He had spent the night sleeping under an old cot topped by a soiled mattress in a deserted apartment off Via Toledo, waiting out the bombing attacks that greeted Naples each night. His mother had sent him out earlier in the day in search of black market bread, which arrived nightly, carted in by flatbed trucks and sold in the darkness of quiet alleys. The war had stripped Neapolitans of even the most basic necessities, and they were forced to dole out small ransoms for what had once been inexpensive staples.
The trucks had been late.
They usually drove into the alleys at nine, but were delayed by mines and German checkpoints. The boy waited on a long, quiet line until nearly midnight for the round loaf that would serve as that day’s meal for his mother and two sisters. The air-raid alarms sounded seconds after the boy paid for the bread. He dropped his lira into the hands of a black marketer he had come to know, nodded and turned to leave. “Don’t go home, Vincenzo,” the man whispered from the emptiness of the dark truck.
“My mother’s waiting for this,” Vincenzo said. “My sisters haven’t eaten all day.”
“Forget about tonight,” the man said. “Let them have their bread in the morning.”
“I’m not worried about the bombs,” Vincenzo said. “I’ve run through them before.”
“It’s not the bombs you need to be concerned about,” the man said. “It’s the thieves who wait to steal the bread you buy. They haven’t eaten all day, either. And they never pay for what goes in their mouths.”
Vincenzo stared at the man, not sure whether to trust his own instincts or the word of a seller who profited from the hunger of his own people. “I’m not afraid,” Vincenzo said, looking around him at the now empty alley.
“Nor are you foolish,” the man said. “Find a warm place and wait out the night. You can make your run in the morning. Feed your family a good meal then. It’s a better choice than arriving home with empty hands.”
The first of the bombs fell in the piazza off the alley, sending debris and dust flying into the night air, the area now lit with flames. The truck’s engine kicked over and the man stood away from Vincenzo and let the cover drop over the back of the truck. “Save yourself,” the man said as he disappeared from view. “And the bread, too.”
Vincenzo waited until dawn before he braved the run back home.
He turned the final corner and skidded to a stop. He stood across from where his house had once been and stared at the crumpled mass of pink stucco, cement and wood. He dropped the bread and fell to his knees, head bowed, hands spread down the length of his face. He began to moan, moving back and forth in painful rhythms of agony, his body lifeless, his muscles weak. He lowered his head to the top of his knees and shook with rage and remorse. He didn’t need to look, didn’t need to search through rubble to find what he already knew to be true—they were dead.
His mother, who had born the weight of the war with stoic strength and love, was gone from his life. His younger sister, always quick to tease him and who loved to hear him laugh, lay crushed under the weight of stones that had once kept her safe. His older sister, who sang and rocked him to sleep when he was a toddler, reached out to her mother one final time before the bomb tore apart their lives.
Vincenzo lifted his head, his face rich with tears and sorrow, and looked to the sky, searching through morning mist for the faces he loved. He let out a series of loud screams, his hands held tight, pounding at the ground around him. No one heard. No one saw. No one came. He was a lost boy now, adrift without a home or a family to fill it. He was a victim of the war, joining the ranks of so many Italians who had been stripped of all they held close to their hearts. He was still only a child, but now he would be forced to set aside such thoughts, to think and fend like a man, responsible to no one other than himself. And he was in pain; sharp, agonizing jolts jarred his every movement. At that moment, empty of all feeling, ripped away from all that he loved, the boy wanted nothing more than to die. Instead, Vincenzo faced the long and grueling process of burying his family.
“You want a marker for the graves?” his friend Franco asked. Franco was fourteen, with a muscular frame, crisp dark eyes and a thick head of hair that he hated to have cut, long locks ruffled by the slightest wind.
The boy shook his head. “I’m the only one who needs to know where they are,” he said.
“I’m sorry, Vincenzo,” Franco said. “They did not deserve to die like this.”
Vincenzo stared at the graves and nodded. “No one does,” he said.
“Maybe if they had left along with the others,” Franco said. He stood next to Vincenzo, his right foot resting against a crumpled stone wall that had once been the older boy’s home. “Left when the Germans told them to leave. Maybe today they would still be alive.”
“My mother said that if we were to die, we had earned the right to die in our own city,” Vincenzo said.
“You heard the soldiers with the bullhorns,” Franco said. “You read the leaflets they dropped. They’re coming back. This time with tanks and many more soldiers. They’re not going to stop until they destroy all of it.”
“I heard them,” Vincenzo said. “And I believe them. What they can’t have, they want no one else to have.”
“These graves we made won’t last very long,” Franco said. “The bombs will see to that.”
Vincenzo looked past Franco and out across the smoke and ruin of Naples. “The bombs can’t hurt them anymore,” he said.
BOOK
ONE
. . . We are but warriors for the working day.
