Seventy-five years ago, U.S. and British naval gunfire was a key ingredient in securing the Allied landings on Sicily and at Salerno, Italy.
Nearly a full year before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor thrust the United States into World War II, U.S. leaders committed the country to a grand strategy of defeating Germany first. Yet 11 months before the Allies assailed the so-called Atlantic Wall in Normandy, U.S., Canadian, and British forces invaded Sicily, and two months after that, in September 1943, they landed in Italy on a broad curve of beach south of Salerno on the Tyrrhenian Sea. In hindsight, they seemed to be logical steps after the May victory in North Africa, but the latter was a move that almost no one had envisioned a year earlier.
It was British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the Trident Conference held that same May in Washington, who insisted that the Allies should invade the Italian boot as soon as Sicily was secured. The Americans were immediately suspicious. Though he had been thrilled and relieved to learn of the United States’ Germany-first commitment, Churchill soon became a powerful advocate of expanding Allied efforts in the Mediterranean. U.S. Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall in particular feared that Churchill’s penchant for Mediterranean adventures would absorb manpower and assets needed for the cross-Channel invasion, then scheduled for 1 May 1944, which he believed was the highest Allied priority.
At Trident, Churchill insisted they had a chance to “knock Italy out of the war,” to which a frustrated Marshall responded that they should focus instead on “knocking Germany out of the war.” Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Ernest J. King, who often jousted with Marshall on strategic priorities, agreed, declaring that going into Italy would create “a vacuum into which our forces would be sucked.” Churchill persisted, however, and rather than continue arguing, the Combined Chiefs of Staff decided the decision could be made by the theater commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, depending on how well the invasion of Sicily went.1
It went surprisingly well. Despite problems inherent to landing on an unfamiliar coast in the predawn darkness, the Allies quickly seized their toehold on the southeastern coast of Sicily and drove northward in a campaign marked by the swift advance of Lieutenant General George S. Patton’s Seventh Army up the west coast of the island and then on to Messina. In that offensive, Patton bypassed several Axis strongpoints by employing amphibious end runs supported by U.S. Navy cruisers and destroyers. Wherever the Germans and Italians tried to make a stand, the 5-inch and 6-inch shells from U.S. Navy ships soon forced them from their positions. As one grateful G.I. put it: “The good old navy. Jesus, there ain’t nuthin’ like navy guns.”2
Up to this point in the war, the Army had been skeptical about the practical utility of employing naval guns in support of land operations. The Navy’s job, as most Army leaders saw it, was to get them to the beach, keep them supplied, and get out of the way. Instead, in both Sicily and Italy, naval gunfire support proved not only useful, but arguably decisive. On one of the U.S. landing beaches in Sicily, four U.S. destroyers—the Beatty (DD-640), Cowie, (DD-632), Laub (DD-613), and Tillman (DD-641)—closed on the beach and sent 1,176 rounds of rapid-fire 5-inch shells into German Tiger tanks that were threatening to pinch out the beach salient.
The light cruiser USS Boise (CL-47) also joined the fight. After her mauling in the Battle of Cape Esperance in the Solomon Islands the previous October, the Boise had limped all the way back to Philadelphia for a refit that took five months. She left there on 8 June, and now, only a month later, she was off the beach at Gela, in Sicily, halfway around the world from Guadalcanal, firing 6-inch airburst shells into German infantry formations.3
The Allied ships had to suspend fire briefly when the opposing forces on land became so intermingled that the Navy gunners could not distinguish friend from foe, but their contribution already had turned the tide. The U.S. task force commander, Vice Admiral H. Kent Hewitt, asserted, “The cruisers really saved the day,” though Eisenhower offered the most comprehensive analysis: “Naval gunfire was so devastating in its effectiveness as to dispose finally any doubts that naval guns are suitable for shore bombardment.” An old tank commander himself, Eisenhower went so far as to say, “the fire power of vessels assigned to gunfire support exceeded that of the artillery landed in the assaults, and . . . permitted a greater concentration of fire than artillery could achieve in the early stages.”4
In only 17 days, Allied troops drove the Italians and Germans to the apex of the Sicilian pyramid, and from there, the Axis forces began evacuating across the Strait of Messina to the toe of the Italian boot. By then, the Italian government had formally capitulated and Churchill’s goal of “knocking Italy out of the war” seemed about to be fulfilled. King Victor Emmanuel III dismissed Benito Mussolini as prime minister, replacing him with Pietro Badoglio, who sought to reach an accommodation with the Allies through back channels. What he wanted was to change sides, though the politically savvy Eisenhower insisted he would accept only an unconditional surrender.
