The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
At 7:30 P.M., as evening again enfolded the beachhead, Clark convened a conference with Dawley, Walker, and Middleton in the hot, dim VI Corps command post. To avoid drawing enemy fire, cigarettes were forbidden in the capacious barn, and only a hooded flashlight illuminated the map board. Staff officers drifted through the spectral gloom, and radios crackled in the corner. Clark recalled a staff college exercise at Fort Leavenworth a decade earlier in which students prepared demolition orders to prevent ammunition and other stocks from falling into enemy hands. “How the hell would you do it?” Clark wondered. Set the stuff ablaze? “You just don’t go up with a match.” Demolition preparations alone would shatter morale. Staff college also had stressed the importance in amphibious invasions of drafting an evacuation plan. Yet the 1941 Army field manual “Landing Operations on Hostile Shores” warned that reembarkations of forces under fire “are exceedingly difficult and hazardous operations,” which could require “the deliberate sacrifice of part of the forces ashore in order to extricate the bulk.” Which forces should be sacrificed at Salerno?
Clark would subsequently deny seriously considering evacuation. “That was never in our thoughts,” he wrote his mother a month later. In fact, he now revealed contingency plans still being cobbled together by the Fifth Army staff. Under Operation SEALION, landing craft would shift British X Corps troops to the VI Corps sector at Paestum; under Operation SEATRAIN, the reverse would occur, with American troops ferried to join the British near Salerno town. Under BRASS RAIL, Clark and his staff would leave the beachhead for a “headquarters afloat” on H.M.S. Hilary. Gruenther was ordered to “take up with the Navy” the necessary arrangements. The plans were strictly precautionary; George Meade had prepared a just-in-case retreat order for his Union army at Gettysburg.
Roused from his torpor, Dawley protested and announced his intention to remain at Paestum, SEATRAIN or SEALION be damned. As the meeting adjourned, others grumbled in discontent, or privately questioned Clark’s fortitude. “I don’t want to tell you how to run your job, but give me support,” Middleton told the army commander. Spitting in annoyance, he added, “I want to stay here and fight.” The time had come, Middleton advised his subordinates, “to do some hard fighting.”
At nine P.M., 2,500 yards south of the Calore, a whistle blew in the Fifth Army bivouac, summoning officers into the bright moonlight. In what the reporter Lionel Shapiro described as a “level, lifeless voice,” a colonel announced, “German tanks have broken through our lines. They are coming down the Sele toward this camp. All officers will take a roll call of their men.” Three quick pistol shots would signal the panzers’ arrival.
Cooks, clerks, and orderlies loaded their rifles and fanned into a firing line. Slapping at mosquitoes, they hoarsely whispered the night’s challenge—“Canadian”—and strained to hear the parole: “wheat.” An officer arrived to find the Fifth Army headquarters “in the weeds no higher than your waist and crawling around on their hands and knees.” Some men sidled down to the sea, determined, as one soldier explained, to wade “up to our necks and wait there until some ship comes along and picks us up.” Clark ordered his staff to prepare for evacuation on ten minutes’ notice: five landing craft bobbed offshore, waiting for a summons to Green Beach.
The waxing moon cast grotesque, unnerving shadows, and in a privet hedge outside the camp a soldier sang softly to himself:
I’m a Yankee Doodle dandy,
A Yankee Doodle, do or die…
General Vietinghoff had placed his headquarters in a tenth-century castle in Sant’Angelo dei Lombardi, an ancient mill town in the eastern hills, known for bell foundries and macaroni. From here the signs of Allied flight seemed unmistakable. “After a defensive battle lasting four days, enemy resistance is collapsing,” the Tenth Army commander cabled Kesselring and the Berlin high command. “Tenth Army pursuing enemy on a wide front.” Told by a subordinate that Allied resistance seemed to be stiffening, Vietinghoff insisted, “The fact that he is collapsing cannot be doubted if he voluntarily splits his force into two halves.” As Black Monday drew to a close, the Tenth Army war diary recorded, “The battle of Salerno appears to be over.”
