The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
On the far right of the Allied line, scout boats spaced half a mile apart flashed red, green, yellow, and blue lights at 3:10 A.M. to signify the four beaches upon which the approaching assault battalions of the 36th Division were to make land at Paestum. As the two-hour run from the transport anchorage neared an end, a soldier in a plywood Higgins boat finished the pocket novel he had been reading and “stood up to see what this war was all about.”
For a moment—a long, queer moment—silence held sway except for the nattering boat engines. Down came the ramps with a clank and a splash, and the first riflemen scuttled nearly dryshod onto the shingle at precisely 3:30 A.M. Then a constellation of silver flares hissed overhead, bathing the beaches in cold brilliance, and the sawmill sound of a German machine gun broke the spell, followed by another and another and another. Mortars crumped, and from the high ground to the east and south came the shriek of 88mm shells, green fireballs that whizzed through the dunes at half a mile per second, trailing golden plumes of dust.
Bullets plumped the sea and slapped the boat ramps. “You can’t dig foxholes in a boat,” one sergeant observed with evident sorrow. To an artillery officer from Austin, the spattering shell fragments sounded like “spring rain on a taxi window going up Congress Avenue.” A second wave landed eight minutes behind the first, and a third wave eight minutes after that; but fire discomposed the four subsequent waves as coxswains swerved left or right or back to sea without unloading. “Shells were wopping in all around us,” a soldier in the third wave recalled. “We knew that when the ramp fell those red and yellow tracers would eat right into us.” A landing craft hit nose-on by a tank shell “seemed to rise completely out of the water,” one witness reported; a second shell caught the vessel’s stern, spinning it around and flinging bodies over the splintered gunwales. A medic described swimming to another blazing boat forty yards from shore. “Some of the boys were on fire,” he later wrote his wife:
We could hear the bullets hitting the water all around us…. I climbed up in the boat. There were four in there, a major and three enlisted men. The fire was so hot by then my clothes started steaming. Went over to the major. He was burnt, bad. The major was dead…. I drug the three soldiers to the ramp.
On the beach, soldiers wriggled out of backpacks ignited by grazing tracers. “I’d rather been born a baby girl,” one soldier muttered. Teller mines buried ten yards beyond the waterline exploded in geysers of sand and shredded tires from the first jeeps ashore. The dunes were as hellish as the beach, raked with fire from a dense wood line just inland and from a fifty-foot stone turret built centuries earlier as a watchtower against Saracens. German gunners on Paestum’s cyclopean walls poured plunging fire on every snapping twig, every rustle in the long grass. Panzers lurked in barns and sheds, firing point-blank on riflemen creeping past. “Great deal of confusion in landing,” a surgeon told his diary. “Tough going. I see I am going to lose weight.”
The first Luftwaffe planes arrived with the morning light shortly after four A.M., strafing and bombing, as the Navy’s official history recorded, “on a scale never before or since equaled in a Mediterranean landing.” An LST captain told his gun crews: “Steady now, steady, here they come…. Steady. Fire away, and good hunting.” After the rejoicing that had met Italy’s capitulation, an officer observed, many troops had “the feeling that someone had let them down.” As the battle intensified, the reporter Don Whitehead overheard someone suggest, “Maybe it would be better for us to fight without an armistice.”
By six A.M., two infantry regiments—the 141st and 142nd—had made land, with the 143rd soon to follow. But the foothold was tenuous. Each assault battalion carried two hundred smoke pots, big buckets of hexachlorethane that were ignited and dropped near the beaches to create a milky haze screening the landing craft. Offshore, destroyers darted through the anchorage and around the incoming LSTs, “trailing ribbons of white, choking smoke,” as John Steinbeck noted. Ventilation fans sucked smoke into LST tank decks—“the sound of coughing is deafening,” Steinbeck added—and some coxswains were forced to navigate through the miasma by compass heading.
