World Battlefronts: The Shape of Hell

For the men who fought the battles, Salerno was hell. At some points the Germans let the first forces come smoothly ashore and cluster on the white beaches, then blanketed them with artillery fire from the near hills. At others, naval landing craft bore the troops landward in the face of continuous fire. Everywhere the men of the Fifth Army had to establish themselves on the beaches, make their first moves inland amid shells, bombs, confusion, fear.

Twelve days after the landings, no connected, firsthand account of all the battles in the British, U.S. and Canadian sectors had reached the U.S. Like the soldiers, the front-line correspondents saw only the shapes of their particular hells. Of the accounts which did arrive, the clearest told of the crisis in an American sector, near the juncture of the Sele and Galore Rivers, where Field Marshal Albert Kesselring’s forces almost pushed to the sea.

TIME Correspondent Will Lang was with a U.S. regiment in that sector. Many of its officers and men were Oklahomans. The regiment was one of several units ordered to march inland, seize high ground commanding a key bridge on the Sele and forestall what finally happened—the German thrust which almost split the beachhead. Said the regiment’s Colonel, explaining the orders to his battalion officers: “It’s pretty far inland and we don’t know exactly what the enemy’s got in that area. But it must be urgent to get that high ground, or we wouldn’t be sent off with so little information.”

The Trick. At sundown the regiment set off. As the soldiers trudged through a moonlit town, a civilian in a long coat gestured and jabbered something about Germans. The soldiers paid no attention. But they remembered later.

In the early morning a German plane bombed the regiment, dispersed for two hours’ sleep in the fields. Three wounded men were sent to the rear; the regiment marched on. By 6 a.m. Lieut. Colonel Earl Taylor’s 3rd Battalion was near the bridge on the Sele.

A German machine gun chattered. Colonel Taylor, a company commander and an artillery captain stood on the road, scanning the tree-screened way to the bridge.

Rifle and machine-gun fire suddenly swept the road. The three officers dropped. The company commander was dead, the artillery captain wounded. Colonel Taylor was unhurt, and he bawled: “Put some artillery on those bastards! Let’s get them!”

Private Louis Fadel looked out of his foxhole, saw men in khaki shorts, khaki shirts and pith helmets across the river. They looked like British soldiers. A faint voice called: “Don’t fire on us. We’re friends. We’re friends.” Fadel’s sergeant ordered his men to hold their fire.

A violent stream of artillery and machine-gun fire tore the platoon positions. Said Private Fadel: “We weren’t fooled any longer. Our artillery started knocking hell out of the houses across the river, and when men in pith helmets came rushing from the buildings, screaming for mercy, we opened up at them with everything we had. We wouldn’t let them go after that trick.”

The Trap. A German Mark-VI and four Mark-IV tanks suddenly appeared on the road. Atop a bare ridge, Sergeant Stanton Dobbins and his men got set with rifle grenades (see p. 68). When the tanks were 60 yards away Dobbins cried: “Let ’em have it.” The first volley set one tank afire, knocked the treads off another. Other tanks came up, concentrated their fire on the slopes where the Americans lay. Some of the soldiers fled. Three more tanks were hit; the rest turned away.

German artillery raked the battalion the rest of the day. A shell from a German 88 hit a company commander pointblank, hurled his body 60 feet. But the men clung to the hills by the bridge, awaiting reinforcements. They did not come. The regiment was trapped. That morning, while the Americans attacked toward the bridge, the Germans had taken a town far to the rear. The enemy had evidently watched the regiment’s advance the night before, had skillfully moved in behind it. Parts of an armored division and a motorized division, outnumbering the Americans, had sheared through the extended U.S. column, isolated the regiment’s tank destroyers, most of its artillery and its reserves of food, water, gasoline, ammunition. The regiment’s officers now remembered the old man at the crossroads trying to tell them something about the Germans.

Lieut. Colonel Edwin Stephenson and three enlisted men saw a German tank running down a road and knocking down U.S. infantrymen like bowling pins. Another tank headed for Colonel Stephenson, Corporals Perry Baker and Alvin Copeland and Private Eli Franklin. The Colonel said: “Boys, let’s stay.”

“Yes, sir,” they said. They and the Colonel crawled into a ditch by the road, fired when the tank was ten feet away. The tank began smoking and the German crew, screaming with pain, started to climb from the turret. Colonel Stephenson said: “My men cut them down one by one with rifles as they climbed out.”

By dusk two battalions with their artillery had been completely cut off, and another was in danger. One battalion, sadly thinned, was pulled back from the hills by the Sele. All were grouped in close defensive rings. The 105-mm. guns were turned around, faced the way the regiment had marched the night before. Only 15 rounds remained for each gun, and they were silent.

The Germans were silent, too, and the trapped men felt that the enemy was closing around them. A lieutenant from Chicago pulled out a snapshot of his girl and said: “There’s the thing. If I live to see her again. . . .”

For reasons unknown, the Germans did not attack that night. Next morning artillery thundered in the distance, a relief column appeared under German fire, and the battalion 105s spat their hoarded ammunition. Cabled Correspondent Lang:

“The regiment had fought off day attacks. It had been sleepless for two nights. Now it had not only hope but a deep and bitter hatred. There were a great many Americans killed and wounded when the Germans had the upper hand. There were dead men who had been old buddies of the survivors, who had trained with them at home and fought successfully with them in Sicily. There is still fierce fighting for this bridgehead, but this regiment will yet avenge its dead.”

The Advance. The dead were avenged. At the height of the German threat, warships, including two British battleships (Warspite, Valiant), shelled the Nazi positions. Allied air forces threw many hundreds of planes at the same positions, flew 2,000 sorties in one day. At the extreme crisis, artillerymen under Lieut. Colonel Hal Muldrow, one of the many Oklahomans, were the only forces facing German tanks and infantrymen. Muldrow stripped his gun crews, gave them rifles and machine guns. The German spearhead was stopped, enveloped, thrown back. Near the northern end of the bridgehead the British stopped a German advance, seized the town and airfield of Montecorvino Pugliano. On the eleventh day a reporter flying over the lines saw columns of Germans retreating inland.

The extent of that retreat became apparent this week: the Germans had given up their best positions for the defense of Naples. Fifth Army troops turned westward from Salerno, occupied the lower coast and the heights of the Sorrento peninsula overlooking the port and its bay. Twelve miles off, midway between the troops and Naples, Vesuvius loomed. Other troops already held Capri, the storied island just off the peninsula, the islands of Ischia and Procida in the Bay of Naples, Ponza and Ventotene northwest of the bay.

Just how, or whether, the Germans now proposed to defend Naples remained to be seen. Certainly the time was near when they would have to retire northward and choose some other point for their next delaying action on the road to Rome.