A Portal Won
FROM the rail of U.S.S. Biscayne, where Kent Hewitt had planted his flag after sending Ancon back to Africa, the distant beach on Tuesday, September 14, still radiated an illusory Mediterranean warmth. The dappled sea stretched to the shore in patches of turquoise and indigo. Beyond the golden ribbon of sand, the Sele plain spread in a silver-green haze. But there the arcadian vision abruptly ended in banks of gray and black smoke, and a pale penumbra of fire hinted at violent struggle and death ashore.
Hewitt bitterly opposed Clark’s evacuation scheme, even as he made ready to carry it out. He spent Tuesday morning in Biscayne’s topside war room issuing orders and dictating messages. All unloading was halted on the southern beaches, and cargo ships prepared on half an hour’s notice to steam beyond range of shore artillery. An awkward message to Cunningham in his Malta bastion reflected Hewitt’s own exhaustion: “Depth of beachhead narrowing and ground forces now taking defensive. Fatigue existing…. Are heavier naval forces available?” Cunningham promptly dispatched the battleships Valiant and Warspite, both fire-breathing veterans of Jutland in 1916, and he sent three cruisers at flank speed to Tripoli, where they were to embark as many British combat troops as could cram the decks. “I will try to help you all I can,” Cunningham signaled.
Hastily summoning his top lieutenants for an afternoon conference, Hewitt unveiled SEALION, SEATRAIN, and BRASS RAIL in the crowded war room. To a man they were horrified.
“If we withdraw we will lose our whole landing force,” warned Rear Admiral Richard L. Conolly, who had landed Darby and his Rangers at Maiori. Amphibious crews lacked “the capability and training and experience to evacuate a force. We have never done this.” The additional tonnage added to landing craft in the shallows would cause them to settle lower in the water and thus exceed the backing power of the vessels’ engines. Fleet planners estimated that at most they could evacuate only half the load that had been landed at Salerno.
The senior British naval officer, Commodore G. N. Oliver, who arrived by barge from Hilary to find “intense gloom” suffusing the Biscayne, was equally adamant. To reembark “heavily engaged troops from a shallow beachhead” was impracticable and would “probably prove suicidal.
“It just cannot be done. Ships get deeper when being loaded, and it would be impossible to get them off the beaches,” Oliver said. “If you shorten the beachhead, the Germans will be within kissing distance and able to shell us from both flanks.” Enemy artillery would “rake the beaches,” destroying mountains of matériel. An evacuation, the commodore added, was “simply not on.” As for BRASS RAIL, he would happily take Clark and his staff aboard Hilary. But Fifth Army headquarters had grown to two thousand soldiers and five hundred vehicles, far beyond the flagship’s capacity. The only recourse was “to stay and fight it out.” Oliver all but spat the words. Heads nodded around the room.
Hewitt nodded, too. The logic was unimpeachable. But Clark was in command at Salerno; preparations for evacuation must proceed, as he requested. “Never mind, Commodore,” Hewitt told Oliver. “You go and do it.”
Yet the pack of fighting sea dogs had failed to sense a turning tide. Just as Fifth Army’s plight had deteriorated from precarious to critical on Black Monday, now it ebbed back to simply precarious. The plucky stand at the Burned Bridge had checked German momentum. Then, just before midnight, a fleet of C-47s had appeared overhead and an enormous letter “T”—with legs half a mile long, fashioned from pails of gasoline-soaked sand—abruptly burst into flame to mark the beachfront drop zone. Like “a cloud of monster snowflakes,” as one witness reported, the 82nd Airborne’s 504th Infantry sifted into the beachhead, on time, on target, and without a single instance of the friendly fire that had decimated the regiment in Sicily two months earlier. Thirteen hundred lightly armed paratroope
Perhaps to compensate for any fainthearted behavior on Monday evening, Clark on Tuesday was conspicuously daring, demonstrating the physical courage that in fact would characterize his generalship. Exposing himself to fire below the Calore, he helped position his battered battalions to suture the seam between VI Corps and X Corps. A German lunge south of the Tabacchificio Fioche at eight A.M. was met with a hot volley of flanking fire that left seven panzers burning in the mist. Early in the afternoon, 45th Division troops threw back two more attacks, and by late in the day two dozen German tanks had been destroyed. “In one case,” an intelligence officer told his diary, “the trapped crew had been broiled in such a way that a puddle of fat had spread from under the tank.”
