Tug of War

by Shelfold Bidwell

  Next morning, the 11th, Sieckenius received his staff’s reports at the pre-breakfast briefing. The good news was that the reconnaissance battalion of the 15th Panzer Division had reinforced Dornemann in the area north of Salerno, and that KG von Doering had not only completed its circuitous march, but had picked up a battalion of the 15th Panzer Grenadier Regiment of the 29th Division marching up from Calabria on the way. (This was the 3rd Battalion. Later in the day the 2nd Battalion of the 71st Panzer Grenadier Regiment arrived.) He felt that he now had the resources to deal with the two remaining and imminent dangers. He sent the battalion of panzer grenadiers to hold Altavilla and the high ground at Point 424 commanding the village, to ensure against any American move towards the Ponte Sele from that direction. Von Doering was to move into the void north of the Sele, wheel northwards, drive in the British at S. Lucia and make for the bridge over the Tusciano at Fosso; his attack to be coordinated by one in the opposite direction with the same objective by the 2nd Battalion/64th Panzer Grenadier Regiment.

  The main attack failed. General Graham had pulled his now contracted right wing together and coordinated his divisional artillery, and von Doering was stopped cold short of S. Lucia by its intense defensive fire; the 2nd/64th receiving the same treatment. The battalion ordered to Altavilla had occupied it without opposition and then been withdrawn by its parent division of which the headquarters was, by then, at Postiglione. This infuriated Sieckenius who, no longer able to endure the contradictory flow of orders, demanded to be told who was in charge of operations. The reply that it was Herr was followed by a warning order from the 76th Corps. A concerted full-scale attack would be mounted against the bridgehead as soon as the main body of the 29th Panzer Grenadier Division and the 9th Panzer Grenadier Regiment from the 26th Panzer Division arrived from the south, on September 13 or 14. It was now the afternoon of the 11th and assistance from the south was badly needed before the 13th. Heavy concentrations of artillery fire were falling on Battipaglia and it seemed that another attack was imminent, but there were no reserves to meet it. Montecorvino airfield had been finally lost to the British, helped by the support of heavy naval guns whose never-ending bombardment was beginning to wear down the morale of the hard-pressed German defence. At this stage, ironically, the commanders on both sides were apprehensive of the latent danger of the void between the two British corps and the two wings of the 16th Panzer Division. While Clark was only too conscious of the fact that he had two inner open flanks Sieckenius saw a clear run for the invaders up to Eboli and a lack of troops to plug the gap. He was alarmed by reports that the Americans were showing signs of activity in the area.8

  After its unrealised success on D-day when it had shouldered KG von Doering off the battlefield, the 6th Corps on the 10th occupied the high ground in front of the 36th Division as far as Albanella village without opposition, while the administrative muddle behind was sorted out. Early in the morning part of the floating reserve, the 179th RCT of 45th Division, landed, followed in the afternoon by the two-battalion 157th RCT, without orders, on the initiative of the naval commander concerned who had become impatient with standing on and off while his craft presented moving targets in a shooting gallery for German guns and fighter-bombers. General Middleton and his headquarters landed, collected both RCTs under his command, attached tanks and M10 tank-destroyers to each, deployed his field artillery and prepared to function as a division. General Dawley now had two divisions and could function as a corps commander, had he been allowed to, and not had an anxious and eager army commander breathing down his neck.

