Salerno landings

Salerno landings. The principal opening gambit of the Allied Italian campaign, and an important move in the battle for the Mediterranean, this amphibious warfare operation was mounted on 9 September 1943 with Naples, 48 km. (30 mi.) to the north-west, as its immediate objective (see Map 93).

The landings, in the Gulf of Salerno, were commanded by the Fifth US Army's Lt-General Mark Clark. They were undertaken by the four divisions of 6th US Corps, commanded by Maj-General Ernest Dawley, and the British Eighth Army's 10th Corps, commanded by Lt-General McCreery, which comprised two infantry and one armoured division. They started a few hours after Eisenhower's announcement of an armistice with Italy and were mounted despite a critical shortage of landing craft and with the knowledge, gleaned from ULTRA intelligence, that total surprise would be impossible.

The landing force and its covering warships from Force H totalled 627 ships. An additional naval force (Force V), of one fleet carrier and four escort carriers, gave extra air cover over the landing beaches which were at the extreme range of Allied air bases in Sicily.

McCreery's Corps landed around Salerno: Rangers (seeUSA, 5(f)) and commandos on the left, 46th and 56th Divisions to the right, while Dawley landed further south in the Bay to protect McCreery's flank. Initially, the British met light opposition from Lt-General Hans Hube's 14th Panzer Corps which was still in the process of taking over Italian defences, but one US unit became stalled on the beach, and the sole panzer division in the area fought with great skill to prevent the Allies advancing inland. Montecorvino airfield was captured immediately, but when General Heinrich von Vietinghoff (1887–1952), commanding Tenth Army in southern Italy, brought forward 76th Panzer Corps from Calabria and a Panzergrenadier division from Rome, the airfield soon came under heavy fire and could not be used. This hampered Allied air cover and on 11 September two cruisers were damaged by radio-controlled bombs (see guided weapons), as was the battleship Warspite later. Airstrips were soon built elsewhere, though they too were under constant attack.

In the week following the landings the Allies were unable to break out of their shallow beachhead. They captured both Salerno and Vietri, but could not push the Germans sufficiently far from either to make use of them as supply ports. The German attacks, piecemeal at first, became more co-ordinated, and their build-up was quicker than Clark's. On 12 September 1943, the day the German garrison on the nearby island of Capri surrendered without firing a shot, Vietinghoff launched a determined counter-offensive and the situation became so desperate that neither the British nor the Americans had any reserves left. Every man who could carry a rifle was fighting, and plans were drawn up for evacuating the beachhead. Reinforcement was extremely difficult without interrupting Allied logistics, but at the height of the battle two battalions of 82nd US Airborne Division were dropped in to the beachhead; the naval bombardment force was reinforced by two British battleships; and 1,500 troops were transported by three cruisers from Tripoli in Libya to reinforce 10th Corps. These emergency measures, plus massive extra air support supplied by Tedder's entire Mediterranean strategic air force, which was switched to a tactical role, turned the tide. The offensive petered out and the Germans, partly outfought but partly through a change of tactics, began slowly withdrawing on 16 September to a new position north of Naples. The Naples rising followed on 27 September 1943. Also on 16 September, American patrols in the southern part of the bridgehead made contact with the balance of Montgomery's Eighth Army, advancing north from where it had landed at Reggio di Calabria, and the first Allied unit entered Naples on 1 October.