The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
A deft shifting of fuel from bunker to bunker brought the cruiser to an even keel, and on Saturday evening Savannah retired with a destroyer escort for Malta. Across the Salerno anchorage, sailors braced the rails, saluting. At Valletta she would moor in Dockyard Creek, where rescuers hoisted bodies from the wrecked compartments below; wrapped in sheets or olive-drab blankets they covered the deck like toppled chess pieces. Four men trapped in a radio room emerged alive after sixty hours, but 206 others had perished.
Savannah’s fight was finished, at least for a year, but at Salerno the war continued. Hewitt desperately sought remedies against the glide bombs, pleading for more smoke generators from North Africa and toying with electronic countermeasures by having sailors flip on their electric razors and other appliances during an attack. The experiment was said “to improve morale without affecting the accuracy of the missiles.” Fritz-X attacks in coming days would also cripple the battleship H.M.S. Warspite and the cruiser H.M.S. Uganda, among eighty-five Allied vessels hit by German bombs at Salerno. In a few months, effective jamming transmitters would emerge from Navy research laboratories, but for the moment every man afloat felt a dread vulnerability.
To the relief of Ancon’s crew, on Sunday morning, September 12, Mark Clark moved his Fifth Army headquarters from ship to beachhead. Clerks, drivers, and staff officers rode a Royal Navy landing vessel to shore, where a witness described “hundreds of soldiers streaming like ants to bring typewriters and filing cabinets up from the beach.” Near Highway 18, in a pine grove southwest of the Sele-Calore confluence, a conspicuous pink-stucco palazzo with a lush garden was chosen for Clark’s command post despite sporadic enemy artillery fire. The late-summer landscape blended the pastoral and the war-torn. Blue grasshoppers whirred among rioting zinnias, and water buffalo grazed in the plashy fens near the carcasses of goats killed in the cross fire. Naval shells had splintered gum trees and cratered the meadows, but a cat dozed on the windowsill of an empty peasant house where sweet peas and tomatoes and geraniums stretched toward the sun.
Clark immediately drove south to General Dawley’s tobacco barn headquarters, his long legs folded awkwardly into the jeep. Across his nose he knotted a bandana against the dust that soon powdered his uniform and whitened his eyebrows. At the Paestum cemetery, corpses lay in windrows awaiting interment—“lots of dead piling up outside the wall and beginning to get ripe,” Dawley’s aide had noted in his diary on Saturday. Inside the VI Corps command post, the rich fragrance of drying tobacco leaves in overhead flues masked the stink. Dawley tromped about in his cavalry boots, flicking a riding crop at the large map board covered with cabalistic red and blue symbols.
Twenty-eight thousand Americans were now ashore, with roughly twice that many British troops to the north. The Fifth Army beachhead stretched for forty miles, at an average depth of six miles. Nowhere was it deeper than eleven miles, and near Battipaglia the line had hardly advanced since the invasion began four days earlier. Montgomery’s army still dawdled far to the south, and Clark could expect no significant reinforcements by sea until another infantry division and an armored division finished arriving in the fourth week of September.
The American right flank seemed secure, but the center worried Clark. This morning, German grenadiers had infiltrated a battalion of the 142nd Infantry in the hilltop village of Altavilla, then cut the unit to ribbons. Driven from Altavilla and the terraced heights to the east, the battalion was reduced by two-thirds, to 260 men. As described by a 36th Division soldier, Altavilla embodied another of those topographical truisms all too common in Italy: “a height of some sort with the enemy looking down at us.” The battalion commander was captured, and among the other casualties was his intelligence officer, a former Southern Methodist University football star named John F. Sprague, who had played in the 1937 Rose Bowl. Bleeding from grenade fragments in his eyes and torso, Sprague told a comrade, “I’m a little hungry. Let’s put on the pan and have some ham and eggs.” Then: “I have a little headache. I wish I had an aspirin.” With a flail of his arms and a final heave of his barrel chest, he died.
