The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
Salerno did not lie in the land of theory. Frictions had accumulated since H-hour. Mistakes were made. Hitches occurred. Three miscalculations in particular would shape the battle, taking the Allied force from the benighted, braying optimism of invasion eve to the brink of obliteration five days later.
The first hitch involved command of the American force. With General Walker leading the 36th Division at Paestum, Clark intended to keep his VI Corps commander, Major General Dawley, out of the battle until September 11, the third day of AVALANCHE, when there would be enough troops ashore to warrant a corps headquarters. A decade older than Clark and also his senior in permanent rank, Mike Dawley was a stocky, cautious artilleryman from Wisconsin who had been described in his West Point yearbook as “a quiet lad that one seldom sees or hears of.” A decorated protégé of George Marshall in the Great War, he had a small mouth, a pushbroom mustache, and a worried look. The brow would only become more furrowed. “Don’t bite off more than you can chew,” he had warned Clark during the Salerno planning, “and chew damn well.”
Clark’s plan to leave Dawley on the sidelines until D+2 lasted less than seven hours. With little information trickling out to Ancon from the beach, the army commander concluded that he needed another major general on the shingle to oversee the landings. Just after ten A.M. on September 9, Clark abruptly directed Dawley to “assume command of all American operations ashore.” That order, however, was not decoded aboard the U.S.S. Funston until after three P.M., by which time Dawley had left his ship to explore the beachhead. A staff officer sent to find the corps commander returned empty-handed. Clark’s message finally caught up with him at Paestum, and at nine P.M. Dawley departed to return to the Funston only to spend most of the night wandering the Mediterranean: German air attacks had scattered the anchorage, leaving no ship where it had been that afternoon. “Coxswain got lost, started for Naples, then Sardinia,” Dawley told his diary. He finally reboarded Funston at four in the morning.
With his dispersed staff in disarray, Dawley returned to Paestum at eleven A.M., September 10, appearing at Walker’s command post as an unwanted guest who now required radios, jeeps, and other support. Nominally in command of the battle since the previous morning, Dawley had actually commanded nothing. “Confusion and disorganization” beset VI Corps from the beginning, one staff colonel admitted. Dawley himself was exhausted and off balance. Another officer described him crouched in a ditch at Paestum watching howitzers battle panzers “pretty much as one would sit in the middle section of the stands at a tennis match and watch opponents bat the ball back and forth.”
The second hitch had been foreseen by George Patton, who at Eisenhower’s request reviewed the AVALANCHE plan on September 1. Patton noted that the Sele River had been chosen as the boundary between British forces in the north of the Salerno plain and Americans in the south. “Just as sure as God lives,” Patton said, jabbing his finger at the map, “the Germans will attack down that river.” As X Corps and VI Corps fought their separate fights on D-day, a seven-mile gap, bisected by the Sele, persisted between the two forces; neither could support the other. Clark recognized the rift, but not its vulnerability. “The gap,” he had told Hewitt on Thursday night, “is not too serious.”
On Friday morning, as Dawley struggled to take command, Clark also went ashore to inspect the beachhead. In the Paestum tobacco barn that served as the 36th Division command post, General Walker described the situation as being “well in hand.” The gap between his force and the British persisted, but German troops seemed to be pulling back. The American beachhead had expanded, unloading proceeded apace, and another six-thousand-man regiment—the 179th Infantry, from the 45th Division—had splashed ashore. At one P.M., back aboard Ancon, Clark radioed Alexander: “Have just returned from personal reconnaissance of VI Corps sector. Situation there is good.” To help unite his two corps, Clark ordered his last reserves, two battalions from the 157th Infantry, to make shore at the Sele. Yet the yawning gap remained, an ominous corridor to the sea between Batty P and the south bank of the river.
The third hitch derived from the failure to secure Montecorvino airfield. Consequences descended, like clattering dominoes. Instead of having more than twenty Allied fighter squadrons ashore in short order, Fifth Army was forced to depend on aircraft from distant Sicily and on little escort carriers like H.M.S. Battler and H.M.S. Stalker, which had intended to withdraw on September 10. Pilots grew fatigued and the number of accidents soared; more than forty carrier-based Seafires crashed, mostly during deck landings hampered by light winds, callow aviators, and flimsy undercarriages. (The accident rate later improved after mechanics sawed nine inches off each propeller blade, giving more clearance from the flight deck.) When a naval officer told Ancon’s crew over the public address system that “the operation in the bay of Salerno is going according to plan,” a British pilot rescued at sea after bailing out heaved his shoe at the loudspeaker and barked, “Bloody nonsense.”
