Tug of War

by Shelfold Bidwell

  The British were alarmed and humiliated by an event unparalleled in their military history. On September 16 a group of replacements (“reinforcements” in British terminology) 700 strong disembarked on the beach and refused to join their designated units. Mutiny, a premeditated, collective refusal to obey orders, is the most heinous of crimes in all armies, and though unthinkable, fear of it is never very far from the surface of consciousness in the military mind. The better the commander the more clearly he understands the delicacy of the balance between good leadership, man-management and discipline on the one side and the fearful stresses and strains imposed by modern warfare on the other. Its causes are known and the early symptoms detectable. Mutiny can be averted, but once the bonds of discipline are broken it is not easy to restore them. The ancient remedy was to surround mutineers with loyal troops and artillery loaded with case-shot and offer them the choice of obedience or massacre, but such draconian measures were no longer appropriate in the armies of the Western democracies. (The sterner and more brutal Russians and Germans never hesitated to shoot down a soldier who flinched or refused to obey an order in action. The officer who failed to do so was himself liable to disciplinary action.) A sit-down strike by 700 men, therefore, presented the officers of the beach organisation and the military police with a problem for which the regulations offered no solution.

  In the opinion of the authorities the basic cause of the mutiny was the failure to explain to the men concerned the grave emergency in the 10th Corps. The 9th Royal Fusiliers, for instance, had lost 300 all ranks at Battipaglia, a battalion of the Queen’s Regiment 182 and the 5th Hampshires three-quarters of its strength, and all the infantry needed replacements to some degree. Had this been understood, it was argued, there would have been no trouble. The blame, in fact, was shifted to the staff and commanders of the base organisation. This was a contributory cause, but the trouble had deeper roots. Unlike the US Army, the British, who in any case were desperately short of man-power, had no well-organised flexible pool of replacements by which men trained in the appropriate skills – squad rifleman, machine-gunner, radio-operator – could be sent to any regiment or battalion. In the British Army, with its system of mutually exclusive regiments designed to reinforce group loyalty and esprit de corps, a Guards battalion could only be reinforced by Guardsmen, Highlanders by Highlanders, and so on. It so happened that when the urgent appeal for infantry replacements for the 10th Corps was received and the staff of the base organisations trawled for infantry, some 200 caught in the net were men left behind by two veteran Eighth Army divisions, the 50th Northumbrian and the 51st Highland, which had returned to England in preparation for OVERLORD. These men believed that they had been promised that they too would be sent home as soon as they could be released from “extra-regimental employment”, or completed their convalescence from wounds or illness. The argument advanced in their defence, that being indoctrinated with the spirit of the regiment they resented being posted among strangers, was not so much the cause as the fact that they might be retained in Italy and altogether miss the chance of being reunited with their families. To this must be added the factor that the Scottish infantry, splendid fighters as they were, were given to riot and indiscipline, and took a pride in the fact that only their own officers and NCOs could control them.

  The impasse on the beach was resolved by the corps commander himself, Richard McCreery. Hearing of the trouble he went to the spot and undeterred by violent barracking addressed the mutineers. He reminded them of the seriousness of their offence, explained that their own comrades, British soldiers, were hard pressed and in danger, that he understood their feelings, but if they went at once and joined the battalions to which they were assigned their offence would be ignored. Five hundred responded, and 192, all from the 50th and 51st Divisions, were disarmed and returned to Africa for trial by court martial. The three ringleaders, all sergeants, of what had been a carefully organised act of collective disobedience, were sentenced to death and the remainder to terms of imprisonment. All sentences were then suspended, and the offenders sent back to Italy to earn their cancellation by good behaviour, which they did.1

  The moral of that unhappy incident was not lost on the British, and least of all on McCreery who, though no “feather duster”, was an excellent man-manager. He realised that a British citizen army required very careful handling. The gut feeling of the Salerno mutineers was neither a refusal to face the dangers of the battlefield nor undue attachment to their regiments but that they had been treated unreasonably; it wasn’t fair, a consideration counting a great deal with the British of all classes. The accusation that British commanders did not drive their men as did the Americans is, therefore, to a certain extent correct. Every British operation was carefully planned so as to save lives – to use fire-power and good tactics rather than an effusion of blood to reach objectives. As McCreery was to say when he became commander of the Eighth Army, “It was like an old steeple-chaser, good for one more race if it were carefully handled.”