A disappointed Badoglio agreed, and thus it was that as British and U.S. infantry headed for the landing beaches at Salerno, south of Naples, they heard the announcement that Italy had surrendered unconditionally. There was cheering and celebrating on board the landing ships, and Hewitt worried that the announcement “had a bad psychological effect on some of the troops, who got the idea that they were going to be able to walk ashore unopposed.” U.S. Rear Admiral John Lesslie Hall, who commanded the covering force for the American beaches, recalled seeing soldiers toss away their grenade belts, assuming they no longer would be necessary.5
The Italian surrender agreement stipulated the internment of the Italian fleet, giving the Allies unchallenged superiority at sea. Consequently, Adolf Hitler considered evacuating Italy altogether; after all, any defensive line across the Italian Peninsula could be bypassed by an Allied amphibious end run. He was talked out of it by the German theater commander, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, who insisted he should be allowed to resist the initial Allied landings to provide time for Axis forces in southern Italy to retire. Hitler agreed, and Kesselring delegated the task to General Heinrich von Vietinghoff, a veteran of the Russian front who, in tribute to the Führer, sported a small brush mustache.6
The beach at Salerno is a 30-mile-long crescent of sand and shingle 20 miles south of Naples. U.S. Lieutenant General Mark Clark exercised overall command of the Allied invasion, and despite earnest pleading from Hewitt, he decided against a preliminary air or naval bombardment in the hope of catching the enemy by surprise. There was a brief, 15-minute bombardment of the British beaches, but none at all on the U.S. beaches. It was a mistake. The Germans were not surprised, and the lack of a preliminary bombardment meant the defenders were ready and waiting. At one point, as U.S. landing craft neared the beach on 9 September, a loudspeaker on shore announced in perfect English: “Come on in and give up. We have you covered.”7
It was no idle boast. As the first wave of Americans hit the beach, they encountered heavy fire from tanks, machine guns, and mobile 88-mm artillery pieces. The 88s in particular proved perilous, as they had for the landings on Sicily back in May. Once again, Allied destroyers and light cruisers closed the shore to challenge them. Off the U.S. beach at Paestum, the light cruisers Philadelphia (CL-41) and Savannah (CL-42) were especially active. The Savannah fired 645 6-inch shells on the morning of the invasion in response to 11 separate requests for direct fire support; the Philadelphia broke up a counterattack by 35 German tanks, destroying seven of them and sending the rest fleeing back into the hills. The Royal Navy monitor Abercrombie hurled 15-inch shells at the German artillery in the hills behind the beach until she struck a mine and had to retire. In spite of that, the fighting ashore was fierce and Allied progress slow. One G.I. was overheard muttering, “Maybe it would be better for us to fight without an armistice.”8
The 88s also were a problem at the British beach north of Paestum near Salerno, where the Royal Navy destroyer Nubian repulsed one German tank attack almost single-handedly. Even U.S. Rear Admiral Richard L. Conolly got into the act. Noting a particularly active German artillery position ashore and unable to raise the destroyers on the radio, Conolly ordered his command ship, the USS Biscayne (AVP-11), which had two 5-inch guns, to close on the beach and take it under fire. That earned him the nickname “Close-in Conolly,” a moniker that followed him for the rest of his life.9
Air support was more problematic. Salerno had been chosen because it was within reach of Allied land-based fighters, yet because of the long flight time from Sicily, the Allies could put only a handful of fighters over the beachhead at any given time. Because of that, the overall naval commander, British Admiral Andrew Browne Cunningham, had insisted on the addition of four small U.S.-built escort carriers that had been transferred to the Royal Navy under Lend Lease. The small carriers bore names that suggested they might be riding to the hounds: Stalker, Hunter, Attacker, and Battler.