—HENRY V
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
1
45TH THUNDERBIRD INFANTRY DIVISION HEADQUARTERS SALERNO, ITALY. SEPTEMBER 25, 1943
Captain Edward Anders leaned under the warm shade of a fig tree, a lit Lucky Strike hanging from his lips, and stared down at the beachhead below. His troops had been in the first wave of the attack to capture a city whose name he had never heard before the war. It took the combined forces of American and British troops nine days to advance past the beach and up the side of the sloping mountain where he now stood, smoking the last cigarette in his pack. Behind him, a command post had been set up inside a long series of brown tents. Inside the main tent, there were 3,500 sets of dog tags scattered in four wooden boxes, waiting to be mailed Stateside for eventual delivery to the relatives of the men who had been lost in a fight for sand and rock. Anders stared at the mountains above him, up toward Cassino, then back down toward the city of Naples, and knew there was still a lot of hard fighting left.
“Hey, Cap,” a voice behind him said. “Word is you want to see me.”
“It was more like an order,” Captain Anders said. “But let’s not stand on formalities.”
Captain Anders turned to look at Corporal Steve Connors as he stood at attention and held his salute, the Gulf of Salerno at his back. Anders brushed away the salute. “From what I’ve seen, you have as little patience for that shit as I do. Which probably means neither one of us is going to get far in this army.”
“I just want to get far enough to go home, Cap,” Connors said.
“Will Naples do you in the meantime?” Anders asked.
“What’s in Naples?”
“Most likely nothing. From the reports I’ve seen, the city’s already nothing more than a ghost town.”
“But still, you want me to go,” Connors said.
He removed his helmet and wiped the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his uniform. Steve Connors was twenty-five years old, a college graduate and second-year law student from Covington, Kentucky. He was just shy of six feet tall with a middleweight fighter’s rugged build, topped by thick strands of dark hair, brown eyes and a wide smile that balanced out a hard edge. He had fought under Anders’s command for fourteen months, pounding and slashing his way from one blood-drenched beachhead to the next, always the first in line, always the first to fire. He had a street fighter’s instincts for battle and survival and was, as far as
Captain Ed Anders was concerned, the best soldier for the task at hand.
“It might just be a ghost town with two of our men in it,” Anders said. “We had a handful of G.I.s helping the Italian resistance—or whatever the hell was left of it. Most of them slipped out before the evacuation. Two didn’t. They could be dead. They could be hiding. They could be back in the States for all I know. But we’ve got to find out.”
“I go in alone?” Connors asked.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Anders said.
“Very much, sir.”
“I’d like a bowl of my wife’s white bean soup,” Anders said. “But that’s not going to happen, either. You’ll be part of a three-man team. You go in, as quiet as you can, check out the city and see if you can find our guys.”
“Who else is on the team, sir?”
“If our soldiers are still in there, they might be hurt. So you’ll take one of the medics, Willis. And then another good rifle to cover your back. That’ll be Scott Taylor.”
Connors winced at the sound of Taylor’s name. “Every man out here has a rifle, sir,” he said. “Not just Taylor.”
“But not every man’s going,” Anders said, raising his voice. “Taylor is. I know you two rub each other the hard way, but this ain’t the senior prom. If it gets tight, he’s somebody good to have on your side. Neither one of you has to like it. You just have to do it.”
“Yes, sir,” Connors said. “Anything else I need to know?”
“Not a damn thing.” Anders reached into the front flap of the younger soldier’s shirt and pulled a loose cigarette from his open pack. “Just radio back what you see. We’ll do the rest.”
“And if we don’t find our men?” Connors asked. “What then, Cap?”
“Enjoy your stay in Naples,” Captain Anders said as he turned and headed back up to his command post.
2
16TH PANZER DIVISION HEADQUARTERS
FIFTEEN MILES OUTSIDE OF ROME, ITALY. SEPTEMBER 25, 1943
The eighty Mark IV tanks sat in long silent rows. German soldiers were scattered about, searching out shade and a cool place to doze. Colonel Rudolph Von Klaus stood in the open pit of his tank and stared at the note in his hands. The words on the paper had been passed down directly from Adolf Hitler himself. They were as simple and direct as any order he had received in his twenty-five-year military career. “Allow no stone in Naples to stand” was all it said.
To a precise and proud officer, the order read as nothing more than a complete waste—of a city once bold and beautiful, of a Panzer division that had fought too hard for too long to be reduced to a mop-up unit, and of time, of which there was precious little left before this wretched war would reach its ruinous conclusion. Naples had already been contained, its streets emptied. Aerial bombings had destroyed any buildings that could possibly be of future use to the enemy. It was a mission of madness. Just one more foolish request springing from the unhinged mind of a leader he found lacking in military logic.
Von Klaus folded the order into sections and shoved it into his pant pocket. He gazed around at his troops and took some comfort from the fact that as inane as the order was, its simplicity would at least guarantee that he would not have to leave behind any more of his men, lying dead or wounded on a battlefield. After the Naples mission, Von Klaus was scheduled to head back home, to a wife he had not seen in two years, a daughter who would now be eight and a son too young to remember the last time his father cradled him in his arms. Von Klaus was only forty-six years old, but felt decades past that. Nothing, he believed, aged a man more than having to face the reality of inevitable defeat.
