current situations. show less
This was one of a job lot of books I was given. Felt I should read it, but having no interest in war, it got relegated to a bookcase, After a recent trip to Naples, Igave it a go...and it's actually very interesting.
The author was sent over with British forces to Naples - in a state of ruin, starvation and lawlessnessafter the recent German occupation. And while war still continues, with delayed-action mines going off, German bombers flying over, and suspected Nazis hiding in the catacombs - Lewis' duties are more concerned with keeping order, flushing out collaborators and handling situations. It is thus much more of a social history, focussing on bandits and mafiosi, plagues and superstition, the locals trying to keep body and soul show more together, whether they're plundering the aquarioum for a fish dinner, stealing everything in sight or selling their daughters into prostitution. By turns very funny and tremendously sad, as the author observes the unjust legal system, where the 'Mr Bigs' get away with everything and the petty criminals are given lengthy sentences. show less
The author was sent over with British forces to Naples - in a state of ruin, starvation and lawlessnessafter the recent German occupation. And while war still continues, with delayed-action mines going off, German bombers flying over, and suspected Nazis hiding in the catacombs - Lewis' duties are more concerned with keeping order, flushing out collaborators and handling situations. It is thus much more of a social history, focussing on bandits and mafiosi, plagues and superstition, the locals trying to keep body and soul show more together, whether they're plundering the aquarioum for a fish dinner, stealing everything in sight or selling their daughters into prostitution. By turns very funny and tremendously sad, as the author observes the unjust legal system, where the 'Mr Bigs' get away with everything and the petty criminals are given lengthy sentences. show less
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“Naples is extraordinary in every way,” says Lewis. It has always been a theater, and in 1944 it combined Grand Guignol with Fellini (we hear of “the famous midget gynaecologist Professore Dottore Salerno”). Its thieves and black-marketeers exhibited an audacity perhaps unequaled until Vietnam...
Lewis dwells also on the starvation, the quasi-medieval religious credulity, the epidemics, show more the madness and deformities, the fraud and bribery and flagrant injustice, the syphilis and child prostitution, the open banditry, the wholesale rape, and the cruelty. A boys’ pastime was to ignite gasoline-soaked rags tied to bats and release them prettily into the night sky; a grave adult Neapolitan “was full of praise for the ingenuity with which they made their own small pleasures.” show less
Lewis dwells also on the starvation, the quasi-medieval religious credulity, the epidemics, show more the madness and deformities, the fraud and bribery and flagrant injustice, the syphilis and child prostitution, the open banditry, the wholesale rape, and the cruelty. A boys’ pastime was to ignite gasoline-soaked rags tied to bats and release them prettily into the night sky; a grave adult Neapolitan “was full of praise for the ingenuity with which they made their own small pleasures.” show less
added by SnootyBaronet
On 19 March 1944 Vesuvius erupted, "the most majestic and terrible sight I have ever seen, or ever expect to see", Lewis wrote. Overhead rose a cloud in the form of Pliny's famous pine-tree, apparently quite solid. While steadily growing larger, it remained entirely immobile. That still shape, hanging above the city, was full of menace. Recently, when I was writing my book Vesuvius: The Most show more Famous Volcano in the World (Profile, £15.99), I reread Naples '44. Of perhaps a dozen resounding accounts of the volcano as it erupted down the centuries, no one has bettered Lewis's description...
Early-21st-century leaders are frequently seduced by credible tribal warlords; their mid-20th-century counterparts seemed unable (or unwilling) to tell a gangster king from a social democrat. For all that, Lewis wrote about the values, ingenuity and extraordinary spirit in many of the individuals he encountered. Tragically, behind them the stage for modern Italy was being set on shifting moral sands guided by little more than ignorance, naivety and astonishing misjudgement. Lewis, a figure in the shadows, was the most profound witness to that process. show less
Early-21st-century leaders are frequently seduced by credible tribal warlords; their mid-20th-century counterparts seemed unable (or unwilling) to tell a gangster king from a social democrat. For all that, Lewis wrote about the values, ingenuity and extraordinary spirit in many of the individuals he encountered. Tragically, behind them the stage for modern Italy was being set on shifting moral sands guided by little more than ignorance, naivety and astonishing misjudgement. Lewis, a figure in the shadows, was the most profound witness to that process. show less
added by SnootyBaronet
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- Canonical title
- Naples '44: An Intelligence Officer in the Italian Labyrinth
- Alternate titles
- Naples '44: A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy
- Original publication date
- 1978
- Important places
- Naples, Campania, Italy
- Important events
- World War II; Allied Occupation of Italy; 1944
- Related movies
- Naples '44 (2016 | IMDb)
- Dedication
- For All My Old Friends of Naples. Especially for Sergio Viggiani
- First words
- Volunteers from the armed forces in World War II found to possess linguistic qualifications, but who had attended either a redbrick university, or no university at all, were frequently directed into the Intelligence Corps.
- Quotations
- All my new friends have been issued with special officer's-type identity documents [...] with the authorization to be in any place, at any time, and in any dress.
The shape of the eruption that obliterated Pompeii reminded Pliny of a pine tree, and he probably stood here at Posillipo across the bay, where I was standing now and where Nelson and Emma Hamilton stood to view the eruption ... (show all)of their day, and the shape was indeed like that of a many-branching tree. What took one by surprise about Pliny’s pine was that it was absolutely motionless, not quite painted - because it was three-dimensional - but moulded on the sky; an utterly still, and utterly menacing shape. This pine, too, trailed uncharacteristically a little tropical liana of heavy ash, which fell earthwards here and there from its branches in imperceptible motion.
She asked me to mention to him in as tactful a way as possible that comment had been caused among her neighbours because he never called on her during the day. Conjugal visits at midday are de rigueur in Naples. This I explai... (show all)ned, and Frazer promised to do better.
I was reminded by this display of audacity and resourcefulness of the first days of our arrival in Naples, and my amazement at the spectacle of a damaged tank abandoned at the Porta Capuana, which, although one never saw a fi... (show all)nger laid on it, shrank away day by day, as if its armour-plating had been made of ice, until nothing whatever remained.
I reminded him that the Germans shot wire-cutters on the spot. ‘Of course they did,’ he agreed. ‘Thank God, you’re a civilised and humanitarian people, and you liberated us from those barbarians. You’ve taught us wh... (show all)at democratic justice is all about and we can’t thank you enough.’ Not a muscle moved in his face to show that he was laughing at me. - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)When it is time to go he will take my hand and say, `I'll be at the station tomorrow, to see you off,' and I know he will be there as promised, dressed in all the dignity of his `Zio di Roma' suit for such an occasion.
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