The Day of Battle (36 page)

Soldiers jettisoned bandoliers and grenades, stuffing their ammo pouches with extra cigarettes. A British officer regretted leaving his dinner jacket in Africa. “I never again expect to witness such scenes of sheer joy,” Clark’s aide wrote. “We would dock in Naples harbor unopposed, with an olive branch in one hand and an opera ticket in the other.” Some lamented the lost opportunity for glory. A 36th Division artilleryman wrote his father, “Our chance to prove ourselves had vanished.”

Hewitt noted with alarm that Fifth Army’s “keen fighting edge” had been dulled. Officers prowled the decks, trying to talk sense to men now convinced that Salerno’s beaches would be undefended. “Stop it, you bloody fools,” a British captain bellowed, while on H.M.S.
Princess Astrid
a large sign advised, “Take your ammunition with you. You’ll need it.” Major General Ernest J. Dawley, commander of the U.S. VI Corps, warned soldiers on the U.S.S.
Funston
that they would “have to fight like horned Comanches if we mean to get ashore and stay there.” The troops raised a cheer, then resumed their poker games on the fantail. “Expect a hostile shore,” a 36th Division officer told his men. “Go in shooting.”

The call to general quarters sixty miles from Salerno restored a modicum of sobriety. “The ship’s company will man their stations,” naval officers intoned. “Gunners, man your guns.” Landlubbers aboard
Ancon
tried to parse the “plan of the day” for September 9: “The ship will be hove to for a while and then anchored, with the anchor at short stay ready to slip at a moment’s notice, with a full steaming watch on and full steam at the throttles.” Any residual hilarity dissolved at 8:15
P.M
., when Luftwaffe planes attacked the fleet with flares, bombs, and torpedoes, though to little effect. As men blackened their hands and faces with burnt cork, a sergeant in the
143rd Infantry observed, “Imagination makes cowards of us all.” John Steinbeck studied the pearly mists rising from the Mediterranean. “Each man, in this last night in the moonlight, looks strangely at the others and sees death there,” he wrote.

Just before ten
P.M
., on the approach to
HARPSICHORD
, lookouts spied blue signal lights from the beacon submarine H.M.S.
Shakespeare
and the destroyer
Cole.
“Do you think we’ve been spotted by the enemy?” someone asked Hewitt on
Ancon
’s flag bridge. “If they haven’t,” replied the admiral, “they’re blind.” Off the port bow, a faint ruby glow radiated from Vesuvius. Capri appeared, as the official U.S. Navy history later reported, “swimming in a silver sea.” The loamy scent of land drifted from the Sorrento Peninsula.

Twelve miles offshore, at the hundred-fathom line, captains ordered all engines stopped just before midnight. Water hissed along the hulls as the vessels lost weigh. Chains rattled. Anchors splashed. A bosun’s whistle trilled. Each ship swung gently on its moorings. The night was bright and balmy, with barely a whisper of wind. “In peacetime,” said an officer on
Hilary,
“honeymoon couples would pay hundreds of pounds for this.” An eruption of tracer fire on the distant shore reminded Sergeant Newton H. Fulbright of “a red, beaded curtain rising in a theater.” Someone murmured, “I think they know we’re here.”

Clark stood beside Hewitt, laved in soft red light on the flag bridge. Sailors tied manila lanyards to ten-gallon coffee urns and lowered them to the boat crews. “You’ll be in total command by tonight,” Hewitt said. Clark nodded. “I can’t help thinking that casualties may be high. Pray God they won’t.”

Gold and crimson flares blossomed inshore, followed by the rumble of demolitions in Salerno harbor. Winches creaked: more boats eased into the water. An overburdened 36th Division soldier likened the creeping descent on the cargo nets to “crawling down a ten-story building on a mesh ladder with a file cabinet on your back.” From below came the cough of landing craft. Brightened by moonset, their dim lights danced on the sea as the boat flotillas at last turned eastward and beat for the distant beaches, tugged by destiny.

A reporter scribbling in a notebook wrote of Clark: “tall, smiling, appearing unconcerned.” The army commander composed a short dispatch for Alexander at two
A.M
.: “Arrived at transport area on schedule. Boats have been lowered and are in position. Sea is calm. Indications are that beaches will be reached on time.”

In his diary he later jotted, “Hewitt and I on bridge. Helpless feeling. All out of my hands.”

“What’s the weather like at Salerno,” the poet Horace wrote a friend in 20
B.C
., “and what sort of people shall I encounter there?” Since then the seaside Roman town had been occupied by Lombards in the ninth and tenth centuries, and Normans in the eleventh, among them one brutish knight known as the Weasel. By the twelfth century, Salerno’s medical school was considered Europe’s finest, lauded by Petrarch and St. Thomas Aquinas alike. Among the bones entombed in the local basilica were supposedly those of Matthew, the Roman tax collector turned apostle, who became the patron saint of bankers and bookies.

The latter-day town had grown to seventy thousand souls, with a handsome corniche fronting the Corso Garibaldi and tunny boats bobbing in the harbor. War had already come to Salerno: Allied bombing raids sent terrorized women rushing through the streets shrieking, “
Basta! Basta!
”—“Enough!” Soon the vegetable market and the gelateria and the tunny boats were wrecked, and messages chalked on charred walls listed both the resident dead and new addresses for the survivors. Many had dragged their bedding into the hills, as their ancestors had a millennium earlier in flight from predatory Saracens and the
mal aria.
South of Salerno, the coastal plain was watered by the Sele and Calore Rivers, which flowed parallel for seven miles before converging four miles from the sea. Tobacco, olives, and teardrop tomatoes grew in the fecund lowlands. But the most singular feature lay on the southern lip of the plain, at Paestum, a sixth-century-
B.C
. Greek colony famed in antiquity for its roses and violets, and still among the grandest complexes of Doric temples outside Athens. It was precisely here that the U.S. 36th Division planned to come ashore, while the British X Corps, comprising the 46th and 56th Divisions, landed twelve miles north, between the Sele’s mouth and Salerno town. Darby’s Rangers and British Commandos would also fall on the Sorrento Peninsula, seizing the mountain passes from Naples.

