by Norman Lewis
The Germans’ obvious takeover of an airfield left no doubt that an immediate counter-attack was likely. No attempt had been made by the Americans to secure the heights overlooking the beach-head, and in the absence of this precaution it seemed more than likely that the enemy would do just that. Altavilla, some six miles away, dominated this area and as a precautionary measure, since no Germans were there, General Clark called for a naval bombardment which left this mountain village in ruins, with substantial loss of life. This was opposed by his own staff, and General Walker later wrote, ‘I did not see how the destruction of buildings and killing of civilians in Altavilla was going to help our situation.’
Infantry units were now called upon to begin limited advances into the encircling hills, but since at this stage no armoured or artillery support was available, some clashes with the 16th Panzer Division’s Mark IV tanks were catastrophic. Blue Beach to the south now came under enemy artillery fire, and the attempt to land the first of the Fifth Army’s tanks here was frustrated. There was a day’s delay before the tanks could be brought ashore on Red Beach, within sight of our farmhouse at Albanella.
The mediocre performance of the first two days ashore was responsible for the growth of something like a military inferiority complex. The FW 190s came and went at will, and any hopes of discouraging them faded after a second and third Spitfire from Sicily succumbed to friendly fire. Rumours were an important part of the Intelligence Corps’ stock-in-trade and an ideal place to collect them was in the evening chow-line, through which they flowed like a ceaseless current. Pessimism was general, but it was of an informed character and bolstered by fact. General Clark, still out of sight on the Ancona, was fighting his first battle command, which was considered a bad start for those who served under him. The soldiers knew that Clark was at loggerheads with his subordinate generals, Dawlish and Walker, and that was a bad thing, too. Among the many rumours, most damaging was the one that Clark was already contemplating withdrawal and would approach the British Navy for their support. Attempting to trace the source of such rumours, it became evident that high-ranking officers on the Ancona talked with extraordinary freedom in the presence of the staff who served them in the mess. The Commander-in-Chief, a showman with a propensity for bullying his inferiors in public, was deeply unpopular with the troops. The sergeants expressing their views freely in the chow-line were of the opinion that Clark had done whatever he could to postpone ‘Operation Avalanche’ until Montgomery’s Eighth Army, coming up from Sicily, was in the vicinity, and preferred even now to defer an advance.
Minor probes into hilly country by infantry unprotected by tanks and without air-cover came to nothing when they ran into opposition, although Altavilla, devastated by the naval guns, was found to be empty. Clark and his staff now left the Ancona in search of ample accommodation for his headquarters ashore. It was inevitable that he should be shown the grandiose abandoned mansion known as the Villa Rossa, a folly full of statuary and old masters—inevitable, too, that he should have decided to move in. Thus, after the huge effort to bring a mountain of HQ equipment ashore and stack it, protected from the weather in a safe position, it now had to be humped by office staff and off-duty soldiers up to the villa, which was only accessible by narrow tracks.
In the old days aristocratic visitors to the Villa Rossa from Rome would have been dropped off at Albanella, within walking distance of our farmhouse. At the time of our arrival the village had been abandoned, with the exception of a shop selling sour white wine and an aphrodisiac cheese famous throughout southern Italy, made from the milk of local buffaloes mixed, it was said, with dried and ground-up flies.
The woman who ran the shop was outside whitewashing her doorstep and seven Sherman tanks were lined up across the road in the shade of a hedge. This was the morning of Day Four, and these were the tanks sent to the wrong beach on Day Three and which, escorted by destroyers, had finally been brought ashore at the point originally intended. The day was fine and the atmosphere calm, although in the distance there was a sound of thumping, like a fist on a heavy door. Having finished her task, the woman went inside and came out with several tiny glasses of wine, which she presented to the soldiers about to carry out the first armoured attack. The soldiers threw away their cigarettes, gulped down their wine, waved to the onlookers and climbed into the tanks. Moments later the engines started and the tanks rumbled away. At the end of the street they turned into the mountain road, and one of the bystanders said, ‘They are going to take Altavilla from the Germans.’ The ruins of the village had now been occupied by enemy troops.
