| Naples had been comprehensively destroyed in 1943 – 1st by the Allied bombs, and then by the scorched earth policy of the retreating Heer (“German Army”). Virgilio Riento’s (November 29, 1889 – September 7, 1959) musical revue “Scandal Show” starring popular singer Luciana Dolliver (April 28, 1910 – September 1, 1982) and orchestrated by Maestro Gaetano Franco (???? – ????) was the most successful show of the 1944-1945 Italian season. The show toured the available venues in Italy, including the Teatro Reale di San Carlo, opened in 1737. Italian singer Adriana Dionisi (1920 – ????) would play an uncredited role in the 1944 film Carmen. While Cinema Teatro Santa Lucia operated from the silent era, screening the American epic Ben-Hur in 1926, it also featured live theatre. Enzo Turco (1902 – July 7, 1983) with La Compagnia di Rivista le Tre Nava touring Florence, Berlin, Ålborg, and Rome. Nino Taranto (August 28, 1907 – February 23, 1986) joined the troupe in 1944 for the reviews “Scampoli” and “Romanzo di un giovane povero” before making the film version Casanova in casa Nava (1954). “At the time of our arrival,” wrote Colonel Edgar Erskine Hume (December 26, 1889 – January 24, 1952), the first Allied Governor of Naples, “the city was in darkness. There was no electric power, gas, sewage disposal, means of collecting refuse, facilities to bury the dead, air raid signals, telephones, ambulance service, fire protection, telegraphs, postal service, street cars, buses, taxis, funiculars, railways, or regular water supply. Police organization had broken down and after days of terror there was almost a state of anarchy… Despair was everywhere.” Over the course of the next year, a series of catastrophes hit the city. 1st there was a water crisis: the departing Heer had blown up all the water mains and sewers, leaving hundreds of thousands of Neapolitans without anything to drink. Next came a food crisis. The countryside around Naples might be some of the most fertile farmland in the world; but all of the transport systems had been smashed, and without any way of transporting food from the countryside into the city, people began to starve. This in turn created an economic crisis. Food prices went through the roof, and families all over the city were forced to sell all of their possessions just to survive. Women everywhere began to sell their bodies: according to 1 British intelligence report in 1944 around 1 in 7 women between 1650 were prostituting themselves. As if this were not enough, a typhus epidemic hit the city at the end of 1943; and 3 months later, Vesuvius erupted. And all the while, just 30 or 40 miles (50 to 65 kilometers) away, the war continued. The people tasked with dealing with this pile up of emergencies were the men and women of a brand-new Allied Military Government in Naples. From the very beginning they found themselves completely out of their depth. They were hopelessly understaffed: at 1 point, a single officer found himself administering an area covering 27 communes, with a combined population of half a 1,000,000 people. They were also underequipped: some departments found themselves without transport or other basic equipment such as pens and paper; others stopped submitting reports to Allied Forces Headquarters, because they did not even have access to a typewriter. But worst of all, they lacked the proper training. None of them had any experience of Italian administration, and few spoke more than a word of 2 of Italian. They were obliged to lean heavily on local officials, but they had no way of telling which officials were trustworthy or competent. Postwar interviews carried out with former Allied Military Government officers sometimes make painful listening. According to Theodore J. “Ted” Shannon (May 22, 1918 – December 11, 2016), the problems he encountered in Italy went far beyond anything his training had prepared him for: indeed, most of his training had been nothing but “pie in the sky”. Lieutenant Colonel Thomas R. Fisher (June 2, 1895 – December 17, 1967), who saw every level of the Allied administration in Italy, claimed that Naples in particular “was probably the worst-governed city in the Western world.” The consequences for the people of Naples were dire. During the period after the Allies took control, crime levels soared. The black market raged out of control. In many areas, law and order were completely non-existent. In his memoir of the war, Australian reporter Alan Moorehead (July 22, 1910 – September 29, 1983) spoke eloquently about how bad things became in the city. “Army cigarettes and chocolates were stolen by the hundredweight and resold at fantastic prices. Vehicles were stolen at the rate of something like sixty or seventy a night (not always by the Italians). Knifing skirmishes in the back streets became a nightly affair. In the whole list of sordid human vices none I think were overlooked in Naples during those first few months.” As Moorehead hinted, some of the worst offenders in this crime wave were the Allies themselves. It was Allied port workers and drivers who fueled the black market: at the beginning of 1944 almost a 3rd of all military supplies in the port were stolen and sold on to local mobsters. It was Allied soldiers and sailors who also fueled the market in prostitution, and even child prostitution. Some of the brothels offered up girls as young as 10 or 12, and several Allied soldiers admit to taking advantage of such offers in their private diaries and memoirs. But the vast bulk of anti-social behavior that plagued Naples in 1944 was caused by ordinary young men on leave, looking for a good time before they were sent back to the violence and squalor of the front line. They had been promised a tourist paradise, and were determined to experience it whether or not it really existed. So they took day trips to Capri and Pompeii, but then they got drunk and made passes at the local girls. When the city’s meager attempt to entertain them became disappointing, they started fights with local people, each other, and the policemen who came to arrest them. 1 group of soldiers hijacked the mayor’s car and forced the driver to ferry them about Naples like a tour guide for several hours while they carried on drinking in the back. Behavior like this left bittersweet memories in Naples after the war was over. On the 1 hand the Allies had rescued Italy from the Germans, whose atrocities were widespread and brutal. Most Neapolitans recognized that the hearts of British and American soldiers were in the right place, and that the vast majority of them genuinely wanted to help the city get back on its feet. United States Navy Lieutenant Wayne F. Miller (September 19, 1918 – May 22, 2013) was an American photographer born in Chicago, Illinois and lived in Orinda, California. He was assigned to Lieutenant Commander Edward Steichen’s (March 27, 1879 – March 25, 1973) Naval Photography Unit. The new mobility enjoyed by the Naval Aviation photographers is evident in the circuit traveled by Miller in 1944. The youngest, least experienced member of the original group, he was the most determined to prove himself as a photographer. Miller managed to photograph his way around the world. In February, he covered, from the air, the Marine landings on Engebi island. In March, he sailed on the USS Saratoga to the Indian Ocean for a joint operation with Lord Louis Mountbatten’s British fleet. In August, he was in the Mediterranean, photographing air operations off the coast of southern France, and stepping ashore at Naples. There, feeling that this, too, was part of the job of photographing the war and its human consequences, he made many photographs of that city’s uprooted children wandering the streets in rags and searching for food among the rubble. By the year’s end he was back in the South Pacific, on board the USS Ticonderoga before its pilots launched the 1st strikes against Japanese-held Manila. In a letter, Steichen offered him a mixture of assessment and advice: “I think you are turning ‘em out of a quality that warms the cockles of the old man’s heart. Don’t worry about la well-known photographer)-you are headed in a warmer and more human direction-don’t be afraid to move in on close-ups-Shoot more color-that’s the only way to get national circulation…The status of the unit gets better all the time…Keep em coming-I’m betting on you — ready to give you my odds. My best to you and lots of it.” He was a member of the Magnum agency and received a Guggenheim Fellowship to photograph African American communities after the war. | |
| Image Filename | wwii0624.jpg |
| Image Size | 1.03 MB |
| Image Dimensions | 2364 x 2490 |
| Photographer | Wayne Miller |
| Photographer Title | United States Navy |
| Caption Author | Written or Adapted by Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | August 1, 1944 |
| Location | |
| City | Naples |
| State or Province | Campania |
| Country | Italy |
| Archive | National Archives and Records Administration |
| Record Number | NWDNS-80-G-474152 |
| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
Author of the World War II Multimedia Database