contact: Jeff Matthews

NAPLES, Oct. 1 (delayed)—Italian guerrillas and American soldiers, in a thrilling battle of the rooftops over crowded Neapolitan streets, shot it out for an hour with the last pocket of enemy resistance in Naples late today and captured eighteen trapped Germans and fifteen Italian Fascists.

The main German forces had left early in the morning after seven days of street rioting and clashes with armed followers of premier Pietro Badoglio, who rebelled against German attempts to draft 30,000 Italian workers.

“We thought the last enemy troops had gone when an English-speaking Italian came up to our command post and said he and his friends had some Fascisti and Tedeschi —that’s their word for Germans—cornered in an old Temple,” Private James H. Smart of Los Angeles said. “When we got there, they opened up on us with rifles, machine guns and carbines, potato-masher grenades —everything you could ask for.”

The entrenched enemy flung all the fire-power that he could and, for a time, pinned down the attackers, who picked back from around street corners. The young Italian guerrillas, fighting with collars open and no helmets, looked like something out of the French Revolution.

They fired through holes in concrete rails bordering a hospital, where hundreds of wounded and unburied dead—victims of the week-long street fighting and German executions—lay. Two hundred dead men, women and children—some dead for a week—lay alongside one of the walls of the hospital and on the other side were wailing survivors and 600 wounded persons. These were just a fraction of the toll.

The sound of the fighting caused thousands of Neapolitans to rush into the streets. They were so intoxicated by the triumphant entrance of the Allies into the city that they rushed, heedless of danger, to watch the last of the hated enemy get a taste of his own lead medicine.

“After we knocked them out of the temple they took to the roofs,” Private Smart said. “We kept right after them until we cornered them and finally cornered them and forced them to give up.”

It then became a problem of protecting the prisoners from the threatening crowd and the more fanatical members of the guerrilla bands, he added. The whole battle was fought without a single American casualty.

On one closed door in the hospital, frantic men and weeping women beat with bare knuckles. Attendants, who let them pass through a few at a time, admitted us into this storehouse of the dead, where the bodies of those who had been killed in the street fighting or who had died of wounds in the hospital had lain awaiting identification. Those longest dead had been placed in plain wooden coffins. Among the dead were nine German soldiers, one Italian colonel, two Italian solders and thirty-thee Italian sailors. Most of the others were guerrillas slain by the Germans, or men, women, and children caught in the line of fire in the streets or in their homes... [skip 1 paragraph]

“Street fighting broke out after the Germans ordered the citizens to give up their guns and told 30,000 Italian men of the classes of 1910 and 1935 to report for labor conscription on Sept. 24,” our interpreter, Umberto Franco, an Italian glass manufacturer, said.

“When only 150 men reported, the Germans shot down the next day seventeen carabinieri—state police—in cold blood.

“The Germans said they would kill all people found with guns after that date. We do not keep guns, but many soldiers turned their carbines over to our young people or joined with them in fighting the Germans, who had begun killing at will.” …[skip 2 paragraphs]

[The secretary to the hospital director, Marinelli, said] ”…The civil war started last Saturday while Germans were burinng and looting the city of everything they could take. The people took up guns, knives and anything they could and fought the Germans and Fascists who still supported them. There have been hundreds and hundreds of persons wounded.”

[Last few paragraphs deleted. They supplied details of the condition of patients in the hospital.]