Naples '44 Read Free Page A

could to the armoured car that had brought the news, and by God’s mercy avoiding the panic-stricken fire directed from cover at anything that moved, reached this field with its rabble of shocked and demoralised soldiery – officers separated from their men, and men from their officers.
    Official history will in due time set to work to dress up this part of the action at Salerno with what dignity it can. What we saw was ineptitude and cowardice spreading down from the command, and this resulted in chaos. What I shall never understand is what stopped the Germans from finishing us off.
September 15
    Miraculously Moore, one of the four sergeants sent to Salerno, got back; a hair-raising twelve-mile drive by jeep, round the edge of a battle raging all the way. The FSO had arrived in the town, and we were ordered to leave the motor cycles and do our best to get into the town by any vehicle that might attempt the run and could be persuaded to take us. After much negotiating Dashwood managed to line up a command car, but at the last moment we were told that there was not enough space to take us. Later we saw the command car depart, loaded up with wine. The cannonading has been going on all day but the din is lessening. Confusion is still intense. Many of the men we see wandering about have no idea where their officers are and have not seen them since the German counterattack began.
September 17
    Attempts by the remaining section members to reach Salerno having been abandoned, I could find nothing to prevent my taking a sightseeing trip. I therefore motor-cycled up to the hill village of Capaccio, which had always been in sight from the beachhead, presiding with cool if distant charm over the raucous confusion below and representing for me all that was most romantic in the landscape of Southern Italy.
    At close quarters its charm was even more pungent; a place of delicately interlocking white masses, and sparkling light. I rode with some caution into a street which could have been almost English, with narrow, picket-fenced front gardens in which grew such recognisable favourites as zinnias and sweet peas. The peace of this place after four days of the racket of warfare was stunning. Two aged women in black gossiped into each other’s ear, and a white-bearded old man, a kind of Italian Father Christmas, spoiled by a crinkling, obsequious smile, sat at a table by his garden gate, selling wine. It was immediately clear that the local belief was that the Germans had gone, never to return, because as soon as he spotted me he held up a notice Vivono gli Alleati . I pulled up, bought a glass of wine which looked and tasted like ink, and asked him whether there were any Germans about, and he put on a hideous smirk. He got up and beckoned to me to follow him into his cottage, where a uniformed man was sprawled, head on his chest, in a deep chair. This was the first German I had seen, and he was dead. Speaking in some local dialect quite inaccessible to me, the old man tried to explain what had happened. He was clearly accepting responsibility for the German’s death, and expected praise and perhaps even a reward. His gestures seemed to claim that he had put poison in the soldier’s wine. I couldn’t decide whether or not this was a piece of sycophantic bluff.
    I pushed him aside and went out. A disgusting old fellow, but a reliable barometer, I suspected, of the Germans’ prospects in this particular theatre of war.
September 18
    Today in the chow-line we spoke to a paratrooper of the American 509th Parachute Battalion, still numb with resentment following his experiences of the night of the 14th, when he had taken part in the wild and foolish drop of six hundred men sent to disrupt communications in the enemy’s rear. The objective, he said, had been Avellino bridge and tunnel, but some of the planes had made the drop up to twenty-five miles off target, and others had dropped parachutists on the roofs of high