Assignment to Hell (37 page)

Alexander, Montgomery, and Clark had a much murkier objective—and no real strategy to speak of. When, on the eve of the Calabria landing, Montgomery asked his boss, Alexander, about the Eighth Army’s geographic goal, Alexander shrugged and muttered something about getting as far north as Monty could manage—and never made it any less amorphous.
¹⁶
The linkup of Monty’s and Clark’s forces was also sloppily thought through.

Clark’s plan for the Salerno invasion, moreover, contained a seven-mile gap between the British and American landing beaches—a flaw that proved nearly fatal and should never have passed muster. But the Supreme Command was preoccupied with planning Operation Neptune, as the cross-Channel invasion was then code-named. Eisenhower tasked Patton, at the time doing penance as Sicily’s occupation viceroy, with critiquing Clark’s invasion plan. Patton looked at the seven-mile breach and predicted that the Germans would exploit it. Yet Clark, given too much latitude by Eisenhower, never altered his plan.

The morass into which Italy degenerated was not Clark’s fault—it had many parents, both British and American—but Clark took a bad situation and made it worse. As historian Chester Wilmot argued, Allied architects early in the war were desperately seeking a “blueprint” in the fight against Nazi Germany—and never found one in the Mediterranean. It wasn’t until Normandy in the spring and summer of 1944, Wilmot maintained, that Allied planners finally devised a strategic design that worked.
¹⁷

I
RONICALLY, THE
A
LLIES STARTED THE
Italian campaign brimming with confidence. Monty’s September 3 (Operation Baytown) assault across the Strait of Messina had the feel of a country outing. Early on, the Brits and Canadians met only token resistance; Kesselring had deliberately abandoned Italy’s toe to defend more forbidding ground north. Clark, slated to land at Salerno a week later, was so convinced that Axis troops would flee that he told a colleague the Fifth Army’s offensive would be more “pursuit” than contested fight. When on the eve of the Salerno invasion Eisenhower announced that Italy had officially surrendered, many Allied soldiers rejoiced, deluding themselves into thinking that the Germans would never spill blood to “save” Italy.

Reprising their one-two approach in Sicily,
Herald Tribune
reporters Homer Bigart and Tex O’Reilly switched places at the outset. O’Reilly went in with the troops at Salerno while Bigart stayed back in North Africa to coordinate coverage at Allied headquarters. Bigart spent five weeks sifting through wire service cables and battlefront communiqués to file stories that consistently made the
Trib
’s front page. He didn’t arrive on Italy’s front lines until almost mid-October.

Hal Boyle, as he had at Morocco and Gela, steamed across the Mediterranean and Tyrrhenian with an invasion fleet inevitably headed by Admiral Kent Hewitt. “Mussolini’s boasted
‘Mare Nostrum’
(Our Sea) has become an Allied mill pond,” Boyle wrote, perhaps too cockily, aboard a British-piloted troopship on September 12. “Crossing to Italy in a British and American invasion convoy was as uneventful as a trip by ferry from Manhattan to Staten Island.”

Things quickly turned eventful. Although casualties were higher than anticipated, the initial Gulf of Salerno landings on September 9 and 10 went reasonably well. Within four days, some seventy-five thousand troops—about two-thirds of them British—had established a beachhead between six and ten miles deep along a forty-mile swath.

Boyle was several miles inland on September 13, a day that went so calamitously for the Allies it was forever branded Black Monday. Beginning just after dawn, Kesselring launched a series of counterattacks that threatened to push the Fifth Army back into the gulf. Boyle had somehow managed to get close to the front with members of the 12th Air Support Command, a unit whose mission was to rehabilitate captured airstrips—a task that would, over the next ninety-six hours, be the least of their concerns.

The next morning, Boyle was eating breakfast with about fifty men along the swampy bottomland of the River Sele at the extreme northern flank of the American invasion force. They weren’t far from the infamous Tabacchificio Fioche, a tobacco factory whose imposing walls and tiny windows resembled a garrison’s. Boyle’s new buddies in the 36th Division and his old friends in the 45th would spend much of the next few days huddled around the Tabacchificio as control of the factory seesawed back and forth.

