A Bell for Adano [antikvár]

ForewordMajor Victor Joppolo, U.S.A., was a good man. You will see that. It is the whole reason why I want you to know his story.He was the Amgot officer of a small Italian town called Adano. He was more or less the American mayor after our invasion.Amgot, as you know, stood for Allied Military Government Occupied Territory. The authorities decided, shortly after the happenings of this story, that the word Amgot had an ugly Germanie sound, and they heard that the two syllables of the word, when taken sepa-rately, were the Turkish words for the male and female genital organs. So they decided to call it A.M.G. and forget about the Occupied Territory.That was later, though. When I knew him, Major Joppolo was Amgot officer of Adano, and he was good.There were probably not any really bad men in Amgot, but there were some stupid ones (and still are, even though the Turkish embarrassment has been taken care of). You see, the theories about administering occupied territories all turned out to be just theories, and in fact the thing which determined w het her we Americans would be successful in that toughest of all jobs was noth-ing more or less than the quality of the men who did the administering.That is why I think it is important for you to know about Major Joppolo. He was a good man, though weak in certain attractive, human ways, and what he did and what he was not able to do in Adano represented in miniature what America can and cannot do in Europe.