World War II Diary

Naples ‘44: A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy - Norman Lewis

Lewis attended London's Enfield Grammar School among whose alumni are Boris Karloff and many other distinguished musicians, scholars, clerics, and scientists. Born in 1908, Lewis served in World War II and this is a chronicle of his service during the Allied occupation of Naples

Although intelligence work was his main area of activity, his office was assigned a wide variety of tasks from policing the black market to assessing damage caused by an eruption of Vesuvius in March 1944 (“the most majestic and terrible sight I've ever seen or expect to see,” he writes). The varied assignments gave him a chance to meet all kinds of people from down at heel aristocrats, starving intellectuals, and the salt of the earth whose instincts for survival seem from the Middle Ages.

Lewis spoke Italian and could handle its regional dialects so he could get the truth more quickly and accurately than his fellow agents. He describes ugly and depressing scenes of people struggling just to eat and survive. His terse prose is angry, mordant, and blistering with regard to Italian gangsterism and corruption, snotty British muddling, American stupidity, and Canadian sadism (don't often see those words together).

He's not prejudiced as nobody gets off the hook. But one understands Lewis when he says if he got to live his life all over again, he would choose to grow up and live in Naples.