After about an hour had passed, two of the tanks returned, driven in a way that suggested they were almost out of control. One charged past, climbed a bank and crashed through a hedge into a field. The other slewed right round and stopped, and the crew came through the door to fall weeping into each other’s arms. Thus ended, with the loss of five tanks, the Allied attack on Altavilla, and with this the curtain rose at last on the long-awaited battle.
In the evening chow-line back in Paestum the details of the sad happenings of that day were common knowledge. The sound of artillery fire was now clearly audible; the Luftwaffe, punctual as ever, was more brazen in its attacks, and some young Texans had formed a circle to pray in loud voices.
Moving onto the offensive, two American columns set out to ford the Sele River, possibly in the hope of blocking any enemy advance down the river valley to the coast. The attempt was frustrated by the 16th Panzer Division, and the attackers withdrew in disorder. Thus, whenever the Germans decided the time was ripe to push down to the sea, there was little but the fire of the gathering battleships to stop them.
In view of the failure of our mission and in the hope of securing our release from what had become an absurd predicament, four members of our section set out on their motorbikes for Salerno, using a track along the edge of the beach, and faced with the certainty that sooner or later they would have to pass through the German lines. While the rest of us remained in reverent occupation of the farmhouse, we decided as a matter of prudency, as the sounds of combat between the antitank unit and German Panzers advancing from the north came closer, to dig a slit trench between the house and the sea. Should the worst happen, our intention was to take to the water and swim along the coast until we reached an area where it looked safe to come ashore.
This crisis apart, this was a pleasant place and the time was passed chatting to displaced persons and Italian soldiers who had hastily demobilised themselves and were on their way home, and to the crew of a British 3.7 anti-aircraft gun, who had been due to land at Salerno but found themselves put ashore at Paestum. The sergeant was bewildered but phlegmatic. ‘We’re supposed to defend a gap,’ he said. ‘Is this it?’
‘Yes,’ I told him, ‘but there’s not much you can do. It’s ten miles wide.’
‘I see,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t make sense. So what am I supposed to fire at?’
‘Tanks,’ I told him, ‘coming down the river.’
‘This gun is designed to fire upwards,’ he said. ‘If it has to fire at tanks, we have to work on it to drop the angle. Feel like giving a hand?’ This we did and after an hour or two the gun pointed straight ahead. ‘You don’t seem to be too worried about this?’ I asked him. ‘I’m not,’ he said. ‘I was at Dunkirk. After Dunkirk nothing worries you.’
While this conversation had been going on three lost American infantrymen had wandered into sight. Somewhere in the Sele Corridor they had surrendered to a German tank. There was no room to take them aboard, so the tank had run over their weapons and let them go. That evening, in the last of the line-ups for chow before this procedure was abandoned, I was told by Americans of the same 45th Division to which these strays belonged that their orders were to take no prisoners, but to use the butts of their rifles to beat to death those who tried to surrender. At the time I rejected this as an exceedingly twisted form of boasting, but later, when I was in the field hospital with malaria, this sto
ry was repeated by several of the wounded and there was no option other than to accept it as a possible, if shocking, truth.
Day Four was one of assorted adventures and alarms. From dawn on, enemy planes were constantly overhead, weaving and twisting through the grey bruises left by the naval ack-ack shell bursts in the lemon sky. The artillery fire, previously no more than a soft thunderous rumble through the hills, was now recognisable as such with faintly audible blasts and concussions. Strain showed in the wary expressions of those who listened. The soldiers’ small-talk had dried up and their faces were thin, perhaps as a result of the absence of cooked food, which had now been replaced by packet K-rations containing ham, cheese, biscuits and sweets, all but the last being frequently thrown away.