  In contrast to the British commanders’ acceptance of human frailty, American commanders were overtly romantic about the capability of their men and covertly disgusted at their actual achievements. The contents of a covering letter from Colonel William Martin, who commanded the 143rd Infantry in 36th Division, to Major-General Fred Walker with an after-action report was applicable throughout the 36th and 45th Divisions:

  Officers from replacement depots who are inexperienced and who are not familiar with their platoons are assigned just prior to combat. All these vacancies should be filled much further in advance and also during the period of waiting for assignment these young officers should be given intensive training of the same type as units to which they are assigned are given. Most officers from replacement depots report soft and unprepared for the arduous task of leading a platoon in combat. The result is that they break down under stress and strain of battle and whole units become disorganised. Too many officers and as a natural sequence too many men are defeatists rather than determined fighters because they exaggerate enemy potentialities and report disturbing rumours of enemy strength and presence. This must be corrected and stopped and the spirit of confidence must prevail when men go into battle.2

  Clark’s perfectly correct reaction was to hound the inefficient who tolerated incompetence wherever they might be and to drive his Fifth Army remorselessly until they were hard, efficient and as professionally arrogant as the Germans. Casualties would not deter him and he would set an example in his intolerance of subordinates who did not drive their men in the face of the enemy as hard as he drove his army and himself.

  An event contributing to the legend of Salerno was the drop of part of the 82nd Airborne Division into the bridgehead on the night of September 13. It was dramatic enough, but it achieved no more than to boost morale for its influence on the battle was hardly decisive. It only underlines the makeshift nature of the arrangements for the reinforcement of the bridgehead, and that the obvious flaws in the operational plan for AVALANCHE were the wide gap in the centre and the vastly over-extended front initially allotted to the 10th Corps. When McCreery asked for his sector to be narrowed by moving the inter-corps boundary north it was done at the expense of poor Dawley, thus robbing Peter to pay Paul. Yet the obvious remedy was not adopted by Clark until the morning of September 13 (D-day plus four): to use the 82nd Airborne Division, GIANT II, the Rome operation, had been stood down on September 8 only when some of the leading aircraft had taken off, and the division made available to the Fifth Army, but Clark, preoccupied with the battle (or, possibly, not informed by his chief of staff) did not become aware of this until the 11th. Understandably, following the theory of airborne strategy so vehemently propounded by its supporters, he first could only reiterate the proposals for distant objectives along the lines originally proposed and shelved in GIANT 1; to drop them where they could most effectively interfere with the movement of enemy strategic reserves. This was the task given to the independe
nt 2nd/509th Parachute Battalion which Clark ordered to be dropped near Avellino on the night of September 14 with the mission of harassing the rear of the Germans attacking the 10th Corps. The operation was ill-timed and failed mainly owing to inaccurate navigation by the US Air Force. Not until the morning of the 13 th did he arrange for a regiment to be dropped inside the 6th Corps perimeter that night where it was most needed.

  The real significance of this affair is the light that it throws on the capabilities and characteristics of the commanders of the Fifth Army and the 15th Army Group. It showed that Clark lacked the instinctive grasp of tactics possessed by lesser but more battle-wise commanders. Alexander had let the unsound plan for AVALANCHE pass with no comment or objection, as he had the original plan for the invasion of Sicily, although objectionable on exactly the same grounds of dispersion. It does not require the advantage of hindsight to perceive that once the excellent 82nd Division was again available, Clark had in his grasp the quickest, best and most positive way to influence the battle at Salerno, by inserting it complete (plus some heavier artillery and tank-destroyers, not too difficult to supply) into the void between the two corps. Alexander, true to form, urged Clark to make use of it, but never gave the order. For what else do general officers commanding-in-chief exist? Instead, he wasted time in exhorting Montgomery to do what, if not completely impossible, was at least very difficult, and something that officer had no intention of doing. Here was seen the first indication of the flawed relationship between a strong-minded but tactically naive subordinate and a commander-in-chief who shrank from imposing his will; which was to bedevil Allied operations until November 1944 when Clark succeeded Alexander as leader of the army group.