Using flashlights for illumination and the stars as reference points, aviation engineers worked nights to build four emergency strips at Paestum and elsewhere on the littoral. But even such heroic “cow-pasture engineering”—filling ditches, felling trees, and chopping up rail fences for runway paving—produced only narrow, dusty, accident-plagued fields that were useless in wet weather. And although Allied air forces remained superior in quantity and quality, the Luftwaffe, which would fly 450 sorties against the beachhead on September 10 and 11, now displayed a pugnacity unseen in Sicily. Hewitt reduced his anxiety to four words in a message from Ancon on Saturday: “Air situation here critical.”
A death struggle had begun, between Allied forces trying to mass enough combat strength to burst free of the Salerno plain and German forces trying to mass enough strength to fling the invaders into the sea. “I feel that AVALANCHE will be a matter of touch and go for the next few days,” Eisenhower cabled the Combined Chiefs from Amilcar. “Our greatest asset now is confusion.”
That was a thin reed. With Fifth Army’s last reserves already committed, Alexander on September 10 urged Eighth Army to make haste from Calabria; Montgomery cheerfully agreed to “push on as soon as admin situation allows,” while confiding to his diary that he intended to “act carefully.” Despite modest opposition he issued no get-cracking orders and on September 11 declared a two-day rest for his 5th Division. The plodding march north resembled, in one description, “a holiday picnic.”
On the other side of the hill, General Vietinghoff had his own worries in the German Tenth Army. Two-thirds of 16th Panzer Division’s tanks had been knocked out in the first day of combat, leaving less than three dozen still in the fight. German scouts, wrapping their boots in rags to silence their footfalls, probed for seams in the Allied lines, but canals, stone walls, and those infernal naval guns hampered mobility. Allied bombers had pulverized most of the German airfields in southern Italy. And Kesselring’s September 9 plea to divert two panzer divisions from Mantua, in northern Italy, to Salerno was denied by the Berlin high command, with profound consequences.
Hitches plagued Vietinghoff, too. His Tenth Army, only a few weeks old, had feeble quartermaster and signal units. Fuel worries persisted: a German tanker captain, fearing capture, had dumped his cargo into the sea; supply officers underestimated the extra stocks needed to move in mountainous terrain; and Frascati had provided the wrong locations for fuel depots in Calabria.
Still, reinforcements gathered in the shadowy glens east of Salerno, where confused villagers threw flowers at the passing panzers and shouted, “Viva English!” Vietinghoff estimated that by Monday, September 13, he would have five divisions ringing the beachhead, including Sicilian veterans like the Hermann Göring and 29th Panzer Grenadier. Company by company, regiment by regiment, they clanked into position with the precision of a clenching fist.
Within the Anglo-American beachhead, rumors flitted like small birds: that the British were in Naples; that the German garrison on Corsica had mutinied;
Fresh dead joined the older dead. Walker reported that in the 36th Division alone 250 men had been killed in action by midday on September 10. Burial details next to Dawley’s headquarters quickly hit water, and the shallow grave became a regular feature at Paestum. Soldiers dug a trench four feet deep and a hundred feet long, then straddled the trench line on planks to lower the dead with canvas straps. “The first body didn’t have a mark on him, all his bones were broken and it was like lifting a bag of rags,” recalled a 36th Division grave digger. Soon dead men lay “like railroad ties” until the trench was filled and another trench was dug. Wooden wedges served as grave markers, with the apex hammered into the ground; officers ordered a canvas screen erected around the Paestum cemetery to hide the forest of triangles growing there. “They’ve placed the graveyard, the latrines and the kitchen all in the same area for the convenience of the flies,” an Army engineer wrote.