Still, German observers on Monte Soprano and other high perches saw well enough to mass fires. DUKWs hauling artillery and antitank guns to Yellow and Blue Beaches sheered away under the sleeting fire; another sixty lay out of range off Green Beach, and 125 loitered near Red. Six LCTs attempting to land thirty tanks at 6:15 A.M. also hauled off rather than risk sinking. Three shells smashed into an LCT carrying part of the 191st Tank Battalion; the blasts shattered the pilothouse, killed seven men, and set fire to a Sherman tank, which was shoved into the sea only with enormous effort. LST officers scrambled from side to side of the bridge as German shells struck port, then starboard, then port again; LST 336 alone took eighteen hits. Drumfire fell the length of the beachhead: a Royal Navy cruiser intercepted a dozen vessels headed for Salerno port and warned, “The harbor’s under enemy fire. You’ll be jolly well shot up if you go in there.”
AVALANCHE planners had hoped the assault vanguard would be four thousand yards inland by daylight—to secure the beaches from mortar and machine-gun fire—and far enough by dusk on D-day to exterminate German artillery still capable of ranging the waterline. Instead, by midmorning the beachhead in a few spots hardly extended four hundred yards. A bulldozer crew trying to scrape an exit from the beach was incinerated by an 88mm shell. “They were completely black except for their teeth, which seemed whiter than living ones,” a witness reported. On Blue Beach in the far south, a battalion was pinned to the dunes and would remain pinned for twenty hours; hundreds of men burrowed into the laurel brakes and ice plant, filching ammunition from the dead. There was more to filch after Mark IV panzers broke through the American line. “It was like fighting tanks barehanded,” a lieutenant colonel in the 141st Infantry reported:
I saw riflemen swarm over the top of moving German tanks trying to shoot through slits or throw grenades inside. Other tanks would machine gun them off. They ran over wounded men…and spun their treads.
An intelligence officer later found that medics had laid the dead “in a row, side by side, shoulder to shoulder, with extreme precision as if about to present arms.” Their feet protruded from the covering blankets, “the stillest shoes the world could boast,” one staff officer wrote. Other bodies were propped into sitting positions, “so it wouldn’t look so bad to the troops coming in.” A radioed query to the Ancon—among the few coherent messages to get through—gave Clark and Hewitt a sense of conditions ashore: “On what beach shall we put our dead?”
Salvation arrived shortly after nine A.M. Minesweepers finished clearing an inshore channel, allowing warships to press toward the beaches. Fire control parties, whose operations had been hampered for hours by balky radios, smoke, enemy aircraft, and utter confusion on the beach, now began sprinkling gunfire around the beachhead rim. By late morning, destroyers steamed within a hundred yards of shore, pumping 5-inch shells into the face of Monte Soprano. The cruiser U.S.S. Savannah soon opened on German tank concentrations with scores of 6-inch shells. Her sister Philadelphia flushed three dozen panzers detected by a spotter plane in a copse near Red Beach; salvo upon salvo fell on the tanks for nearly an hour, reportedly destroying half a dozen and scattering the rest. Eleven thousand tons of naval shells would be fired at Salerno, almost comparable in heft to the bombardments at Iwo Jima and Okinawa later in the war, but no barrage was more timely than the D-day shoot.
As German troops backed into the sheltering hills, two American regiments pushed east past Paestum’s temples—“This place looks just like the cover of a Latin book,” one soldier remarked—and north toward the Sele River. A third regiment, the 141st, remained trapped near Blue Beach by enfilading fire from high ground to the south. Forty-eight DUKWs finally made shore, each carrying a howitzer, a six-man gun crew, and twenty-one rounds.
Near a tobacco barn at Casa Vannula, three miles inland, guns from the 151st Field Artillery arrived at noo
“It was thrilling,” said Walker, the 36th Division commander, who had watched from the gun line. The shallow American beachhead was secure, for now.
A dozen miles to the north, the British also had won a lodgment on the hostile shore.
German air attacks had harassed the fleet even before the landing boats were lowered, and 88mm airbursts lacerated some of the approaching landing craft. Dive-bombers caught the U.S.S. Nauset, an ocean tug assisting the Royal Navy. Fire engulfed the boat deck, then scaled a ladder to the chart room before spiraling upward in fifty-foot orange flares behind the bridge. Powerless, rudderless, and listing, Nauset struck a mine, snapped in half, and sank in sixty-five fathoms, taking her captain and first mate. More than fifty other crewmen were killed or wounded.