  This was manifested again in the Affair of the Adventurous Journalists, mildly comical but injurious to Anglo-American relations. We left the British 13th Corps in Calabria, toiling forward over crest and crag through as complete a belt of demolitions as hitherto seen in war. It is greatly to the credit of its engineers that by September 8 it had covered over 100 road miles in five days, when it had run out of bridging material. Montgomery, on the very day of the AVALANCHE landings, reported that he was halting for a few days to improve his lines of communications. His decision was not made solely from over-caution. Unless there are roads over which trucks carrying petrol can run a motorised army is stalled, and until the existing roads can carry bridging lorries they cannot be extended. Not surprisingly, on the 10th he received an anxious signal from Alexander, urging him to disregard administrative risks and hurry to Clark’s aid. This having no effect Alexander sent his chief-of-staff to Montgomery on the 12th to re-emphasise the need for haste, and offering extra shipping to speed up the transport of stores. Montgomery replied that the best he could do was to send his light troops ahead, resume the advance of his main body on the 13th, and hope to pose a threat to the enemy forces surrounding the beach-head on the 17th. With this Alexander had to be satisfied, though it would seem that he felt anxious about the progress of AVALANCHE and even the safety of the Fifth Army well before Clark.

  By the 14th the 5th Division Reconnaissance Regiment’s leading troop was at Scalea, on Highway No. 18, without contact with any German outpost, and on the 16th it met a patrol from the 6th Corps at Vallo, some thirty miles south of Paestum. No one in the intelligence branches at Fifth Army or 15th Army Group should therefore have been in any doubt that the no-man’s-land south and east of the bridgehead was occupied by no more than a handful of German troops observing the movements of the Eighth Army. Nevertheless, the arrival in the Salerno bridgehead of a party of journalists from HQ Eighth Army, announcing that they had seen no enemy en route, caused great astonishment. This enterprising band together with their conducting officer had been visiting the forward areas, where they were told that there was no sign of the enemy. Scenting a scoop, they decided to try their luck and push on to Salerno. With the advice and help of friendly Italian officials they were able to avoid German picquets and thread their way through a maze of demolitions, including a belt made by US engineers to bar the approaches to the right flank of the 6th Corps, arriving at HQ Fifth Army on the 15th. There they were interviewed by Alexander himself, who was visiting Clark, and were able to inform him that nothing opposed the advance of the Eighth Army.

  This incident somewhat naturally led to a certain amount of derision on the part of the Americans. (Armies rapidly become jealous of their reputations. The British First took great exception to the vainglorious boasting by the Eighth whose members claimed to have come to its aid in Tunisia.) It would however have been no more than a minor irritation, had it not been for Montgomery’s personal message to Clark that soon he hoped to have joined hands with him. More harmful were directives from the press relations department of Alexander’s headquarters, suggesting that the situation at Salerno should be played down and the advance of the famous Eighth Army should be played up. This may have been intended more for enemy than friendly consumption, but it illustrates the dangers of manipulating news. It deeply offended the publicity-conscious Americans and was in the political context crass to a degree.3

  All hinged on personalities. Montgomery had made it clear in August that he considered the whole BAYTOWN project misguided and the distance between the two landings dangerous. One cannot help feeling that he enjoyed being proved correct. In any case his energy was expended in bursts, with lulls in between during which he did nothing but reflect, or bombard his seniors with advice on the future prosecution of the war. By September 12 he was beginning to rouse himself. He was about to deploy another corps and his eyes were turning not to Salerno but to major operations on the Adriatic coast, even the capture of Rome by an attack from the east. Martin Blumenson has suggested persuasively that a more enterprising or politically astute commander might have formed a sort of flying column and despatched it to Salerno. Such an improvisation was completely foreign to Montgomery’s military philosophy and it is rather absurd to argue that it would have been anything more than a gesture and, moreover, open to misinterpretation. Montgomery could just as easily have been accused of trying to steal the credit of Clark’s success.

