The Day of Battle (41 page)

Roused from his torpor, Dawley protested and announced his intention to remain at Paestum,
SEATRAIN
or
SEALION
be damned. As the meeting adjourned, others grumbled in discontent, or privately questioned Clark’s fortitude. “I don’t want to tell you how to run your job, but give me support,” Middleton told the army commander. Spitting in annoyance, he added, “I want to stay here and fight.” The time had come, Middleton advised his subordinates, “to do some hard fighting.”

At nine
P.M
., 2,500 yards south of the Calore, a whistle blew in the Fifth Army bivouac, summoning officers into the bright moonlight. In what the reporter Lionel Shapiro described as a “level, lifeless voice,” a colonel announced, “German tanks have broken through our lines. They are coming
down the Sele toward this camp. All officers will take a roll call of their men.” Three quick pistol shots would signal the panzers’ arrival.

Cooks, clerks, and orderlies loaded their rifles and fanned into a firing line. Slapping at mosquitoes, they hoarsely whispered the night’s challenge—“Canadian”—and strained to hear the parole: “wheat.” An officer arrived to find the Fifth Army headquarters “in the weeds no higher than your waist and crawling around on their hands and knees.” Some men sidled down to the sea, determined, as one soldier explained, to wade “up to our necks and wait there until some ship comes along and picks us up.” Clark ordered his staff to prepare for evacuation on ten minutes’ notice: five landing craft bobbed offshore, waiting for a summons to Green Beach.

The waxing moon cast grotesque, unnerving shadows, and in a privet hedge outside the camp a soldier sang softly to himself:

General Vietinghoff had placed his headquarters in a tenth-century castle in Sant’Angelo dei Lombardi, an ancient mill town in the eastern hills, known for bell foundries and macaroni. From here the signs of Allied flight seemed unmistakable. “After a defensive battle lasting four days, enemy resistance is collapsing,” the Tenth Army commander cabled Kesselring and the Berlin high command. “Tenth Army pursuing enemy on a wide front.” Told by a subordinate that Allied resistance seemed to be stiffening, Vietinghoff insisted, “The fact that he is collapsing cannot be doubted if he voluntarily splits his force into two halves.” As Black Monday drew to a close, the Tenth Army war diary recorded, “The battle of Salerno appears to be over.”

A Portal Won

F
ROM
the rail of U.S.S.
Biscayne,
where Kent Hewitt had planted his flag after sending
Ancon
back to Africa, the distant beach on Tuesday, September 14, still radiated an illusory Mediterranean warmth. The dappled sea stretched to the shore in patches of turquoise and indigo. Beyond the golden ribbon of sand, the Sele plain spread in a silver-green haze. But there the arcadian vision abruptly ended in banks of gray and black smoke, and a pale penumbra of fire hinted at violent struggle and death ashore.

Hewitt bitterly opposed Clark’s evacuation scheme, even as he made ready to carry it out. He spent Tuesday morning in
Biscayne
’s topside war
room issuing orders and dictating messages. All unloading was halted on the southern beaches, and cargo ships prepared on half an hour’s notice to steam beyond range of shore artillery. An awkward message to Cunningham in his Malta bastion reflected Hewitt’s own exhaustion: “Depth of beachhead narrowing and ground forces now taking defensive. Fatigue existing…. Are heavier naval forces available?” Cunningham promptly dispatched the battleships
Valiant
and
Warspite,
both fire-breathing veterans of Jutland in 1916, and he sent three cruisers at flank speed to Tripoli, where they were to embark as many British combat troops as could cram the decks. “I will try to help you all I can,” Cunningham signaled.

Hastily summoning his top lieutenants for an afternoon conference, Hewitt unveiled
SEALION
,
SEATRAIN
, and
BRASS RAIL
in the crowded war room. To a man they were horrified.

“If we withdraw we will lose our whole landing force,” warned Rear Admiral Richard L. Conolly, who had landed Darby and his Rangers at Maiori. Amphibious crews lacked “the capability and training and experience to evacuate a force. We have never done this.” The additional tonnage added to landing craft in the shallows would cause them to settle lower in the water and thus exceed the backing power of the vessels’ engines. Fleet planners estimated that at most they could evacuate only half the load that had been landed at Salerno.

