The Italian Campaign during the Second World War is a story of scarcity; too few men, not enough boats, too little luck, and a shortage of beer.[1] Morale suffered, and troops were rightly browned off. To make things worse, when the troops got a chance to relax there was a serious shortage of ping pong balls! Across Italy for much of 1944, sorry looking table tennis tables and bats lay unused in the corners of NAAFI clubs and rest camps for want of a ball with which to play. Exploring this seemingly trivial hardship reveals some aspects to military life and the wider campaign that are often overlooked.
Brigadier A.L.W. Newth, the Director of Welfare of Army Welfare Service (AWS) was the man ultimately responsible for table tennis balls in Italy. Here’s a photo of Newth with Tommy Trinder from February 1944.
Newth was a man of action, had no time for muddle and didn’t think much of ENSA. Major Nigel Patrick, ENSA’s liaison officer, once arranged a show called Staff Party, at the Bellini Theatre, Naples, where (much to the delight of the AWS staff) he played a lisping officer whose comment on every situation was, ‘Well no Newth, is good Newth’.[2] Apart from avoiding being the butt of jokes, Newth’s aim was
“to raise the whole standard of welfare and to provide for the troops amenities on a scale as near as possible to that of the American Army.”[3]
The British and Commonwealth troops fought and relaxed in close proximity with their American cousins and they couldn’t help comparing their own amenities with those of the lavishly pampered G.I.s. As Hoggart describes,
“Most of the Americans in and around Naples seemed, to the very prejudiced British eyes, just bigger, louder and better paid… most Americans preferred to be cocooned in the creaturely signs and symbols they had come to associate with their own superior nationhood.”[4]
The AWS was painfully aware of this unfavourable comparison and had to work hard to make their limited resources go further to keep their troops happy. From November 1943, Newth transformed welfare in the region by establishing policy, setting up a scalable welfare organisation, and building rest camps in Bari, Naples, and Sorento. The AWS achieved remarkable success in Italy, introducing innovations like mobile welfare circuses, British Forces radio, organising the Allied Track & Field games in Rome in July 1944, and coping with the varying troop ration strengths and distribution.[5]
With this kind of success, Newth’s boss, Brigadier Morgan flew over from London to tour North Africa, Italy, and Sicily to see the progress for himself. On completion of the tour of brand new recreation centres and accompanied by Morgan, Newth chaired the weekly welfare coordination meeting on 22 March 1944. It was a bad meeting for Lt. Col. Lomar, the Assistant Director for Sports & Entertainment who was forced to respond to Newth’s criticism,
‘in most canteens visited it was noticed that table tennis equipment was lying idle owing to lack of balls’.[6]
Demanding an explanation, Lomar explained that 10,000 ping pong balls had been despatched to Naples earlier that year and immediately tasked his deputy at HQ Allied Army Italy (AAI) to investigate. The ping pong ball shortage had caught the attention of at least four layers of AWS bureaucracy and became a topic that would continue to bounce for the remainder of 1944.
After investigation, it was reported to the Army Welfare Conference on 19th April 1944 that sports gear had been delivered as planned to the ports of Naples, Taranto, and Brindisi. Despite arriving in March, no one in Welfare had been informed for a month and then it had not been possible to pick up and distribute the equipment because of a lack of manpower at E.F.I. In the intervening time, the original consignment of 12,720 table tennis balls that was unloaded had been reduced to 4,716 balls.[7] I really don’t know what is more shocking; the fact that someone in Naples was hoarding 8,000 ping pong balls or that some poor sod had been tasked with counting all the balls left in the depot!
Norman Lewis’s memoir Naples 44 talks of the rampant black market and criminal activity surrounding military supplies, especially around the port.[8] The situation was so bad in the city that orchestras couldn’t leave their musical instruments on stage between breaks for fear of having them swiped.[9] The AWS established new procedures to avoid welfare amenities sitting in depots at ports and to be distributed to the appropriate areas and formations as quickly as possible. Additionally, AWS started to try to source amenities locally and commissioned Italian companies to produce table tennis tables, swimming trunks, dart boards, and even chess boards.[10] When 32,000 pairs of swimming trunks were delivered by the Italian manufacturer in July 1944, just in time for the summer, there were some complaints about the quality. One can only imagine if the British soldiers were suffering wardrobe malfunctions on the Amalfi Coast during that summer.
