Tug of War

by Shelfold Bidwell

  The German battle-group commanders had not been able to complete their preparations until the afternoon of the 13th. KG von Doering, or what remained of it, then found the defences south of Bivio Cioffi too strong for it, so it sheered off and joined KG Kleine Limburg in its attack on the 1st Battalion 157th RCT at the tobacco factory. Hit front and flank this battalion’s position was rapidly overrun; it broke and the survivors fled to the rear, rallying on the 3rd/157th. Part of KG Klein Limburg motored then with great verve across the unguarded bridge at Persano and attacked the luckless 2nd/143rd Infantry in the rear at the same time as KG Kruger, basically a battalion of the 71st Panzer Grenadier Regiment and a handful of tanks, drove through the isolated company “G” and fell frontally on its main position. Like two or three of the British battalions in the 10th Corps, the Americans were overawed by their first experience of a German attack delivered à outrance, every weapon blazing, tanks shooting up the defences while the grenadiers, shouting, leapt from their armoured carriers to follow their officers and under-officers in a charge made at the run, firing their sub-machine guns and flinging grenades as soon as they came to close quarters. Their morale broke, they offered little or no resistance and 500 out of a total strength of 834 surrendered, the rest fleeing to report that they had been attacked by a full panzer division. Meanwhile, the 71st Panzer Grenadiers scored another success over at Altavilla. The 3rd/142nd Infantry, following its orders, was preparing to capture Point 142, and was actually assembling on its start line when it was beaten to the punch and driven back in disorder, leaving one company surrounded. The 1st/142nd Infantry, sent up to support the attack, never arrived, having been caught by intense artillery fire when jammed in a defile, and cut to pieces.

  The time was now 5.30 p.m. with about an hour of daylight remaining. The view from HQ Fifth Army was bleak. General Walker had already suffered the loss of three battalions reduced to cadre, good only for puttying up small gaps in his defensive front. In the 45th Division the 1st/157th Infantry was more or less in the same case. The sound of battle was only too audible at HQ Fifth Army, located three miles south-west of the Sele–Calore confluence behind the 45th Division’s gun line. There seemed little to protect it from being overrun, and it went to panic stations; understandably, for the political consequences of its loss and the capture of the army commander would have been even more dire than the military. A scratch force made up of headquarters staff and employed men was hastily assembled for its local defence. General Clark put it at ten minutes’ notice to move if necessary, and ordered a fast naval craft to stand by to take him to 10th Corps, where the situation was more stable and where he could retain a toehold in Italy, if the worst came to the worst. More questionably he gave what he surely intended to be a secret and confidential instruction to Admiral Hewitt to make contingency plans to re-embark the 6th or possibly both corps. This was wholly impractical, but Hewitt, following the strict discipline of the US armed forces, complied with his orders, and his staff went through the motions of the exercise, but it was abandoned as abruptly as it had been started.* Hewitt himself, although unshaken, was not in the happiest of positions, as the air-naval conflict had reached the highest pitch during the battle. Two of his most valuable units, USS Philadelphia and HMS Uganda had been hard hit and were hors de combat. Fortunately for the invaders, the danger of the Germans cutting through to the sea was averted, partly by a misfortune to the right wing of KG Kruger, now thrusting deep into the Sele–Calore pocket, and the instant reaction of the well-trained and well-commanded artillery of the 45 th Division.

  A military road ran south from Persano through low ground to a point a quarter of a mile east of the confluence. It may have seemed reasonable to assume that no one built a road leading to nowhere, and that at its end there would be a bridge, but there was not. It was purely a road serving a training area. The only ford, near S. Cesareo on the Calore, was overlooked from the high south bank and difficult to find. There was no ford over the Sele. Having rounded up his prisoners the German commander, following the German principle of exploiting success, remounted his grenadiers and belted south at full speed, only to find that he had stuck his head in a bag. He was hardly to blame, for being part of the 29th Panzer Grenadier Division fresh up from Calabria he did not have the same detailed knowledge of the ground as the 16th Panzer Division. (The Italian maps were inaccurate, not having been amended since 1939, and gave both sides trouble.) He paid dearly for his mistake. In the 26th Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion every senior officer became a casualty. KG Kruger was immediately engaged by the observers of two field artillery battalions deployed south of the pocket, their fire reinforced by an armoured field battery sent up to join in the bombardment, together with some tanks and tank-destroyers. The field artillery fired 3,940 rounds in the next four hours and the panzer grenadiers, greeted by this rude welcome and failing to find an exit from the pocket after much milling around, withdrew to Persano.

