The Day of Battle (33 page)

That army would need his lucky clovers. Operation
AVALANCHE
was to land at Salerno, seize nearby Naples, and eventually establish air bases “in the Rome area, and if feasible, further north.” As in
HUSKY
, preparations suffered from the diaspora of Allied planners across the ancient world. Instead of the three to five months needed to thoroughly plan a major amphibious expedition, Clark got forty-five days. Rehearsals were minimal and disheartening. Owing to the belated discovery of minefields in Salerno Bay, Hewitt would have to lower the landing craft nine to twelve miles from the beaches in order to avoid endangering his troop transports. Clark on August 24 also accelerated H-hour by thirty minutes, “upsetting all the detailed timings of convoys and assault waves.” “Men of calm dispositions,” one commander noted, “became quite irritable.” Quartermasters struggled to overcome shortages of hospital beds, bakeries, laundry units, and—because planners had simply forgotten to requisition it—100-octane aviation fuel.

Only three assault divisions were available for
AVALANCHE
, so the operation would have less than half the heft of
HUSKY
. Clark had pleaded for at least four divisions, but, as usual, force size was determined by shipping capacity rather than battlefield needs. Even as Clark boarded
Ancon
it was unclear to Hewitt how many ships and landing craft he had in his fleet; some vessels still required refurbishing after duty in Sicily, and much shipping had been diverted to support Montgomery in
BAYTOWN
. Adding to Clark’s burden, Eisenhower on September 3 told him he could no longer count on the 82nd Airborne Division in reserve, a blow that Clark likened to “cutting off my left arm.”

Eisenhower had his own disappointments. Three times he asked Washington and London to temporarily double his heavy bomber force for
AVALANCHE
, and three times the Combined Chiefs refused to divert planes from the growing air campaign in Britain. A separate request—to ferry another infantry division to Salerno by borrowing ten LSTs bound for India through the Mediterranean—was rejected by the Charlie-Charlies in late August. Eisenhower advised his superiors that the invasion would proceed apace with “whatever forces we have at the moment,” but that “risks must be calculated.” To bolster fighter protection for Hewitt’s ships, the Royal Navy had added a light fleet aircraft carrier—H.M.S.
Unicorn
—and four smaller escort carriers known as Woolworths. Allied air strength was roughly thrice that of the Axis, but most U.S. and British fighters would fly from distant Sicilian bases. Air planners estimated that they lacked about a third of the strength required to provide maximum protection for the invasion force, a shortfall Eisenhower found “rather disquieting.” He told the Charlie-Charlies in early September that the Allied air forces could not, as they had done in Sicily, prevent the enemy from reinforcing the invasion beachhead with substantial reserves.

But would the Germans fight for Salerno? Ultra provided a detailed portrait of the sixteen German divisions now in Italy, including the four withdrawn from Sicily; those forces had grown steadily since Mussolini’s overthrow in late July. (“Treachery alters everything,” Hitler declared.) AFHQ intelligence still believed that, given limp Italian resistance, the German high command would fall back to a defensive line across northern Italy from Pisa to Rimini, blocking Allied occupation of the Po Valley, where three-quarters of Italy’s industry was located. Yet “if and when the Germans realize that our assault is not in very great strength they may move to the sound of the guns,” the Combined Chiefs were told at Quebec. An estimated 40,000 enemy troops would oppose the Salerno landings on D-day, but that number could grow to 100,000 within four days; the Germans may “attack us with up to six divisions some time during
September,” while Clark would not have that many troops ashore until late fall. The key in amphibious landings was not the size of the landing force, but whether invaders could build up the beachhead faster than the defenders.

Salerno would be a poor place to fight outnumbered. As an invasion site it offered nearly perfect hydrography, with few sandbars, a negligible tide, a small port in a sheltered bay, and twenty-two miles of gorgeous beaches. “This is the finest strip of coast in the whole of Italy, perhaps anywhere in the Mediterranean,” one British planner noted. But, he added, it had the misfortune of being “hemmed in by mountains.” Mostly rugged limestone, those mountains encircled an alluvial plain traversed by a pair of modest rivers, the Sele and the Calore. A terrain study for
AVALANCHE
warned, “The mountainous terrain completely surrounding the Sele plain limits the depth of the initial bridgehead and exposes this bridgehead to observation, fire and attack from higher ground.” Salerno’s topography, a U.S. Navy planner added, was like “the inside of a cup.”

