Unconventional

Naples '44, and Norman Lewis, then serving as an officer in the British army's nascent security services, records two 'secret weapons' deployed in theatre by the Allies — both with a significant blow-back effect and both arguably deserving of prohibition by the same international treaties which prevent the use of chemical and biological weapons — Islamic sexual psychopathy and southern Italian criminality. 

For the Free French had sent in their North African troops, and this went about as well as the use of Moroccans in Spain by Franco had done a decade earlier...

'At last one had faced the flesh-and-blood reality of the kind of horror that drove the whole female population of Macedonian villages to throw themselves from cliffs rather than fall into the hands of the advancing Turks. A fate worse than death: it was in fact just that...

'The French colonial troops are on the rampage...Whenever they take a town or a village, a wholesale rape of the population takes place. Recently all females in the villages of Patricia, Pofi, Isoletta, Supino, and Morolo were violated. In Lenola, which fell to the Allies on May 21, fifty women were raped, but - as these were not enough to go round - children and even old men were violated. It is reported to be normal for two Moroccans to assault a woman simultaneously, one having normal intercourse while the other commits sodomy. In many cases severe damage to the genitals, rectum and uterus has been caused. In Castro di Volsci doctors treated three hundred victims of rape, and at Ceccano the British have been forced to build a guarded camp to protect the Italian women. 

'Many Moors have deserted, and are attacking villages far behind the lines, and now they are reported to have appeared in the vicinity of Afragola to add a new dimension of terror to that already produced by the presence of so many marauders.

'The Psychological Warfare Bureau has been very energetic in its investigations into the crimes committed by the Moors. I wonder if any news of this episode will find it way into the bulletin.'

That sounds all too familiar.

Anyway, 'Let us deal with this...our way' came the response from the good people of the Zona di Camorra just outside Naples. And, sure enough, Lewis reported to his diary on June 4...

'The inevitable has happened with the murder of five Moors in a village near Cancello. They were enticed into a house with the offer of women, and then given food or wine containing some paralysing poison. While fully conscious they were castrated, and then beheaded. The decapitation was entrusted to pubescent boys to prove their worth, but the boys lacked both the skill and strength to carry the task out in a speedy and effective manner. The bodies were buried under cabbages, which were first dug up and then replanted over them in several village gardens, and there has been an undercurrent of sinister merriment in the Zona di Camorra about the prospects of fine vegetable crops in the coming year.'

The black-market activities of the Camorra had been bolstered by an unusual decision taken by the American high command...

'Too many American officers had been chosen to go on the Italian campaign because they were of Italian descent. For this reason it was hoped they might easily adapt to the environment, and this they had done all too well...

At the head of the so-called Allied Military Government was Colonel Charles Poletti, and alongside him is former American mafioso Vito Genovese, in a position of what Lewis describes as 'unassailable power' as the colonel's official advisor and interpreter, from which he has been personally selecting all the key officials in the towns around the city…

'He had been second-in-command of a New York Mafia ‘family’ headed by Lucky Luciano...and had succeeded to its leadership when Luciano was gaoled, after which he had been acknowledged as the head of all the American Mafia. Shortly before the outbreak of war Genovese had returned to Italy to escape a murder indictment in the US, had become a friend of Mussolini’s, and then, with the Duce’s fall, transferred his allegiance to Allied Military Government, where he was now seen as the power behind the scenes. Genovese controlled the sindacos in most towns within fifty miles of Naples. He leased out rackets to his followers, took a toll of everything, threw crumbs of favour to those who kept in step with him, and found a way of punishing opposition.'

The end result of all this is that key supplies that the Allies depended on — such as penicillin — were now easier to come across on the black market than in American military facilities.

And when it came to addressing this increasingly pressing problem, Lewis noted rather ruefully, 'Justice was never seen to be done; and if ever there was a place where it was on sale, it was Naples.'