  When General Clark came ashore from USS Ancon to visit his commanders on the 10th, McCreery without any beating about the bush told him what was obvious: he was involved in heavy fighting all along his front, especially at Battipaglia, he had had to refuse his right flank at S. Lucia as it was wide open, and he had no troops to spare to send eight miles away to the east to capture Ponte Sele, one of the objectives allotted to the 10th Corps in the operational plan. Clark agreed. He saw that McCreery was being distracted from his primary mission, to open the roads to Naples and Avellino, so he decided to move the 6th Corps boundary northwards in 10th Corps’ favour, and to send a battalion group from the 36th Division by sea to Maori to reinforce the US Ranger Force, at that moment holding on to the pass over M. di Chiunzi leading down to Nocera on the Naples road. He then repaired to HQ 6th Corps where he ordered Dawley to assume the offensive and made his plan for him. (The relationship between Dawley and Clark ended in open disagreement, with Dawley calling his army commander a “boy scout” and being finally dismissed. It seemed to have been fraught from the first hour of the invasion with lack of confidence and understanding, when Clark had impulsively ordered him ashore on D-day to command a single division and without his staff.) The 6th Corps attack would be made on three thrust lines. On the left the 157th RCT, which had been landed just south of the mouth of the Sele, was to cross over by the bridge near Albanella railway station, demolished by the Germans but repaired by the US Engineers. This would automatically take care of the northward shift of the inter-corps boundary. It was then to advance along the secondary road leading from the junction with Highway No. 18 to Eboli as its objective, an ambitious manoeuvre involving a march of eight miles. The 179th was to advance with two battalions between the Sele and the Calore, and its third battalion south of the Calore, to secure the Ponte Sele, while a battalion from the 142nd Infantry of 36th Division occupied Altavilla.

  In the meantime, General Graham, though he had lost Battipaglia, was not prepared to relinquish his hold on the road; he was about to send the Scots Guards battalion of the 201st Guards Brigade to capture a strongly built and fenced group of warehouses known as the “British” tobacco factory commanding the road east of Bellizzi. (Two almost similar groups of buildings, stoutly built, fenced and arranged in a circle were the scene of hard fighting and were both confusingly known to the Allies as “the” tobacco factory. This one, unsuccessfully attacked by the Scots Guards, was on Highway No. 18. The other, the “American” tobacco factory was just north of Persano on the other side of the River Sele and was about to be the scene of a clash between the 157th RCT and elements of KG von Doering.) Thus an interesting situation was about to develop as both sides launched simultaneous offensives. Parts of KGs Stempel, von Holtey and von Doering were about to fail in their attempt to drive back the 56th Division, KG von Doering more or less crossing the thrust line of the 157th from right to left, while the Panzer Grenadier battalion that had been withdrawn from Altavilla just before the 142nd Infantry occupied it, was ordered to retake it.

  Partly due to the compartmented nature of the battlefield, and partly due to lack of contact and knowledge of where the enemy was, the Americans did not mount well-prepared attacks but simply marched off into the blue. Preoccupied with organising themselves after the confusion of unplanned landings, they neither sent out reconnaissance patrols nor showed any inquisitiveness about the strength or whereabouts of the enemy. They were also very slow. The 157th RCT did not move off until the afternoon of the 11th. It crossed the river and turned off Highway No. 18 on to a secondary road that led northwards towards Eboli. Some two miles on the vanguard stopped to examine a group of buildings used as a storage depot and drying sheds where the tobacco crop was cured, the “American” tobacco factory. The ground was open, and the company of Sherman tanks attached to the 157th RCT approached it cautiously, only to lose seven tanks to a sudden burst of fire. It was held by some carefully concealed tanks and anti-tank guns of KG von Doering, posted to act as flank protection for the attack against the 56th Division. Feeling out to his left, the commander of the 157th came into contact with other German positions, while still further over on that side he could hear heavy firing. In fact what he heard was the terrific defensive fire which the British artillery was laying down in front of the attack by von Holtey and von Doering on Graham’s right flank. The Germans had been halted there, and had the commander of the 157th
Infantry shown the slightest curiosity or, better, in the old phrase “marched to the sound of the guns” he might have caused the German attack to finish not merely in defeat but disaster. Instead, he decided to halt his advance and remained where he was doing nothing until the following day.

