The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (40 page)

The results of UNRRA’s work in Greece were mixed. The official history naturally makes significant claims: that despite the “lethargy, inefficiency, and corruption” of the Greek government, “the Greek people and the na- tion were quite literally kept alive by the contribution of UNRRA supplies and by the hard, practical work of hundreds of UNRRA employees without whom the sup- plies would never have reached the Greek people.”
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By the end of 1945, the organization had shipped 5,000 tons of clothing, shoes, and blankets into the country, opened welfare centers in every province, distributed

over 1,000 tons of raw wool to families with looms to weave their own textiles, shipped in over $3 million of medical supplies, and were delivering 8,000 vials of penicillin each month. The list of the goods offloaded each month from UNRRA ships reveals that UNRRA was doing more than merely providing a hot meal: it was repairing the basic fabric of life for millions whom the war had left destitute. By the start of 1946, UNRRA had shipped to Greece 14,000 cases of matches, 2.8 million razor blades, 6,500 pounds of candles, 96,000 rolls of toilet paper, 324,000 tubes of calcium hydrochlorite for water purification, along with hundreds of thousands of household items such as cooking utensils, cutlery, soup bowls, lamps, bathtubs, tents, tables, garden hos- es, shovels, tea towels, soap, brooms, mops, and even corkscrews. Far more important than such household items was the monthly total of grain UNRRA brought into Greece: 77,000 tons per month, about half the dai- ly ration of every person in the country. Yet there was no getting around the massive work that still lay ahead. The Germans had wrecked the country and it would take years to recover. Food stocks, transport, water and sewage systems, medical facilities—all had completely collapsed and even UNRRA’s work made only modest progress against such a massive crisis. UNRRA workers often felt the Greeks themselves were simply helpless, too corrupt or simply too ignorant to pull themselves

out of their misery. One medical officer claimed that the reason typhus and fly-borne diseases were ram- pant was that “the Greek people have a profound dis- respect for the infectious nature of fecal matter,” and left rather a lot of it piled in heaps around their homes. UNRRA’s labors could not heal Greece, nor steer it away from another cataclysm: by late 1945, tormented Greece was heading into four years of civil war that would further delay the nation’s recovery. The deputy chief of the Greek Mission summed up UNNRA’s work at the end of 1945 with a tone of resignation. “I hope the more fortunate peoples of the United Nations,” he told a press conference wearily, “will understand how deep-rooted and desperate are the needs of the Greek people and how limited must be the assistance which UNRRA can provide.”
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THE ITALIANS ALL seemed to be dirty, ragged, de- jected and without hope.” This was a fairly typical assessment of Italy and its inhabitants made by Anglo-American relief workers and military personnel in early 1945. In this case, the writer was Anne Dacie, a Briton who, under Red Cross auspices, had spent ten weeks in Naples, and in the displaced persons camps at Bari, on Italy’s Adriatic coast. “ The streets [of Na-

ples] were crowded with homeless people who walked around to get warm,” Dacie went on. “Many of them were living in dirty shelters which the military were making efforts to clean…. The great concern of the military authorities was venereal disease, which is go- ing to be one of the problems of Europe.”
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For Anglo- American relief workers, there was a tendency to ex- plain this state of affairs as indicative of a general and predictable Italian turpitude. Yet this was simply the face of war, visible now through the dust and wretch- edness of systemic poverty and neglect.

Of course, there are various explanations for Italy’s sad state of affairs in 1945. The Anglo-American mili- tary occupation of southern Italy began with the land- ings in Sicily in July 1943. In early September, the Allies jumped across to the mainland and within a few weeks controlled the “foot” of Italy; by November 1943, the Al- lies had made it just north of Naples. There, however, their progress slowed, and it would take another year and a half to free the rest of Italy from German con- trol. The “hot rake of war”—in Churchill’s memorable phrase—clawed Italy to bits in 1944 and early 1945. The parts of the country that were liberated first, from Sic- ily and Sardinia up through Naples, were historically Italy’s poorest. Even before the war, Naples was notori- ous for its disease, public health crises, malaria, un-

employment, crime, high child mortality, prostitution, and venereal disease. By the time the Allies got there, the city was a total shambles and the people in a state of extreme filth and dejection. While the recovery and relief efforts slowly got under way in southern Italy, the northern part of the country, where Italy’s larger, industrial cities lay, was under German occupation. Italy was only partly liberated, and wholly occupied, by these contending armies.
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As a former enemy country, Italy was not supposed to receive any UNRRA aid at all. But Italy’s circumstanc- es—it switched sides and joined the Allies in Septem- ber 1943—meant that in some sense Italy was UNRRA’s responsibility. The Americans and British asked UN- RRA to deliver a minimum of $50 million in emergency food and medicine for Italy’s children and pregnant mothers. Despite the huge transportation problems, with roads, ports, and rail lines either in use by the mil- itary or out of commission, UNRRA managed to sustain over one million mothers and children with this ini- tial food aid.
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Italy’s place in the international system shifted after the summer of 1945. The Big Three, though deadlocked about what to do with occupied Germany, agreed to work out a peace treaty with Italy and at Pots- dam acknowledged the importance of Italy’s switch to the Allied cause in 1943. UNRRA’s council swiftly took

advantage of this improvement in Italy’s position and announced a change of its own policy in August 1945: Italy was to receive aid on the same terms as any other liberated Allied state. This marked the significant ex- pansion of UNRRA’s program in Italy, and indeed by the end of the UNRRA experience in 1947, Italy had become UNRRA’s second largest recipient of aid, receiving $418 million in food, clothing, textiles, medical supplies, and industrial and agricultural equipment. Italy’s UN- RRA staff expanded to over 4,000 individuals, and UN- RRA actually became the principal import agency for Italy until spring 1947, when it turned over this role to the Italian government.