“The tanks are repaired and fueled, sir.” The young soldier stood several feet across from Von Klaus, half-hidden by the shadows of dangling tree limbs. He looked to be months removed from his teenage years.
“Good,” Von Klaus said. “And the mules have been fed as well?”
“Yes, sir,” the soldier said. “Earlier this morning.”
“Check on them again tomorrow,” Von Klaus told him. “Until then, enjoy this warm Italian sun.”
“Sir, if I may, some of the men were wondering when we would be moving on,” the soldier said.
“Do you have a girl back home that you care about, Kunnalt?” Von Klaus asked him.
“Yes, sir,” Kunnalt said, surprised at the question. “We plan to marry once the war is over.”
“Then go and find a large rock, sit down and write her a letter,” Von Klaus said. “Make it a long one and take your time doing it. I’m in no rush to leave. The empty buildings of Naples will wait for us.”
3
LUNGOMARE, NAPLES
LATE NIGHT
SEPTEMBER 25, 1943
Two hundred boys and girls were spread out around a large fire, the flames licking the thick, crusty wood, sending sparks and smoke into the starlit sky. Their clothes were dirty and shredded at the sleeves and cuffs, shoes held together by cardboard and string. All their memories had been scarred by the frightful cries of war and the loss that always followed. The youngest members of the group, between five and seven years old, stood with their backs to the others, tossing small pebbles into the oil-soaked Bay of Naples. The rest, their tired faces filled with hunger and sadness, the glow from the fire illuminating their plight, huddled around Vincenzo and Franco. They were children without a future, marked for an unknown destiny.
Vincenzo stepped closer to the fire and glanced up at the sky, enjoying the rare evening silence. He looked down and smiled at two small boys, Giancarlo and Antonio, playing quietly by the edge of the pier, their thin legs dangling several feet above the water below. He glanced past them at a girl slowly making her way toward him, squeezing past a cluster of boys standing idle and silent. She was tall, about fifteen, with rich brown hair rolled up and buried under a cap two sizes too large. Her tan face was marred by streaks of soot and dirt. She stepped between Vincenzo and the two boys, her arms by her side, an angry look to her soft eyes.
“Where do we go from here?” she asked.
“The hills,” Vincenzo said with a slight shrug. “It seems the safest place. At least for now.”
“And after that?” she asked in a voice younger than her years.
“What’s your name?” Vincenzo asked, the flames from the fire warming his face.
“Angela,” she said. “I lived in Forcella with my family. Now I live there alone.”
Forcella was the roughest neighborhood in Naples, a tight space of only a few blocks that historically had been the breeding ground for thieves and killers and the prime recruitment territory for the Camorra, the Neapolitan Mafia. “Forcella?” Vincenzo said to her. “Not even a Nazi would be brave enough to set foot on those streets.”
“Especially after dark,” Franco said, laughing.
“But they did,” Angela said, lowering her eyes for a brief moment.
“What do you want me to do?” Vincenzo said. “Where do you think we should go? Look around you. This is all that’s left of us.”
“So we run,” she said, words laced with sarcasm. “Like always.”
Vincenzo stepped closer to her, his face red from both the fire and his rising anger. “There is nothing else to do,” he said. “You can help us with some of the little ones. A lot of them are too sick to walk.”
Angela glared at Vincenzo for several moments, lowered her head and then turned back into the mouth of the crowd.
Vincenzo walked in silence around the edges of the fire, the sounds of the crackling wood mixing with the murmurs of the gathered teens. They were all children forced to bear the burden of adults, surviving on the barest essentials, living like cornered animals in need of shelter and a home. They had been scattered throughout the city, gutter rats in soiled clothing, enduring the daily thrashings of a war started by strangers in uniforms who spoke of worlds to conquer.
They had been born under the reign of Benito Mussolini and his fascist regime. As the United States suffered through
the pangs of a Great Depression, Italy lived under the warmth of economic prosperity. Its fields were flush with crops and its factories filled to capacity with products that brought the country headfirst into the modern age. Now, the fields were burned and barren, the factories bombed and bare. Where there was once hope, there now rested only hunger. Where once visions of great victories filled Italian hearts, there was now nothing more than the somber acceptance of a humiliating defeat.
“Naples has always been ruled by outsiders,” Vincenzo said, stopping alongside Franco and tossing two more planks of old wood onto the fire. “We’ve always been someone’s prisoner. But in all that time, the people have never surrendered the streets without a fight. This war, against this enemy, would be the first time that has ever happened.”
“Who are we to stop it?” Franco said, staring into his friend’s eyes.
Vincenzo stood in front of the flames, his shirt and arms stained with sweat, light gray smoke filling his lungs. He then turned and walked away, disappearing into the darkness of the Neapolitan night.