The Day of Battle (37 page)

On the beach, soldiers wriggled out of backpacks ignited by grazing tracers. “I’d rather been born a baby girl,” one soldier muttered. Teller mines buried ten yards beyond the waterline exploded in geysers of sand
and shredded tires from the first jeeps ashore. The dunes were as hellish as the beach, raked with fire from a dense wood line just inland and from a fifty-foot stone turret built centuries earlier as a watchtower against Saracens. German gunners on Paestum’s cyclopean walls poured plunging fire on every snapping twig, every rustle in the long grass. Panzers lurked in barns and sheds, firing point-blank on riflemen creeping past. “Great deal of confusion in landing,” a surgeon told his diary. “Tough going. I see I am going to lose weight.”

The first Luftwaffe planes arrived with the morning light shortly after four
A.M
., strafing and bombing, as the Navy’s official history recorded, “on a scale never before or since equaled in a Mediterranean landing.” An LST captain told his gun crews: “Steady now, steady, here they come…. Steady.
Fire away,
and good hunting.” After the rejoicing that had met Italy’s capitulation, an officer observed, many troops had “the feeling that someone had let them down.” As the battle intensified, the reporter Don Whitehead overheard someone suggest, “Maybe it would be better for us to fight without an armistice.”

By six
A.M
., two infantry regiments—the 141st and 142nd—had made land, with the 143rd soon to follow. But the foothold was tenuous. Each assault battalion carried two hundred smoke pots, big buckets of hexachlorethane that were ignited and dropped near the beaches to create a milky haze screening the landing craft. Offshore, destroyers darted through the anchorage and around the incoming LSTs, “trailing ribbons of white, choking smoke,” as John Steinbeck noted. Ventilation fans sucked smoke into LST tank decks—“the sound of coughing is deafening,” Steinbeck added—and some coxswains were forced to navigate through the miasma by compass heading.

Still, German observers on Monte Soprano and other high perches saw well enough to mass fires. DUKWs hauling artillery and antitank guns to Yellow and Blue Beaches sheered away under the sleeting fire; another sixty lay out of range off Green Beach, and 125 loitered near Red. Six LCTs attempting to land thirty tanks at 6:15
A.M
. also hauled off rather than risk sinking. Three shells smashed into an LCT carrying part of the 191st Tank Battalion; the blasts shattered the pilothouse, killed seven men, and set fire to a Sherman tank, which was shoved into the sea only with enormous effort. LST officers scrambled from side to side of the bridge as German shells struck port, then starboard, then port again;
LST 336
alone took eighteen hits. Drumfire fell the length of the beachhead: a Royal Navy cruiser intercepted a dozen vessels headed for Salerno port and warned, “The harbor’s under enemy fire. You’ll be jolly well shot up if you go in there.”

AVALANCHE
planners had hoped the assault vanguard would be four thousand yards inland by daylight—to secure the beaches from mortar and machine-gun fire—and far enough by dusk on D-day to exterminate German artillery still capable of ranging the waterline. Instead, by midmorning the beachhead in a few spots hardly extended four hundred yards. A bulldozer crew trying to scrape an exit from the beach was incinerated by an 88mm shell. “They were completely black except for their teeth, which seemed whiter than living ones,” a witness reported. On Blue Beach in the far south, a battalion was pinned to the dunes and would remain pinned for twenty hours; hundreds of men burrowed into the laurel brakes and ice plant, filching ammunition from the dead. There was more to filch after Mark IV panzers broke through the American line. “It was like fighting tanks barehanded,” a lieutenant colonel in the 141st Infantry reported:

An intelligence officer later found that medics had laid the dead “in a row, side by side, shoulder to shoulder, with extreme precision as if about to present arms.” Their feet protruded from the covering blankets, “the stillest shoes the world could boast,” one staff officer wrote. Other bodies were propped into sitting positions, “so it wouldn’t look so bad to the troops coming in.” A radioed query to the
Ancon
—among the few coherent messages to get through—gave Clark and Hewitt a sense of conditions ashore: “On what beach shall we put our dead?”

