SHOT IN COLD BLOOD

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 87, Issue 234, 4 October 1943, Page 5

SHOT IN COLD BLOOD

GERMANS FIRE ON WOMEN AND CHILDREN Recd. 11.38 p.m. London, O£t 3. The Germans during the last uayt of their occupation of Naples shot down in cold blood ragged, starving Italian women and children queueing up for rations, says the Associated press with the Fifth Army. The Germans simply fired into the thick of the food queues from sheer spite. The once beautiful city of Naples is now in pitiful condition. Only one street, the Via Roma, is intact. The R.A.F.’s three weeks’ bombing completely demolished the dock area. The Royal Palace, overlooking the port, is a gaunt skeleton. There is no light-' ing, gas, water or food. At least half a million inhabitants are on the verge of starvation. To add to the devastation the Germans, before quitting the city, mined or set fire to most of the public buildings and big hotels. The inhabitants are still welcoming ti. 2 incoming Fifth Armv hysterically. Soon after daybreak the populace packed the streets and continued cheering, shouting, weeping and kissing as interminable army convoys came in. Italian guerrillas and Americans fought side by side in a roof-top battle over the crowded Naples streets, clearing up the last pockets of enemy resistance, says the Associated Press correspondent with the Fifth Army. The bodies of 200 men, women and children, some dead for a week, lay in Naples hospital, while on the other side of the doorway 600 wounded waited for attention. They told of a week of bloody fighting against the Germans and Fascists in the rubbbhfilled streets. Reuter’s correspondent says typhus and tphoid are rife. Naples is without food and medical supplies, which the Germans looted and burned. Marshal Badoglio, in an interview with Allied newspaper correspondents, his first Press interview since the armistice, said as soon as the Italian Government was re-established in Rome political participation with the Government would be extended over a wide basis. He was convinced new co-operation between Italy and her traditional friends would produce the same results as in the last war.