Stretcher bearers hurrying to the rear learned to walk off-step, John Steinbeck observed, “so that the burden will not be jounced too much.” U.S. Army Medical Forms 52b, 52c, and 52d were tied to wounded soldiers with wire clasps; in the space labeled “place where injured,” an overworked medic often just scribbled, as medics in Italy would so often scribble: “Hill.” The evacuation hospital near Red Beach was so overcrowded that many patients lay “along the walls of the tents with their heads inside and their bodies outside.” Surgeons operated by flashlight at night—much medical equipment had been lost in the landings—and sometimes both doctor and patient were concealed beneath blankets. German shells fell anyway, and a battalion medical history noted that “patients displayed unusual agility in jumping from operating tables into foxholes.”
Not all. Richard Tregaskis watched a Catholic chaplain give extreme unction to a young soldier with a bullet in the throat; when the boy’s eyes grew fixed and glassy, a doctor turned away, muttering, “Well, that’s the way it is.” Alan Moorehead wrote of Italian peasants mourning a child killed in the cross fire: “They cried over it with a nameless uncomprehending anguish, blaming no human agency, attributing everything to the implacable will of God…. This attunement to blind providence communicated itself to the soldiers.” Again, not all. When a German shell killed a lieutenant sleeping in his slit trench at Chiunzi, a comrade concluded, “I don’t think God has anything to do with this war.”
Wishful thinking flocked with rumor. “Our forces have captured Salerno,” the BBC declared, “and are advancing steadily inland.” Just after midnight on Saturday, Fifth Army reported, “Combat efficiency all units excellent.” At two A.M. Clark radioed Alexander, “Am satisfied in both corps sectors.” Fifth Army was ready to march north toward Naples. As often occurred on even the fiercest battlefields, an odd lull briefly becalmed Salerno. “The worst is over,” the 142nd Infantry commander told his Texans. “We are more than a match for all that can meet us.”
The Moan of Lost Souls
AS a gloriously warm and clear Saturday morning spread across the Gulf of Salerno on September 11, Kent Hewitt harbored no illusions that the worst was over. Four German bombs had landed off Ancon’s starboard bow the previous day, and four more had detonated a hundred yards astern just before five A.M. The ship’s size and antennae made her conspicuous—“like a sore thumb,” Hewitt complained—and radio intercepts revealed that German pilots were specifically hunting the flagship. Trenchant scuttlebutt could be heard about whether General Clark ever intended to “get off and get into the action” by moving his headquarters permanently ashore, allowing Ancon to return to Algiers.
Thirty “red alerts” had sounded in thirty-six hours, and frequent hailstorms of spent antiaircraft splinters forced sailors topside to flatten against the bulkheads. Even Ancon’s mess orderlies had joined the human chains passing ammunition to the gun turrets. Belowdecks, with safety hatches closed and ventilation fans turned off to avoid sucking in acrid smoke, the crew sweltered. At night, helmsmen tried to minimize the ship’s silhouette by steering straight toward or away from the moon at twelve knots—slow enough to shrink her wake but fast enough to complicate any U-boat captain’s torpedo trigonometry.
Three days into AVALANCHE, Hewitt’s cares had doubled and redoubled. The beaches were now so congested that fuel, food, and ammo lay heaped in the shallows, drawing enemy fire and impeding further unloading. Army and Navy officers argued bitterly over who outranked whom and which service bore responsibility for clearing the shingle. Drivers could not find their vehicles, surgeons their scalpels, mortarmen their mortars. Sailors playing “cowboys and Indians” aboard one of Ancon’s barges had peppered floating crates, first with pistol fire, then with 20mm slugs. The scouring action of LST and other landing craft propellers had created formidable new sandbars and runnels 150 yards offshore.
Worst of all, Luftwaffe attacks had intensified almost hourly. Hewitt this morning had sent Admiral Cunningham an urgent plea for more air cover. Repeated alerts and shooting throughout the night rattled skippers and swabs alike. “All are jumpy and nervous and washed out now,” one LCT commander told his diary. The cruiser Philadelphia reported that her crew was drinking a daily average of a gallon of coffee per man, and the ship’s surgeon had begun distributing “nerve pills.”
