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.
An unfinished letter found in the tunic of a dead German paratrooper foreshadowed the world ahead. “The Tommies will have to chew their way through us, inch by inch,” the soldier had written, “and we will surely make hard chewing for them.”
So ended the first great battle to liberate the continent of Europe.
Even in retreat, the Germans deemed the ten-day struggle at Salerno a victor
y. Kesselring told Berlin that he had captured three thousand Allied prisoners, inflicted at least ten thousand additional casualties, and left the invaders “incapable of attacking for a long time…. Above all, the value to us is the time won, which assists us in the building up of strength.” General Sieckenius, the 16th Panzer Division commander, considered both the British and Americans to be inferior combat soldiers—devoid of “the offensive spirit,” excessively dependent on artillery, and reluctant to close with the enemy. Hitler agreed. “No more invasions for them!” he said. “They are much too cowardly for that. They only managed the one at Salerno because the Italians gave their blessing.”
Once again the Führer and his minions had misjudged their adversaries. Certainly Salerno was inelegant and brutal, a fitting overture for the Italian campaign that followed. Allied casualties totaled about 9,000—5,500 for the British and 3,500 for the Americans—of whom more than 1,200 were killed in action. Total German losses numbered roughly 3,500, of whom an estimated 630 had been killed, a modest butcher’s bill for an army that in September alone would suffer 126,000 casualties in Russia.
Yet Salerno for the Allies was a blood chit, to be redeemed in the future. Much had been learned—some of it, sadly, for the second or third time—about combat loading, over-the-beach resupply, naval gunnery, and ground combat. No officer planning for Normandy nine months hence would ever forget that while land warfare offers “a road upon which you may retire, there is no road of retirement in amphibious operations,” as one Navy commander put it. Eisenhower emerged from AVALANCHE convinced of the need “to turn the scales by turning every ship and every aircraft on the vital battle area”; he would also demand, when his hour at Normandy came round, absolute authority over air forces as well as those of the sea and land. But he had again neglected to make demands of Alexander, to insist on cohesion between V Corps and X Corps, and between Fifth Army and Eighth Army. Alexander’s handling of Montgomery was said by his biographer Nigel Nicolson to resemble that of “an understanding husband in a difficult marriage.” Eisenhower recognized what he called General Alex’s “unsureness in dealing with certain of his subordinates,” yet failed to intervene.
George Marshall had decreed that the “vital qualifications” for senior U.S. Army officers included “leadership, force, and vigor.” Too often such traits were most conspicuous in their absence. Dawley’s deficiencies made him an easy scapegoat, but he was hardly the only senior officer still struggling to meet the chief’s high standard. Mark Clark was also in over his head at Salerno, as he showed in matters ranging from the confusion over H-hour to his approval of a plan that left a gaping hole between his corps. Salerno annealed Clark: he emerged stronger and wiser, if still so autocratic and aloof that soldiers now called him Marcus Aurelius Clarkus. “He is not so good as Bradley in winning, almost without effort, the complete confidence of everybody around him,” Eisenhower wrote Marshall on September 20. “He is not the equal of Patton in refusing to see anything but victory in any situation that arises. But he is still carrying his full weight.”
Others wondered. “Mark Clark really didn’t have a true feel for what soldiers could and could not do, and how much power it took to accomplish a particular mission,” James Gavin later wrote to Matthew Ridgway. Whether Clark had the mettle of a great field commander was yet to be discovered, a central subplot in the unfolding drama that was the war in Italy.
Still, the Allies were on the continent, never to be expelled again. An alert and skilled enemy, fighting on favorable terrain with the advantage of terrestrial rather than maritime lines of communication, had been cudgeled aside. A portal had been won, and through it poured men and matériel; from two divisions on September 3, the Allied host in Italy grew to thirteen by the end of the month, with captured airfields that would contribute to pummeling the Reich.
Precisely where they were going and what they would do when they arrived there remained in doubt. The avowed strategic purpose of the Italian campaign—to knock Italy from the war and to engage as many German divisions as possible—had been at least partly fulfilled. How to completely satisfy those war aims was as unclear in Salerno as it was in Washington, London, and Algiers. The strategic drift persisted.
That was neither the province nor the fault of those who had fought their way ashore. Perhaps only a battlefield before the battle is quieter than the same field after the shooting stops; the former is silent with anticipation, the latter with a pure absence of noise. Calm now settled over Salerno as the troops stood down, resting for the long march ahead.