Of still greater concern to Clark was the American left flank. The Sele corridor, code-named BRYAN, was even more vulnerable after the loss of Altavilla. As one officer noted, the Sele had become not just a river but “a tribulation.” In the V-shaped bottoms where the Calore flowed into the Sele from the northeast, the 179th Infantry for the past day had fought desperately against panzers spilling from the dells below Eboli. One artillery battalion was reduced to five rounds, to be “fired point blank in the final emergency,” and as riflemen fixed bayonets and formed a 360-degree perimeter, gunners made contingency plans to spike their tubes and flee through the brush. On a commanding rise just north of the Sele, a tank battalion had been ambushed by 16th Panzer Division troops this morning at the Tabacchificio Fioche, a stronghold of five brick buildings with massive walls, red tile roofs, and small windows resembling gun ports; the tobacco factory would change hands several times through the afternoon, as tank rounds gnawed at the brick and machine-gun bullets scythed the Sele rushes. After seesaw fighting, American troops occupied the tabacchificio, digging in along the river and the dusty road to Eboli.
If German forces followed the Sele to the sea, Clark realized, they could turn the inner flanks of both X Corps in the north and VI Corps in the south. Was Dawley alive to the peril on his left? Clark wondered. The 45th and 36th Divisions were arrayed in a brittle cordon defense, and the 45th had just five infantry battalions in Italy. The enemy noose grew tighter by the hour, yet the corps had no reserves. Unmentioned was Clark’s original decision to divide his army by landing on both sides of the Sele, rather than putting all forces north of the river and using it to shield his right flank. He ended the conference, folded himself back into the jeep, and drove to Red Beach, where he flagged down a patrol boat and roared off to the British sector in search of the X Corps commander, Lieutenant General Richard L. McCreery.
Here things were even worse. “Very heavy fighting today involving very great expenditure of ammunition,” McCreery had informed Clark the previous night. On Saturday alone, the Germans had captured fifteen hundred Allied soldiers, mostly British; X Corps casualties at Salerno approached three thousand. A pious, blunt Anglo-Irish cavalryman—“tall, lean, and vague,” as one Yank described him—McCreery limped from a Great War wound and tended when alarmed to lower his voice to a near whisper. He was whispering now. Hounded by panzers, the exhausted 56th Division was pulling back to a new line two miles west of Battipaglia, a town badly pulverized and reeking of seared flesh. Grenadier and Coldstream Guardsmen were only five thousand yards from the beaches; some battalion officers had burned their secret documents and maps as a precaution against capture. “Shells whined swiftly over us like lost souls. Moan, moan, moan, they wept,” wrote a young Coldstream officer named Michael Howard. The Scots Guards official history later acknowledged “a general feeling in the air of another Dunkirk.”
Shaken by the sight of the British dead stacked in the dunes, Clark at dusk raced the failing light back to Paestum. His first order was to abandon the pink palazzo, now within earshot of panzer fire; the army headquarters moved into a green calamity tent hastily erected in a thicket just a stone’s throw north of the VI Corps barn. Under prodding, Dawley—who complained about “my paucity of reserves”—issued VI Corps Field Order No. 2 to shift his forces to the left. The 45th Division would sidestep north of the Sele, with two battalions on the far left of the American line stretching toward Batty P in an effort to seal the gap with the British; Walker’s 36th Division now held everything south of the river on an exceptionally elongated thirty-five-mile front. In his pencil-written diary, Dawley scribbled: “Situation bad.”
Grimy and dust-caked, Clark crawled into Al Gruenther’s small trailer for a few hours’ sleep. Flares limned the horizon to the east, bleaching out the rising moon. Muzzle flashes twinkled along the ridgelines, and the nag of artillery rolled down the hil
September 13—“Black Monday,” to those who outlived it—dawned “so quiet that the crowing of a cock cut the ears.” Mist drifted in the flats, wet and eerie. Eight-foot tobacco fronds nodded on the morning airs. Somewhere a cow lowed, longing to be milked.
All tranquillity vanished at six A.M. Two battalions from the 36th Division struck Altavilla through the peach and apple trees in a futile lunge for the high ground behind the town, especially a cactus-infested knob known as Hill 424. Ferocious German counterattacks with twenty tanks eventually drove the Americans down the terraced slopes, firing over their shoulders. Off to a bad start, the morning only worsened when the 142nd Infantry’s 1st Battalion, already reduced to 260 men, pushed through a ravine south of the village in a column of companies; artillery shells—some alleged they came from American guns—ripped the formation from front to back. By day’s end, just sixty men were reported fit for duty. The 3rd Battalion of the 143rd Infantry, encircled and besieged by five counterattacks, would slip away only after nightfall, although Company K remained trapped in Altavilla for another twenty-four hours; fighting with desperate gallantry, three soldiers in the battalion earned Congressional Medals of Honor. Yet three battalions had been repulsed with heavy losses, and an uncharitable soldier in another division wondered “if the Texans were having any trouble getting the Germans to stand up and take off their hats when ‘Deep in the Heart of Texas’ was played.”
Slapped around in the uplands at Altavilla, the Americans now faced mortal danger in the Sele flats. For only on Monday morning did General Vietinghoff confirm that a rift ran through the center of Fifth Army; German intelligence surmised that the two enemy corps had “independent and almost unconnected leadership.” Vietinghoff, who had amassed six hundred tanks and self-propelled guns, now insisted that the Allies had “split themselves into two sections” to expedite evacuation of the beachhead. The arrival of more ships in the anchorage, as well as an intercepted radio message, seemed to confirm the enemy’s intention of abandoning Salerno. A quick thrust down the Sele to the sea could thwart any escape; there would be no second Dunkirk.
Grenadiers sang “Lili Marlene” as they rolled into their assembly areas at midday. “The engines were started up again,” a 16th Panzer Division history recorded. “Once more the dust rose in clouds above the hot, narrow roads.”
Even in peacetime the five stout warehouses of the Tabacchificio Fioche offered scant shelter from the hard life of the Sele peasantry. Reclamation projects in the nineteenth century had converted malarial swampland—“altogether insalubrious,” a visiting priest complained—into tenant farms growing tobacco for a state monopoly that by 1940 was producing nearly twenty billion cigarettes annually. Hundreds of women in homespun smocks labored under the tabacchificio’s brick archways from dawn to dusk, typically for less than twenty lire a day, spearing leaves onto drying-rack spindles, or sorting them by grade into large wicker baskets. “Andare al tabacco”—“going to tobacco”—had become a euphemism for a hard life, often choked with tragedy.
Here the full fury of the German attack fell at 3:30 P.M. A spearhead of fifteen panzers clanked southwest down the Eboli road, followed by a shrieking battalion of grenadiers shooting colored flares and smoke grenades to simulate a bigger force. (“Fireworks created an appearance of large numbers,” an American officer later observed.) Like a battering ram, the assault stove in first one flank and then the other of the 157th Infantry’s 1st Battalion, part of Middleton’s 45th Division. From the far bank, tank fire screamed through the Yank command post. The battalion soon broke, pelting west down the river for nearly two miles toward Highway 18 with a loss of more than five hundred men. A mortar company left unprotected near the tabacchificio continued to fire until German machine gunners closed to within two hundred yards, forcing the mortarmen to flee as well, their abandoned tubes unspiked.
The wolf was in the fold. “Tracers were going through my pack,” a soldier later wrote his father. “My nose was all scratched trying to hug the ground.” Across the river, a single battalion from the 36th Division—the 2nd of the 143rd Infantry—had been plopped after midnight between the Sele and the Calore, just beyond the hamlet of Persano. Germans from the tabacchificio looped behind the unit’s left flank, while other panzers struck from the right and head-on, machine-gunning GIs in slit trenches along a dirt track. “For a description of the next five hours,” one corporal later wrote in his diary, “I will reserve a space in my memory.” A sergeant was reading the Twenty-third Psalm when grenadiers yanked him from his hole; he was surprised to see “Gott mit Uns” belt buckles, having been told that all Germans were atheists. Rifle companies, one witness said, “were swept aside like furrows from a plow.” Of 842 men, 334 survived to fight another day; half the battalion was captured, including the commander. Some men dropped their weapons on the pretext that the barrels had become too hot to handle. Poor coordination between the 45th and 36th Divisions resulted in gunners from one firing into the backs of soldiers from the other. All afternoon panzers hunted GIs like game birds in the dense undergrowth. A major who escaped across the Calore summarized his report in five words: “It was hell up there.”
And soon, back here. “Situation worse. Enemy closing. Heavy tank and artillery action,” a 179th Infantry war diary recorded. “Aid station set up in haystack.” The 191st Tank Battalion backed its Shermans into a semi-circle to fire on three fronts; quartermasters dumped ammunition in a hedgerow, and tank crews took turns scuttling back one by one to rearm. Dead men lay on a gravel bar in the Calore as if sunning themselves. A young major in the 179th Infantry told his men, “Tonight you’re not fighting for your country, you’re fighting for your ass. Because they’re behind us.”
“Enemy on the run,” the German vanguard reported. Only a charred, demolished bridge across the Calore, five miles from the beach, momentarily stalled Vietinghoff’s drive to Paestum and the sea. Deep drainage ditches kept German tanks and armored carriers from veering off the narrow dirt road. Panzer commanders milled at the Burned Bridge, studying their maps.
Then, on the southwest bank of the Calore, hard by the junction with the Sele, two field artillery battalions from the 45th Division—the 158th and the 189th—shouldered two dozen guns into the brambles, and at 6:30 P.M. let fly volley after stabbing volley, point blank across the muddy stream. Drivers, bandsmen, and cooks crawled along the bank, and the crackle of rifle fire soon punctuated the roar of 105mm howitzers and the pumpf of white-phosphorus mortar shells springing from their tubes. Smoke billowed in the bottoms, swallowing the molten glare of flares floating on their tiny parachutes, and howitzer shells splintered trees on the far bank, clear-cutting the wood with steel and flame. Some guns fired nineteen rounds a minute, triple the howitzer’s supposed maximum rate of fire, in a blur of yanked lanyards and ejected brass. Stripped to the waist and black with grit, soldiers staggered from dump to gun with a high-explosive shell on each shoulder, and sheets of flame bridged the Calore, hour after hour after hour.
Three miles down Highway 18, grim dispatches fluttered into the VI Corps tobacco barn: an enemy column a mile long was moving south from Eboli toward Persano to exploit the gash in the American line; several battalions had been ravaged if not obliterated; German shells had destroyed forty thousand gallons of fuel and thwarted efforts to reopen the Salerno port. The rude airstrips around Paestum were so dusty that pilots often took off and landed by instrument even in daylight. Runway construction work had been impaired this afternoon by the desertion of terrified Italian laborers. Also, a P-38 fighter had crashed into a water truck that was laying
“Things not too hot for the home team today,” General Dawley’s aide wrote in his diary. Haggard and gray from lack of sleep, Dawley in his own diary entry assessed the afternoon with a single noun: “Disaster—.” A Fifth Army messenger found him “resting on a cot, looking very bad.” When the corps commander phoned Clark to warn of the enemy breakthrough at Persano, Clark asked, “What are you going to do about it? What can you do?” Dawley replied, “Nothing. I have no reserves. All I’ve got is a prayer.”
Clark had spent the day in Gruenther’s trailer hearing the same bleak reports. The beachhead, he concluded, had deteriorated from precarious to “extremely critical.” Not until this morning had Alexander issued an unambiguous hurry-up order to Eighth Army, but Montgomery remained more than sixty miles away—despite annoying BBC broadcasts that portrayed him as heroically galloping to the rescue. Only the lightly armed 82nd Airborne Division in Sicily could provide quick reinforcement, and Clark this morning sent Ridgway a note so hastily scribbled that he omitted the final consonant from the 82nd commander’s first name: “Dear Mat…It is absolutely essential that one of your infantry regimental combat teams drop today within our defended beachhead.”