Take Naples 44: A World War II Diary Of Occupied Italy Fabricated By Norman Lewis Expressed As E-Text

is a fine book, accurate daily participation in history with the addition of Lewis's fine irony, For example, put in charge of Naples security by the Allies, he is given the same offices the Germans hadwith all their files.
The persons reporting to German security, snitching on their neighbors, were the same ones who reported to Norman Lewis.

His account of the workings of Italian courts are vivid, sometimes heartbreaking, as when a father of three is jailed for a year for having army rations.
Or when a woman is raped because there are army blankets in her apartment, His descriptions of soldiers, such as the Canadians who use first names with their superior officers, are perceptive, often amusing.




Here's his definition of democracy after Mussolini: "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".
Applying this to theUS election of a Liarin
Chief, I add from Julian Gray's thorough review,
Perhaps the nonreading US who elected our first TV, nonreading, prez share the Welsh townships' love of Liars: “ in the old Wales each village had what the writer D.
J. Williams called its own Transparent Liar, a man who reigned in pubs and farmhouse kitchens, the fun being derived from the fact that his audience knew, and he knew they knew, that he was lying.
” Byron Rogers,Spectator review But the Welsh towns did not elect the Liar mayor, or Prime Minister,
After seving with the American Fifth Army in Algeria and Tunisia, Norman Lewis, of the British Intelligence Corps, was dumped ashore in Italy along with his team of Americans, to play his role in the Allied effort.
With a lack of forward planning and hardly any briefings or guidance I think he had only one big important mission in the whole book he records, over the space of nearly a year, his experiences.
And it didn't take long to see the desperation, near starvation, and disorganized chaos raining down on the people of Naples.


With bellies rumbling ferociously because of hunger, it was little surprise to see the lengths one would go to just to survive both legit and, more so, illegal.
Including hundreds of folk heading eight miles out of town on foot atam to hunt for edible flowers, and mothers offering naked viewings of their pubescent girls atlira a pop.
The depravity, despair, and criminal activity running throughout Naples and the surrounding area really was quite staggering, Especially the levels of prostitution rape and sodomy also with practically three out of every four women selling their bodies to get by.
Some driven totally insane even by the constant Moroccan Goumier and marauder attacks,


Here, to all intents and purposes, we are living in the Middle Ages, Only the buildings had changed and most of these were in ruins, Epidemics, robbers, funerals followed by shrieking women, deformed and mutilated beggars, legless cripples dragging themselves around on wheeled platforms even raving lunatics they'd no room for in the asylum.
This morning I actually found myself in a little square tucked away among the ruins where women were dancing to drive the sickness away.



Passages like this and others, including the bizarre meeting with a doctor who specializes in the restoration of virginity, and being witness to group of youths masturbating whilst sat on top of a fountain, reminded me so much of Curzio Malaparte's La pelle The Skin, and both books do share some of the same ground albeit Lewis writes in diary form.
Both are brilliant when it comes to the details describing the day to day occurrences on the streets of Naples and again there is General Clark being served the prized specimen from the rapidly depleted Naples aquarium.
I loved Malaparte's novel probably my favourite WWnovel ever so it was going to very difficult not to love this too.
From the thriving black market to the Camorra, and the eruption of Vesuvius to the more bizarre and absurd incidents and, more importantly whether right or wrong in some cases, Lewis's full admiration and utter fascination for the resilience and resourcefulness of the Neopolitans, made this such an engrossing read literally every page of it.


The whole thing could have come off being too dark and depressing too much death and destruction, but Lewis writes with a trenchant wit only now and then letting rip with serious fury that keeps it from feeling that way.
Dare I say it, but I even laughed under my breath on a few occasions, It's just the way he went about detailing certain things, Altough it was also, in places, distinctly moving, when thinking of a group of escaped blind girls from an orphanage walking hand in hand crying out for food, amongst other things.
Got to be a/for me, I wanted this to be exactly like the bits in "Catch" in Rome: airmen and their prostitutes walking naked around crumbling baroque apartments.


But Norman is a bit dull, He'd have been happier taking the Met line to a desk as a staff writer on the Daily Mail.
He's pofaced or rolling his eyes, Not what I expected at all,


"Quite frequently suspects were not even identified by name, but by such descriptions as 'of medium height', 'age between thirty and forty', 'strikingly ugly', or in one case, 'known to possess an obsessive fear of cats'.
"

"It turned out that what the villagers had been trying to explain was that the woman was a witch, and that if allowed to cast her malefic gaze on the units water supply, she would make it undrinkable.
"

"She had made him understand by gestures one could only shudderingly imagine that her late husband, . . never failed to have intercourse with her less than six times a night, She also had a habit, which terrified Frazier, of keeping an eye on the bedside clock while he performed.
"

"Normally I detest nightclubs, "

"The impudence of the black market takes one's breath away, "

"An Italian sanitary team chasing peasants to spray them with antityphus power, The peasants did not know what was happening to them, and some were hooting in fear, "

"It is the duty of all officers to protect our troops from matrimonial shipwreck, It should be pointed out that the soldier has no future security to offer his wife, No one can marry with impunity on such a basis, There are many other differences which, although small in themselves, such as different tastes as regards cooking, do militate strongly against happiness.
" I have a GR virtual bookshelf for "WWII" and this is theth book to be added to it.
None of the otherare anything like this, A journal written at the time with the author's immediate impressions, and providing a view of the conflict that I personally hadn't encountered before.


The account starts with the landings at Salerno, and from the author's perspective the event was one of confusion, widespread panic, deaths from "friendly fire", and all round ineptitude, with results that varied from the comic to the tragic.
The narrative then moves on to the Allied occupation of Naples, The author's Italian language skills led him to be posted to something called"The Field Security Service", It seems to have been a sort of frontline version of M, I., responsible for rooting out enemy agents, saboteurs etc, although Mr Lewis seems to have spent much of his time checking on the background of Italian women seeking to marry British servicemen.


When the Allied troops arrived in Naples the population was starving, and a large proportion of the female population was forced into at least part time prostitution, simply to obtain food.
The author also describes how the population quickly organised mass theft of supplies from the Allied Army, to the extent that military hospitals were sometimes so short of medicines that they had to buy them back from those who stole them.
The author's sympathies lay entirely with the civilian population, and he was very much of the view that senior commanders/staff of the Allied Military Government were involved in racketeering.


It's probably the case that the author saw Naples through the telescope of his job in Field Security, but that job, and his language skills, allowed him something of a window into a section of Neapolitan society, and the reader is treated to images that range from the astonishing to the horrifying.
Overall though, the author describes being an outsider a cog in a machine trying, and largely failing, to govern a society with social norms the occupiers did not understand.


A fascinating account of a society under extreme stress,

.