Whicker’s War and Journey of a Lifetime. Alan Whicker
until June 10 1940 to declare war on the Allies in a belated scramble for spoils, Mussolini, the man who (as we always said) made the trains run on time and drained the Pontine Marshes, the Duce’s speeches brandished Italy’s eight million bayonets. This was the usual bellicose nonsense from the balcony of Rome’s Palazzo Venezia.
In fact the Italian Army boasted about 79 divisions, though only nineteen were complete with men and arms, and most of the rifles were made in 1891 – even older than ours. Much of their equipment was imaginary, though they did have 1900 antiquated aircraft, and 400 3½-ton tanks. The German Tiger tank, at 57 tons, weighed more than 40 Rolls-Royces; the Italian pocket tank, a few Minis. No wonder Hitler was unimpressed. It was bad enough on our side of the scales: Shermans only weighed 35 tons.
Facing us when we landed in Sicily had been a massive Italian army – somewhere. In truth we hardly noticed it, for all its ranks were deeply nervous, had no idea why they were fighting and just wanted to go home and forget the whole uncomfortable business.
Naples had fallen on October 1 amid a clamour of urchins shouting at our armoured cars for food and hungry women offering themselves for a packet of biscuits. Following our bombings and German demolition, it seemed a dead city of shuttered shops. Even the high-pressure Neapolitan salesmen were out of action. The wide harbour was clogged by the wrecks of 130 ships, and the retreating Germans had blown-up and booby-trapped the city’s sewage and water systems. Typhus arrived instantly.
Naples has always had a tenuous and insecure grasp upon health and hygiene. Thirty years later, a cholera outbreak in 1973 was to reveal that the city had no sewers, yet was living contentedly around its beautiful but poisoned bay. The popular saying, ‘See Naples and die’ was meant to summon visitors to enjoy its ramshackle charms, but took on a forbidding significance with every passing plague.
General Mark Clark was displeased because he had planned a grand entry into the city when he would acknowledge the plaudits of welcoming crowds – a sort of curtain-raiser for Rome. He wrote in his Memoirs that there was little triumph in his journey through the deserted streets of ‘a city of ghosts’. He gave a Liberation celebration, but nobody showed.
The always surprising stoicism of the Neapolitans soon surfaced and the shops began to open for business, though with little on display. Neapolitan shopkeepers were of course cannier than those in other towns who, before remembering to put up their prices, sold their remaining stocks to eager Allied soldiers enjoying the benevolent rate of exchange. In Naples they waited weeks or months before emptying the storeroom and adding zeros to the price tags.
A few good harbourside restaurants around the famous Zit Theresa opened, with costly menus. They offered a good four-course meal with wine for 140 lire, or seven shillings. Only the military – or black marketeers – could afford such outrageous prices.
One private enterprise flourished as never before. Naples had long been known as the capital of major and minor thievery, a lifestyle stimulated by war. Now beneficent Allied merchant ships arrived daily with food and army supplies, their crews not geared to deal with mass and well-organised criminality which in a hungry lawless land had become woven into every life. It was calculated that one third of all supplies landed at this major port was instantly stolen, to reappear in the black market. So it was Christmas every day for the gangsters of the Camorra.
The emerging shopkeepers of the Via Roma were followed by the friendly Neapolitan signorinas. So effusive was their more private welcome that notices soon went up along roads into the city: ‘Dangerous type of VD in this area.’ We never discovered where the safe type was.
Public Relations settled happily into the Villa Ruffo on Posillipo Hill, a stately mansion overlooking the bay, with Vesuvius – the terror and the pride of the city – smoking peacefully in the distance. This was a spectacular setting of style and comfort amid the tarnished splendour of Naples, though our billet became unkindly known as Villa Rough-it. I would happily have roughed-it indefinitely, but needed to return to the Eighth Army, still trying to push north up the east coast of Italy, 140 miles away.
An unopposed landing by the 1st Airborne Division at Taranto had been followed by the liberation of Brindisi and then the major port on the ankle of Italy, Bari, a Fascist stronghold.
The ironies of life at a warfront when you’re living on a razor’s-edge between stiff-upper-lip badinage, and death – the injustice, the unfairness of it all – was underlined for me in this Adriatic port. We arrived in Bari just after the Italian surrender and found it untouched and, like Capri, quite indifferent to war.
We were particularly irritated by the many Italian Army officers in ornate uniforms strutting about the boulevards wearing their revolvers, and lounging in pavement cafés like the cast of a Drury Lane musical. We – the victors – had been fighting the Germans, sleeping in ditches and unable to bathe; now it was infuriating to find ourselves patronised and dismissed by defeated posturing pseudo-soldiers in this unscathed city, who had never heard a gun fire. What’s more, they also had to live-down a worse record than the Germans in their treatment of prisoners.
Much boorishness survived. The posh Hotel Imperiale refused to give a room to the Allied Tactical Air Commander in Italy, Air Vice Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham. This was unwise. The irate New Zealander promptly commandeered an entire floor for the RAF.
On the plus side, the shops in their city were still stuffed with goods that at our victor’s exchange-rate seemed encouragingly cheap: a pair of rare silk stockings and a bottle of Asti Spumante to go with them, 4s.6d each. Chanel No 5 as a going-away present – 15s. The rate at the top local brothel was seven lire – then less than tuppence and, I was told, usually worth every penny. None of these bargains survived the frantic inflation which arrived soon after as Italians chased the rate of exchange, and won.
Disregarding, in the main, such inexpensive distractions, the Eighth pushed forward up the east coast of Italy, attempting to relieve the pressure on the desperate Fifth.
A popular silver-haired public relations officer, Captain Sir Gerald Boles, reminded us how our warfront lives were ruled by luck. We would sometimes find ourselves working alongside our brother War Correspondents – civilians in uniform who were taken around in the Humber Pullmans of Public Relations by Conducting Officers. They were usually subalterns recovering from wounds or officers regarded as dispensable by their units. One was Sir Gerald and he, to put a fine point upon it, was allergic to lead. He was deeply anxious not to be killed – injured, even. In a charming and patrician manner he would shy away from the most distant explosion.
While escorting Correspondents around the Front in search of their stories, he refused to go anywhere near the fighting. ‘Might get the Humber damaged,’ he would explain, apologetically. ‘War Department property, you know.’
It was true that PR only had a few Pullmans left from the desert, and that some Correspondents were quite content to go along with his careful timidity and fight-the-good-fight only upon their portable typewriters; but the more gung-ho reporters would not be fobbed off by the gentility of ‘Sir Gerald and Lady Boles’, as Ted Gilling called him scornfully. They were missing all the action and the subsequent stories. After indignant protests from the Press it was decided that Sir Gerald had to go.
He was too endearing a man to humiliate by RTUing, by returning to his unit, so his seniors cast around for an acceptably safe job away from the Front where Sir Gerald could pursue a gentler life undisturbed by explosives. They finally decided to send him back to Bari. This port was then miles behind the Front, but a sufficient number of Correspondents were passing through on their way to Yugoslavia and the Balkans to justify the posting.
With touching relief he turned his back on the war, leaving his brother officers to get on with what could be quite a dangerous role – without, as it transpired, further casualties. Sir Gerald drove south and settled into a sea view suite in a comfortable harbourside hotel to sit-out the rest of the war peacefully in that tranquil unscathed city.
In a surprise Luftwaffe raid a few nights after his arrival, an ammunition ship anchored in the harbour outside his hotel suffered a direct hit. It exploded and sank, taking sixteen other ships with it. The blast was felt for 20 miles.