The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  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 airs
trips 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.

  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:

  I’m a Yankee Doodle dandy,

  A Yankee Doodle, do or die…

  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

  FROM 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 “heavil
y 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.”