  Ruenkel was now faced with the question of what his next move should be. On the one hand the German soldier had once more given an impressive demonstration of the superiority of his fighting power, the leading troops were less than seven miles from the beaches and all Ruenkel’s training as a German officer pushed him to the conclusion that now was the moment for the final heave that might dislodge an enemy already shaken by the day’s fighting. On the other, he could count the odds, which were cruelly against him. Privately he might have agreed with the views of the corps commanders. Balck, who was making little progress against the British 46th Division, and his own chief, Herr, were at that very moment trying to convince the euphoric von Vietinghoff that the enemy was not in full retreat, and that though it might be possible to score a few more local tactical successes there was no hope of a strategic victory. The Allies were growing stronger, and to persist in the counter-offensive would only destroy the Tenth Army. However, Ruenkel had been sent by Herr with the mission of driving his divisional commanders hard, and he considered that it was his duty to persist. He scolded Generalmajor Fries, 29th Division, for the failure of his battle-group in the pocket to fight its way out (such was the authority of a mere colonel of the General Staff) and at midnight gave out orders for resuming the offensive on the morning of the 14th. In the 29th Division the group at Altavilla was to stand fast, and the one in the pocket was to cross the Sele by the bridge south-east of Persano, make for Albanella village and then hook south-westward for Paestum and the coast. KG Kleine Limburg was to cross the Sele using the bridge near Albanella railway station and try to roll up the American line south of the La Cosa stream, as before. Neither attack made any headway. Dawley and Walker, urged by Clark, shortened the line and plugged the holes in it. Clark played a general’s part, touring the front, encouraging the troops and letting them see that he was cheerful and confident, and the troops, with characteristic American resilience, recovered their form, and grasping the fact that the way to deal with the panzers and panzer grenadiers was to stand firm and unleash their own formidable fire-power, shot them to pieces. By 3 p.m. they had re-pulsed every attack and their positions everywhere were intact.

  Late in the afternoon Ruenkel conceded failure and ordered all the German units to halt wherever they stood and dig in. General Sieckenius toured the front and returned at 9 p.m. with a gloomy report. Of the one hundred odd tanks in his division fifty-four had been runners on the morning of the 13th. Now he was down to twenty-two. (His 2nd Panzer Regiment was the major source of tanks for the various battle-groups formed in the whole of the 76th Corps.) As far as his own division was concerned, the men were worn out by their exertions and depressed by the enemy’s relentless artillery fire. They could do no more. Ruenkel was forced to agree that the 16th Panzer Division was a spent force, but even then remained determined to make one more effort. He reorganised the 76th Corps front, giving the sector north of the Sele to the 26th Panzer Division (lacking its panzer regiment but reinforced by two battalions of parachute infantry from Apulia), and conf
irmed that the 29th Panzer Grenadier Division would command all operations south of the Sele. There was to be a pause all day while this reorganisation was completed and preparations were made for the resumed offensive on the 16th. The 29th Division was to continue on the same thrust line and objective as on the 14th. The 26th was to attack through Battipaglia and open the vital stretch of road to Bellizzi, still dominated by the British 56th Division. This, it could be hoped, would squeeze the British between the 76th Corps and Balck’s Hermann Goering and the 15th Panzer Grenadier Division hammering away at the 46th Division in the north, and the 10th Corps position might crumble.

  This was indeed a forlorn hope. On the 15th the Allied aircraft were for the second day in succession out in force over the bridgehead, and their bombing combined with the sustained battering by the guns on land and sea held up the regrouping until after dark. Battipaglia lay in ruins, its streets choked with rubble and impassable to vehicles. The German artillery observers had not been able to find the units to which they had been assigned in the dark, with the result that the fire-plans in support of the attacks were not properly registered by daylight and proved ineffective. On the 16th the 29th Division made no impression on the now tightly knit and confident defenders along the La Cosa stream and once more the attacks withered under the American fire. The assault units of the 26th Panzer Division were once more decimated by the British defensive barrage as they assembled on their start line, and had made only a few hundred yards’ progress before they were thrown back to it by a powerful counter-attack by the tanks of the Royal Scots Greys who, displaying the true cavalry spirit, charged the attacking line from a flank and drove through it from end to end. They counted 200 German dead, and so the Scots Greys avenged the Hampshires. The remnants of the 26th Panzer Division were barely able to hold the position where it had assembled for its desperate stroke.

  After this third failure Kesselring assessed his position. He was not dissatisfied. For eight whole days he had with his scanty resources forced the Anglo-American army on to the defensive despite its air-power and the support of the heavy guns of the Allied fleet; indeed he was sure he had its measure. He could repeat this manoeuvre indefinitely, and had proved his point that he could fight a defensive war in central Italy. On the 17th orders went out to Tenth Army to put his plan for withdrawal into effect, and as a first move Herr disengaged, unharassed by any pursuit, and began to pull away to the north.

  So ended the great crisis – it could be called the great “flap” – of the Battle of Salerno. To be sure, there had been much hard fighting, setbacks and many anxious moments, but such is the very nature of war. When, however, all is said and done, the event that had so alarmed General Clark and led him momentarily to consider re-embarkation, and whose shock-waves reverberated as far as Alexander’s HQ 15th Army Group in Sicily and Eisenhower’s HQ in Algiers, was the attack on the 13th by no more than four battle-groups, each no more than a reinforced battalion; the whole little more than a British brigade or an American “regimental combat team”.

