The Day of Battle (38 page)

“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 switchback road, where poppies danced like candle flames. One officer forever remembered “that long line of men and boys in rags winding up Chiunzi Pass, each with his load.”

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.

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; that the Allies had landed in France; that Italian troops blocked the Brenner Pass; that the Germans were using poison gas. The savvy and the cynical soon credited only what their five senses confirmed. Few would dispute the 45th Division gunner who wrote in his diary, “From what we have seen, the surrender of Italy hasn’t hindered the Germans too much.”

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.”