The Day of Battle (78 page)

A Fairyland of Silver and Gold

T
HE
trolleys were running again in Naples, along with the stinking diesel buses and the trams that clacked uphill to the swank villas above the city. Few motor vehicles could be seen, except for jeeps and Army deuce-and-a-half trucks, but hundreds of dogcarts and rattletrap barouches pulled by swaybacked nags filled the boulevards. “The bay was as blue as ever, Vesuvius as black, and the pines as green,” Fifth Army’s OSS chief reported. Neapolitans in shabby clothes and shabbier shoes strolled the Via Francesco Caracciolo, “arm in arm, talking, laughing, crying, arguing, gesticulating,” Frank Gervasi observed. Scavengers hunted cigar butts in the gutters, and slatterns with rented babies begged in the piazzi where quacks peddled their nostrums and shoeblacks, called
lustrini,
signaled their services by rapping on their wooden boxes. “Hubba, hubba,” the urchins sang in mimicry of GIs. “Chicken-a shit, second-a lieutenant.” In the public gardens, “storytellers have been drawn out by the sun to take up their positions,” the British officer and writer Norman Lewis noted in late February. For a coin they “chanted recitations of the deeds of Charlemagne and the Paladins,” using their hands to “build up their thoughts, like a potter at his wheel.”

Naples over the centuries had lured the likes of Petrarch and Goethe, Rossini and Donizetti, Dickens and James Fenimore Cooper. While writing the
Aeneid,
Virgil was said to have driven the snakes from a city he adored, although two millennia later John Ruskin found it “the most loathsome nest of human caterpillars I was ever forced to stay in—a hell with all the devils imbecile in it.” Now resurgent Naples drew hordes of Allied soldiers. Given that Cassino lay only fifty miles north and Anzio but ninety, the city conveyed “a complacency and lack of realism worse than that prevailing in New York City,” the reporter Homer Bigart complained. But for many on leave from the front, Naples was “the nearest symbol of every man’s immediate aspirations,” wrote the British officer Fred Majdalany.

Of course the war intruded at times. Each afternoon, a hospital train pulled into the Piazza Garibaldi station with broken boys from Cassino shelved in triple-tiered berths, the most grievous cases in the bottom bunks. Luftwaffe raiders still struck the port and anchorages, and “every ship opened up with its guns until there were a hundred necklaces of red tracer bullets over Naples bay,” wrote Alan Moorehead. Just the rumor of an attack triggered orders to “make smoke,” and within eight minutes a thousand soldiers manning fog-oil generators and smoke pots would lay a dense blanket along twenty miles of Neapolitan coast, thick enough that jeep drivers had to shine flashlights at the curb to follow the road. Despite the smoke and the swarming tracers, an occasional bomber got through, followed immediately by looters, who staggered from bombed-out buildings with “perhaps a door, a bedstead, a couple of kettles, a birdcage,” wrote Margaret Bourke-White. After a raid in early spring, Norman Lewis watched as dead children were lifted from the rubble and laid out side by side with dolls “thrust into their arms to accompany them to the other world. Professional mourners…were running up and down the street tearing at their clothing and screaming horribly.”

Yet for most soldiers Naples was a haven, a tabernacle of
la dolce vita
into which they poured for “I&I”—intercourse and intoxication—aboard trucks known as “passion wagons.” Italian porters lugged their packs to the Volturno Enlisted Men’s Hotel on Via Roma or to the city jail, which Fifth Army renovated as a rest center for twelve hundred men. “The Americans had control of the whole city,” complained a British sapper, C. Richard Eke. “Everywhere were GIs and military police, the burly, truncheon-swinging Yanks.” The Red Cross auditorium showed a new movie every day at four
P.M
., drawing big crowds despite frequent interruptions from power failures. A music hall on Via Constantinopoli sponsored dances several nights a week, and Irving Berlin’s show
This Is the Army
drew packed houses; roars invariably greeted his rendition of “Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning.” When a soldier spotted Humphrey Bogart in the Hotel Parca, he asked how he could purchase a pistol like the one the actor had used in
Sahara,
which “could fire sixteen shots without reloading.” Bogart flicked away his cigarette and replied, “Hollywood is a wonderful place.”

