The Day of Battle (40 page)

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 hills, echoing and reechoing across the Sele tribulation. “Situation unfavorable in 10th Corps,” Clark warned Alexander before dropping off to sleep. “It now appears I must await further buildup before resuming offensive.” Two hours after receiving Clark’s message, Alexander scratched a note to Eisenhower on a blank sheet of white typing paper: “The situation is not favorable, and everything must be done to help him.”

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 the dust, killing two engineers; a wrecking crew raced onto the field, cinched cables around the dead men’s ankles, and dragged them off along with the other debris. “The work went on as if nothing much had happened,” one officer noted. “A pretty hard-boiled business.”

“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.”

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.