The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  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.

  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:

  My dear Clarke…It looks as if you may be having not too good a time, and I do hope that all will go well with you…. We are on the way to lend a hand.

  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 occ
ur 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.