  By the 15th Clark had been reinforced by the first echelon of the British 7th Armoured Division, the third regiment of the 45th Infantry Division, and the dramatic if belated arrival of the 505th Parachute Infantry, dropped on the beach near Paestum, while an independent parachute battalion was dropped operationally at the same time behind the enemy lines near Avellino. By then the “crisis” of the battle was over.5

  The plan for the withdrawal of the Tenth Army was for the 76th Corps to wheel back, pivoting on its right, while the 14th hung on like grim death to the gateways leading northwards out of the bridgehead. Both corps would then gradually withdraw behind successive belts of demolitions until they reached the Gustav Line.

  It took McCreery’s tired infantry ten more days to force their way through the mountain passes against the dogged resistance of Balck’s equally tired panzer grenadiers, learning the difficult and to them unfamiliar art of mountain warfare as they went. At last on September 27 their vanguards emerged from the defiles leading to the plain of Naples. Those who had the opportunity to enjoy the pleasant prospect of orchard and vineyard with Vesuvius smoking peacefully in the distance, like the artillery observers perched on the last foothills covering the advance, then became aware of a strange phenomenon. There were no aircraft in the sky and the Allied artillery was for once silent, but as far as the eye could see the landscape was suddenly covered by a pattern of erupting plumes of brown-black smoke, followed by the muted rumble of distant explosions. Its significance became clear as the tanks and infantry advanced into the plain. The German engineers had fired their demolitions. Every bridge and culvert over stream, canal and irrigation ditch had gone up in the air; every crossroad and raised embankment had been cratered.

  The pace of the victorious advance on Naples was to be determined by the speed at which the engineers could sweep for land-mines and bridge the gaps. That was to be the pattern of war in Italy until the bitter end.

  * Apart from the tactical dangers of the withdrawal proving a rout and exposing the craft ashore to artillery fire, landing craft cannot easily beach and then load and haul off, as the additional weight increases their draught. Once aground they can only refloat by discharging their cargoes.

  6

  SALERNO – THE POSTSCRIPT

  Salerno had been truly an extraordinary battle. The low ratio of troops to space meant there were wide-open gaps not only between the corps and divisions but between battalions, and the result was “mobile warfare at the halt”, as the British Field-Marshal Wavell once said of the middle period of the Battle of the Somme. The 16th Panzer Division gained the upper hand at first because it was a fully motorised and armoured formation and Sieckenius handled it as if it were fighting an action on the steppes of Russia painted on a small canvas. General Clark persisted in regarding it as a defensive battle, an affair of defensive lines. In staff colleges and academic institutions where strategy and tactics are studied Salerno can doubtless still provide many “lessons” in the art or science of warfare. There is no need to labour these. It is sufficient to say that its course underlined the morale effect of violent, offensive action, of the propensity of intelligent and able men on both sides of the firing line to become the victims of their hopes or fears in defiance of the evidence, and above all, of the ancient principle that a force given a difficult and dangerous mission against a formidable opponent must have the strength and resources to match.

  Salerno was a decisive battle by virtue of being indecisive. Had Clark been provided with two full corps, strong in armour, able to burst out of the ring of hills and in the process smash the game but skeletal German divisions, Kesselring and his strategic arguments would have been discredited and the campaign in Italy have taken a completely different course. As it was, Kesselring concluded that one German soldier was worth three Anglo-Americans – they were soft, feared close combat and soon gave up – and given the topography of Italy he could prolong its defence indefinitely. The casualty figures support his view, bearing in mind that the Tenth Army was on the offensive, the costlier phase of war, as much as or more than the Fifth Army. The Germans inflicted 8,659 casualties and suffered 3,472; captured 3,000 prisoners and lost 630, most of them in the defence of the beaches on D-day. The superior performance of the Germans was at the root of the Allied commanders’ conclusions too, although they were less objective.

  In private the British and American commanders despised each other for lack of drive, attacking in insufficient strength and lack of appetite for combat. In this they resembled two whores upbraiding each other for lack of chastity. There were excellent, good, indifferent and downright bad units, both American and British, the real difference between them and the Germans being that many were green; hastily raised, from essentially unmilitary and on the whole reluctant populations. Their armies were what the Germans in a favourite but pejorative phrase used to call “militias”. They had to be handled appropriately and that had been beyond the abil
ity of some commanders and their staffs at Salerno. By contrast the German war-machine had been created for the pursuit by force of the national aim from a population long educated and indoctrinated in the martial virtues, and strictly trained and disciplined. German soldiers at Salerno had been easy to handle and their commanders had made mistakes without paying any penalty, taken risks and gained rewards. In fact, they had conducted the battle in a classical manner whereas their opponents had made elementary mistakes.

  Salerno therefore was an important event in the Italian campaign, not only because it enabled the German soldiers to take the measure of their opponents, but unalterably fixed the attitude of the Allied commanders to each other. The private reports of the British liaison officers attached to HQ Fifth Army were very disparaging of the Americans, who had made a bad plan, failed to exercise control of the battle, and had been sufficiently panicked to plan for re-embarkation. Clark’s vanity was badly scarred and he was convinced that the British as a matter of policy were determined to steal the publicity for victories gained by American valour. He took a strong dislike to McCreery which lasted until the end of the war; a “feather duster”, as he called him in his private diary.