The British at Taranto and Bari

On 11 September 1943 British troops entered Bari, the largest port on Italy’s Adriatic coast. They did not have to fight for it: the city was in the hands of the Royal Italian Army, which two days earlier had itself driven German sappers out of the port. That same day the British occupied Brindisi, where King Victor Emmanuel III and Marshal Pietro Badoglio had been staying since the previous afternoon. Both ports were the fruit of an operation that had begun on 9 September at Taranto – in the “heel” of the Italian boot.

A port opened by the armistice

While General Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army was crossing into Calabria on 3 September and the American Fifth Army was preparing to land at Salerno, General Dwight Eisenhower’s headquarters received an unexpected offer. During the secret negotiations over the surrender, the Italian envoys proposed opening the ports of Taranto and Brindisi to the Allies. There were few Germans in south-eastern Italy, and it could be assumed that in the face of a landing they would withdraw rather than give battle.

Eisenhower decided to seize the opportunity. On 6 September the decision was taken to mount an operation codenamed Slapstick. Taranto was the main base of the Italian battle fleet – the same base that British torpedo aircraft had attacked in November 1940 – and had one of the best harbours in southern Italy. Together with Naples, which the Americans were to take, it would give the Allies supply bases on both sides of the peninsula. The operation was also meant to draw German attention away from Salerno.

The choice of forces was dictated by necessity. The transport aircraft had been allotted to the American 82nd Airborne Division, earmarked for operations at Salerno, and there were no landing craft to spare. So the British 1st Airborne Division of Major General George Hopkinson was sent to Taranto – not by parachute, but aboard warships. The division had never yet fought as a whole, and its 1st Parachute Brigade and 1st Airlanding Brigade had suffered heavy losses in Sicily. Men, vehicles and stores were loaded at Bizerte onto the cruisers of the British 12th Cruiser Squadron – Aurora, Penelope, Dido and Sirius – the fast minelayer HMS Abdiel and the American cruiser USS Boise. The decks were so crammed with lorries and crates that the ships could not have defended themselves.

The landing at Taranto

Commodore William Agnew’s force sailed from Bizerte at 5 p.m. on 8 September. An hour and a half later, with the ships already at sea, Eisenhower announced Italy’s surrender on the radio. Admiral Andrew Cunningham nevertheless feared that the Italian battleships stationed at Taranto might still put to sea and attack the overloaded cruisers, so he sent the battleships Howe and King George V with destroyers from Malta to meet the force.

The fears proved groundless, although on 9 September everyone held their breath for a few minutes. As the Allied ships approached Taranto, the battleships Andrea Doria and Caio Duilio came out of the harbour with cruisers. The crews went to action stations, but the Italians passed the British and sailed on to Malta to place themselves in Allied hands in accordance with the terms of the armistice. In the afternoon the destroyer Javelin passed through the minefield at the harbour entrance and returned with an Italian pilot. Penelope and Boise went alongside the quay, while the other ships landed troops by boat in the roadstead.

The Italian garrison greeted the British in a friendly manner and told them that the Germans had already gone. The port installations were in working order and unloading began at once. Hopkinson set up his headquarters in the Hotel Europa and accepted the surrender of the Italian military commandant. According to British figures, some 3,600 men came ashore that day; the battalions of the 4th Parachute Brigade passed through the town and took up positions to the north of it to cover the port against a possible counter-attack.

The loss of Abdiel

The only serious loss during the landing itself came just after midnight on 9–10 September. Abdiel, which was carrying men of the 6th (Royal Welch) Parachute Battalion, anti-tank guns and the division’s reserve ammunition, was manoeuvring by the quay when two mines exploded beneath her hull. The ship sank within minutes. The mines had been laid only a few hours earlier by two German torpedo boats (S-boats), S-54 and S-61, as they left Taranto before the Allies arrived.

The casualty figures vary from source to source. Forty-eight members of the crew were killed. As for the paratroopers, some accounts (among them figures cited in the history of the 1st Airborne Division) speak of 58 killed and about 150 wounded, others of around 120 killed and more than 120 wounded. British accounts also mention that the captain of the American cruiser Boise had earlier declined to take the same berth at the quay.