Risks had been calculated. At 6:30
A.M
. on September 6,
Ancon
cast off her lines and steamed from Algiers at twelve knots in a convoy of seventy ships that included three cruisers and fourteen destroyers. Sailors awake but not on duty watched an early showing on the boat deck of
Strange Cargo,
with Joan Crawford. Hewitt and Clark, fellow Freemasons who had known each other since they were both stationed near Puget Sound in the 1930s, chatted on the flag bridge and scrutinized an immense map of Salerno Bay. Belowdecks, a ten-by-twenty-foot map in the war room charted the position of every Allied ship between Gibraltar and Tripoli. In forty-eight hours, six hundred vessels sailing in sixteen convoys from six ports would converge on “an enchanted land,” as Longfellow had called it, where “the blue Salernian bay with its sickle of white sand” awaited them.

What else awaited remained to be seen. A British commander had told Clark he had “high hopes of being in Naples the evening of D+2,” or Saturday, September 11. “Boldness must be the order of the day,” Eisenhower proclaimed. He was already planning to move his headquarters from Algiers to Naples in late September. “The time has come to discontinue nibbling at islands and hit the Germans where it hurts,” he told reporters. “Our object is to trap and smash them.”

Bravado was easier in Algiers than on the high seas steaming north. As Clark’s gaze swiveled from horizon to horizon, he felt an unnerving fatalism. “I realized I might as well be on a raft, no control, no nothing,” he later recalled. “If it wasn’t going to work now, it wasn’t going to work.” The solitude of command—that “forlorn feeling,” he called it—had set in. Surrounded by his army, with a great fleet fore and aft, he was alone.

Plots, Counterplots, and Cross-plots

E
VEN
as the invaders bore down on Salerno, hope persisted that diplomacy might spare Italy from being dragged lengthwise by what Churchill called “the hot rake of war.” Since Mussolini’s arrest in late July, the Italian government had repeatedly sworn fealty to the Pact of Steel. Both the king and his new plenipotentiary, Marshal Badoglio, vowed to preserve the Axis. Rome decried—with huffy assertions of Italian honor—any notions of a separate peace. In truth, the Italians had been making diplomatic overtures to the Allies since early August—in Tangiers, Madrid, and Vatican City—in a surreptitious tangle of “plots, counter-plots and cross-plots,” as diplomat Harold Macmillan put it.

Wary but intrigued, the Combined Chiefs had instructed Eisenhower to send two AFHQ officers to neutral Portugal for a clandestine rendezvous with an ostensible Badoglio emissary. On August 19, Beetle Smith and the AFHQ intelligence chief, Brigadier Kenneth W. D. Strong, flew via Gibraltar to Lisbon with forged papers in “an atmosphere of amateur theatricals,” in Macmillan’s phrase. Discomforted by chronic ulcers, Smith wore “an appalling Norfolk jacket which he had somehow purchased in Algiers and some grey flannel trousers which fitted him very ill”; only with difficulty was he persuaded to remove “a dubious hat with a feather in it,” but he insisted on toting two pistols under his armpits, with another pair holstered on his hips. “I envisaged a desperate gunfight in the best Western manner,” Strong confessed. The two envoys were chauffered around Lisbon in a rattletrap Buick by a young American diplomat named George F. Kennan.

Their Italian counterpart proved to be a short, swarthy character of Sicilian descent, with thinning hair, a hooked nose, and a loathing of the Germans matched only by his affection for political skulduggery. General Giuseppe Castellano had come to Lisbon to ask “how Italy could arrange to join the united nations in opposition to Germany”; as a token of good faith, he offered a stack of secret documents detailing the military dispositions of 400,000 Germans now in Italy. Castellano quickly discerned that the Allies were in no mood to forgive and forget. In an all-night session at the British ambassador’s house, fueled by whiskey and soda, Smith made it clear that Italy’s only choice was surrender or the ruination of total war. Paragraph by paragraph he read the proposed capitulation agreement aloud.

“We are not in a position to make terms,” Castellano admitted. In contrast to the clumsy U.S. negotiations with Vichy French officials in North Africa a year earlier, Smith displayed admirable dexterity in mixing tact
with resolve. Castellano slipped from the house at seven
A.M
., carrying an American radio and ciphers with which Rome could secretly contact AFHQ; his government was given until the end of August to accept the Allied terms. Smith, who privately began referring to Castellano as “my pet Wop,” advised AFHQ, “The Italians expect bitter reprisals from the Germans, whom they both hate and fear.”