What sort of people shall I encounter there?
On the morning of September 9, 1943, certainly many Germans. Neither Kesselring nor his lieutenants believed that Montgomery’s landing in Calabria a week earlier presaged an Anglo-American march up the entire length of Italy; in recent days, Salerno had seemed an increasingly likely place for the Allies to force open a back door to Naples and Rome. German reconnaissance on September 6 detected assembling British aircraft carriers, and a German naval analysis warned that “a strike in the direction of the gulf of Salerno is not precluded.” Another convoy was spotted north of Palermo a day later. A midafternoon alert on September 8 cited a “large naval force of more than 100 ships” approaching the southwest coast.

Following the capitulation announcement three hours later, Kesselring displayed the agility so characteristic of his generalship. With Hitler’s authorization, at eight
P.M
. he invoked Operation
ACHSE
, a secret contingency plan drafted in August to disarm Italian forces and take over key fortifications. Confirmation that the Allied armada was closing on Salerno restored Kesselring’s smile; at least he would not have to fight an invasion force near Rome while also subduing the capital. The invaders “must be completely annihilated and in addition thrown into the sea,” he declared. “The British and Americans must realize that they are hopelessly lost against the concentrated German might.”

That German might took the form of Tenth Army, created in mid-August and reinforced with retreating units from Sicily. Army command fell to a veteran of France, Yugoslavia, and Russia: General Heinrich von Vietinghoff, a capable Prussian infantryman with baggy eyes, graying temples, and a little Hitler mustache. Some 135,000 German troops now occupied southern Italy, and Kesselring channeled his resentment at Italy’s betrayal—he called it “a spiritual burden for me”—into demands for swift vengeance. “No mercy must be shown the traitors,” he cabled Vietinghoff. “Long live the Führer.” As Allied soldiers danced on the decks of their ships Wednesday evening, Wehrmacht troops burst through the oak door of the office belonging to General Don Ferrante Gonzaga, commander of the Italian coastal division at Salerno. “Hand me your pistol, General,” a German major demanded. Gonzaga stepped back from his desk, fumbling with the Beretta in his holster. “A Gonzaga never surrenders,” he shouted. “
Viva Italia!
” A burst of Schmeisser fire to the head and chest cut him down. “He died as a great soldier,” the major observed.

With Gonzaga’s troops melting away or in German custody, defense of the Gulf of Salerno fell to the 16th Panzer Division. Claiming to be the first German unit on the Volga, the division subsequently crawled away from Stalingrad with only 4,000 survivors. Now rebuilt under General Rudolf Sieckenius, the 16th Panzer was perhaps the best equipped division in Italy, with 17,000 men, 104 functioning tanks, and 700 machine guns.

Sieckenius had split his forces into four battle groups, positioned about six miles apart down the length of the Sele plain. Communications were poor and Highway 18, the coastal road that would bring any German reinforcements, lay within range of Allied naval guns. Still, the defenders had fashioned eight strongpoints, from Salerno in the north to Paestum and Agropoli in the south, each a quarter mile wide and fitted with mines, automatic weapons, mortars, heavy guns, and an abatis of felled trees. As Fifth Army’s landing craft swarmed across the bight, the Germans waited, alert and aggrieved, unburdened by delusion that the war might be over.

On the far right of the Allied line, scout boats spaced half a mile apart flashed red, green, yellow, and blue lights at 3:10
A.M
. to signify the four beaches upon which the approaching assault battalions of the 36th Division were to make land at Paestum. As the two-hour run from the transport anchorage neared an end, a soldier in a plywood Higgins boat finished the pocket novel he had been reading and “stood up to see what this war was all about.”

For a moment—a long, queer moment—silence held sway except for the nattering boat engines. Down came the ramps with a clank and a splash, and the first riflemen scuttled nearly dryshod onto the shingle at precisely 3:30
A.M
. Then a constellation of silver flares hissed overhead, bathing the beaches in cold brilliance, and the sawmill sound of a German machine gun broke the spell, followed by another and another and another. Mortars crumped, and from the high ground to the east and south came the shriek of 88mm shells, green fireballs that whizzed through the dunes at half a mile per second, trailing golden plumes of dust.

Bullets plumped the sea and slapped the boat ramps. “You can’t dig foxholes in a boat,” one sergeant observed with evident sorrow. To an artillery officer from Austin, the spattering shell fragments sounded like “spring rain on a taxi window going up Congress Avenue.” A second wave landed eight minutes behind the first, and a third wave eight minutes after that; but fire discomposed the four subsequent waves as coxswains swerved left or right or back to sea without unloading. “Shells were
wopping
in all around us,” a soldier in the third wave recalled. “We knew that when the ramp fell those red and yellow tracers would eat right into us.” A landing craft hit nose-on by a tank shell “seemed to rise completely out of the water,” one witness reported; a second shell caught the vessel’s stern, spinning it around and flinging bodies over the splintered gunwales. A medic described swimming to another blazing boat forty yards from shore. “Some of the boys were on fire,” he later wrote his wife: