The crisis at Salerno

A week after the landing in the Gulf of Salerno the fate of the Allied beachhead hung by a thread. On 13 September the German Tenth Army struck at the Fifth Army’s weakest point – the junction of the American and British corps in the valley of the River Sele – and got within a few kilometres of the beaches. General Mark Clark’s staff drew up plans to re-embark part of the force. The crisis was overcome only by paratroopers dropped onto the beachhead at night, by naval gunfire and by massed air bombardment. On 16 September, as the Germans were making their last attacks, patrols of the Fifth and Eighth Armies met south of the beachhead, and the next day Field Marshal Kesselring agreed to break contact.

The race for reinforcements

After the first day of fighting neither side had the upper hand. The Allies had held the beachhead but had not taken the hills surrounding it, and their two corps – the British X Corps of General Richard McCreery in the north and the American VI Corps of General Ernest Dawley in the south – were separated by a wide gap along the Sele. The course of the battle would be decided by who could bring up reinforcements faster. Here the Germans had the advantage: their divisions could come up by road, albeit harassed from the air, whereas the Allies had to ship every battalion across the sea according to a timetable fixed before anyone knew how the fighting would go. The commander of the Tenth Army, General Heinrich von Vietinghoff, was drawing to the gulf the Hermann Göring Division, the 15th and 29th Panzergrenadier Divisions (PL), part of the 26th Panzer Division from Calabria and, from the Rome area, units of the 3rd Panzergrenadier Division released by Albert Kesselring once the capital was secured. They reached the battlefield piecemeal and went straight into action as improvised battle groups.

At sea and in the air the Allies paid for the fact that land-based aircraft could not use the airfield at Montecorvino, which was under German artillery fire. The Luftwaffe attacked the ships day and night. On 11 September German Dornier Do 217 bombers dropped radio-guided Fritz X bombs on the ships off Salerno – the same weapon that two days earlier had sunk the Italian battleship Roma on her way to Malta. One of them badly damaged the American cruiser USS Savannah, killing nearly two hundred sailors. The escort carriers, which were due to leave after two days, stayed on so that their Seafires could stand in for the missing land-based fighters. On 12 September Clark moved his headquarters ashore. That same day the commander of the 15th Army Group, General Harold Alexander, reported to London that he was not happy with the situation: reinforcements were arriving slowly, the beachhead was too shallow and a strong counter-attack was to be expected.

Alexander was also pressing General Bernard Montgomery, whose Eighth Army, advancing through Calabria since 3 September after landing near Reggio, had halted to sort out its rear areas and supply. On 10 September Alexander instructed him to keep up the pressure on the Germans so that they could not shift forces to Salerno, and on 12 September he sent his chief of staff to Montgomery with the same demand. Montgomery sent light forces forward along the coast, but his main body was still far away.

13 September: the beachhead in danger

On the morning of 13 September units of the American 36th Division took the small town of Altavilla Silentina in the hills behind Paestum, but towards evening a German counter-attack forced them to withdraw. The main blow, however, fell elsewhere. In the afternoon two German battle groups attacked around Persano, in the fork between the Sele and its tributary the Calore, overran a battalion of the 157th Regiment of the American 45th Division and, after crossing the Sele, all but destroyed a battalion of the 143rd Regiment. Tanks and panzergrenadiers pressed on south-west along the corridor between the rivers, straight towards the beaches. According to many accounts, only a few kilometres now separated them from the sea.

They were stopped at the confluence of the Sele and the Calore. American artillery fired over open sights, supported by the ships offshore, and the gap in the line was filled by gunners, drivers, cooks, clerks and anyone else the commander of the 36th Division, General Fred L. Walker, could gather. General Clark himself drove to the most threatened sectors and personally organised the defence – for his conduct in those days he was later awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. At the same time his staff considered the worst. Plans were prepared to move army headquarters onto a ship (“Brass Rail”) and to ship one of the corps by sea to the other’s sector (“Sealion” and “Seatrain”). The naval officers protested that withdrawing troops from the beaches under fire was practically impossible, and according to British accounts McCreery and his officers received the news of the plans with indignation. Clark decided in the end to fight on, and after the war he denied that he had seriously contemplated evacuation. Historians still argue over how close he came to such a decision.

VI Corps lost most of three battalions that day. During the night the forward units were pulled back to a shorter line: the 45th Division dug in in the fork of the Sele and the Calore, and the 36th Division on the hills on the seaward side. That same night the first help arrived from the air. Two battalions of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment of General Matthew Ridgway’s 82nd Airborne Division – some 1,300 men prepared for an entirely different operation – jumped over the beachhead, guided by radio beacons set up on the ground, and went into the line on the right flank of VI Corps before dawn. That day the Luftwaffe also hit the British cruiser HMS Uganda and the clearly marked hospital ship Newfoundland, which could not be saved and was scuttled.

14 and 15 September: fire from sea and air

On 14 September the Germans probed for a weak spot along the whole length of the front. All their attacks broke against a reinforced and regrouped defence, supported by the fire of the Fifth Army’s artillery and of warships that closed to short range off the shore. German losses, especially in tanks, were heavy. Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder, commanding the Allied air forces in the Mediterranean, threw every available aircraft into the battle over Salerno, strategic bombers included; in a single day more than a thousand tons of bombs were dropped on roads, junctions and troop concentrations behind the front. On the night of 14–15 September Colonel James Gavin’s 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, some 2,100 men, jumped onto the beachhead. The drop of the 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion around Avellino, intended to disrupt German supplies, was however scattered and suffered severe losses. That same day the leading units of the British 7th Armoured Division began coming ashore, and the last regiment of the American 45th Division could now be held in reserve – a clear sign that the worst was over.