During the rest of 1944, some minor things relating to the war and bravery happened further north, meanwhile in Naples, the topic of the AWS welfare coordination meeting on 22 November, was a ‘great shortage’ of ping pong balls. This time it was the Tommies who were pilfering the balls in the clubs. Another ping pong crisis loomed and so close to Christmas! The AWS swung into action and it was agreed that there was a need to ‘have notices placed in canteens stressing the need for the return of balls issued when the players had finished.’[11] More ping pong balls were needed and fast.
Two days before Christmas Day 1944, the AWS meeting minutes reports that 7,000 ping pong balls had been distributed to canteens and another 10,000 balls had just been unloaded at the port in Naples. Once again, I can’t help but think about the poor chap responsible for counting these balls in a warehouse (perhaps to the music of Christmas carols sung by the dock). On 11th January 1945, the ping pong crisis was averted for the foreseeable future with the distribution of an abundance of the little white bouncy balls. Packed in cartons of 180 balls, these were assigned to formations based on ration strength. In forward areas the Eighth Army and the British contingent of the 5th Army received 4 cartons, 1 District 5 cartons, and a prodigious 11 cartons went to 3 District.[12]
Why am I banging on about ping pong balls? I was amazed by the amount of paperwork devoted to this seemingly trivial topic. Relaxing, however, was not a trivial matter and the British Army took welfare seriously. If a Tommy had 72 hours leave out of the line and found a games room in a NAAFI club with a table tennis table but couldn’t play because of the lack of balls, he would understandably be upset. I think it also illustrates the incredible length of the British Army’s long tail. A significant organisation and bureaucracy was needed to look after the welfare of hundreds of thousands of servicepeople. Of course, the AWS did much more than supply sports equipment, such as providing legal and marital advice, providing service newspapers, and radio stations. I think it also shows the difficult conditions faced by the military in early 1944 establishing a reliable supply chain once amenities arrived in Italy and some of the ways this was overcome.
[1] In August 1944 the E.F.I. rationing for beer was one bottle per week per Other Rank. This did not improve until March 1945 when the beer ration was increased to 1.5 bottles per week! ‘WO 170/117 Administrative Echelon D.A.D. Army Welfare Services, 1944 Jan. - Dec’, fol. 8, TNA WO 170/117 Administrative Echelon D.A.D. Army Welfare Services, 1944 Jan. - Dec.
[2] Basil Dean, The Theatre at War (George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd, 1956), p. 462.
[3] Brigadier M.C. Morgan, C.B.E., M.C., p.s.c., ‘WO 277/4 Army Welfare 1939-1945’ (The War Office, 1953), p. 133, WO 277/4: Army Welfare 1939-1945, 1953.
[4] Richard Hoggart, A Sort of Clowning: Life and Times, Volume 2: 1940-59 (Oxford University Press, 1991).
[5] In Nov 1943 there were 367,000 British troops in Italy. Diana Butler, ‘CAB 101/224: The British Soldier in Italy, September 1943-June 1944’, 1967, p. 24, CAB 101/224: The British Soldier in Italy, September 1943-June 1944, by Butler, D.F., 1967.
[6] ‘TNA WO 170/117 Administrative Echelon D.A.D. Army Welfare Services’, fol. 3.
[7] ‘WO 170/116: Administrative Echelon Army Welfare Services, 1944 Feb. - Dec’, fol. 3, WO 170/116: Administrative Echelon Army Welfare Services, 1944 Feb. - Dec.
[8] Norman Lewis, Naples ’44: An Intelligence Officer in the Italian Labyrinth (Eland Publishing, 2011).
[9] Keith Lowe, Naples 1944: War, Liberation and Chaos (William Collins, 2024), p. 348.
[10] ‘TNA WO 170/116’.
[11] ‘TNA WO 170/117 Administrative Echelon D.A.D. Army Welfare Services’.
[12] ‘WO 170/4110 Army Welfare Service Jan 1945 - Dec 1945’, TNA WO 170/4110 Army Welfare Service Jan.