The demand for pills must have spiked at 9:35 A.M., when an enormous explosion fifteen feet to starboard caused a “very marked hogging, sagging, and whipping motion” from Philadelphia’s bow to her fantail. Nine minutes later, as Clark and Hewitt stood on Ancon’s flag bridge sorting through frantic reports of the mysterious blast, a slender, eleven-foot cylinder dropped from a Luftwaffe Do-217 bomber at eighteen thousand feet. Plummeting in a tight spiral and trailing smoke, the object resembled a stricken aircraft.
In fact, as Hewitt soon surmised, it was a secret German weapon: a guided bomb with four stubby wings, an armor-piercing delayed fuze, and a six-hundred-pound warhead. A radio receiver and movable fins permitted a German bomber pilot to steer with a joystick from his cockpit, tracking the falling bomb by the burning flare mounted on its tail. Four years in development, the FX-1400—soon known as the Fritz-X or Smoky Joe—had first appeared in combat in late August, sinking a British sloop in the Bay of Biscay; on September 9, two Fritz-Xs had sunk the Italian battleship Roma near Corsica as she sortied to join the British fleet at Malta. Allied intelligence would dispatch agents from Norway to Greece in an effort to capture one of the missiles, which an intelligence officer called “the holy grail.” For now, as Hewitt knew, the only defense against the Fritz-X was to hope it missed, as the Philadelphia had been missed.
Closing at six hundred miles per hour with a “terrific screeching noise,” the bomb appeared to Clark to be aimed straight for Ancon. Instead, it swooped over the flagship toward a cruiser five hundred yards to starboard. The U.S.S. Savannah had been lying to while awaiting the morning’s shore-bombardment assignment, but a red alert from Ancon caused her to ring for twenty knots and a hard left rudder. She had just leaned into her turn when calamity struck.
“It didn’t fall like bombs do,” an observer on Ancon later said. “It came down like a shell.” At a 20-degree angle from true vertical, the Fritz-X hit just forward of Savannah’s bridge, punching a twenty-two-inch hole in the armored roof of turret number 3 and slicing through three more steel decks before detonating in the lower handling room, thirty-six feet down. No American vessel had ever before been struck by a guided missile, and no U.S. Navy warship in World War II would be struck by a larger bomb than the Fritz-X that caught Savannah at 9:44 A.M. Another witness concluded, “That hit wasn’t natural.”
A spurt of flame “flared like a sulphur match” from the turret. Quentin Re
The blast vaporized bulkheads, buckled decks, and shattered watertight doors, killing every sailor in turret number 3, and ripping a thirty-foot hole in the ship’s bottom. Flame licked through ventilation ducts, incinerating more men with flash burns; poisonous gases rolled up powder hoists and piping. Eight magazines were wrecked, and a design flaw caused ducts from the magazines to vent on the third deck rather than overboard, killing men in compartments that suffered little structural damage. Twenty-one sailors died in a gun room when visibility instantly dropped to six inches and toxic fumes overwhelmed them before they could escape through a rear hatch.
Not least, gunpowder lay scattered five inches deep. At Pearl Harbor twenty-one months earlier, a conventional bomb under similar circumstances had ignited a forward powder magazine and eviscerated the U.S.S. Arizona with a devastating explosion; Roma had died in like fashion on Thursday afternoon, broken in half with a loss of thirteen hundred lives. Only massive flooding preserved Savannah from the same fate: her powder had begun to burn but an abrupt tide of seawater through the side plates and lower hull quenched the fire just seconds before the magazines would have ignited.
Her rugged hull saved her, along with luck and heroic firefighting. Flooded for 152 feet of her length and listing 8 degrees to port, Savannah settled 12 feet in the bow until her forecastle was nearly awash. Frozen in a left turn, she crossed Ancon’s bow before gliding by the flagship’s port side as if passing in review. Detonating 6-inch shells and burning balsa rafts on the weather deck complicated the rescue efforts of men playing hoses down gun muzzles and through the violated roof of turret number 3. The lucky died quickly, including one human torch who appeared on deck and leaped overboard—his body was never recovered—and a turret officer, naked and charred and entangled in phone wire, who passed within minutes. Others lingered for days. Among the unluckiest was Bosun’s Mate John M. Wilhelm, who had been transferred from his minesweeper to Savannah the previous day for treatment of a broken ankle; he died with eight others in the sick bay, and would be buried at sea.