World Battlefronts: THE BEACHES OF SALERNO

Jack Belden, war correspondent for TIME and LIFE, was wounded at Salerno (see p. 15). This, his last dispatch for many months, was written in sick bay aboard ship leaving Italy.

The Germans knew we were coming and waited for us. All they had to do was study the map and see that the obvious place for us to strike was south of Naples. The day before our landing our LSTs were bombed continuously. Probably the German air force had us under observation at all times. The enemy knew not only approximately where we were going to land, but when.

The announcement of the Italian surrender, which we heard at 6:30 on our radios, had an unfortunate effect on the troops. We all cheered the news and shouts from the whole fleet echoed over the Mediterranean as we followed one of our surfaced sub marines and swung around her close in to the coast of Italy. But too many officers and men thought it was all over but the shouting. Some of them had not been in combat before and some complained that they would not have a chance to fight.

Everything seemed to be going too smoothly. As soon as the anchor was down the boats of the first assault wave were away and circling in the water. It was the smoothest debarkation I had ever seen. It was too smooth.

Toward the Beach. We were nearly ten miles from the beach. The continuous circling in the water was tedious and some of us fell asleep. When we woke the yellow moon was turning orange and growing dimmer, the sky to our left was lit by flashes of gunfire where the British were supposed to be attacking Salerno, and now & then a huge glare ripped apart the darkness, as if a ship were exploding out to sea. But before us all was quiet and dark. We broke our circle and headed in a column toward a shore, which we could not see but which still looked safe.

Above the roar of our motors we did not hear the approach of that first shell. But I saw the flame leap out of the boat next to me and the crash shook our boat. The boat jerked once or twice and then went on. Abruptly I sat down in the bottom, not as a precaution but because I was afraid. I heard a soldier say: “I saw a shell close like that in training once,” and I was more afraid.

We were still a good distance from the beach; we had not even reached our line of departure; yet the German guns were on us already. As we learned later, the Germans were so sure of where we were going to land that they brought their defenses right onto our beach. Trees, brush and all obstacles were cut down so as to obtain a clear field of fire. Nothing was left to chance. Machine guns fired only in certain zones; the zones interlocked. Almost on the water’s edge, in some cases only 50 yd. apart, machine guns were set up facing the sea. Fifty yards from the beach four-barreled machine guns threatened death to anyone coming out of the boats. Behind these were mortars. Only 200 yd. from the beach 88s were employed.

As we came abreast of the Navy patrol vessel marking our line of departure, the assault waves bunched up and shells fell in among them. We needed no order. We broke column, went into a skirmish position and throbbed toward shore like so many racing boats, close together, with motors roaring and spray flying.

Shells were flashing in the water, flames were yellowing the sky and bullets slapped into the boat. They snapped over our heads, rattled against the boat sides like hail and beat at the ramp door, seeming to say: “When you open the door, I’ll get you, get you, get you.” The coxswain shouted: “Get ready!” The boat shuddered and the ramp creaked open. A man leaped into the void and his legs flailed the sea, which was babbling and breaking in a white froth on the white sandy beach. I stepped down. My legs sank down to their knees and my feet touched the sandy soil of Italy.

I stumbled, fell on my face in the water, got up again, crawled on the beach, lay panting with a score of soldiers, went on through sand dunes and halted before a line of barbed wire.

Through the Wire. We were supposed to be the second wave, but no one seemed ahead of us. There were no wire cutters among any of us, so we held the wire for each other and crawled through. Flares shot up & down, and as they were too close and bright, we lay down. From the indeterminate shadows around us anxious voices were yelling as if in pain. I thought the Germans were howling, but soon I distinguished the words: “Help! Help!”

We went on in jerks, throwing ourselves to the ground at the snap of a bullet, getting up again, anxious when we saw how little distance we had covered and how soon the sun would come up on this denuded flat ground. Obstacles clutched at us everywhere. We broke through rail fences that had been interlaced with barbed wire, able to move only in single file, for we never could find enough wire cutters. At one barricade, after we had cut our way through, we lost our balance and tumbled into a ditch filled with water and fecal matter up to our necks. When we dragged ourselves out on the other side we had to hang on to another barrier of wire until others found the way through.

Lost, stumbling through an unfamiliar country, beset by uncertainty and slowing down from fatigue, we at last broke through our eighth barbed-wire barrier and just before dawn emerged on a macadam highway. A few miles beyond it was a high hill, which we were to have seized before daylight but which the Germans now undoubtedly held and from it looked down on us. Toward this hill the battalion commander urged his companies, which were coming by in groups of ten and 20, having become separated from each other in the dark.

Down the Highway. In a little while the commander meandered off down the highway to the right. I followed him. Abruptly he turned around and came back. “I thought I saw vehicles,” he said.

We heard a truck coming, and as we turned around it was right on top of us. We yelled: “Stop!” and fire flashed from the colonel’s hand. The truck halted in front of us and we yelled: “Get out! Come on, surrender! Get out!” With his pistol the colonel put a bullet in a back tire, but there was no other sound or movement.

Just then, a few paces to the rear, the walkie-talkie operator fired his rifle. In the flash I saw a pair of legs on the opposite side of the truck.