Hal was chatting with two PROs he’d gotten to know in North Africa, Lieutenant Louis Harris, a former reporter from Pontiac, Michigan, and Captain Jay Vessels, a prewar journalist from Minneapolis, when the first German artillery shell came crackling overhead. The three instantly dived into a prickly ten-foot-high blackberry bush. “They were the most comfortable thorns anyone ever laid on,” Boyle wrote. Joined by others in the 12th, Boyle, Harris, and Vessels sought cover in those thorns for several hours.

U.S. howitzers and Navy guns soon matched those of the Germans. The menacing artillery barrage gave way to the rumble of tanks from the 29th Panzers. With thousands of infantrymen in tow, the enemy tanks were rolling down the Sele Valley toward the Tabacchificio. “Despite stiffening resistance, the heavy Nazi tanks bored forward in force,” Boyle wrote. “Their whistling shells began shuttling a few feet over our heads and bursting
somewhere near the sea with the terrific crack peculiar to German high-velocity artillery.”

Kesselring’s aim was to splinter the British troops in the northern part of the gulf beachhead from the American troops in the south. The Germans were attacking exactly where George Patton had predicted: in the crack between the two Allied forces.

None of the men in the 12th Air Support Command was equipped with heavy weapons. “All we have got to throw back at them is bedrolls,” quipped Vessels. They had no choice but to “lie there and sweat it out,” Boyle wrote.

The battle noise was excruciating: At one point that morning, the grenadiers had advanced so far down Highway 18 that they had practically reached Boyle’s blackberry bush. Had the Germans continued pushing toward the sea, Boyle and his friends would have been, Hal wrote, “exposed like so many pins in a giant bowling alley.”

Minutes later the cavalry arrived, in the form of an American air armada. Boyle goosed his neck outside the bush. “Dozens of A-36 Invaders and P-38 Lightnings suddenly swooped low out of sight,” he wrote. The planes descended to what seemed to Boyle to be just a few feet off the ground. “We could hear their whining motors, thud of bombs, and rattle of machine guns and then they wheeled around the river bend, and rose triumphantly into the sky.”

All of a sudden it was quiet—except for the huzzahs from the guys in the 12th. The German tank advance had been halted. Not long after, another cheer went up; a fleet of Mitchell medium bombers droned overhead. Boyle began counting but lost track at forty-two. “After passing us they tuned sharply inland and later we heard distant dull rumbles as they unloaded heavy bombs on German positions and supply lines,” he wrote. “When they passed us on the return trip we were packing to pull out.”
¹⁸

B
UT THEY WEREN’T PULLING OUT
to chase Germans. Americans along the Sele were retreating to find what Boyle euphemistically called “more tenable shelter.” Brits and Yanks all around the gulf were hunkered down amid ruins that one GI likened to the cover of a Latin textbook.

Assessing events from the other side of the Mediterranean, Boyle’s friend Bigart called September 14 a day of “deepening crisis” for the Fifth Army. Salerno, the history devotee wrote, was beginning to “bear an ominous resemblance to the Gallipoli campaign in the Dardanelles in 1915.” Just as the Australians and New Zealanders had in Turkey three decades earlier, Allied invaders at Salerno had spread themselves too thin and were vulnerable to both counterattacks and artillery fire.

“So far,” Bigart wrote of the six-day Salerno invasion, “[the Allies] have been unable to wrest from the Germans the high ground that must be won, at whatever cost, if the bridgehead is to be saved.”
¹⁹

Not even the jaded Bigart realized how precarious the Allied bridgehead truly was. By then, Mark Clark had ordered his underlings to develop various withdrawal scenarios, a directive that caused teeth to grind at Supreme Headquarters and aboard Admiral Hewitt’s flagship. For two days, Army and Navy staff officers agonized over the prospect of a Tyrrhenian Dunkirk until Alexander put an end to it, slapping his swagger stick while sputtering, “Oh, no! We
can’t
have anything like that. Never do, never do.”
²⁰

Worried that his image had been tarnished, Clark by September 16 was disingenuously telling correspondents that the situation at Salerno was “never desperate.” Fortunately for Clark, that day things significantly turned in the Allies’ favor when forward patrols from Montgomery’s Eighth Army began linking up with Clark’s Fifth.

After another series of counterattacks was rebuffed on September 17 and 18, the Germans began what Bigart called an “unhurried” retreat toward Naples, plugging mountain passes, mining roads and fields, and detonating bridges and culverts. Allied warplanes, mainly A-36 Invaders, inflicted horrendous damage on the German tank columns plodding north, but Kesselring was undeterred.