But the preliminary naval bombardment eschewed by the Americans helped clear Red, White, and Green Beaches for the British. Hundreds of rockets flew from modified landing craft with a pyrotechnic swish-swish-swish that was “quite terrifying even when expected.” The 46th Division, on the left, and the 56th Division, on the right, began wading ashore at 3:30 A.M. At the water’s edge, a sailor escorting the Coldstream Guards stood waving a huge flag, urging, “This way to Naples, boys!” Among the “essential assault stores” first rolled from the landing craft ramps was a piano, soon followed by crated chickens, geese, and turkeys, all lashed to jeep hoods, as well as a sow for the officers’ mess.
By day’s end, X Corps would land about a third of its strength—23,000 soldiers, 80 tanks, and 325 guns—despite what one chronicler called “unutterable confusion” on some beaches as subsequent waves intermingled the two divisions. Besides the usual lost coxswains, confused soldiers, and fuming beachmasters, German gunfire soon intensified. LST 375 caught nine 88mm rounds, with many near misses. LST 357 suffered two dozen casualties. LST 365 collided in-shore with LST 430, knocking her beam-on to the beach; enemy shells wounded 430’s skipper in all four limbs, sprayed steel through the tank deck, set fire to an ammunition truck, and terrorized wounded soldiers as they hobbled aboard for evacuation from the shingle.
Beyond the beaches, the invasion unfolded with heady initial promise. Tommies rushed three miles inland to seize Montecorvino airfield, the preeminent D-day objective. Astonished Luftwaffe pilots pelted across the runway to their cockpits only to be shot down by tanks and self-propelled guns that blew apart three dozen parked planes. Yet the field remained within easy range of German guns, a misfortune discovered by an unwitting American air force colonel, John G. Ayling, who landed in a B-25 with a cargo of radio equipment. The aircraft had hardly taxied to a stop when 88mm shells riddled the fuselage, killing Ayling and his pilot, burning the plane to the spars, and, as it transpired, ending Allied hopes of using Montecorvino for the next eleven days.
For every heartening advance, the British front suffered a disheartening setback. The 5th Battalion of the Royal Hampshire Regiment had pushed six hundred yards inland down a narrow lane hemmed in with high stone walls when a German counterattack caught two companies and the battalion headquarters like sheep in a slaughterhouse chute. Three assault guns fired point-blank as the Hampshires clawed at slick stones soon made slicker with blood. Grenadiers in half-tracks rumbled through the lane, crushing the living and the dead alike; a Hampshire radio operator was found with working headphones on his ears and his legs flattened to the thickness of a table leaf. Forty Hampshires died and more than three hundred others were wounded or led away to German cages.
Past Montecorvino, Tommies in khaki drill hurried east toward the town of Battipaglia, soon known as Batty P, a squat, melancholy Fascist showcase straddling the key intersection of Highways 18 and 19, five miles inland. The 9th Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers capered forward by tractor, dray horse, barrow, and bicycle. Crossing dikes and tobacco fields, they entered Batty P shortly after midnight on Friday, September 10, exultant but isolated. German infiltrators in camouflage face paint soon crept through swales and irrigation ditches to flank the British salient. One wary Guardsman detected “a feeling of looseness, of porosity, where all should have been tightly sealed.”
As another hot, luminous Mediterranean day dawned on Friday, German counterattacks added panic to that loose feeling. Fusiliers scoured westward past the Lombardy poplars and oleander, warning of Tiger tanks “like bloody great battleships.” Some flung away their weapons, yelling, “Back to the beaches! We’re overrun!” By Friday afternoon, a Guards officer wrote, “the small roads were full of frightened soldiers, many retiring pell-mell regardless of officers.” Short, violent scraps flared across the beachhead, gunfights rather than battles. Outside Battipaglia at a three-acre complex encircled with an eight-foot spiked fence—labeled “Tabacchificio” on military maps, it was in fact a tomato canning plant—the 2nd Scots Guards made a valiant but bootless attempt to oust German squatters with grenade volleys and bursts of fire down darkened corridors. After reverses on the left flank, some Grenadiers clung to an overloaded truck, shouting in alarm. “They’re coming! They’re through!”