I felt foolish in the middle of the road with no firearms, so I climbed over a low stone wall and began working my way toward the front of the truck. Crawling behind the wall, I came abreast of the truck door, and through an open window I saw the dim outline of a figure in a slumped position, as if he had been killed or wounded or was now trying to avoid both. Still behind the wall, I made my way beyond the front of the truck and peered over the stones. The truckdoor on the far side of the road was open and a figure was lying beneath it, on his back, with his arms outstretched. Then I slid first one leg and then another on to the top of the wall.

Something like a baseball bat hammered into my leg. At the same instant there was a loud report and a burst of flame across the yard and dimly I saw a figure. I flew off the wall.

The Leg. A cloud of darkness enveloped me and a great weight pushed my leg into the ground and the leg swelled and puffed and tried to push off the weight. I tried to rise, but fell back. Blood was slipping down my right leg. I struggled, but could not rise.

Fear shook me like a fever. I yelled: “Colonel! Colonel! I’ve been wounded!” When there was no answer I felt a rush of shame at crying out so loud.

The colonel came back and bent over me. “Are you hit bad fella?” he said.

“I can’t move,” I said, and then, trying to make amends for crying out, I said: “Keep down. That fellow is just across the road.”

To get rid of the pain I closed my eyes. When I opened them again there were four medics standing in front of me.

“Morphine,” I said.

“You’re talking,” said a dark-haired boy, and he jabbed me in the arm. Then two of them grabbed my shoulders, a third pulled on my leg, and the dark-haired fellow prepared a splint.

They carried me to the side of the road near the truck, and then they laid a wounded German near me, and then they went away.

I heard a car approaching. It snorted and poked its head around the truck and stopped 20 yd. away. It was a German Volkswagen. There were six men in it. One got out. He looked at the body in the road and then got back in the Volkswagen. He talked to the five other men and soon the Volkswagen turned around and went away.

The medics, excited and out of breath, ran up from the opposite direction. “Gosh, that was a German car, wasn’t it? We better get you out of here.”

Picking up the stretcher, they hustled me awav from the truck and the stretcher was jostled as shells arched overhead toward the beach and the bearers quickened their pace. I saw a two-story stone building some 25 yd. from the road and I said: “Put me behind there.” They set me down behind it among a flock of chickens and put a stone under my head and went away.

The Nature of Baffle. After a while I heard a clanking on the road. Nearer and louder, louder and nearer it came. Propping myself in a sitting position, I watched a column of tanks, with turrets clamped down, moving slowly down the road, their guns revolving round & round. They were yellow-brown, not green, and I knew they were not ours.

Pretty soon some of our jeeps raced back from the direction which the tanks had taken. As they went by, the occupants yelled something to a group by the house next door, and those men, to my astonishment, suddenly started running toward the beach, looking back in anxious alarm at the road.

Suddenly a soldier ran around a corner of the house. He went away but was soon back with a young medic, who threw off his pack, mixed some powder and liquid, poured it into a glass and held the glass to my lips. He gave me another shot of morphine and carried me to the front of the house and laid me under a grapevine a few yards down the road. Out of a large cylinder he took two bottles. One held powder, the other liquid. He mixed the two in a bottle, which he hung to the grape arbor by a string, and prepared to inject me with plasma.

A duck came roaring down the road and from it, as it passed by, flew a chorus of voices:

“Tanks are coming! Tanks are coming!”

A jeep rushed by and the passengers shouted the same refrain : “Tanks are coming!”

“It would be safer behind the building,” said someone, so they carried me back there again.

The tanks were coming very fast, throwing shells as they came. One of the shells flew over with a quick whistle and fell a few yards away, by the corner of the building. In the opposite direction, through the grapevines, I could see one of our heavy guns coming up the road. So this gun and the tanks were about to duel at close range, and we were right in the middle.

There were two Italian officers wandering around in the garden. I decided to ask the Italians to carry me to the beach. They picked me up. I had been vomiting off and on for the last hour, and I did so again and the Italians looked at me with sorrowful eyes.

Farewell to Arms. The Italians weren’t very strong, and they set me down to rest every hundred yards or so, but they were willing bearers and they kept on going toward the sea, though shells were now coming down faster in the vicinity of the beach. At last they could go no farther, and they put me down in a semicircle of stones that offered very good shelter. There was another wounded man there.

An ambulance finally drove up there and they loaded us in it. The ambulance carried us to the first-aid station by the beach, where doctors were in attendance. Around the wounded, stretching everywhere over the beach, were strewn guns, trucks, tanks, bulldozers, ducks and jeeps, and down by the beach, with their mouths hanging in the water, were landing craft of many sizes and shapes.

The ambulance took me to a landing craft and, with several other wounded, I soon found myself alongside a ship. A hook descended over the boat and the sailors fastened lines around my stretcher and that of another man. When we came abreast of the rail, careful hands seized our stretchers and voices said: “Good work, soldier.”

I have not been out of a war zone for seven years, but I don’t think I ever really knew how the soldier felt until I was wounded and had to lie on the battlefield alone and in pain, as so many have done before me.