City of Havoc

It was a white city on a blue gulf. Beside it rose Vesuvius, breathing a plume of smoke. Around its feet clustered warships, steamers, merchantmen from Mediterranean ports. It was ancient. Virgil had lived in the city when he wrote his Georgics. Cicero had loafed among the villas. On its outskirts were the ancient suburbs of Herculaneum and Pompeii, which had been mummified 1,860 years ago by Vesuvius' erupting ash. It was a sight, a pile of palaces, churches, an opera house, university, museum, an aquarium where famous pale octopuses swam in tanks. It was slovenly and filthy and loud. Hoarse-voiced women dumped their garbage from windows, chased their dirty children through the narrow streets. It was one of the great cities of the world. Its citizens had a proverb: "Vedi Napoli e poi Muori." ("See Naples and die.") But last week, ravaged and gutted, Naples was dead.

The blind windows of its houses stared down on death. Death's silence hung over the white city. The silence was broken by the rattle of rifle firing. General Mark Clark's Fifth Army probed the city's fringes, cleaning out Nazi snipers, rolled more boldly over the rubble of Naples' streets. From thousands of hiding places the Neapolitans dashed out to meet them.

Many of the young men had been deported by the Germans to serve in labor battalions. Many of the people had fled. Vehicles loaded with goods and furniture cluttered the highways for miles around. But many--mostly the poor--had remained. They were the half-crazed, grief-shocked people who welcomed the Fifth. Hysterical at deliverance from the Nazis, they bombarded the Allied soldiers with flowers, fruits, "vivas and kisses. Men and boys came out of holes, too, carrying rifles and grenades. Packs of them screaming vengeance on the Tedeschi (the Germans) swarmed through the streets, drawing their hands menacingly across their throats, firing their guns indiscriminately. Some of them were murderers and thieves whom the Germans, with diabolic humor, had released from Naples' jails before they cleared from the city. They went through the city looting. Others were the kin of men who had been executed by German firing squads, or shot on sight for being on the streets after curfew. They sought out Neapolitan Fascists to lynch them. Yelling girls ran with them. Older women gaped from doorways at the corpses of neighbors lying in gutters, screeched and waved their hands, ducked out of sight when German bombers roared overhead.

For all the sudden uproar of hysteria the city was still dead. The marks of death were all around. Allied shells, allied bombs which had rained incessantly since October 1940, had wrecked the waterfront. German torch and dynamite had finished the havoc.

The harbor, Italy's biggest port after Genoa, was cluttered with sunken ships. The Germans had sown the dockside with mines and booby traps, had destroyed warehouses and dock installations. The Germans had stripped the steel works, machine shops, locomotive factories, glass, wool, linen, silk, even macaroni factories of their machinery and left the buildings charred and gutted.

Worse, they had demolished utilities. The city had left to it no gas or electric systems. The vaulted central railway station, the telephone building were in ruins. With Nazi ruthlessness the retreating army had wrecked the waterworks. Gaunt, thirsty women & children roamed the streets looking for water, in desperation dipped into sewers. Out of sheer spite against the ally who had deserted him, the Germans even destroyed his palaces and his public buildings. The aquarium was wrecked and the famous octopuses thrown in the street. From his pedestal a statue of Garibaldi looked blankly down. From beyond the mountains came the heavy blasting of German artillerymen as they retreated grudgingly from the wreckage they had left.

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