The senior British naval officer, Commodore G. N. Oliver, who arrived by barge from
Hilary
to find “intense gloom” suffusing the
Biscayne,
was equally adamant. To reembark “heavily engaged troops from a shallow beachhead” was impracticable and would “probably prove suicidal.

“It just cannot be done. Ships get deeper when being loaded, and it would be impossible to get them off the beaches,” Oliver said. “If you shorten the beachhead, the Germans will be within kissing distance and able to shell us from both flanks.” Enemy artillery would “rake the beaches,” destroying mountains of matériel. An evacuation, the commodore added, was “simply not on.” As for
BRASS RAIL
, he would happily take Clark and his staff aboard
Hilary.
But Fifth Army headquarters had grown to two thousand soldiers and five hundred vehicles, far beyond the flagship’s capacity. The only recourse was “to stay and fight it out.” Oliver all but spat the words. Heads nodded around the room.

Hewitt nodded, too. The logic was unimpeachable. But Clark was in command at Salerno; preparations for evacuation must proceed, as he requested. “Never mind, Commodore,” Hewitt told Oliver. “You go and do it.”

Yet the pack of fighting sea dogs had failed to sense a turning tide. Just as Fifth Army’s plight had deteriorated from precarious to critical on Black
Monday, now it ebbed back to simply precarious. The plucky stand at the Burned Bridge had checked German momentum. Then, just before midnight, a fleet of C-47s had appeared overhead and an enormous letter “T”—with legs half a mile long, fashioned from pails of gasoline-soaked sand—abruptly burst into flame to mark the beachfront drop zone. Like “a cloud of monster snowflakes,” as one witness reported, the 82nd Airborne’s 504th Infantry sifted into the beachhead, on time, on target, and without a single instance of the friendly fire that had decimated the regiment in Sicily two months earlier. Thirteen hundred lightly armed paratroopers would hardly reverse Fifth Army’s fortunes, but the boost to morale was incalculable: from their slit trenches and fluvial thickets, soldiers cheered themselves hoarse as they watched the snowflakes descend. “Men, it’s open season on krautheads!” the 504th commander roared as his soldiers headed for the corrugated uplands. “You know what to do.”

Perhaps to compensate for any fainthearted behavior on Monday evening, Clark on Tuesday was conspicuously daring, demonstrating the physical courage that in fact would characterize his generalship. Exposing himself to fire below the Calore, he helped position his battered battalions to suture the seam between VI Corps and X Corps. A German lunge south of the Tabacchificio Fioche at eight
A.M
. was met with a hot volley of flanking fire that left seven panzers burning in the mist. Early in the afternoon, 45th Division troops threw back two more attacks, and by late in the day two dozen German tanks had been destroyed. “In one case,” an intelligence officer told his diary, “the trapped crew had been broiled in such a way that a puddle of fat had spread from under the tank.”

South of the Sele the 36th Division shortened its line along La Cosa Creek, scattering mines and unspooling barbed wire from the Calore to Monte Soprano, and halting the German drive through Altavilla. To the north, the British still fought furiously from Vietri to Battipaglia, but McCreery showed studied nonchalance in his signal to Clark at five
P.M
. on Tuesday: “Nothing of interest to report during daylight.”

Vietinghoff was loath to accept that he had not driven the Allies back to their ships. Yet frictions had accumulated in Tenth Army: a corps commander had been injured in a plane crash; many German troops suffered from heat exhaustion; and Allied artillery was profligate—U.S. gunners alone fired ten thousand shells on Tuesday, and howitzers sniped at individual German soldiers. Berlin’s refusal to release the two tank divisions from Mantua had also hurt the cause in Salerno. Those reinforcements that did arrive often came in penny packets—a company here, a battalion there—and were committed to battle the same way, without providing a critical mass anywhere. Attacking downhill brought certain pleasures,
but also exposed the attackers to blistering fire that unhinged German formations.

No fire blistered more than naval shelling, for which there was no antidote except to flee the littoral. “The heavy naval artillery barrages were especially unpleasant,” a Hermann Göring Division commander confessed. Hewitt ordered every boat with a gun barrel into the fight, led by the big warships dubbed “the murderous queens.” Steaming off the Sele’s mouth,
Philadelphia
from nine
P.M
. Monday until four
A.M
. Tuesday fired nearly a thousand 6-inch shells at roads, intersections, and German troop concentrations, then yielded to the equally murderous U.S.S.
Boise.
Guns grew so hot that hydraulic rammers slowed, barrel paint blistered, and the canvas boots that kept seawater off the gun mounts charred. To clear their decks, sailors took fire axes to empty shell cases and heaved the splinters over the side. Soldiers ashore greeted new salvos with a baying war cry: “Adolf, count your children now!”