Cooks bolstered their Army rations with Italian tomatoes, beans, and onions, while soldiers “made our acquaintance with vino, Alberti gin, 40-octane cognac, and grappa.” Staff officers moved into the Fascist party headquarters in Salerno, slapping black paint across the gilt lettering of “Credere, Obbedire, Combattere” and other fatuous slogans. Civilians emerged from their hiding places to resume the interrupted harvest. Peasant women glided through vineyards with great baskets of blue and white grapes on their heads, or searched tomato vines for fruit overlooked by pillagers. An Italian farmer appeared at a command post with a note, in English, given him by retreating Germans: “The Americans will pay for the two pigs we took.” George Biddle’s artistic eye detected signs of life in the rubble: a man toting his framed legal diploma; a woman carrying an iron bedspring; an old man clutching a rabbit by the ears; another woman with a sack of potatoes and, on her head, a straw hamper holding a baby.
The living searched for the dead “by smelling them out,” wrote one soldier assigned to a burial detail. “I covered my mouth and nose with a piece of parachute silk…. When I returned to the company no one would have anything to do with me because my clothes retained the smell of the dead and my own puke.” Michael Howard described “the hunched, urgent diggers, the sprawling corpses with their dead eyes in a cold dawn light that drained all colour from the scene.”
So many civilian bodies littered the mountain town of Avellino that they were doused with gasoline and burned in a pyre. Altavilla was even more horrible. The bloated corpses of civilians slaughtered in the cross fire, including many children, burst from their clothing. “The stinch was terrible,” a military policeman reported. Entire platoons of 36th Division soldiers killed early in the battle lay in shallow revetments, their faces “black and hard like an eggplant.”
Bulldozers now dug the trenches at Paestum, and proper grave markers replaced the crude wooden triangles. A visiting general complained that a Star of David among a row of Latin crosses “spoils the symmetry of the cemetery. Move it.” A 36th Division chaplain refused. His boys held title to that ground.
5. CORPSE OF THE SIREN
“I Give You Naples”
TOWARD Naples they pounded, long columns of jeeps and trucks and armored cars with German coal-scuttle helmets wired to the radiators as hood ornaments. British military policemen in red caps and white canvas gloves waved them north beneath the rocky loom of Vesuvius, through Nocera and Angri and Torre del Greco. Jubilant crowds strewed flowers beneath their wheels, and priests in threadbare cassocks crooked their fingers in benediction. Refugees trudged along the road shoulders, including boys “so dirty they didn’t look human” and hatless, truant Italian soldiers, who carried their shoes to spare the leather and bathed their feet in hillside streams. Villagers who had been to the States shouted denunciations of Fascism in broken English spiced with recollected American profanities, or recited the brands of toothpaste and laxatives they had encountered in the land of opportunity. The reporter John Lardner found the Campanian countryside redolent “of bandits and light opera,” while another American insisted that southern Italy “just stinks of the classics.” After searching the ruins at Pompeii, a lieutenant from Indiana nodded toward the Roman amphitheater and observed, “They certainly make ’em to last.”
A squadron from the King’s Dragoon Guards was the first Allied unit to enter Naples, at 9:30 A.M. on Friday, October 1, 1943. Mark C
lark followed a few hours later. Much discussion had been devoted to arranging a triumphal entrance, but in the event the procession had an air of hasty improvisation and slapdash stagecraft. On Highway 18 in the southern suburb of San Giovanni, Clark climbed into the open cockpit of an armored car with Ridgway, who clutched his Springfield rifle and squinted at the rooftops for snipers. Gavin led the convoy in a jeep, a city map spread across his lap, and a paratrooper battalion trailed behind in trucks. Laundry flapped from iron balconies and geraniums spilled from their windowsill pots, but every door and window remained shuttered in what Clark called “a city of ghosts.” A team of OSS infiltrators warned that retreating Germans had mined at least fifty buildings, and Italian bodies lay in the streets of a city “heavily scented with the sweet heliotrope odor of unburied dead,” an OSS officer wrote. Now and then a gunshot echoed down the Corso Umberto, sharp as a single handclap: partisans were hunting Fascist collaborators. Clark surveyed the deserted Piazza Garibaldi, across from the central train station, and confessed to being “in a less happy mood than I had expected to be in.”
He was in the wrong place. Thousands of joyful Neapolitans awaited their liberators barely a mile away, in the Piazza del Plebiscito, where conquering heroes traditionally appeared. As soldiers eventually tramped past the stately Palazzo Reale and into the semicircular plaza a great shout went up. “Viva, viva!” the throng screamed. “Grazie! Viva!” Weeping and genuflecting, they plucked at the uniforms of the passing troops or flung themselves down to kiss their boots. The pandemonium soon spread through the city. “Walls of shouting faces leaned out at us, and arms pelted us with grapes and chrysanthemums,” wrote the reporter Richard Tregaskis, who likened the crowds to “ants swarming toward and over us.”