On 15 September the 16th Panzer Division and the 29th Panzergrenadier Division went over to the defensive. In the north a battle group of the Hermann Göring Division surprised a British brigade of the 46th Division in the hills above Salerno, but the tanks following it were repulsed. The British battleships HMS Warspite and HMS Valiant, sent by Admiral Andrew Cunningham, took up station off the beachhead. Their 15-inch (381 mm) guns made an enormous impression on the troops, although their share of the total weight of naval fire was small. That day Kesselring reported to the Wehrmacht high command that the enemy’s superiority in the air and at sea had forced part of his forces onto the defensive, and that if the attack on the northern flank failed, the Tenth Army would have to break off the battle to avoid being destroyed.

16 September: the end of the offensive and the link-up with the Eighth Army

On 16 September a battle group of the Hermann Göring Division renewed its attacks on the British X Corps, but without success, although the Commando units fighting there suffered heavy losses. That day the Germans landed one spectacular blow: in the afternoon a Fritz X hit Warspite, and another exploded close alongside. The battleship, a veteran of Jutland and Matapan, lost all power and had to be towed to Malta, where she was under repair for many months. This did not, however, change the situation on land. In the evening Vietinghoff reported to Kesselring that Allied superiority in the air and at sea was decisive and that his troops had nothing with which to counter it. The naval bombardment was particularly painful for the Germans – the commander of XIV Panzer Corps, General Hermann Balck, later wrote that his tanks suffered badly from naval gunfire, against which they had no answer. Vietinghoff proposed breaking off the battle and withdrawing northwards, pivoting on Salerno. Kesselring agreed early on the morning of 17 September.

The approach of the Eighth Army also contributed to the decision. From 14 September Montgomery was advancing on a broader front, and on 16 September the leading patrols of the British 5th Infantry Division, moving along the Tyrrhenian coast, made contact with patrols of the American 36th Division near Vallo della Lucania, several dozen kilometres south-east of Paestum; sources name different places for this meeting. The statement that on this day “British and American troops linked up at the Salerno beachhead” therefore needs qualifying: it was light reconnaissance units that made contact, not the main forces. Those were still several days’ march from the battlefield. Once the crisis at Salerno had been mastered, the Eighth Army shifted its weight eastwards, beyond the Apennines, where since the capture of Taranto and Bari a second Allied base had been growing on the Adriatic coast. The men of the Fifth Army themselves believed they had held the beachhead by their own efforts – and to a large extent they were right – but the threat from the south was nonetheless real for Vietinghoff and Kesselring.

The Salerno mutiny

On 16 September the beachhead saw an event the British Army long preferred not to talk about. Some 1,500 men of the 50th (Northumbrian) and 51st (Highland) Infantry Divisions, Eighth Army veterans of North Africa, had been sent from camps at Tripoli in the belief that they were rejoining their units in Sicily. At sea they learned that they were bound for Salerno as replacements for the badly mauled 46th and 56th Divisions. After landing amid the chaos of the beachhead, some of them – several hundred men, according to most accounts – refused to be posted to strange units and demanded to return to their own. They were not refusing to fight as such, but protesting at a broken promise. General McCreery addressed them, admitted that a mistake had been made and promised that once the fighting was over they would return to their parent divisions, while warning them of the consequences of mutiny in wartime. Some obeyed. The 192 men who did not change their minds were charged with mutiny – the largest number of soldiers ever tried for mutiny at one time in the history of the British Army. A court martial in Algeria convicted them all, sentencing three sergeants to death, but the sentences were commuted and then suspended, and the convicted men returned to the front. The case resurfaced later in British public debate; in 2000 the government refused to pardon them.

Place in the war

The Germans broke contact with the beachhead on the night of 18–19 September and began an orderly withdrawal northwards, destroying bridges and roads behind them. The Fifth Army moved on Naples, which it took on 1 October, and at the beginning of October reached the River Volturno – the first of a series of German defensive lines, behind which lay the Winter Line, the Gustav Line and Monte Cassino. The battle was costly for both sides. According to figures cited in the literature, the Fifth Army’s losses from 9 to 16 September amounted to some 2,000 killed, 7,000 wounded and 3,500 missing, and the German losses, according to the same figures, to about 3,500 killed, wounded and missing, though the data for both sides vary depending on the source and the period covered. On 20 September Clark relieved General Dawley of command of VI Corps, since Alexander and Dwight Eisenhower judged him incapable of directing a corps in a crisis; he was replaced by General John P. Lucas.

The crisis at Salerno mattered beyond the battle itself. It showed that a landing on a coast defended by a prepared enemy could succeed only with massive support from sea and air and the efficient delivery of reinforcements – a lesson taken into account in planning the Normandy landings. It also showed that the Germans would not give up Italy without a fight. The success of the Tenth Army, which for a week had held a much stronger enemy in check, strengthened the position of Kesselring, who was convinced that the peninsula could be defended far to the south of Rome. Adolf Hitler eventually came round to his view and in the autumn gave him command over the whole of Italy, and the Italian campaign turned into a slow, costly struggle through one mountain line after another. For Clark himself, Salerno was both a baptism of fire and a source of controversy: some stressed his courage and his presence in the front line, while others blamed him for the flaws in the plan, the separation of the corps and the thought of evacuation.