The Day of Battle (42 page)

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:

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 tedeschi
?
Où
are the
Allemands?
Where the hell are the Germans?” This morning the first jeepload of hacks met American scouts south of Agropoli, having encountered nary an enemy soldier in two days. Not for another thirty-six hours would a British patrol make contact with the bridgehead, thirty-five miles south of Paestum, and no significant link-up would occur until September 19. Clark, whose casualty list had swelled to nearly seven thousand, swallowed his fury and replied to Montgomery, “It will be a pleasure to see you again at an early date. Here situation well in hand.”

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.

“Although I am not entirely happy about the situation,” Alexander cabled Churchill after leaving Salerno, “I am happier than I was twenty-four hours ago.”

As for Clark, perhaps inspirited despite himself, he wrote Renie, “No doubt you people are worried to death—far more so than I am…. I am not downhearted a bit.” To Fifth Army he proclaimed on Wednesday night, “Our beachhead is secure…. We are here to stay.”

He did not tell the Germans, however, and on Thursday morning, September 16, they struck again.

Hardly had the shrieking hordes begun to lunge seaward, however, than Allied cannonades smacked them down. An attempt by the 26th Panzer Division to thunder down Highway 18 from Battipaglia and join forces with the Hermann Görings in Salerno was “under bad auspices from the start,” a German commander reported: fuel shortages in Calabria had delayed the division’s arrival at Eboli by two days; Allied air attacks and naval gunfire raked the lumbering columns; scouts got lost in the dark; artillery observers failed to find the grenadier spearhead; and traffic bottlenecks near Batty P disrupted timetables. When two regiments finally attacked at midmorning, they covered less than two hundred yards before British tanks flayed them, with severe casualties. A regiment of German paratrooper reinforcements never penetrated the curtain of naval shells, and two Hermann Göring battalions reported being “put out of action in close-quarters fighting.” The Allied weight of metal was now insuperable. Vietinghoff had shot his bolt.

This welcome news greeted Eisenhower when he arrived Friday afternoon in the Salerno anchorage aboard H.M.S.
Charybdis
. With Hewitt at his elbow, he clambered into a DUKW and headed to shore for his first look at the battlefield that had so vexed him for the past week. On Black Monday, with his usual impulse to take responsibility, Eisenhower had cabled Marshall that if the beachhead collapsed he intended to “announce that one of our landings had been repulsed due to my error in misjudging the strength of the enemy at that place.” To Harry Butcher he added, “If things go wrong there is no one to blame except myself.”

As recently as yesterday, Eisenhower had mused aloud during breakfast at Amilcar that if Salerno ended badly he “would probably be out” as commander-in-chief. Clark’s now defunct
BRASS RAIL
plan caused particular anguish—a leader must “stay with his men to give them confidence,” Eisenhower fumed—and he wondered whether he had erred in giving
command of Fifth Army to Clark rather than to Patton, who at least “would prefer to die fighting.” Alexander’s report that he was “most favorably unimpressed by Dawley,” and a message from Clark that Dawley “appears to go to pieces in the emergencies,” made Eisenhower flush with anger at the Fifth Army commander. “Well, goddam,” he snapped, “why in the hell doesn’t he relieve Dawley?”

If Salerno plagued him, other things also gnawed, including the usual barrage of “most immediate” cables from Washington and London. “It is now 15 months since I saw you,” he wrote Mamie. “My life is a mixture of politics and war. The latter is bad enough…. The former is straight and unadulterated venom.” He had been thinking of their dead son, who would have turned twenty-six this month, but also of their living son, John, to whom he wrote at West Point as if lecturing himself: “Learn to live simply…. Do not be too free with advice…. Don’t be afraid to do the dirty work yourself.” Even his appearance on the cover of
Time
this week (the article included a backhanded compliment from a female admirer who called him “the handsomest bald man” she had ever met) caused him more chagrin than pleasure. “When this war is over,” he wrote a friend, “I am going to find the deepest hole there is in the United States, crawl in and pull it in after me.”

There was dirty work to be done at Salerno, but Eisenhower would leave it to others. Though fretful, he kept his temper during a conference in the VI Corps tobacco barn. But after traveling by jeep to a farmhouse command post occupied by the 36th Division, he listened distractedly for a few minutes, then whirled on Dawley. “For God’s sake, Mike,” he said. “How did you manage to get your troops so fucked up?” Dawley sputtered in reply. “I’ll back you up, anything you do,” Eisenhower privately told Clark. “I really think you better take him out of the picture.” Later in the day, after Eisenhower had visited a gun battery and a field hospital, Dawley and Clark quarreled during a jeep ride back to Paestum, with Dawley deriding his younger superiors as “boy scouts” and “boys in short pants.” Clark expelled him from the jeep, then drove off in anger.

The course was set. “I want you to go down and tell General Dawley that there will be an airplane in here for him at dawn,” Clark subsequently told a staff officer. “Tell him to take it and go back to Algiers and they’ll give him transport back to the States.” The messenger found Dawley napping on a cot under mosquito netting. “I know what you’re going to say,” the corps commander said. “When do I leave?” He later added, with a shrug, “You can’t fight city hall.” In his diary, Dawley described the day in a single misspelled word: “Releived.” After shaking hands with his staff he left Italy forever, playing gin rummy on the long trip home, for which he was
authorized a fifty-five-pound baggage allowance and a $7 per diem. “It was just as well,” he later said. “I couldn’t work with Clark. He made decisions off the top of his head.” Busted to his permanent rank of colonel, he would regain one star before the end of the war and eventually retire with both stars restored. “He is being promoted,” Marshall ostensibly told a U.S. senator, “as a reward for keeping his mouth shut.”