Salvation arrived shortly after nine
A.M
. Minesweepers finished clearing an inshore channel, allowing warships to press toward the beaches. Fire control parties, whose operations had been hampered for hours by balky radios, smoke, enemy aircraft, and utter confusion on the beach, now began sprinkling gunfire around the beachhead rim. By late morning, destroyers steamed within a hundred yards of shore, pumping 5-inch shells into the face of Monte Soprano. The cruiser U.S.S.
Savannah
soon opened on German tank concentrations with scores of 6-inch shells. Her sister
Philadelphia
flushed three dozen panzers detected by a spotter plane in a copse near Red Beach; salvo upon salvo fell on the tanks for nearly an hour, reportedly destroying half a dozen and scattering the rest. Eleven thousand tons of naval shells would be fired at Salerno, almost comparable in heft to the bombardments at Iwo Jima and Okinawa later in the war, but no barrage was more timely than the D-day shoot.

As German troops backed into the sheltering hills, two American regiments pushed east past Paestum’s temples—“This place looks just like the cover of a Latin book,” one soldier remarked—and north toward the Sele River. A third regiment, the 141st, remained trapped near Blue Beach by enfilading fire from high ground to the south. Forty-eight DUKWs finally made shore, each carrying a howitzer, a six-man gun crew, and twenty-one rounds.

Near a tobacco barn at Casa Vannula, three miles inland, guns from the 151st Field Artillery arrived at noon, just as a dozen panzers closed on the 36th Division command post; in what one major called “hip-shooting with howitzers,” gunners demolished a stone wall for a better field of fire, cut their fuzes, then yanked the lanyards at two hundred yards’ range. By 12:30
P.M
., greasy smoke boiled from four burning tanks and the others had dispersed.

“It was thrilling,” said Walker, the 36th Division commander, who had watched from the gun line. The shallow American beachhead was secure, for now.

A dozen miles to the north, the British also had won a lodgment on the hostile shore.

German air attacks had harassed the fleet even before the landing boats were lowered, and 88mm airbursts lacerated some of the approaching landing craft. Dive-bombers caught the U.S.S.
Nauset,
an ocean tug assisting the Royal Navy. Fire engulfed the boat deck, then scaled a ladder to the chart room before spiraling upward in fifty-foot orange flares behind the bridge. Powerless, rudderless, and listing,
Nauset
struck a mine, snapped in half, and sank in sixty-five fathoms, taking her captain and first mate. More than fifty other crewmen were killed or wounded.

But the preliminary naval bombardment eschewed by the Americans helped clear Red, White, and Green Beaches for the British. Hundreds of rockets flew from modified landing craft with a pyrotechnic
swish-swish-swish
that was “quite terrifying even when expected.” The 46th Division, on the left, and the 56th Division, on the right, began wading ashore at 3:30
A.M
. At the water’s edge, a sailor escorting the Coldstream Guards stood waving a huge flag, urging, “This way to Naples, boys!” Among the “essential assault stores” first rolled from the landing craft ramps was a piano, soon followed by crated chickens, geese, and turkeys, all lashed to jeep hoods, as well as a sow for the officers’ mess.

By day’s end, X Corps would land about a third of its strength—23,000 soldiers, 80 tanks, and 325 guns—despite what one chronicler called “unutterable confusion” on some beaches as subsequent waves intermingled the
two divisions. Besides the usual lost coxswains, confused soldiers, and fuming beachmasters, German gunfire soon intensified.
LST 375
caught nine 88mm rounds, with many near misses.
LST 357
suffered two dozen casualties.
LST 365
collided in-shore with
LST 430,
knocking her beam-on to the beach; enemy shells wounded
430
’s skipper in all four limbs, sprayed steel through the tank deck, set fire to an ammunition truck, and terrorized wounded soldiers as they hobbled aboard for evacuation from the shingle.