Each carried 18 Supermarine Seafire fighters, naval cousins of the more famous Spitfire, and those planes flew a total of 713 sorties over the beaches. Because of the escort carriers’ short flight decks, many of the Seafires were damaged on landing as they rocked forward when they were yanked to a halt by the arresting wires, and that bent the tips of their propeller blades. The solution was to cut nine inches off the end of each blade. That slightly reduced their top speed but enabled them to land without incident. Though half of the planes were lost during the invasion, they provided the bulk of the air support for the troops until landing strips could be seized ashore.10
On the beaches, the fighting was, as Eisenhower reported to Marshall, “touch and go.” A combined Ranger unit under U.S. Lieutenant Colonel William O. Darby seized the rugged Sorrento Peninsula north of Salerno, but Vietinghoff’s Germans stubbornly held the high ground beyond the beaches, and their artillery kept the invaders pinned down inside that deadly amphitheater.
The U.S. and British landing beaches were too far apart for mutual support, and at one point Clark seriously considered consolidating them by evacuating one or the other, though the commanders who would have to execute such a perilous move talked him out of it. Hewitt explained to Clark that beaching a loaded landing ship, tank (LST), and then emptying it was vastly easier than beaching an empty LST, loading her up, and then trying to retract. Instead, covered by a thick smoke screen laid by Allied destroyers, the transports and LSTs continued to shuttle in men, supplies, and ammunition to both beaches. Making smoke helped obscure the beaches from the German gunners, though some of the smoke was sucked into the ventilation intakes of the LSTs and triggered violent coughing spasms among the embarked soldiers.11
Thanks to the surrender of the Italian Navy (the Regia Marina), the Axis had no major naval combatants to challenge the invaders, though the Germans struck back with the small, swift Schnellbooten (fast boats), which the Allies called S-boats or E-boats. One hundred and fifteen feet long (35 feet longer than a PT boat) and carrying four torpedoes, the E-boats sank a U.S. destroyer, the Rowan (DD-405), on 10 September; damaged other ships; and compelled a lot of hasty maneuvering to avoid torpedoes in the water.
The greater danger, however, came from German aircraft, many of them armed with a new FX-1400 radio-controlled bomb called the Fritz-X. These glide bombs could be launched from an aircraft more than three miles away from the target and then guided by radio signals. They were, in effect, the world’s first air-launched guided missiles. One of them hit the Savannah on 11 September, and another struck the British cruiser Uganda. Both ships remained afloat, but they had to be towed back to Malta for repairs. Other ships suffered significant damage from near misses. The Germans also bombed two hospital ships, one of which sank.
Losses among the gunfire support ships were so great that Clark became concerned the troops ashore would not be able to hold their positions. With laconic understatement, Hewitt noted, “the situation ashore and afloat was far from favorable.”12
Encouraged by the slackening fire from offshore, Vietinghoff ordered a ground attack on 12 September that was designed to split the Allied enclave in half. Panzers charged down out of the hills and came within two miles of the beach before they were repulsed by artillery ashore and naval gunfire afloat. In his after-action report, Cunningham claimed primacy for the ships, asserting, “it was the Naval gunfire, incessant in effect, that held the ring when there was danger of the enemy breaking through to the beaches.”13
Concerned by the losses among his cruisers and destroyers, Hewett asked Cunningham for some battleships. The British admiral sent him HMS Valiant and the “Grand Old Lady” HMS Warspite, built before World War I and a veteran of the Battle of Jutland, whose 15-inch guns blasted the German gun positions in the hills. Even then, the invasion might have been stillborn but for Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s conviction that the main defensive effort should be made farther north. Because of that, the “Desert Fox,” then serving as Army Group B commander in northern Italy, declined to send reinforcements to Vietinghoff. On 16 September (the day after the Valiant and Warspite arrived), the Germans pulled back from the hills, effectively giving up the fight for the beaches. Kesselring reported to Berlin that it was necessary to fall back “to evade the effective shelling from warships.”14
The contribution of the sea forces to the seizure of Salerno was not over. Released from their beachfront enclave, Allied ground forces moved north to capture Naples, only to find that the Germans had so thoroughly sabotaged the harbor there that Allied reinforcements and supplies had to continue to come in over the beaches via the amphibians. Those amphibians again proved their value as they brought in reinforcements, supplies, and ammunition around the clock to sustain the invasion. Cunningham described the beach at Salerno as an “ants’ nest” with “streams of boats and landing-craft passing to and fro between the ships and the shore.” Over the ensuing three weeks, a nearly constant rotation of LSTs and smaller landing craft delivered 225,000 men, 34,000 vehicles, and 118,000 tons of supplies over the beaches. Without that, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to sustain the invasion.15
Axis resistance at Salerno proved more robust than U.S. and British planners had foreseen, and the key to eventual Allied success both there and throughout the Mediterranean was unchallenged control of the sea. Though German planes employing the FX-1400 guided bombs caused serious problems, the Allies were able to maintain sufficient naval gunfire from the sea to protect the troops ashore, and enough sealift capability to keep those troops supplied both during the invasion at Salerno and over the ensuing days and weeks.