Naples was less than thirty miles away; the German commander wanted to buy time to demolish the city’s harbor facilities so the Allies would be hard-pressed to convert it into a naval base.
²¹
Kesselring and the Gestapo decimated much more than Naples’ port. Precious antiquities, museums, libraries—none of which had military worth—were torched as the Allies inched closer. By October 1, Naples had been virtually abandoned
by the Nazis. There was still fighting in the streets, but it was mainly internecine warfare among Italian Partisans and youth street gangs, some of it directed at a common Fascist enemy but too much of it driven by fratricidal revenge.

H
AL
B
OYLE WAS WITH THE
36th Division as it attempted to pacify a city that had turned primal. “Italian guerrillas and American soldiers, in a thrilling battle for the rooftops over crowded Neapolitan streets, shot it out for an hour with the last pocket of enemy resistance in Naples late today,” Boyle wrote in a piece the
New York Times
subheaded H
OSPITALS
C
ROWDED WITH
D
EAD AND
W
OUNDED
C
HILDREN
.

A week earlier, the Germans had tried to force some thirty thousand young Neapolitans into labor conscription, triggering a vicious response, which, in turn, elicited even more vicious reprisals and frenzied street fighting. Helmetless, their collars flung open, Naples’ guerrillas “looked like something out of the French Revolution,” Boyle thought. “They fired through holes in concrete rails bordering a hospital, where hundreds of wounded and unburied dead—victims of the week-long street fighting and German executions—lay. Two hundred dead men, women, and children—some dead for a week—lay alongside one of the walls of the hospital and on the other side were wailing survivors and 600 wounded persons. These were just a fraction of the toll.”

General Clark thought that enemy soldiers had deserted Naples when an English-speaking Italian guerrilla approached the Allied command post to report that several dozen members of the Wehrmacht and some local
Fascisti
were holed up in an ancient temple. A spectacular firefight ensued, with doughboys side by side with vigilantes as they dodged from pillar to pillar. Most of the enemy holdouts were killed, but nearly three dozen ended up surrendering.

Boyle watched as American GIs tried to protect the Fascist survivors from an angry mob that spat on the prisoners and threatened them with knives and rocks. The rioters also begged for food and water. An aging grandfather proudly pointed out one youngster, whom Boyle estimated to
be about twelve, and pantomimed how the lad had snuck up behind a German soldier and slit his throat.

The scene at the hospital was even more ghoulish. Weeping mothers were beating on doors and windows, desperate to see their wounded and dying children.

“An 8-year-old-boy lay with a rosary gripped in his hand, which almost covered the hole in his abdomen, ripped open by a German bullet,” Boyle wrote. “Nearby was an old man who was so thin that one could circle his thigh with a finger and thumb. He had apparently died of starvation.”
²²

Boyle asked someone at the hospital why so many young people were armed with carbines and automatic rifles. Once the Germans began looting Naples’ treasures, the person said, members of the carabinieri, the Italian state police, plus disaffected
soldati,
began handing over weapons en masse. Soon the city devolved into a bloodbath.

The Germans had stolen or destroyed all of the Incurabili Hospital’s supplies. Hospital officials had nothing left to treat wounds—no morphine, no serum, no bandages.

“Candles were lit in the shrine at one end of the room,” wrote Boyle, “and serene-faced nuns moved about comforting the ill and wounded or helping care for their families.”
²³
Boyle interviewed Incurabili’s head, a doctor named Giuseppe Marinelli, who told him that they didn’t have enough carts to transport all the dead bodies to the cemetery. Marinelli and a prominent Neapolitan named Franco showed Boyle a pair of brothers, ages six and eight, guarded by their sixteen-year-old brother, whose head bore a wound from a German rifle butt.

“These boys’ father was killed, and their mother was shot in the eye and the ten-year-old brother was killed,” Franco said, adding, “This family will always have something to remember the Germans by.”
²⁴

The AP columnist was among the first Americans in the hospital ward. Patients cheered, trying to kiss his hands as he walked by. One young woman thought Boyle was a physician and begged him to look at her mother’s mangled arm. “The woman’s face was turning visibly white with the pallor of death,” Boyle wrote. When Marinelli explained that nothing
could be done, the girl “made a sound like a shot animal and began rubbing her mother’s hands.”
²⁵