What naval shells missed, air force bombs hit. Several hundred bombers struck the Sele plain during daylight on Tuesday. That night, in an unusual tactical role, sixty B-17s battered road and rail targets around Eboli and Battipaglia; by late Wednesday, more than a thousand “heavy” sorties had been flown at Salerno. Over the next four days, the heavies would drop 760 tons of high explosives per square mile, annihilating intersections, rail yards, and villages. Smaller fighter-bombers grew pugnacious enough to strafe lone German motorcyclists, while flocks of Spitfires flew from Sicily every fifteen minutes and pilots in the tiny Piper L-4 Grasshopper spotter planes known as Maytag Messerschmitts took occasional potshots with their .45-caliber pistols.

By dusk on Tuesday, German commanders reported that movement during the day had become “almost impossible” without attracting Allied artillery, naval shells, bombs, mortar rounds, or tank fire—and sometimes all five. Having seen such firepower in Tunisia and again in Sicily, Kesselring now doubted that Tenth Army could mass enough combat strength to obliterate the beachhead. Still, the stakes made it worth one more try. Smiling Albert on Tuesday gave Vietinghoff his marching orders: make a final effort to throw Fifth Army into the sea, but be prepared to march north, perhaps as far as Rome.

The somber if sketchy reports from Salerno had so incensed Winston Churchill that he threatened to set things right by flying to the beachhead personally. Instead he sent his favorite
beau sabreur,
a man who had reputedly built sand castles under fire on Dunkirk beach and whose very name calmed tempests and stiffened spines. Harold Alexander—“General
Alex” to buck privates and brigadiers alike—arrived in the roadstead aboard the destroyer
Offa
before dawn on Wednesday, September 15, and clambered aboard the
Biscayne
to learn from Hewitt what all the fuss was about.

“Quelle race!”
murmured a visiting French officer who watched Alexander at Salerno. What breeding, indeed. He was immaculate, as always, with his bloused britches, sleek mustache, and steep-peaked, red-banded cap, worn with an upward tilt of the head “that might be called supercilious if it were not so serene,” John Gunther wrote. As always, he carried in his kit an Irish flag, which he intended to raise over Berlin. A talented draftsman who had been known to sketch a battlefield amid bursting shells, he evinced “a calm, gentle, friendly presence whose influence, like an oil slick, spread outward,” according to a fellow Guardsman, the future military historian Michael Howard. He assumed that “nothing ever went right in battle,” and thus was rarely surprised by confusion or calamity; in Alexander’s cosmology, chaos at Salerno reflected the natural order. “Good chaps get killed and wounded, and it is a terrible thing,” he once said of combat, though without great conviction. To him, war was simply “homicide on a scale which transformed it into a crusade and an art, dignified by its difficulties and risks.” Churchill adored Alexander, according to the prime minister’s physician, because he “redeemed what was brutal in war, touching the grim business lightly with his glove. In his hands it was still a game for people of quality.”

No sooner had Hewitt laid out Clark’s evacuation contingency than General Alex in a rare flash of temper cracked his bloused britches with a swagger stick and stepped to the front of
Biscayne
’s crowded war room. “Oh, no! We
can’t
have anything like that,” he said, bristling. “Never do, never do.” All planning for
SEATRAIN, SEALION
, and
BRASS RAIL
would “cease immediately,” lest panic infect the ranks. Alexander looked about as if seeking sand to build a castle. “There will be no evacuation,” he said. “Now we’ll proceed from there.”

He and Hewitt found Clark awaiting them on the Paestum beach. Around a camp table in the Fifth Army headquarters thicket, an orderly served breakfast while
Philadelphia,
back on the Sele station, unlimbered at targets near Persano, rattling coffee cups and shivering the tent canvas with concussion ghosts. Alexander and Clark vanished for a private conversation in the army commander’s little trailer; when they emerged, all evacuation schemes had been scrapped.