They were not coming, nor were they through. The line stiffened, shoving the Germans back to Batty P, and by early Saturday the British held roughly eight miles of beachfront that extended inland for two to four miles. British Commandos held a smaller, shallower adjacent plot at Salerno town, including the port. Every occupied inch was vulnerable to German guns—the “demented choirs of wailing shells,” as Wilfred Owen had written on a different battlefield—and those without shovels soon dug with their hands. As one artillery major observed, “We’ve got them just where they want us.”
Only on the extreme left of the Allied line could the invaders report unqualified success. Bill Darby’s Rangers had captured the resort villages of Maiori, Minori, and Amalfi without opposition, then climbed a serpentine road through groves of thick-skinned lemons the size of a child’s skull to seize the hogback crest of the Sorrento Peninsula. Five hours after crossing the black-sand beaches, Rangers held Chiunzi Pass, six miles inland and four thousand feet up.
“If ever there was an artilleryman’s dream,” Darby later said, “here it was.” The windswept defile offered a panoramic view of Naples, Vesuvius’s purple shoulders, and all German military traffic crawling south toward Salerno on Highway 18. “This is the place for fighting,” said Robert Capa upon reaching Chiunzi. “It reminds me of Spain.” Rangers nested like cliff swallows in the ridge face, then trimmed the chestnut branches for a better view and called for fire. “We have taken up a position in the enemy’s rear,” Darby radioed Clark on Ancon. “We’ll stay here until hell freezes over if necessary.”
Soon a battleship, two cruisers, and a plug-ugly, flat-bottomed British monitor crowded the Amalfi hollow, where Sirens once lured sailors onto rocks “white with the bones of many men.” With their guns cocked like howitzers to clear the mountain crest, the ships unlimbered in a concussive mêlée of smoke rings and shrieking shells that soared above the pass like “a freight train with the caboose wobbling from side to side,” one Ranger recalled. German infantry in long-billed caps furiously counterattacked Chiunzi, firing mortar barrages through holes chopped in farmhouse roofs below the pass and trying to flank the Ranger pinnacles by scaling higher pinnacles. The reporter Richard Tregaskis described “showers of white phosphorus rising like luminous fountains” from the saddles. Wounded Rangers sheltered in a stone roadside tavern at the top of the pass—now renamed Eighty-eight Junction—with mattresses wedged against the window; others filled a Catholic church in Maiori that had been converted to a hospital. OSS agents hired three hundred Italians—$1 a day for men, 75 cents for boys, plus two cans of C rations—to lug mortar shells and water up the swit
Others forever remembered deep-chested Darby, ubiquitious and apparently sleepless, still a lieutenant colonel but leading a force that soon swelled in size to that usually commanded by a major general. Always washed and shaved, his uniform somehow always creased, he radioed orders using the call sign Snow White from a command post in the ramshackle, eight-room San Francisco Hotel. To various Bashfuls, Grumpys, and Dopeys he dictated map coordinates: “I want to give this a hell of a pasting…. I want to blast the crap out of this hill.”
Until hell freezes over, Darby had vowed. Of all the commanders ashore in Fifth Army, only he could truthfully radio Clark, “We are sitting pretty.” For the rest, American and British, in VI Corps and in X Corps, Naples still lay far to the north, and no man doubted that the beachhead had become a magnet for every Gefreiter in southern Italy with a machine pistol. At a cost of a thousand Anglo-American casualties, Fifth Army in two days had won a footing ashore; yet the struggle at Salerno would not be for the beach but for the beachhead.
“Corpses lay on the sand. The living ran for cover,” wrote one soldier after slogging ashore near Salerno. “There was,” he added, “an uneasy feeling of a hitch somewhere.”
“In the land of theory…there is none of war’s friction,” the official British military history of Salerno observed.
The troops are, as in fact they were not, perfect Tactical Men, uncannily skillful, impervious to fear, bewilderment, boredom, hunger, thirst, or tiredness. Commanders know what in fact they did not know…. Lorries never collide, there is always a by-pass at the mined road-block, and the bridges are always wider than the flood. Shells fall always where they should fall.