So, too, was Pompeii. Each morning at eight, a commuter train hauled hundreds of soldiers to the ruins, where guides offered tours of “The House of the Two Bachelors Who Were Never Married” and intimated that the
city’s awful fate resulted from “too many different positions.” A 3rd Division soldier wrote home that “the old Romans certainly knew how to get the most out of life,” but a diarist from the 56th Evacuation Hospital concluded that the lost city had been “built by a clever, wine-drinking, sensuous, evil-minded people.”

Soldiers also jammed the reopened San Carlo opera house, despite the fleas in the padded seats and a lack of heat that kept everyone bundled up. From the balcony tiers they chattered like parrots, gawking at the depictions of Parnassus on the domed ceiling. Then the crimson curtain rose, the overture swelled, and the spell was cast. A private from Ohio slapped his knee during the second act of
La Bohème
. “That’s good,” he murmured, “that’s real good.” Soldiers spilled into the night humming arias, so many Carusos in olive drab.

New Neapolitan cabarets opened every week. The Orange Club above the Via Posillipo was said by Bourke-White to be “the most lively and popular night club on the European continent.” Patrons on the circular terraces gazed at Vesuvius’s ruby glow and the winking signal lights from warships in the bay below. Nurses danced the Jersey Bounce, and inebriated officers aimed champagne corks at the brooch on a singer’s décolletage. No I&I to Naples was complete without a tour of Capri, where room and board could be had for a dollar a night, and the bars opened at nine
A.M
. The island struck Alan Moorehead as “a curious little nodule of lotus-eating,” with “the slightly beaten air of a worn-out roué.” Soldiers lounged on the rocks in straw hats and sandals, or rode to the Marina Piccola in carriages pulled by plumed horses. In hotel dining rooms, waiters served supper from silver chafing dishes to men who had not held a fork since leaving the United States. One visitor was happy simply to list the shades of the sea: turquoise, emerald, purple, peacock, violet.

“I could never forget,” wrote Bourke-White, “that many of these boys would go back into the rain and mud and screaming dangers of the hills, never to return.”

“The people are terribly poor and everything in the shops is shabby,” an American nurse wrote home from Naples. “They all stand outside the mess hall and go through the 55-gallon drums into which we empty our mess kits.” For most Neapolitans, there were no lotuses to eat, nor much of anything else. War had moved north, but famine, pestilence, and death tarried through the winter. Most of occupied Italy still relied on Allied food imports to stave off starvation. Ernie Pyle, described by Bill Mauldin as “a tiny wizened bundle of misery with two sharp eyes” who spent his I&I nights nipping brandy in an Air Force compound known as Villa Virtue, watched
Italian mobs on the docks battle for scraps tossed from LST decks by soldiers sailing to Anzio. “Every time a package of crackers went down from above,” Pyle wrote, “humanity fought and stamped over it like a bunch of football players.” A British lieutenant eating chops in a Pozzuoli café was astonished when “a ragged old woman dashed in and snatched the bones off my plate.”

For two months, a particularly virulent strain of typhus raged unchecked, infecting more than two thousand Neapolitans of whom it killed one in four. Carts hauled away the dead at night, as in medieval times. Typhus, which had killed three million people in Russia and Poland during and after World War I, is spread by lice, and 90 percent of the civilian population in Naples reputedly harbored head lice. Each night “a disordered throng of miserable, frightened and soapless citizens” jammed the city’s air raid shelters, which became disease incubators.

Army physicians had quarantined Naples on January 1; for weeks, soldiers on leave were diverted to Caserta. Mass delousing was planned for the entire population, which would be sprayed “on the hoof” at fifty “public powdering stations.” Transport planes brought emergency supplies of a chemical first synthesized in 1874 but only recently recognized as a potent insecticide: DDT. A year earlier, the entire U.S. stockpile had amounted to a few ounces; now a chemical plant in Cincinnati was making seventy thousand pounds of DDT each month, and eventually sixty tons would be shipped to Italy. At one commandeered palazzo, MPs carrying sacks of the stuff stood by with spray guns. “People queued up in two lines many blocks long and marched slowly in and up the marble stairs,” according to a witness. “The men were sprayed from head to foot. The women were shot down their bosoms and backs and were sprayed back and front.” Other spray teams prowled caves and shelters, and soon the typhus epidemic ended. Like DDT itself, the spraying of more than a million Neapolitans remained a military secret for months. Only one Fifth Army soldier had been infected.