Beyond the beaches, the invasion unfolded with heady initial promise. Tommies rushed three miles inland to seize Montecorvino airfield, the preeminent D-day objective. Astonished Luftwaffe pilots pelted across the runway to their cockpits only to be shot down by tanks and self-propelled guns that blew apart three dozen parked planes. Yet the field remained within easy range of German guns, a misfortune discovered by an unwitting American air force colonel, John G. Ayling, who landed in a B-25 with a cargo of radio equipment. The aircraft had hardly taxied to a stop when 88mm shells riddled the fuselage, killing Ayling and his pilot, burning the plane to the spars, and, as it transpired, ending Allied hopes of using Montecorvino for the next eleven days.

For every heartening advance, the British front suffered a disheartening setback. The 5th Battalion of the Royal Hampshire Regiment had pushed six hundred yards inland down a narrow lane hemmed in with high stone walls when a German counterattack caught two companies and the battalion headquarters like sheep in a slaughterhouse chute. Three assault guns fired point-blank as the Hampshires clawed at slick stones soon made slicker with blood. Grenadiers in half-tracks rumbled through the lane, crushing the living and the dead alike; a Hampshire radio operator was found with working headphones on his ears and his legs flattened to the thickness of a table leaf. Forty Hampshires died and more than three hundred others were wounded or led away to German cages.

Past Montecorvino, Tommies in khaki drill hurried east toward the town of Battipaglia, soon known as Batty P, a squat, melancholy Fascist showcase straddling the key intersection of Highways 18 and 19, five miles inland. The 9th Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers capered forward by tractor, dray horse, barrow, and bicycle. Crossing dikes and tobacco fields, they entered Batty P shortly after midnight on Friday, September 10, exultant but isolated. German infiltrators in camouflage face paint soon crept through swales and irrigation ditches to flank the British salient. One wary Guardsman detected “a feeling of looseness, of porosity, where all should have been tightly sealed.”

As another hot, luminous Mediterranean day dawned on Friday, German counterattacks added panic to that loose feeling. Fusiliers scoured
westward past the Lombardy poplars and oleander, warning of Tiger tanks “like bloody great battleships.” Some flung away their weapons, yelling, “Back to the beaches! We’re overrun!” By Friday afternoon, a Guards officer wrote, “the small roads were full of frightened soldiers, many retiring pell-mell regardless of officers.” Short, violent scraps flared across the beachhead, gunfights rather than battles. Outside Battipaglia at a three-acre complex encircled with an eight-foot spiked fence—labeled “Tabacchificio” on military maps, it was in fact a tomato canning plant—the 2nd Scots Guards made a valiant but bootless attempt to oust German squatters with grenade volleys and bursts of fire down darkened corridors. After reverses on the left flank, some Grenadiers clung to an overloaded truck, shouting in alarm. “They’re coming! They’re through!”

They were not coming, nor were they through. The line stiffened, shoving the Germans back to Batty P, and by early Saturday the British held roughly eight miles of beachfront that extended inland for two to four miles. British Commandos held a smaller, shallower adjacent plot at Salerno town, including the port. Every occupied inch was vulnerable to German guns—the “demented choirs of wailing shells,” as Wilfred Owen had written on a different battlefield—and those without shovels soon dug with their hands. As one artillery major observed, “We’ve got them just where they want us.”

Only on the extreme left of the Allied line could the invaders report unqualified success. Bill Darby’s Rangers had captured the resort villages of Maiori, Minori, and Amalfi without opposition, then climbed a serpentine road through groves of thick-skinned lemons the size of a child’s skull to seize the hogback crest of the Sorrento Peninsula. Five hours after crossing the black-sand beaches, Rangers held Chiunzi Pass, six miles inland and four thousand feet up.