Even those who doubted Dawley’s generalship fretted at the peremptory dismissal of senior commanders that had become commonplace in the U.S. Army. Of four American corps commanders to face the Germans thus far, two had been cashiered. “It makes a commander supercautious,” James Gavin told his diary. “Lee would have been relieved in ’61 if our present system were in effect.” Major General Ernest N. Harmon, who was about to bring his 1st Armored Division to Italy, alluded to the oak leaf insignia of his own permanent rank when he wrote Clark in late September that Dawley’s relief “has had a rather dampening effect on us general officers…. I will bring my lieutenant colonel’s leaves along in my pocket, to have them ready.”

As Eisenhower left, so did the Germans. Vietinghoff late on Thursday concluded that “complete success at Salerno could no longer be hoped for.” Acknowledging Tenth Army’s “grievous losses,” Kesselring authorized a retreat, with the proviso that Vietinghoff hold the Volturno River, twenty miles north of Naples, until at least October 15. After a final mauling of two isolated American paratrooper battalions at Altavilla, the Germans stole away from the beachhead on Friday night, leaving a rear guard of 2,500 to discourage pursuit.

On Saturday morning, September 18, the long German convoy snaked up Highway 91 from Eboli. Ribbons of dust rose from the road, the spoor of an enemy retiring to fight another day. Northward they trudged with their plunder piled on trucks and dray carts: olive oil and salami, linen and silver. Under Tenth Army Order No. 3, roads were to “be destroyed most thoroughly,” factories would be dynamited, and “all supplies and equipment that cannot be taken along must be destroyed.” An “evacuation list” of items to be pillaged included rolling stock, machine tools, typewriters, cars, buses, the Alfa Romeo plant in Naples, ball bearings, lathes, saw blades, and measuring tools—“but not slide rules.”

The scorching and salting of the earth had begun. Horses and mules were stolen or shot, and even surplus saddles and horseshoe nails were put to the torch. An estimated 92 percent of all sheep and cattle in southern Italy, and 86 percent of all poultry, were taken or slaughtered. “Rail rooters”—huge iron hooks pulled behind locomotives—snapped railroad ties like matchsticks. The echo of demolitions rolled from the mountains, and oily smoke smudged the northern skyline.

An unfinished letter found in the tunic of a dead German paratrooper foreshadowed the world ahead. “The Tommies will have to chew their way through us, inch by inch,” the soldier had written, “and we will surely make hard chewing for them.”

So ended the first great battle to liberate the continent of Europe.

Even in retreat, the Germans deemed the ten-day struggle at Salerno a victory. Kesselring told Berlin that he had captured three thousand Allied prisoners, inflicted at least ten thousand additional casualties, and left the invaders “incapable of attacking for a long time…. Above all, the value to us is the time won, which assists us in the building up of strength.” General Sieckenius, the 16th Panzer Division commander, considered both the British and Americans to be inferior combat soldiers—devoid of “the offensive spirit,” excessively dependent on artillery, and reluctant to close with the enemy. Hitler agreed. “No more invasions for them!” he said. “They are much too cowardly for that. They only managed the one at Salerno because the Italians gave their blessing.”

Once again the Führer and his minions had misjudged their adversaries. Certainly Salerno was inelegant and brutal, a fitting overture for the Italian campaign that followed. Allied casualties totaled about 9,000—5,500 for the British and 3,500 for the Americans—of whom more than 1,200 were killed in action. Total German losses numbered roughly 3,500, of whom an estimated 630 had been killed, a modest butcher’s bill for an army that in September alone would suffer 126,000 casualties in Russia.

Yet Salerno for the Allies was a blood chit, to be redeemed in the future. Much had been learned—some of it, sadly, for the second or third time—about combat loading, over-the-beach resupply, naval gunnery, and ground combat. No officer planning for Normandy nine months hence would ever forget that while land warfare offers “a road upon which you may retire, there is no road of retirement in amphibious operations,” as one Navy commander put it. Eisenhower emerged from
AVALANCHE
convinced of the need “to turn the scales by turning every ship and every aircraft on the vital battle area”; he would also demand, when his hour at Normandy came round, absolute authority over air forces as well as those of the sea and land. But he had again neglected to make demands of Alexander, to insist on cohesion between V Corps and X Corps, and between Fifth Army and Eighth Army. Alexander’s handling of Montgomery was said by his biographer Nigel Nicolson to resemble that of “an understanding husband in a difficult marriage.” Eisenhower recognized what he called General Alex’s “unsureness in dealing with certain of his subordinates,” yet failed to intervene.

George Marshall had decreed that the “vital qualifications” for senior U.S. Army officers included “leadership, force, and vigor.” Too often such traits were most conspicuous in their absence. Dawley’s deficiencies made him an easy scapegoat, but he was hardly the only senior officer still struggling to meet the chief’s high standard. Mark Clark was also in over his head at Salerno, as he showed in matters ranging from the confusion over H-hour to his approval of a plan that left a gaping hole between his corps. Salerno annealed Clark: he emerged stronger and wiser, if still so autocratic and aloof that soldiers now called him Marcus Aurelius Clarkus. “He is not so good as Bradley in winning, almost without effort, the complete confidence of everybody around him,” Eisenhower wrote Marshall on September 20. “He is not the equal of Patton in refusing to see anything but victory in any situation that arises. But he is still carrying his full weight.”