  The 179th RCT proved equally unenterprising. While one battalion advanced as a flank guard south of the Calore, the others entered the Sele-Calore pocket and were fired on from Persano, by then held by a detachment from KG von Doering and some recently arrived parachutists. Leaving the supporting tanks and tank-destroyers behind to cover the village, they moved on tentatively towards Ponte Sele, their objective. One battalion halted after advancing 1,000 yards, the other found the objective defended, occupied it briefly after a brisk fight, but then withdrew. In fact, the bridge was held by a weak guard scratched up from some engineers and reconnaissance troops, KG Kleine Limburg, which could have been easily driven off by a determined attack, but the commander of the 179th RCT decided not to attempt it as night was falling. He fell back on his other battalion and also did nothing until the following day. His third battalion had been directed, somewhat ambitiously, on the village of Serre on Highway No. 19, eight miles from its jump-off line. It ran into stiff resistance at a bridge over the Calore from a battalion of the 71st Panzer Grenadier Regiment and, feeling exposed, fell back to the La Cosa stream early on the 12th and dug in behind it.

  The 1st Battalion of 142nd RCT of 36th Division found Altavilla unoccupied and put it into a state of defence, but its position would have been tenable only if the rest of the corps operation had been successful and Eboli and Ponte Sele captured. During the night of the 11th, the battalion of the 15th Panzer Grenadier Regiment ordered to re-occupy Altavilla by Sieckenius, using the aggressive tactics that made the German infantryman so dangerous an opponent, infiltrated between the companies of the 1st/142nd Infantry, waited for daylight and defeated them one by one. In fact, the plan made by General Clark was bad; the effort dispersed in three different directions, the objectives chosen without any consideration of the enemy or, indeed, any knowledge of his locations or strength or consideration of how they were to be secured when captured. Sieckenius’ entire resources – little more than the two powerful RCTs sent against him – were fully occupied against the other corps, and a well-coordinated attack by the Americans might have won a considerable success. As it turned out, the outcome of the operations of the 11th did not win any laurels for either side.

  General Clark, in the meantime, had been shanghaied. As it had not yet been possible for him to establish even a small command post ashore, he had returned to USS Ancon, whose identity as a command ship, bristling with radio antennae, was obvious to the enemy. On the 11th the radio intercepts of Luftwaffe traffic revealed instructions for a mass attack on her after dark. Admiral Hewitt accordingly ordered her to put to sea and was later rewarded by intercepts of the Luftwaffe pilots’ transmissions, enquiring of each other if they could see Ancon. This was satisfactory from Admiral Hewitt’s point of view, but it kept Clark away from the battle until late on the 12th. That morning the 179th nerved itself to attack Persano, to find its defenders had vanished, and the 157th wrested possession of the tobacco factory from von Doering’s 79th Panzer Grenadiers, successfully repelled a counter-attack and captured the bridge over the Sele leading to Persano. So ended the 6th Corps’ first attempt at an offensive.

  General Clark returned from his unwanted cruise in USS Ancon in a pardonable mood of rage and frustration. He had been cut off from the battlefield at the very moment when he should have been in hourly touch with events, and returned on the 12th to learn that his offensive had failed, although, by securing the “American” tobacco factory, Persano village and the bridge over the Sele between those two places, the 157th RCT had given him, had he but realised it, possession of a key area in the 6th Corps sector. Instead, his chagrin at the failure of his plan led him to upbraid Dawley. In reality the principal responsibility for the failure was his, for he had dissipated the strength of his powerful RCTs instead of concentrating them on one vital objective. The blame had to be shared with the two divisional commanders and, indeed, lack of training in Africa and Sicily was evident. The regimental commanders and battalion commanders clearly had not been drilled to the point when the process of locating the enemy, closely reconnoitring his position, making a coordinated plan for the use of infantry, tanks and artillery, briefing all ranks and then striking hard was second nature. Instead they marched and counter-marched to no effect and withdrew into a shell of defence, like snails, at the first sign of opposition. Dawley was not a man capable of inspiring or driving on his divisional commanders. In this connection one might speculate on how the battle would have gone had Eisenhower not turned down General Patton’s plea to be given the 6th Corps after Seventh Army had been sidetracked following the end of the Battle of Sicily. Dawley had been on the wrong foot from the start of the battle. He was irritated by Clark’s sudden and unexplained orders, and chagrined by Clark blaming him for not anticipating them. On his side, Clark’s concept of the art of command did not embrace the idea that as well as driving his subordinates he should support and encourage them. The unhappy rift between the two men dated from the 12th.

