Chapter 4
The Tough Underbelly
“The close country and rugged mountainous terrain greatly restricted the employment of armor.”
At one minute after midnight on 9 September 1943, riflemen of the 141st and 142d Infantry regiments, 36th Infantry Division, began descending from troop transports into waiting landing craft off the Italian coast in Salerno Bay. There was no naval bombardment under way—an attempt to achieve surprise.
Monty’s Eighth Army had already crossed the Straits of Messina from Sicily to the toe of Italy on 3 September in Operation Baytown, which was designed but failed to draw German forces away from the Salerno area. That same day, Italy had secretly surrendered after quiet negotiations in neutral Portugal. Eisenhower had announced the capitulation only hours before the Salerno landings, but the Germans had expected as much; they rapidly disarmed the Italians and deployed their own troops in key positions.
Stubby landing craft prows turned toward shore, and at 0330 hours the initial wave hit the beach. Miraculously, all was quiet. The rumble and flashes of gun and rocket fire to the north, where two divisions of the British 10 Corps were conducting an assault closer to Naples, told a different story.
The first squads pushed inland toward their objectives. Suddenly, German flares began to pop in the night sky. A furious rain of mortar and machine gun rounds struck the men now crossing the beach.1
The main invasion of Italy—Fifth Army’s Operation Avalanche—had begun. The Allied spear struck what British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had described as the “soft underbelly” of Hitler’s Fortress Europa.
Waiting in a series of strongpoints along the shoreline and in the heights further to the rear was the entire 16th Panzer Division: 17,000 men, more than one hundred tanks, and thirty-six assault guns.
No tank destroyers were assigned to the initial waves, despite the waiting German armor. For the first several hours, infantrymen beat off small panzer probes with bazookas and hand grenades. By 0730, disorganized artillery elements joined the riflemen and established ad hoc batteries. At 0930, several 105mm howitzers of the 151st Field Artillery Battalion engaged German tanks and helped repel a counterattack. The first Sherman tank landed at 0830 hours, but the German fusillade prevented landing craft from delivering armor from the 191st and 751st Tank battalions except in dribs and drabs for most of the day.2
The infantry battled inland against poorly coordinated efforts by the 16th Panzer Division to stop them. Battered by bazookas, tanks, artillery, naval gunfire, and air strikes, the German division lost two-thirds of its tanks by the end of the day.3
That is when the TDs finally arrived.
The 601st Tank Destroyer Battalion landed one complete company of twelve guns, one partial company of eight guns, and one depleted company of four guns, plus command vehicles, on Red Beach near Paestum at 1630 hours. The veteran outfit’s mission was to support the untried 36th Infantry Division. Upon landing, the battalion CO, Maj Walter Tardy, reported to the CP of the 151st Field Artillery Battalion, where he received orders to support the artillery providing covering fire on the right flank of the beachhead and to cover the road from Ogliastro against possible tank attack.4
At 1900 hours, the men of the 645th Tank Destroyer Battalion landed on Red Beach. The battalion was also attached to the 36th Infantry Division and ordered to protect the division’s left flank and help cover the seven-mile gap between the American VI Corps and British 10 Corps. The two Allied corps intended to anchor their abutting flanks on the Sele River, but neither reached the objective on 9 September. The next day, the battalion was shifted to support the advance of the 45th Infantry Division—VI Corps’ floating reserve—which was just coming ashore.5
Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring, now in command of German forces in southern (and after November all of) Italy, ordered the 26th Panzer and 29th Panzergrenadier divisions to leave only delaying forces in front of the Eighth Army and to move the bulk of their organizations to the Salerno beachhead. He also set the 15th Panzergrenadier and Hermann Göring divisions—both rebuilding after taking a battering in the Sicily fighting—in motion from Rome. The Allies in Fifth Army could only wait for Monty to arrive, and he was, as usual, advancing with all due deliberation.6
Unaware that new German divisions were converging on the field, the men of the 36th Infantry Division were pleasantly surprised that they could find hardly any Germans at all on 10 September. The division easily seized its objectives on Fifth Army’s right flank. Two regiments of the 45th Infantry Division, meanwhile, moved into position on the American left near the Sele River.
Amidst the seeming calm, twelve M10s from the 601st reembarked as part of a task force rapidly organized to help the British, who faced stiff resistance to the north. Built around an infantry battalion, the task force sailed on 11 September to support Darby’s Rangers—who had been fighting beside the British Commandos since D-day—at Amalfi Peninsula. Various problems, including the offloading of the first M10 into deep water by the Royal Navy, delayed the TDs’ commitment to battle. The next day, the entire task force was attached to the British 46th Infantry Division.7
On 11 September, the U.S. 45th Infantry Division was ordered to cross the Sele River into what had been the 10 Corps zone in order to link up with the British right flank, which had been unable to push south. Company C/645th Tank Destroyer Battalion and a platoon of Sherman tanks from the 191st Tank Battalion supported the advance of the 179th Infantry Regiment. The infantry bypassed the town of Persano in the hills overlooking the beachhead, but German defenders amidst the buildings opened up with machine guns and cut communications between the doughs and the armor.8 The doughs of 2/179th Infantry Regiment, meanwhile, were struck by an armor counterattack and thrown back across the Sele River.9
The tanks and TDs tried to force their way into Persano to clear the Germans out. The advancing armor encountered roadblocks and blown bridges and could not maneuver off the road because of swampy ground. German guns opened fire on the column and knocked out seven of the M10s. Company A was called forward, only to find itself isolated when the infantry and tanks pulled back. When the company tried to extricate itself, two M10s got stuck in ditches and one was destroyed by artillery fire. The company claimed to have knocked out two Mark IV tanks, one Mark VI, and an 88mm gun, but the battalion’s first real contact with the enemy had not gone well.
The next morning, the newly arrived 29th Panzergrenadier Division tore into the 45th Infantry Division and the left end of the 36th Infantry Division line at Altavilla. The panzergrenadiers pushed the 36th off the strategic high ground at Altavilla and tried to drive to the sea. Over the next four days, a total of three panzer and three panzergrenadier divisions struck all along the perimeter of the tenuous Allied beachhead.10