On September 8, Italy announced the armistice officially, made personally by Badoglio on the radio at 1900 hours and 37 minutes. Thanks to the reinforcements which had arrived rapidly, Germany had remained undisputed master from the Alps to the city of Naples, while the province of Salerno had become a combat zone for the Anglo-American landing on September 9.
The anger of the Neapolitans, already hot because of the war they had already been through, had become scorcing. They had had to endure too much in the three years and more after the regimes traitorous and improvident entry into the conflict on June 10, 1940, behind Nazi Germany. Naples had been systematically bombed by the British and then also by the Americans, with as many as one hundred and five raids until the armistice, all of which had hit the mark turning buildings to rubble and leaving large numbers of people dead, injured and mutilated, and hordes of homeless families. Not a single district had been spared, also because the political and military leaders had been unable to prepare adequate anti-air defenses, which had been entrusted almost entirely, in an improvised way, to the warships at anchor in the port.
And then, the hunger! That grim and voiceless hunger that takes your legs from under you; and since the illusion of peace of July 25 has faded, more bombs hail down on the city, bringing absolute famine and diseases with more deaths from the lack of medicines. From September 9, Naples had suffered material damage from the Germans, including serious damage to the port, and had been subjected to roundups and executions not only of Italian soldiers on the loose but also civilians.
Even the fascists, albeit in a subordinate position, had taken possession of the city a couple of weeks after September 8, risen again from the political tombs to become the newly born Stato Nazionale Repubblicano10 soon to become the Italian Social Republic formed on the 23rd of that month by Hitler himself, headed by an unwilling but resigned Mussolini who on the 12th had been freed by German paratroopers from house arrest in his refuge-hotel of Campo Imperatore on the Gran Sasso, where the King had relegated him.
The traditional Teutonic harshness of wartime had become, if possible, even more barbaric, incited by isolated attacks from citizens with the support of sailors from the moored ships of the Regia Marina11 . It was a very early, sporadic and spontaneous resistance, not yet connected to the adversaries of Nazi fascism. The rebellion had started in Via Santa Brigida where, on the morning of the 9th, about thirty residents had attacked a Wehrmacht squad after one of those soldiers had shot at an unarmed twelve-year-old shop boy with his ordinance rifle, a Mauser Kar 98k, as if he was at the shooting range in an amusement park, while the boy was at the door of the shop getting some sun.
The person who had kick-started that group of humiliated Neapolitans was the young Deputy Commissioner that we have already met in passing, Dr. Vittorio D'Aiazzo, who was passing nearby on foot when the German soldier had aimed and fired at the boy. Very indignant, the young Public Security officer had shot from around a corner without taking aim into the Teutonic bunch with his ordinance Beretta M34, emptying the magazine and killing two soldiers. He had then vanished down a side alley, not so much for fear of the enemy but afraid of trouble, or worse, from his superiors.
As he disappeared, those of the thirty exacerbated civilians present who had knives in their pockets, which was almost all of them, had pulled them out. The crowd, which had now become white hot with anger at the sight of the enemy corpses and the image d'o sbenturàto guaglio' 12 who had been hit in the femoral artery and was dying fast, had thrown itself on the rest of the German squadron, screaming like savages. The soldier who had fired was the first to be slaughtered, emasculated by three outraged men, and a soldier had been punched on the nose by an assailant without a blade. Then someone behind him had attacked him with a large knife wounding him horizontally on the buttocks. Almost all the assailants had suffered bruising and lacerations to the arms and face, and one, worse, had lost his nose.
No German had managed to fire a single shot at the feral horde and, with the sergeant in the lead, the squad had fled quickly abandoning its arrogance on the cobblestones. The rifles and hand grenades of the slain and the rifles left on the ground by the most seriously wounded had been collected and hidden in the houses. Very soon they would serve to free the city. The three corpses had been taken to the slums and were dissected there. The shreds of flesh had been wrapped in rags and buried in various places in the area. It would be whispered later, true or false? that some nice piece of buttock though had ended up in undernourished bellies roasted. The street had been washed very energetically by the women of the fearless rebels, and never again would it be so clean.