South of the Sele the 36th Division shortened its line along La Cosa Creek, scattering mines and unspooling barbed wire from the Calore to Monte Soprano, and halting the German drive through Altavilla. To the north, the British still fought furiously from Vietri to Battipaglia, but McCreery showed studied nonchalance in his signal to Clark at five P.M. on Tuesday: “Nothing of interest to report during daylight.”
Vietinghoff was loath to accept that he had not driven the Allies back to their ships. Yet frictions had accumulated in Tenth Army: a corps commander had been injured in a plane crash; many German troops suffered from heat exhaustion; and Allied artillery was profligate—U.S. gunners alone fired ten thousand shells on Tuesday, and howitzers sniped at individual German soldiers. Berlin’s refusal to release the two tank divisions from Mantua had also hurt the cause in Salerno. Those reinforcements that did arrive often came in penny packets—a company here, a battalion there—and were committed to battle the same way, without providing a critical mass anywhere. Attacking downhill brought certain pleasures, but also exposed the attackers to blistering fire that unhinged German formations.
No fire blistered more than naval shelling, for which there was no antidote except to flee the littoral. “The heavy naval artillery barrages were especially unpleasant,” a Hermann Göring Division commander confessed. Hewitt ordered every boat with a gun barrel into the fight, led by the big warships dubbed “the murderous queens.” Steaming off the Sele’s mouth, Philadelphia from nine P.M. Monday until four A.M. Tuesday fired nearly a thousand 6-inch shells at roads, intersections, and German troop concentrations, then yielded to the equally murderous U.S.S. Boise. Guns grew so hot that hydraulic rammers slowed, barrel paint blistered, and the canvas boots that kept seawater off the gun mounts charred. To clear their decks, sailors took fire axes to empty shell cases and heaved the splinters over the side. Soldiers ashore greeted new salvos with a baying war cry: “Adolf, count your children now!”
What naval shells missed, air force bombs hit. Several hundred bombers struck the Sele plain during daylight on Tuesday. That night, in an unusual tactical role, sixty B-17s battered road and rail targets around Eboli and Battipaglia; by late Wednesday, more than a thousand “heavy” sorties had been flown at Salerno. Over the next four days, the heavies would drop 760 tons of high explosives per square mile, annihilating intersections, rail yards, and villages. Smaller fighter-bombers grew pugnacious enough to strafe lone German motorcyclists, while flocks of Spitfires flew from Sicily every fifteen minutes and pilots in the tiny Piper L-4 Grasshopper spotter planes known as Maytag Messerschmitts took occasional potshots with their .45-caliber pistols.
By dusk on Tuesday, German commanders reported that movement during the day had become “almost impossible” without attracting Allied artillery, naval shells, bombs, mortar rounds, or tank fire—and sometimes all five. Having seen such firepower in Tunisia and again in Sicily, Kesselring now doubted that Tenth Army could mass enough combat strength to obliterate the beachhead. Still, the stakes made it worth one more try. Smiling Albert on Tuesday gave Vietinghoff his marching orders: make a final effort to throw Fifth Army into the sea, but be prepared to march north, perhaps as far as Rome.
The somber if sketchy reports from Salerno had so incensed Winston Churchill that he threatened to set things right by flying to the beachhead personally. Instead he sent his favorite beau sabreur, a man who had reputedly built sand castles under fire on Dunkirk beach and whose very name calmed tempests and stiffened spines. Harold Alexander—“General Alex” to buck privates and brigadiers alike—arrived in the roadstead aboard the destroyer Offa before dawn on Wednesday, September 15, and clambered aboard the Biscayne to learn from Hewitt what all the fuss was about.