If Rome was in no position to make terms, Eisenhower could hardly let an Italian surrender slip away. Admitting to feeling “very anxious,” he told the Combined Chiefs on August 28 that the risks at Salerno “will be minimized to a large extent if we are able to secure Italian assistance.” Alexander feared that without such assistance
AVALANCHE
“might fail,” perhaps causing the fall of Churchill’s government and “seriously compromising Britain’s determination to remain in the war.” Coded messages flew between Rome and Algiers with no real agreement on surrender terms. In a letter to Roosevelt, the diplomat Robert Murphy reported that the Italians seemed to be debating “whether we or the Germans will work the most damage and destruction in Italy.”

The plots, counterplots, and cross-plots thickened. On September 1, an ambiguous radio signal from Badoglio declared, “The reply is affirmative.” Castellano flew to Sicily a day later and was escorted to a private tent in the thirty-acre olive and almond orchard at Cassibile, south of Syracuse, where Alexander now kept his headquarters. In quizzing Castellano inside the tent, Macmillan and Murphy were distressed to learn that he still lacked authority from Rome to sign an armistice. Leaving the envoy to bake beneath the hot canvas, they rushed off to find Alexander in his trailer.

More amateur theatricals followed. Hearing a commotion through the nut trees, Castellano pushed back the tent flaps to find a British honor guard in parade order, smartly presenting arms as the commanding general’s staff car roared up with flags flying. Alexander emerged in his finest dress uniform, “cut breeches, highly polished boots with gold spurs, and gold peaked cap.” Medals and campaign ribbons spilled down his chest. “I have come to be introduced to General Castellano,” he boomed. “I understand he has signed the instrument of surrender.”

Macmillan stepped forward, his face a study in regret. “I am sorry to say, sir, but General Castellano has
not
signed the instrument, and says that he hasn’t the authority from his government to sign such a document.”

Alexander swiveled slowly. His icy gaze locked on the abject Castellano.

“Why, there must be some mistake!” Alexander said. “I have seen the telegram from Marshal Badoglio stating he was to sign the armistice agreement.” Alexander’s eyes widened, as if suddenly seeing the awful truth. “In that case, this man must be a spy. Arrest him!”

A dreadful fate would befall Italy as well as Castellano, Alexander intimated. Within twenty-four hours, Rome would be destroyed in reprisal for Italian recalcitrance. As the diplomats counseled moderation, Alexander seemed to reconsider. Perhaps, if Castellano telegrammed Rome, asking Badoglio to confirm his authority to sign the surrender, calamity might be avoided. That, Alexander said slowly, was “the only way out of this.” Alexander turned on his heel, the guard again presented arms, and off he stalked, “booted, spurred, and bemedaled,” a gold-capped avatar of imperial wrath.

The telegram was sent posthaste, and at four
P.M
. on September 3, explicit permission arrived from Rome. Seventy-five minutes later, beneath a gnarled olive tree on a scarred wooden camp table hastily upholstered with napkins, Castellano and Smith signed Italy’s capitulation using a borrowed fountain pen. Eisenhower, who flew in for the occasion, looked on with Alexander. Someone produced a whiskey bottle and dirty glasses for a toast, and each witness plucked an olive sprig for a memento.

The surrender was to be jointly announced in Rome and Algiers on the eve of D-day. Castellano pressed to learn that precise date, but Smith in a low voice replied, “I can say only that the landing will take place within two weeks.” Castellano soon advised his government that there was still a fortnight to prepare. “Today’s event must be kept secret,” Eisenhower cabled the Charlie-Charlies, “or our plans will be ruined.”

Those plans grew more convoluted by the hour. Smith had rejected Italian demands that fifteen Allied divisions land north of Rome; had the Anglo-Americans possessed such a capability, he archly noted, they would not be treating with Castellano. But as an earnest of the Anglo-American commitment, the Allies would consider dropping the 82nd Airborne Division on Rome to help Italian forces secure their capital. With little consideration, Eisenhower and his lieutenants approved the scheme “to stiffen Italian formations”; the 82nd was thus plucked from Clark’s reserves at Salerno. “They all thought the risk was worth taking,” Murphy wrote Roosevelt, “even if the [division was] lost.”