World Battlefronts: Qualified Victory

The Allies won a qualified victory at Salerno, deprived the Germans of a major one. Below Naples, from beaches where death and uncertainty had lately reigned, the British-American Fifth Army moved inland, taking towns, a few airdromes, hills where hell had breathed from German guns. The British Eighth Army had come up from the south. Eighteen days after their first entry into Hitler’s Europe, the Allies in lower Italy had the ports, the airdromes, the space they needed to secure their entry and give the Germans an unqualified defeat. For that end, they must now prepare and fight.

Why Salerno? When Lieut. General Mark Wayne Clark’s troops landed at Salerno, the troops of the Eighth Army had been in Italy for six days. They held about 750 sq. mi, of Italy’s Calabrian peninsula and they were moving steadily northward and eastward. The British V Corps was about to take the port of Taranto, secure the lower Adriatic coast. German mines and booby traps delayed these troops, but the delays were not serious. Holding southern Calabria and moving into Apulia, the British held very little of Italy. But that little was secure, it was open to as many more men as the Allied commands cared to send across the Strait of Messina, and to enlarge their conquest the invaders had only to keep on marching.

On Sept. 9, the Fifth Army landed 175 mi. north of the nearest Eighth Army troops. As the first man ashore discovered, they landed exactly where the Germans expected them to land (see p. 28). Many British and American soldiers were killed. At the center of the 24-mi. beachhead, on the fifth day, the Germans drove within three miles of the sea, almost severing the invasion forces. Great heroism, strong naval and air support and reinforcements saved the landings. Ten days after the landings, three days after the crisis on the beaches had passed, the Eighth Army was arriving in force at the lower end of the Fifth’s hard-won position.

These circumstances raised the question: Why Salerno at all? General Clark said that his troops had never been near disaster, told the survivors that they had won the positions from which to march on Naples and Rome. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the theater commander, was busy and silent at his advanced headquarters. At his base headquarters in Algiers, correspondents raised the question and conveyed this explanation:

The Eighth had an easy time in Calabria only because the Germans did not fight there. They would have been there, fighting hard, if they had not had to prepare for landings farther north, and the Allies might be struggling for their first toehold on Italy’s tip instead of holding the Salerno area and the Sorrento peninsula. 20 mi. below Naples. The fact that the Germans expected the landing at Salerno cut no military ice; they presumably knew that the Salerno beaches, about as far north as the Allies could land and still be within fighter cover from Sicily, were logical points of attack.

To this explanation, President Roosevelt last week added a final word. Said he, noting that the Italian surrender was announced the day before the landings occurred: “We had planned these landings some time before, and we were determined to go through with them, armistice or no armistice.”