Yet if UNRRA aid began to flow in earnest in 1946, for most of 1945 the country was in a wretched state, with food production well below prewar levels, indus- trial activity at a halt, and disease, malnutrition, and homelessness ubiquitous. An UNRRA survey of April 1945 painted a woeful picture indeed. A third of Italy’s roads, it said, were unusable; 13,000 bridges were de- stroyed or damaged; 80 percent of the railroads’ car- rying capacity was gone; the merchant marine was a wreck; 90 percent of the country’s trucks and 70 per- cent of the buses were inoperable. This crisis of trans- portation was “one of the main causes of the paraly- sis of the country.” It also contributed to a collapse of

food distribution. “Food riots continue throughout the country,” the report continued. The Anglo-American occupying authority, called the Allied Commission, set the bread ration at 200 grams in late 1943 and failed to raise it for all of 1944. By December 1944, the food situation was “critical, and much worse than under the Germans.” The falloff in food production and transport contributed to a sharp rise in mortality rates, espe- cially among the very old, and in a general lowering of resistance to illness: in June 1944, “one in five people in Rome had tuberculosis.” To make matters worse, the Allies—not the Germans or Mussolini—were by mid- 1944 blamed for the shortages. The report concluded, “ The fall of Fascism, the Armistice, and the declara- tion of war on Germany led the people to believe that the Allies were really their friends, and this belief was fostered by Allied propaganda which contained many promises. When these promises were not carried out, it is easy to understand how disappointed the people became within a few weeks after their liberation.”

The Allies made some things worse when trying to do good. The black market, which the Allied occupation initially tried to suppress, had been a fairly regular source of food supplies in Italy’s large cities. The oc- cupation, by instituting regular roadblocks around the cities, and fixing prices for key goods such as bread,

effectively shut off black market supplies; but it failed to replace them with sufficient goods. This led to even more acute shortages and soaring prices, as farmers and black marketers now simply withheld goods alto- gether. In Naples, according to the April survey, “in a few weeks’ time the food conditions of the population greatly deteriorated,” and the Allies got the blame. The same happened in Rome, and “a great outcry was raised to lift the prohibitive regulations and remove the road blocks.” The Allied authorities evidently concluded that the black market was better than no market and allowed goods to trickle into the city for illegal sale. As a result of “the Black Market sprang to a new life.”
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Medical supplies were even scarcer than food. Dr. Mario Volterra, a pathologist from the University of Cagliari in Sardinia, surveyed a few large hospitals in Rome in late 1944 and reported his findings in a let- ter to the UNRRA mission. It makes sobering reading. In Rome, he wrote, conditions in hospitals have taken “a step backwards of nearly a century.” Basic supplies for disinfecting equipment, for example, were lack- ing, as were drugs of all kinds. Patients were limited to two meals a day; the lack of bedding and linens “is a common disaster.” At the San Giovanni hospital—”the worst hospital in Rome”—a surgeon invited Volterra into the operating room. The place was infested with

ants. “ They come in droves from the walls,” he noticed, “from the gray cracks in the floor. They try to climb the cold legs of the table and get into the bandages.” The surgeon shrugged his shoulders: “’Men are dying; it is so easy to let them die. But it isn’t easy to kill these darn ants.’” There were no sterile bandages, no operating gloves, insufficient anesthesia. The patient on which the surgeon was operating began to scream. Then the generator cut out, and the rooms went dark.
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In May 1945, the Unitarian Service Committee (USC), based in Boston, secured UNRRA’s approval to launch a long-term nutritional study in Italy, focusing on se- lected cities and towns in southern Italy. Their work was conducted throughout 1945 and 1946, and the re- sults reveal the awful toll that the war, coming on top of widespread poverty, had taken, especially upon children. Dr. Frank Gollan of the U.S. Public Health Service, and a pediatrician by training, served on the USC’s team in Italy, and delivered a sobering sum- mary of the mission’s findings. After examining over 24,000 people, the survey found that tuberculosis was widespread, that malaria had staged a comeback due to the flooding of once-drained swamplands, and that “the low standard of sanitation and cleanliness in the population of Naples due to unsanitary latrines or their complete absence and the lack of soap and warm water” had contributed to rampant diarrhea and intes- tinal parasites among much of the population of that city. Ten percent of the children in Naples had dysen- tery, which made the absorption of nutrients difficult. The food shortages made recovery even harder, as “the daily hunting for food requires again a great amount of energy,” and so the very young, the elderly, and the ill were often left behind in the competition to find food. The results of a survey of two hundred children in a Naples foundling home make the point: they all suf-