  On that day Clark analysed the situation as follows (to quote Martin Blumenson):

  To General Clark, who came ashore again on the 12th September and who found the 45th Division “badly bruised”, the German strength near Persano seemed to be a spear pointing towards the center of the bridge-head. If the Germans pushed to the sea, they could turn the inner flank of either or both corps … Dawley, Clark believed, had either misinterpreted the failure of the 45th Division’s thrusts towards Ponte Sele and Eboli or was oblivious to its meaning. To Clark, it was clearly evident that the enemy intended to launch a major attack in that area, and that adequate measures had to be taken to meet it.9

  It is not at all clear how much of this estimate was the result of sitting down with his staff and how much instinctive and “off the top of his head”, but he was both right and wrong. He had at last seen the potential danger of the gap between the two corps, and also the mistake of allotting the 10th Corps so absurdly long a front, and agreed to shift the boundary between the corps northward. His expectation that the enemy would exploit it was to prove correct, but at that moment they were not in any strength near Persano, nor were they to be reinforced for another twenty-four hours. As for Clark’s impression of the state of the 45 th Division, it is reasonable to conclude that it was based more on the timidity of its senior officers than on the physical condition of its soldiers or its casualties. Except morally, it cannot have been hurt, let alone “badly bruised”, by what had been no more than a little skirmishing. The rank and file may have been confused, even depressed, by these inconclusive manoeuvres, and the division may have been disorganised, no more.

  If General Clark is to be criticised for his decision on the 12th it can be said that he “took counsel of his fears”, he did not follow the logic of his analysis to its conclusion and he failed to discharge his proper responsibilities as the commander of an army. If he was so certain that a counter-offensive was about to be unleashed against his left-centre, it would have been prudent to call off the plan to recapture Altavilla, and strengthen his left by shortening and drawing in his right. As it was, the 6th Corps was spread out in a thin cordon of battalions some twenty miles long. The situation cried out for closer coordination between the two corps, so lacking on the 11th, but Clark, who had good reason to be dissatisfied with the progress of the 10th Corps, once he had assisted McCreery by shortening its front, left him to fight a separate battle, while he himself, virtually abdicating his position as army commander, personally directed the 6th Corps.

  The position in 10th Corps was not dire, but stagnant. McCreery’s hope of gaining a foothold in the exits of the mountain passes had been foiled, the airfield although clear was still dominated by the enemy and unusable, and he had lost h
is grip on the key area of Highway No. 18. The Scots Guards entered the “British” tobacco factory, only to be thrown out again, so it and Battipaglia were once more in enemy hands. On the 11th the 167th Brigade of 56th Division on the extreme right of the 10th Corps had repulsed the attack by KG von Doering, but in the evening part of KG Stempel after a brief but violent artillery bombardment fell on the remaining units of the 201st Guards Brigade still holding a stretch of Highway No. 18 west of Battipaglia, putting first a company of 3rd Coldstream and then a company of the 6th Grenadiers to flight and sweeping with undiminished momentum into the 6th Grenadiers’ position. For a time it seemed as if it was about to be overrun, and the battalion headquarters staff burned their marked maps and code books. However, the remainder of the Grenadiers and Coldstream stood fast and then counter-attacked, to discover that their assailant was a single battalion, which upon being challenged disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived. The brigade commander nonetheless thought it prudent to withdraw half a mile or more to a position more suitable for defence. This short withdrawal had a significant if misleading influence on the plans the Germans were to make in the next few days. The 10th Corps had by the 12th suffered not severe but significant casualties, including the greater part of the 1,500 prisoners captured in the bridgehead, and it was everywhere on the defensive. It might be thought that this is where the presence of an army commander was urgently needed, but Clark was now obsessed by his premonition of an impending attack on the left of the 6th Corps, and determined to run that battle personally. In any case, rightly or wrongly, he considered that he could only advise and request a British commander, and not drive him as he would a subordinate in his own army.