ITALIANS FIGHT ON IN RUINS

Dominion, Volume 36, Issue 310, 25 September 1943, Page 7

ITALIANS FIGHT ON IN RUINS

Stricken City Of Naples LONDON, September 23. Naples is rapidly becoming a city of the dead. The Italians continue io fight the Germans and disease is spreading, state accounts from inside the stricken city.

The Germans have blocked almost every shipping berth along' the docks and are trying to smash Italian nests of resistance in the rabbit-warren of streets behind the harbour front. Italian soldiers and citizens arc fighting back as best they can, hoping for the day when the Allies will break into the city to relievo them.

No real attempts seem, to have been made to extinguish the fires along the waterfront, and new explosions as a result of German demolitions constantly increase the blaze. Air photographs taken by Allied planes reveal that the Germans are destroying the great harbour works and that at least 30 ships have been scuttled. The city had oil refineries, iron, works, and munition and aircraft factories all within a few miles of its centre. A great black cloud hangs like a funeral, pall over liviug and dead. The smoke climbs into the blue Mediterranean sky, fouling it with the filth of burning oil and rubber and the contents of scores of warehouses and factories. Fighting is going on in the ruins between German ’ armoured units aud Italian soldiers. Complete chaos reigns in the city. Cholera is spreading, and over. 120 persons have already died. The hospitals are overcrowded with sick aud wounded. Thousands of citizens are fleeing daily into the mountains. , , , , , Much of Naples was smashed by bombs before the Allied invasion of the mainland; now the Germans are completing the job. ’