In Sicily back in July, the successful Allied landings had led to a swift conquest of the island. Not this time. After seven days, the Allies had won a foothold on the Italian boot at Salerno, but the campaign for Italy would grind on for another year and a half. Precisely as George Marshall had feared, the Allied decision to invade Italy created a logistics black hole for Allied men and resources, as well as for the scarce, valuable, and essential landing ships. That had a dramatic effect on Allied planning for the rest of the war.
1. Minutes of the meeting of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, 13, 14, 21 May, Foreign Relations of the United States (Special Conferences Series), 3:41–44, 53–54, 348.
2. Quoted in Carlo D’Este, Bitter Victory: The Battle for Sicily, 1943 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1988), 476–81.
3. Robert L. Clifford and William J. Maddocks, “Naval Gunfire Support of the Landings in Sicily,” monograph No. 5 (October 1984), 45th Infantry Division Museum, Oklahoma City, 25–26, 30; U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, The Sicilian Campaign, 10 July–17 August 1943 (Washington, DC: U.S. Navy, 1945), 69; Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943–1944 (New York: Henry Holt, 2007), 103; Samuel Eliot Morison, Sicily-Salerno-Anzio, January 1943–June 1944, vol. 9, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II (Boston: Little Brown, 1954), 113, 117.
4. H. Kent Hewitt, “Naval Aspects of the Sicilian Campaign,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, 79, no. 7 (July 1953), 718; Morison, Sicily-Salerno-Anzio, 118.
5. Morison, Sicily-Salerno-Anzio, 253; Hewitt, “The Allied Navies at Salerno,” 965; John L. Hall oral history, Columbia Center for Oral History, Columbia University Libraries, New York, 147.
6. Ralph S. Mavrogordata, “Hitler’s Decision on the Defense of Italy,” in Kent Robert Greenfiled, ed., Command Decisions (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1960), 317–19.
7. Carlo D’Este, Fatal Decision: Anzio and the Battle for Rome (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 36–38, 41; Morison, Sicily-Salerno-Anzio, 250, 265.
8. Morison, Sicily-Salerno-Anzio, 266–68. The anonymous G.I. is quoted by Rick Atkinson in The Day of Battle, 205.
9. Andrew B. Cunningham, A Sailor’s Odyssey (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1951), 571; Stephen W. Roskill, The War at Sea, 1939–1945 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1954), vol. 3, part 1, 172, 177; Morison, Sicily-Salerno-Anzio, 276–78.
10. Corelli Barnett, Engage the Enemy More Closely (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 659–60; Cunningham, A Sailor’s Odyssey, 571; Roskill, The War at Sea, vol. 3, part 1, 155; Atkinson, Day of Battle, 213.
11. Eisenhower to Marshall, 13 September 1943, The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, vol. 3 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 1411; C. J. C. Molony, The Mediterranean and Middle East, vol. 5 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1973), 28; Atkinson, The Day of Battle, 205.
12. Hewitt, “The Allied Navies at Salerno,” 969.
13. Morison, Sicily-Salerno-Anzio, 290; Roskill, The War at Sea, vol. 3, part 1, 178–79; Cunningham, A Sailor’s Odyssey, 568–69, 571.
14. Morrison, Sicily-Salerno-Anzio, 296; Jack Greene and Alessandro Massignani, The Naval War in the Mediterranean, 1940–1943 (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute, 2002), 302.
15. Cunningham, A Sailors’ Odyssey, 571.