The removal of the Fifth Army’s headquarters from the Ancona to the Villa Rossa was now complete, with most of the furniture and the senior officers comfortably installed, when the alarm was raised that spearheads of an armoured German column were within three miles. With this, a hasty evacuation of the villa began and General Clark moved into a mobile caravan. He was reported to have pressed US Admiral Hewitt to agree to re-embarkation, but his plea had been rejected by both Hewitt and the British Navy, because it was too reminiscent of Dunkirk, and also on the score of the thousands of tons of supplies that would have to be abandoned.
At the villa a ‘last-stand’ defence-line was organised, and MPs began a forceful mobilisation of all members of the villa’s staff considered capable of firing a gun. These included office clerks, maintenance personnel, electricians and bakers, and—outstandingly—members of a military band who had ill-advisedly volunteered to entertain guests at the headquarters’ formal opening. The defenders were given a choice of guns or spades. Heroic military rituals such as this, we were told, had been inherited from the American Civil War.
Having completed the enforced recruitment of the headquarters’ staff, the MPs dashed about in jeeps in search of other slackers and inevitably we fell into the net. They arrived while we were enjoying the last of the afternoon sun behind a sand dune. Light carbines were shoved into our hands and we were ordered to be ready to join the nearest resistance group, should the feared emergency arise. The news of General Clark was that he had ordered a tank landing-craft to stand by in case he and key members of his staff needed to escape to British General McCleary’s headquarters in Salerno.
Shortly after nightfall, and in bright moonlight, the battleship Warspite arrived offshore and began bombarding the German tanks in the Sele Corridor. Shells from its fifteen-inch guns passed overhead in clusters of fiery points, and as they struck home the trench shuddered, as if struck by the waves of a distant earthquake. At one point a major arms dump blew up and a great pulsating halo spread, twinkling with sparks and throwing out sensitive feelers of fire, across a half-mile of sky. At some time in the early hours three tanks came into sight a mile away at the edge of the beach, moved towards us, then turned back.
At 4 a.m., notwithstanding our conviction that we had been forgotten, an armoured car arrived to lead us on our motorcycles to an olive grove two miles to the south. This short journey involved us in the only serious danger we had encountered in the battle. Obliged to skirt a last-stand line, we were fired at by the defenders, who believed that they were being infiltrated by the enemy. There were blood-curdling screams from those hit by the bullets.
In the olive grove we joined a rabble of shocked, demoralised and even weeping soldiery. Our hope was to find just one senior officer who could perhaps calm them and convince them that they would neither be captured nor killed. But there were no officers here. Demoralised too, they had abandoned their men in a sauve qui peut panic and taken refuge on the ships, and it was late in the morning of the next day before they began to reappear. While these depressing happenings had been taking place, 500 paratroopers of the American 509th Parachute Regiment had been flown in to save the battle by creating a diversion in the enemy’s rear, being dropped up to twenty-five miles off target and a number on the roofs of buildings in Avellino from which, unable to disentangle themselves from their gear, they fell to their deaths.
Salerno was advertised and planned as one of the decisive battles of the Second World War, linked with the huge prestige of the return of the Allied armies to Europe. But with the collapse of the Italians, the Germans had no interest in remaining in southern Italy and, having fought no more than a series of delaying actions at Salerno, withdrew in good order. It was a withdrawal no more than accelerated by the news of the approach of Montgomery’s Eighth Army from Sicily. Of this battle General Alexander wrote in his War Diary, ‘The Germans may claim with some justification to have won, if not a victory, at least an important success over us.’
Thus, for 312 Field Security Section of the British Army, a mess of a battle had come to an end. We gathered up such belongings as had survived the confusion, mounted our motorcycles and rode off into the devastated landscape, making for the vast urban enigma of Naples, where our next year was to be spent.
