Naples ’44

Theme

Bureaucracy & absurdity

Military/administrative farce, red tape, false alarms

Appears in 30 diary entries.

  1. September 8 1943
    Aboard ship off Italy, news arrives of the armistice; Lewis notes the total lack of intelligence about what awaits them at Salerno.
  2. September 15 1943
    A comrade's harrowing return from Salerno; confusion persists as officers and men lose track of each other amid ongoing shelling.
  3. September 21 1943
    Ordered back to the idle beachhead life at Paestum despite its pointlessness; the section finally gets a small, real intelligence task that evening.
  4. October 8 1943
    Floods of dubious civilian tips overwhelm the section, including a "spy" who turns out to be rumored a witch by superstitious villagers.
  5. October 10 1943
    Amid the grim work of processing denunciations, Lewis is struck by the vivid street life and rituals of a working-class Neapolitan neighborhood.
  6. October 13 1943
    A week of fruitless "spy scares" turns up only harmless eccentrics, while a new bureaucracy of mail and phone censorship intercepts trivia.
  7. October 23 1943
    A false tip about mass delayed-action mines triggers a chaotic mass evacuation of Naples, including hospital patients and the bedridden.
  8. October 24 1943
    Lewis is sent to investigate whether the German soldier behind the mine hoax should be executed as a spy.
  9. November 1 1943
    Lewis is indignant at the drastic cut to informant funds, arguing money isn't really what motivates their most dedicated Italian contacts.
  10. December 5 1943
    Lewis avoids an unwanted arrest by spending the day on unrelated errands, reflecting on the unit's discomfort with being used for private vendettas.
  11. December 18 1943
    Lewis describes how gullible unit commanders and their local interpreters get dragged into baseless denunciations and village feuds, including against a corrupt police marshal.
  12. January 1 1944
    A tedious, unproductive investigation into telephone-wire theft, which the Army wrongly treats as sabotage rather than opportunistic copper theft.
  13. January 12 1944
    The wire-theft crackdown continues to unfairly target small, desperate offenders like an elderly scrap-merchant, while real traders go untouched.
  14. January 14 1944
    Amid a flood of usually-worthless rumors, one turns out to be true — an imminent Anzio landing — sending Lewis scrambling to trace a security leak.
  15. January 19 1944
    Chaotic, arbitrary court proceedings at Castel Capuano illustrate the absurd unevenness of wartime justice, set against an open black market.
  16. February 5 1944
    Thieves brazenly strip the wheels from vehicles at the supposedly secure Field Security Headquarters, showcasing local audacity and ingenuity.
  17. March 3 1944
    An account of a bizarre, catastrophic Allied intelligence scheme prompted by fears that prostitution was being used to spread disease among troops.
  18. March 5 1944
    The growing, increasingly careless traffic of "line-crossers" and letter-couriers moving between Allied and German territory raises serious security concerns.
  19. March 13 1944
    The crackdown on the black market punishes only the powerless, as shown by a farcical smuggling trial that collapses through prosecutorial incompetence.
  20. May 7 (ii) 1944
    Frustrated by unresolved banditry, the General pressures Italian police into a harsher new anti-bandit operation, which Lewis observes as an onlooker.
  21. May 31 1944
    Post-Fascist Italy's political life fragments into dozens of parties, some espousing bizarre or fringe ideas, reflecting a climate of instability.
  22. July 26 1944
    An almost novelistic assignment to escort a mysterious, allegedly dangerous female internee to Rome for interrogation raises awkward questions among the section.
  23. August 20 1944
    The local Marshal frets over bandit threats to the town, but Lewis notes how absurdly under-armed and unprepared the local security forces really are.
  24. August 25 1944
    A grenade attack on an MP sergeant prompts a tense but ultimately toothless conference about how to respond to the now-motorized bandits.
  25. September 6 1944
    The generous but reckless Canadians treat everything, including two local girls they've picked up, with careless ease; Lewis is assigned to probe a clandestine political party.
  26. September 19 1944
    A tense overnight checkpoint operation against suspected bandit traffic is set up on a lonely road, staffed by a poorly coordinated mix of Allied and Italian forces.
  27. October 8 1944
    Mob violence breaks out against local girls seen with Allied soldiers, and the section is controversially ordered to intervene with sub-machine guns.
  28. October 16 1944
    A large-scale, coercive round-up of women for VD examinations follows a tip from a gynecologist contact, exposing the harsh methods used to fight the disease.
  29. October 20 1944
    Official policy strongly discourages marriages between soldiers and Italian civilians, citing poor historical outcomes for such wartime unions.
  30. October 24 1944
    Lewis is abruptly ordered to a new mission repatriating Russian ex-POWs, sensing this marks the end of his time in Naples.

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