As night fell on 8 September 1943, a vast armada of more than 600 Allied ships headed towards Salerno Bay. On board were some 55,000 assault troops of Mark Clark’s Fifth Army, followed by a similar number of reinforcements and support troops. They brought with them all the impedimenta of an invading army: weapons, munitions, army vehicles, medical supplies, food, water, petrol—the British contingent even brought a grand piano for use in the officers’ mess.
As they neared the coast towards midnight, those on the northern-most flotilla could see the faint red glow of Vesuvius ahead of them off the port bow. The island of Capri rose like a distant shadow—as the US official naval history put it, ‘swimming in a silver sea’. Beyond lay the Bay of Naples, ‘redolent with history, beauty and romance’: this was the timeless coastline where Sirens had once tempted Odysseus and his men with their enchanting song, and where the waves still whispered with memories of the fleets of ancient Rome, of Normans and Saracens, of the exploits and treacheries of the eighteenth-century admirals Nelson and Caracciolo.
On board the ships, the thousands of waiting soldiers were mostly quiet. Earlier in the evening, when the announcement of the Italian armistice had been broadcast on Radio Algiers, there had been scenes of wild excitement. Those on board HMS Hilary had leapt and danced on the steel decks with cries of ‘The Eyeties have jagged it in!’, and on some of the ships the rumour had quickly spread that the whole of the war in the Mediterranean was now over. ‘I never again expect to witness such scenes of sheer joy …’ wrote Clark’s aide-de-camp. ‘We would dock in Naples harbor unopposed, with an olive branch in one hand and an opera ticket in the other.’ But by now a slightly more sober sense of reality had returned. Those who had enthusiastically thrown aside their ammunition with cries that they would not need it now gathered it up again and readied themselves for the battle that lay ahead of them in the midnight surf: the Italians might have surrendered, but nobody knew how the Germans would react.
Around midnight, as the moon was setting, the lead ships of the armada reached the 100-fathom mark, and gradually drifted to a halt. Anchors were dropped, followed by the sound of winches lowering landing craft into the water. These huge warships could not proceed any closer to the coastline until minesweepers had cleared a path for them through the shallows. From here, the invading armies would have to proceed on shallow-draft Higgins boats, armour-clad assault barges known as LCAs (‘Landing Craft Assault’), and amphibious DUKWs that could drive straight out of the surf and up onto the beach. Cargo nets were dropped over the sides of the ships so that men laden with all their kit could climb down into the boats below—an exercise that one soldier compared to ‘crawling down a ten-story building on a mesh ladder with a file cabinet on your back’.
According to General Clark’s plan, the troops would come ashore in three distinct prongs of attack. At the northwestern end of the bay, at Maiori and Vietri, a small force of US Rangers and British Commandos would scramble ashore and make their way into the mountains to secure the passes that led through to the wide open spaces of the Neapolitan plain.
Around Salerno itself, and on the beach that stretched for miles to the south of it, the British 46th and 56th Divisions would land, protected by a massive barrage of naval fire aimed at German positions in the hills that overlooked the coastline.
The third prong of attack would land south of the River Sele, which disgorged itself into the Tyrrhenian Sea about two-thirds of the way along the beach. Here the US 36th Division would come ashore and drive inland to secure the invasion’s southern flank. Unlike the British troops further north, they would land without an initial bombardment from the powerful naval guns 12 miles out to sea. ‘I see no point to killing a lot of peaceful Italians and destroying their homes,’ declared their leader, Major General Fred Walker, arguing that if they sneaked ashore quietly they might be able to take the Germans by surprise.
Such illusions evaporated when the first wave of American troops finally arrived at the beach near the ruins of ancient Paestum. While tracers split the darkness to the north of them, accompanied by the muffled thumping of the naval bombardment around Salerno, here there was little but the sound of surf and the low hum of the engines driving the landing craft up to the shore. But as the boats finally hit the sand at 3.30 a.m. the silence was broken by what sounded like a public address system cutting through the darkness telling them all, in English, to surrender. Moments later, a flurry of silver flares appeared in the skies above them illuminating the beach, and the German guns opened up with a roar.
No account of the following two hours could do justice to the chaos that engulfed the beaches around Paestum. Machine guns raked the water, and shell fragments sprayed the landing craft with a sound like ‘spring rain on a taxi window’. Several landing craft were blown apart by tank shells, or by artillery shells tearing into them from the invisible mountainsides up ahead. ‘Shells were wopping in all around us,’ recalled one soldier in the third wave. ‘We knew that when the ramp fell those red and yellow tracers would eat right into us.’
The American official history describes burning landing craft drifting helplessly in the surf, and men losing their heavy equipment and weapons in the water, or swimming ashore as the boats sank under them. Those who reached the shore faced other hazards: tripwires, machine-gun nests, barbed wire and Teller mines that tore through the wheels of the first jeeps to drive up the beach, spraying all around them in great fountains of sand and shrapnel. ‘Scared, tense, excited, some soldiers blundered across the loose sand. Others ran for cover across the open ground to the dunes. Some threw themselves into shallow irrigation ditches or huddled behind rock walls in the fields. Still others sought the scant protection afforded by scattered patches of scrub.’
As dawn approached, isolated pockets of men found themselves in a twilight landscape of sand dunes, watermelon fields and olive groves, scattered with various buildings left behind by more than 2,000 years of history. One artillery unit found itself nestled beside the ancient Greek temples to Neptune and Ceres at the foot of Monte Soprano. Others found themselves under fire from the walls of an ancient Etruscan city; others still from a medieval tower built centuries earlier to watch for Saracen pirates.
With daylight came new dangers. That morning German panzers began roving beyond the dunes, firing on any groups of American infantrymen they came across. They were followed shortly afterwards by German planes that strafed and bombed the invaders in ‘the heaviest aerial resistance ever encountered during the war in the Mediterranean’. The picture was fairly similar all along the coast. Further north, the British had got onto the beaches more easily, but then found themselves pinned down in the narrow exits to the hinterland that lay beyond. According to the plan for Operation Avalanche, the first waves of attackers should have been a couple of miles inland by now—but in some areas they had barely made it 400 yards.
In the grand scheme of things, casualties were still relatively light at this point, but that was not how the soldiers themselves experienced it. On the beaches, and in the fields that lay just beyond them, corpses lay in lines, ‘shoulder to shoulder … as if about to present arms’; others had been propped up into sitting positions ‘so it wouldn’t look so bad to the troops coming in’. It did not bode well for the days that lay ahead.
