Keith Lowe has built a well-deserved reputation in recent years as a chronicler of the interface between military operations and civil society, especially once the fighting on a battlefield has ended. For instance, his ‘Savage Continent’ tracked the long, wearying aftermath of the Second World War in Europe. It is not something that normally interests those concerned only with the stories in men in war, or of those who like to chronicle the movement of the big battalions, but I suggest this is where these folk are really missing out: Lowe reminds all readers that its rare for battlefields not to be full of terrified, starving, bombed innocents trying to survive amidst the horror, brutality, violence and squalor of war. In other words, war is something that enjoys holding the unarmed in its embrace as much as it likes clasping those in uniform. In another earlier book Lowe investigated the impact of the Bomber Command assault on the ancient Hanseatic League city of Hamburg in July 1943. He’s now turned his pen to tracing the story not of a city – Naples, in 1944 – but more accurately the people who lived in and transited through this city, in 1944. This magnificent book is a story therefore about people, and it is this which gives the book its great strength.

We start, sensibly enough, with the Allies – the Americans and British – who draw up plans to invade Italy and make their landings at Salerno in late 1943. This then introduces us to the Axis forces – the Italians on the verge of collapse and surrender and the Germans, forbidden by Hitler from doing anything other than fighting for every inch of territory with every pint of their – and other’s – blood.  Last but by no means least we are introduced to the poor benighted souls who in live in and around Naples itself and who have to find a way to survive the inclemency of war. The book describes how all three groups of people interface with each other. The focus isn’t on the battle, but on how the Germans treat the city first, and then the Allies. It won’t come as a surprise that the Germans were the bad guys. The shocking destruction of the city and the deliberate humiliation of its population was a visceral riposte by the Nazis to the perfidious Italians who had deserted them in their hour of need by surrendering. No deprivation was too much for the first city in Italy to be given the scorched earth treatment. The ugly brutality of human vengeance of the kind wrought upon the helpless citizens of this ancient city is horrible to behold.

The Allied occupation comes as something of a comedic relief. The liberators came prepared to fight the Germans, not rebuild the water and sewerage systems of the city but needs must, and Allied engineers did wonders to reverse and repair the most dreadful of the Germanic depredations. It was horrifying to read for instance of the land mines the Germans planted liberally throughout the city, on long time delay fuses, designed to explode long after their departure. The rest of the book – apologies, but this review is outrageously word-capped – tells the fascinating story of the ordinary folk, together with the harlots, pimps and scoundrels who lived through these desperate, and hungry, days. It’s compelling and difficult to put down.

Robert Lyman is a historian and the author, with Richard Dannatt, of Victory to Defeat: The British Army 1918-40.