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 victory. 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 Clark 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.”
“Naples has been taken by our troops,” Clark radioed Alexander. “City quiet. No indications of disease or disorder.” The delirious welcome buoyed Clark’s spirits, and to Renie he wrote, “I give you Naples for your birthday. I love you. Wayne.”
It proved an odd gift, neither quiet nor lacking in disease and disorder. Insurrection had flared in Naples on September 26, two weeks after Kesselring’s troops occupied the city and began conscripting young men into labor battalions. A reign of German terror that featured public executions for minor infractions led first to gunplay by Italian snipers reportedly as young as nine, and then to pitched battles in the railroad station and Piazza Carlo III. Rebels manhandled streetcars to build barricades, and fought with shotguns, swords, ancient muskets, and roofing tiles. An estimated three hundred locals died in the brawling, and the OSS believed that Neapolitan fury had forced German troops to quit the city two days sooner than planned.
“There were still Germans fighting in spots,” Gavin later told his diary, “but worse the Italians were fighting each other, accusing friends and foes alike of being Fascists or tedeschi.” Teenagers in tin helmets roamed the streets, armed with kitchen knives, tire irons, and German Lugers; red Italian grenades dangled from their belts. Robert Capa photographed a schoolhouse converted into a morgue with twenty boys arrayed in twenty crude coffins shouldered by men in black fedoras; keening women blotted their eyes and held up photographs of their dead children. George Biddle took his sketchbook into the Ospedale degli Incurabili, where he found 150 dead civilians on stretchers and window shutters, slips of paper with their names and addresses tucked into their folded hands. There were no trucks to haul them to graveyards, nor was there water to wash their blood from the hospital floor. Families carrying clean shirts and white undergarments to dress the dead “wandered about the corridor in the semi-darkness, holding mufflers or handkerchefs over their faces,” and peering at each body in dread of finding a familiar face.
Naples itself—“the most beautiful city in the universe,” in Stendahl’s judgment—had been mutilated. German vengeance at Italy’s betrayal foreshadowed the spasmodic violence that European towns large and small could expect as the price of liberation. Half of the city’s one million residents had remained through the German occupation, but none now had running water: Wehrmacht sappers had blown up the main aqueduct in seven places and drained municipal reservoirs. Dynamite dropped down manholes wrecked at least forty sewer lines. Explosives also demolished the long-distance telephone exchange, three-quarters of the city’s bridges, and electrical generators and substations. Among the gutted industrial plants—about fifty in all—were a steelworks, an oil refinery, breweries, tanneries, and canneries; others were wired for demolition though they had been not fired. Saboteurs wrecked city trams, repair barns, and even street cleaners. A railroad tunnel into Naples was blocked by crashing two trains head-on. Coal stockpiles were ignited, and for weeks served as beacons for Luftwaffe bombers. The Germans had extorted ransom from Italian fishermen for their boats—a small skiff was worth one gold watch—and then burned the fleet anyway. Even the stairwells in barracks and apartment buildings were dynamited to make the upper floors inaccessible.
The opportunities for cultural atrocity were boundless in a city so rich in culture. A German battalion burst into the library of the Italian Royal Society, soaked the shelves with kerosene, and fired the place with grenades, shooting guards who resisted and keeping firemen at bay. The city archives and fifty thousand volumes at the University of Naples, where Thomas Aquinas once taught, got the same treatment, leaving the place “stinking of burned old leather and petrol.” Another eighty thousand precious books and manuscripts stored in Nola were reduced to ashes, along with paintings, ceramics, and ivories.
Worse yet was the sabotage around the great port, which compounded grievous damage inflicted by months of Allied bombing. Half a mile inland, the city’s commercial districts remained mostly intact, although looters had rifled the Singer Sewing Machine showroom and the Kodak shop on Via Roma. But along the esplanade—where the corpse of the beautiful Siren Parthenope was said to have washed ashore after Odysseus spurned her “high, thrilling song”—all was shambles. Bombs had battered the Castel Nuovo, the National Library, and the Palazzo Reale, where every window was broken, the roof punctured, and the chapel demolished by a detonation beneath the ceiling beams. Grand hotels—the Excelsior, the Vesuvio, the Continental—had been gutted by bombs or by German vandals who torched the rooms and ignited the bedding in courtyard bonfires. An American port battalion stevedore, Paul W. Brown, described waterside buildings that had been
sliced in half, leaving the remaining halves showing exposed rooms with furniture intact or half hanging out, pictures on a wall, a brass bed slanting down toward the street, bed linen still in place. From the open side of a third-story room the legs of a corpse dangled.
Not a single vessel remained afloat in the port, a drowned forest of charred booms, masts, and funnels. Thirty major wrecks could be seen, and ten times that number lay submerged. All tugs and harbor craft had been sunk; all grain elevators and warehouses demolished; all three hundred cranes sabotaged or toppled into the water. Vessels had been scuttled at fifty-eight of sixty-one berths, often one atop another. An Axis ship with seven thousand tons of ammunition had blown up at Pier F, wrecking four adjacent city blocks, and fires still smoldered on October 2. At Mole H, slips were blocked by a dozen rail cars and a pair of ninety-ton cranes shoved off the pier. Quayside buildings were dynamited so that their rubble tumbled like scree across the docks. To complicate salvage, German demolitionists had seeded the harbor with ammunition, oxygen tanks, and mines.
Only rats still inhabited the waterfront, and hungry urchins with knife-edge shoulder blades who reminded Paul Brown of “small, aged animals.” Although U.S. Ar
my engineers reported that the sabotage had been conducted “by a man who knew his business,” a closer inspection revealed that the Germans “planned their demolitions for revenge, to wreck the economy of Naples, rather than to prevent Allied use of the port.” As the Allies learned from each campaign, so did the Germans, and they would be less sentimental and more comprehensive when the time came to undo Marseilles and Cherbourg.
Still, the damage was monstrous. To sustain an army of half a million men—and Fifth Army would be half that size within weeks—required the monthly cargo equivalent of sixty-eight Liberty ships. Only Naples—sad, scuttled, big-shouldered Naples—could handle such commerce. There was nothing for it but to get to work, and to bring the Siren back from the dead.
The capture of Naples gave Clark time to take stock of a campaign that grew bigger and dirtier by the day. Rommel’s genteel Krieg ohne Hass—“war without hate”—was but a hazy memory from North Africa. The brutality of total war had long been felt on the Eastern Front, but as the Second World War entered its fifth year the stain spread throughout western Europe.
Contrary to Clark’s hopes, the Italian army contributed little to the Allied cause after Rome’s capitulation. Twenty-nine Italian divisions in the Balkans and five more in France mostly surrendered to the Germans, sometimes duped by forged orders and sometimes reduced by force. “Every bomb is chipping a little piece off my heart,” the Italian garrison commander on Rhodes radioed during a Luftwaffe attack. Those defending Italia proper proved just as impotent.
Brave souls—and there were some—faced barbaric reprisals. On the rocky Greek island of Cephalonia, in the Ionian Sea, the 12,000-man Italian army garrison fought for five days at a cost of 1,250 combat deaths before surrendering on September 22. On orders from Berlin, more than 6,000 prisoners were promptly shot, including orderlies with Red Cross brassards, wounded men dragged to the wall from their hospital beds, and officers, executed in batches of eight and twelve. An Italian commander ripped off the Iron Cross given him by Hitler personally and flung it at his firing squad. The dead were ballasted on rafts and sunk at sea or burned in huge pyres that blackened the Ionian sky for a week; decades later, when the air grew heavy and clouds darkened before a storm, islanders would say, “The Italians are burning.”
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