The Day of Battle (39 page)

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

A
S
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 Reynolds on
Ancon
wrote, “The flame must have shot eighty feet into the air and then, as it receded, men who had been blown skyward fell with it, mingling with the flame and the orange smoke.” Hewitt watched aghast as the explosion vented along the cruiser’s port waterline:
Savannah
had been his flagship during North Atlantic convoy duty in 1941.

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.

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.