Venereal disease was another matter. “A victorious army found in Italy good-looking and amorous women, and cheap intoxicating vino in good supply,” a British analysis concluded. As a result, “the damned army is all clapped up with slit-trench romances,” a Fifth Army surgeon complained. Soldiers joked that Naples would be the world’s largest bordello, if someone could roof it. “There’s pox galore out here,” a sergeant warned British soldiers arriving in the Piazza Dante. “One good screw and yer prick will swell up like a marrow and yer balls drop off.” A crestfallen Tommy muttered, “Now why doesn’t Thomas Cook put
that
in his brochures?”

With the average worker earning only sixty lire a day—sixty cents, less than the cost of a kilogram loaf of bread—thousands of desperate, destitute Neapolitan women turned to prostitution, which typically paid one to two thousand lire per night. On New Year’s Day, after dubious studies and laboratory tests suggested that “60 percent of all women in Italy had some form of venereal disease,” Neapolitan brothels had been placed off-limits; the skin trade simply moved into the streets and to nearby towns where “they have developed the most loyal and finest pimp system in the world,” according to a provost marshal’s report. Battalions of streetwalkers paraded down Via Roma, their tresses frosted in “DDT hairdos”; one soldier grew so weary of pimps plucking at his sleeve that he hung a sign around his neck: “NO.” A strumpet on Capri who insisted on fixed-price services was known as “Madame Four-Dollars.”

The “perfunctory jogging of the haunches,” in Norman Lewis’s phrase, brought dire results to Fifth Army. The VD rate exceeded one in ten for white soldiers—it was much higher for blacks—with the average gonorrhea infection in February requiring ten days’ recuperation. “The Italian strain of gonococci proved to be 70 percent sulfa resistant,” British doctors reported. Another new wonder drug, penicillin, was generally not available in Italy until mid-February, and then in such limited stocks that it commanded the same black market price as morphine. A secret debate raged over whether penicillin should be given to infected troops or reserved exclusively for those valorously wounded. Churchill himself directed that “it must be used to the best military advantage,” and soon enough the drug would be administered to bedroom libertines and battlefield heroes alike.

Until then, Allied commanders struggled to curb their troops’ lascivious impulses.
GIRLS WHO TAKE BOARDERS PROVIDE SOCIAL DISORDERS
, street signs warned. Twenty “personal ablution centers” operated around the clock in Naples, providing the postcoital GI with soap, water, an iodine solution, and a receipt for his trouble. Still, as battles raged at Cassino and Anzio, 15 percent of all American hospital beds in Italy were occupied by VD patients. Another five hundred beds in Naples were reserved for infected prostitutes, in clinics dubbed “whorespitals.” At the Bagnoli racetrack outside Naples, the 23rd General Hospital filled hundreds of beds with diseased Lotharios, whose hospital tunics were stenciled with a large red “VD”; despite the barbed wire and sentries ringing the compound, an Army provost marshal reported that some patients were “jumping the wall and consorting with the prostitutes in the immediate neighborhood.” An exasperated major who discovered a tryst under way in a Bagnoli cave flushed the miscreants with tear gas grenades.

Near Avellino, in the hills above Salerno, even sterner measures were taken. “The chaplains thought the whores from Naples had been using the straw huts up and down the valley,” one infantryman reported, “so they set fire to all of them.”

The Orange Club was pleasant enough, and the opera house and the Capri chafing dishes offered an interlude from the war. But above all else Naples was a port, and by late winter 1944 it was among the world’s busiest. Here “that huge and gassy thing called the war effort”—John Steinbeck’s words—took solid form as the broad-shouldered avatar of Allied logistical hegemony. To keep a single GI fighting for a month in Italy required more than half a ton of matériel. Can do. For every artillery shell fired at Anzio, for every bomb dropped or Sherman tank lost at Cassino, two more seemed to levitate from the holds of arriving cargo ships, winched out by gantry cranes and placed on rail cars, truck beds, or LSTs bound for the front.

By now the American war machine had become the “prodigy of organization” so admired by Churchill and so dreaded by German commanders. U.S. production totals in 1943 had included 86,000 planes, compared with barely 2,000 in 1939. Also: 45,000 tanks, 98,000 bazookas, a million miles of communications wire, 18,000 new ships and craft, 648,000 trucks, nearly 6 million rifles, 26,000 mortars, and 61 million pairs of wool socks. Each day, another 71 million rounds of small-arms ammo spilled from U.S. munitions plants. In 1944, more of almost everything would be made.