1997
The Private Secretary
THE SECRET PROPOSALS FOR the destiny of a liberated Austria at the end of the last war were no more impractical, even absurd, than any such army schemes. They were under discussion at Security Headquarters at Castellammare, southern Italy, and were listened to against a background of soft guffaws by section members with some experience of operations of the kind. Experts neutered by the unreality of a non-combatant war were sent out from London to speak of the many war criminals who had taken refuge in this basically pacific country, from which, at the moment of defeat, they would slip away across the Alps to Italy en route for South America. A plan devised to baffle them was explained. It involved the encirclement of the whole country by hundreds of miles of unscaleable and impenetrable electrified fencing, linking radar-equipped strongpoints at twenty-mile intervals. Behind this fence the whole Austrian population, both military and civilian, would be confined, prior to investigation in the equivalent of a vast concentration camp, while Allied forces dealt with the expected pockets of armed resistance with firmness and precision.
Nothing in the history of warfare approached the ingenuity and the scale of this planned undertaking, yet when the talking was at an end, and we were finally despatched to the Italian frontier with Austria, our mood was one of profound scepticism. It was characteristic of this adventure that the Intelligence Corps sergeant with whom I had joined forces, a PhD in Hellenic studies, should be fluent in Greek of the time of Pericles, but spoke no German. We arrived at the Brenner Pass three days after the cessation of hostilities. According to the plan, this should have been firmly closed, with a mixture of thirty-odd million Germans and Austrians penned in behind the fences awaiting our arrival. The stunning fact was that the pass was wide open and we squeezed our lorry into the roadside as a grey avalanche of humanity slid down through the valleys towards us. The fugitives were on foot or being carried in every conceivable conveyance from farm-carts with peasants wedged in among their cattle to a circus steam-engine towing a truckful of performers, a few even still dressed for the ring, with a caged bear on a trolley. Many soldiers who had torn the distinguishing marks from their uniforms were mixed in with non-combatants of every kind and all ages. No one would ever know how many responsible for war crimes had been able to hide themselves away in this desperate snail’s-pace exodus into the neutrality of Italy.
Some hours later, radiator spouting steam, we reached the top of the pass ready for the view of the first of the strongpoints, the electrified fence and the searchlights that would turn the Alpine night into day. Of these nothing was to be seen, and even the post with its notice proclaiming the frontier’s existence had been dismantled and thrown to the roadside. Soon, with the frontier hardly two hours behind, we discovered in Austria an extraordinary normality. The war had never come as far as this and, with the first of the Russians still 200 miles away, Austria remained a fragment of the dismantled empire of the Hapsburgs. Country
people free of wartime controls came and went as they had always done. It was a journey into the past, full of picture-postcard Tyrolean scenes: farmers in Lederhosen with wooden pitchforks, yoked oxen, and gigantic mountain dogs bounding to snap at our wheels.
On the second day we reached our destination, the small Alpine town of Engelsdorf. Here there were houses painted with flowers and angels in flight, and churches with enormously high steeples and clocks with little hammer-armed figures revolving to music as they struck out the hours. Carts replacing the cars that had vanished were drawn by oxen with splendidly carved horns. Women wearing billowing skirts and bonnets kept the streets clean and scraped the ox-droppings into neat piles. We stopped for a girl herding geese, and later saw another shoeing a horse. From this small town all the men had been carried off to the war. Stopping, we listened to the silence, broken only by the tinkling of the ox-bells, which was to continue through day and night. Engelsdorf smelt of milk.
No hotels were open so we moved into a Gasthaus run by a Frau Pauli, possessor of the fairest skin, the blondest hair and, as a result of her endless labours, the hardest muscles of them all. She was assisted in her never-ending tasks by two girls, also blonde, beautiful and muscular. Sometimes they broke off from whatever they were doing to watch with bereaved eyes as a squad of newly arrived young British soldiers marched by. Asked what had happened to husbands or lovers, the answer was, ‘Sir, the house-painter [Adolf Hitler] carried them away to Russland. We do not think we shall see them again.’ Work, perhaps, saved them from repining, and for the abandoned women of Engelsdorf work was unending.