“Quelle race!” murmured a visiting French officer who watched Alexander at Salerno. What breeding, indeed. He was immaculate, as always, with his bloused britches, sleek mustache, and steep-peaked, red-banded cap, worn with an upward tilt of the head “that might be called supercilious if it were not so serene,” John Gunther wrote. As always, he carried in his kit an Irish flag, which he intended to raise over Berlin. A talented draftsman who had been known to sketch a battlefield amid bursting shells, he evinced “a calm, gentle, friendly presence whose influence, like an oil slick, spread outward,” according to a fellow Guardsman, the future military historian Michael Howard. He assumed that “nothing ever went right in battle,” and thus was rarely surprised by confusion or calamity; in Alexander’s cosmology, chaos at Salerno reflected the natural order. “Good chaps get killed and wounded, and it is a terrible thing,” he once said of combat, though without great conviction. To him, war was simply “homicide on a scale which transformed it into a crusade and an art, dignified by its difficulties and risks.” Churchill adored Alexander, according to the prime minister’s physician, because he “redeemed what was brutal in war, touching the grim business lightly with his glove. In his hands it was still a game for people of quality.”
No sooner had Hewitt laid out Clark’s evacuation contingency than General Alex in a rare flash of temper cracked his bloused britches with a swagger stick and stepped to the front of Biscayne’s crowded war room. “Oh, no! We can’t have anything like that,” he said, bristling. “Never do, never do.” All planning for SEATRAIN, SEALION, and BRASS RAIL would “cease immediately,” lest panic infect the ranks. Alexander looked about as if seeking sand to build a castle. “There will be no evacuation,” he said. “Now we’ll proceed from there.”
He and Hewitt found Clark awaiting them on the Paestum beach. Around a camp table in the Fifth Army headquarters thicket, an orderly served breakfast while Philadelphia, back on the Sele station, unlimbered at targets near Persano, rattling coffee cups and shivering the tent canvas with concussion ghosts. Alexander and Clark vanished for a private conversation in the army commander’s little trailer; when they emerged, all evacuation schemes had been scrapped.
Clark accepted the bucking-up graciously, and managed to conceal his seething anger at Montgomery, who seemed impervious both to Alexander’s exhortations and to the predicament of Fifth Army. This very day, the Eighth Army commander had sent a message, both tactically and syntactically suspect, and with a misspelled salutation:
My dear Clarke…It looks as if you may be having not too good a time, and I do hope that all will go well with you…. We are on the way to lend a hand.
In fact, Montgomery’s 64,000 troops were still fifty miles from Paestum, patching demolished bridges and holding medals ceremonies. In nearly two weeks only eighty-five German prisoners had been captured; the rearguard 26th Panzer Division was suffering just ten combat casualties a day; and Montgomery’s army on Monday reported a total of sixty-two British dead since arriving in Italy. Several squads of British reporters, chafing at the glacial pace, set off by road for Salerno with their public relations escorts, flinging wild hand gestures and demanding of cheerful Calabrian peasants, “Dove te
Of more immediate concern to Clark was General Dawley. “I would like you to go now and visit VI Corps headquarters and look over Dawley,” Clark told Alexander. “I’m worried about him.” Shortly before nine A.M., Alexander strolled into the big corps barn where Dawley stood before his map board like a condemned man on the scaffold. After little rest in nearly a week and no sleep at all for the past forty-eight hours, his voice cracked as he described, incoherently, both corps dispositions and his future plans. Asked to pinpoint Walker’s 36th Division, he gestured vaguely with a trembling hand to a much larger sector around the Gulf of Salerno than even the doughty Texans could occupy.
“I do not want to interfere with your business,” Alexander told Clark an hour later. “But I have some ten years’ experience in this game of sizing up commanders. I can tell you definitely that you have a broken reed on your hands, and I suggest you replace him immediately.”
“I know it, Alex,” Clark replied. “I am up there every day.” He asked Alexander upon returning to North Africa to tell Eisenhower what he had seen. With a hearty cheerio, Alexander sped off by patrol boat to the British sector, where McCreery had spread a checkered tablecloth on the beach, with picnic platters of sandwiches and crackers.