  Alexander had been wrong to believe or encourage the idea that the Eighth Army could reach the Salerno bridgehead in time to do any good. If he felt that only Montgomery could save the Fifth Army he should have spoken to him face to face, and made himself familiar with the true state of affairs on the 13th Corps’ lines of communication. What Clark required was more infantry in the beach-head, and Alexander was, in the last analysis, responsible for wasting the British 1st Airborne in SLAPSTICK (where it achieved nothing of value) and not insisting on the 82nd being used to reinforce Clark as soon as GIANT II was cancelled.

  All of this is summed up by the picture of Montgomery reaching down from a vehicle to shake the hand of Mark Clark when he visited Salerno on September 24. It signifies the myth that the Eighth Army rescued the Fifth – of which many senior officers of the former remained convinced – and provoked the counter-myth that the Fifth had survived attack by a superior force while Montgomery dawdled. It is the sequel to the Affair of the Adventurous Journalists. Behind the captions there is another story. Clark’s inexperience was palpable but Montgomery’s patronising manner which established that there was a pupil and master relationship and that there was an unbridgeable chasm between the experienced Eighth and the novice Fifth Army was insufferable. Clark knew that he had not gripped the battle, to use a term to which Montgomery was addicted. In fact he had muddled through in spite of favourable odds, but he was not one to admit it, yet until he did he was incapable of learning any but the wrong lessons from the battle. One of these was that he would follow Montgomery’s advice not to take any notice of what Alexander told him to do because Alexander was a man of straw. Monty had known it for years. Another was that he would take a leaf out of Montgomery’s book and become a celebrity at the head of a celebrated army. Like Montgomery he would thrive on deriding his rivals and his allies, but
be much more circumspect than Montgomery about the way that he did it. He would keep his nose clean and avoid the pit into which Montgomery’s arrogance was leading him.

  The version of the battle as a near-run thing which he had pulled out of the fire served him well, and he himself believed it until the end, but it required a sacrifice and Dawley was sacked. On the 14th Clark received the Distinguished Service Cross for his leadership, and he thoroughly deserved it. But the complexity of Clark’s personality is illustrated by his uncertain touch when dealing with unsatisfactory subordinates. Another general might have put Dawley on a ship for Africa at the first sign of not measuring up to his heavy responsibilities. Yet he wavered, as he was to waver over Dawley’s successor, Major-General John P. Lucas, whom he also had to relieve, and over General Walker. It might have been thought that a man so determined to succeed might have demonstrated his force of character, and dissociated himself from failure by being a good butcher, but this he was not. When one of his staff boldly told him that he had sacked the wrong man and that it was General Fred Walker who ought to have gone after Salerno, he turned on him and rent him. It is true that when he was involved in building up the new US Army divisions he had earned a reputation for ruthlessness, but then he was acting for a powerful chief and was under his aegis. When the supreme authority was his, he was apt to falter. He only sacked Dawley when prompted by Alexander. When he relieved Lucas, Dawley’s successor, he weakly told him that it was because he was under pressure from Alexander. He allowed General Walker to continue in command, in spite of the poor performance of the regiments for whose training he had been responsible. It is possible that Clark felt diffident because he had been appointed corps commander over men who were older than he and senior in army rank, although that does not match his reputation for ruthlessness. It is difficult enough to make the decision to sack a corps or division commander in mid-battle even with great experience, and Clark was new to the burden and solitude of an army commander. He was also a man who weighed his every action as it might affect his own position, and in the politicised US Army all his prospective victims had friends at court.