On to Brindisi and Bari

That same night the 4th Parachute Brigade moved inland. At dawn on 10 September it was at Massafra, where the inhabitants received the paratroopers warmly. At Mottola it ran into the Germans: small detachments of the German 1st Parachute Division of Generalmajor Richard Heidrich – only three of its battalions and its headquarters were in Apulia – set ambushes and roadblocks to delay the pursuit, then fell back north towards the plain of Foggia. Heidrich had decided on his own initiative, without consulting the staff of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, not to defend Taranto, expecting overwhelming Allied forces. Near Castellaneta Hopkinson, who was watching an attack by the 10th Parachute Battalion, was hit by a burst of machine-gun fire and died the next day. Command of the division passed to Brigadier Ernest Down.

Other units moved east and north from Taranto towards the Adriatic coast. On 10 September Monopoli was taken without a fight, and on 11 September the British entered Brindisi and Bari. Both cities were held by the Royal Italian Army, so there was no need to fight for them.

Bari owed this largely to the Italians themselves. On the morning of 9 September a German detachment – about a hundred sappers, according to Italian accounts – forced its way into the port, sank two ships and began laying charges to destroy the quays and harbour installations. General Nicola Bellomo, responsible for the defence of the city, hastily gathered a few dozen soldiers, Guardia di Finanza men and sailors, who were joined by infantrymen, sappers and townspeople, including teenagers. After several hours of fighting, at about 5.30 p.m., the Germans agreed to leave. Italian sources speak of a few dead among the defenders and more than a dozen Germans killed. The port was saved. The first British units entered Bari on 11 September; according to Italian accounts, larger Allied forces arrived only on 18 and 22 September, and it was to them that the defenders handed over their German prisoners.

The king at Brindisi

Brindisi mattered to the Allies for more than military reasons. Before dawn on 9 September, as the Germans launched Operation Achse – the disarming of the Italian army and the occupation of the country – Victor Emmanuel III and his family, Badoglio and some of the commanders left Rome. Travelling via Pescara they reached Ortona, from where the corvette Baionetta took them south. On the afternoon of 10 September they arrived in Brindisi, which was still in Italian hands, and that evening, as the Germans were taking control of Rome, the king explained in a recorded address on Radio Bari why he had left the capital.

The British entry into Brindisi on 11 September made the king and the government safe from German pursuit, and gave the Allies a partner they could deal with as the legitimate authority in Italy. For several months Brindisi became the seat of the king and the government in the part of the country the Germans had not occupied, later known as the “Kingdom of the South”. As early as 19 September the Allies left the provinces of Bari, Brindisi, Lecce and Taranto, together with Sardinia, under the administration of the Badoglio government rather than Allied military government. For many Italians, however, the king’s flight was a source of anger: the army in Rome, in the Balkans and in France had been left without orders, and most of its soldiers ended up in German captivity.

“Up the boot”

From the outset the Allies described their plans as a march “up the boot” – from the toe and heel of the peninsula towards Naples and Rome. The ports of Apulia were ideally suited to this. While on 9 September the Americans and British were landing at Salerno and the Eighth Army was struggling along the wrecked roads of Calabria, the intact quays of Taranto, Brindisi and Bari became a second supply base on the eastern side of the Apennines. Through them would now flow equipment and men for the Eighth Army, which was shifting its weight to the Adriatic coast.

The objective for the following weeks was the plain around Foggia. Here lay a group of airfields from which heavy bombers could reach southern Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania and the Balkans – places hitherto hard to reach from North Africa and Sicily. The British got there at the end of September.

Significance

The capture of Taranto, Brindisi and Bari came almost without a fight, but not without cost: the sinking of Abdiel and the death of General Hopkinson were the operation’s heaviest losses. As a diversion Slapstick failed – the Germans did not move troops here from Salerno, and Heidrich’s paratroopers withdrew in good order. Its real gain lay elsewhere: three working ports, a foothold for the legitimate Italian government and an open road north along the Adriatic coast.

At the end of September further divisions of the Eighth Army began arriving at Taranto and Bari, and on 27 September the British took Foggia. From its airfields, from the turn of 1943 and 1944, the American Fifteenth Air Force bombed targets in southern and central Europe, including the Ploiești refineries. Through the ports of Apulia passed supplies for the troops fighting in Italy and for the partisans in the Balkans, and from the end of 1943 also for the Polish II Corps, which in 1944 fought at Monte Cassino and on the Adriatic. Bari paid a high price for this: on 2 December 1943 a German air raid on the crowded harbour sank more than a dozen ships, including an American transport carrying mustard gas, costing the lives of many sailors and townspeople.