Out of the Night Sky: Paratroopers, Battleships and the Turn (13–20 September)

Antiaircraft fire over the Allied fleet off Salerno, photographed from HMS Warspite, September 1943. Imperial War Museums photograph A 19250 (Crown copyright expired), via Wikimedia Commons.

Operation Avalanche · Chapter 7 of 9

Out of the Night Sky: Paratroopers, Battleships and the Turn (13–20 September)

On the worst night of the battle, Clark called for paratroopers to drop inside his lines; within a week the guns, the bombers and the Eighth Army had turned the battle and the Germans were pulling back.

13–20 September 1943Paestum · Agropoli · Avellino · Altavilla · Hill 424 · Auletta~25 min read

From 2100 on 13 September 1943, every antiaircraft gun in the Salerno area was ordered silent and every barrage balloon was hauled down to the ground. For gun crews who had been under German air attack since the landings four days earlier, it was an unnatural order. It meant that whatever came over the Gulf of Salerno that night had to be allowed through.

At 2326, four minutes ahead of schedule, the first of them arrived. Men of the 2nd Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry, jumped from thirty-five transport planes at 800 feet over a field about five miles north of Agropoli, just south of the Paestum beaches. A pathfinder group on the ground had set up radar equipment to lead the flights in. Most of the paratroopers came down within 200 yards of the drop zone. Hours later, forty-one more aircraft, delayed in Sicily by mechanical trouble, dropped their men at about 0130, and fourteen more followed. In all, ninety planes brought about 1,300 troops into the beachhead within fifteen hours of the moment Lt. Gen. Mark W. Clark asked for them.

The drop did not win the battle by itself. But it came on the worst night of the campaign, after the German thrust down the Sele–Calore corridor told in Chapter 6, and it opened the week in which the battle of Salerno turned. In seven days the Allies flew in two parachute regiments and dropped a third unit far behind the German lines, sent more than 2,000 air sorties over the beachhead in a single day, and brought British battleships into the gulf. By the end of that week the German Tenth Army was asking permission to retreat, the Eighth Army had arrived from the south, and the American corps commander had lost his job.

From Rome to the beachhead: how the cancelled Giant II freed the 82nd Airborne

By the plans of early September, Maj. Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway’s 82nd Airborne Division should not have been anywhere near Salerno. Under the armistice scheme called GIANT II, it was to “secure the city of Rome and adjacent airfields” with Italian help, dropping first at Cerveteri and Furbara and then, the next night, at Guidonia, Littoria and Centocelle. Ridgway protested strongly. On 3 September the division was pulled from the AVALANCHE troop list, in the words of Martin Blumenson’s official history, “despite General Clark’s shocked protest.”

The plan died in Rome. Brig. Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor and Col. William T. Gardiner went secretly to Rome, reported that they were “Unable to secure satisfactory guarantees of Italian co-operation,” and at 1135 on 8 September sent the codeword that cancelled the drop: “Situation innocuous.” Garland and Smyth’s volume of the Army’s official history records that GIANT II had been set to begin at 1830 that evening, with about 150 aircraft loading and 62 planes already circling into formation when the cancellation arrived. The air forces’ history and Blumenson say only that the operation was “scratched” on the eve of D-Day. The whole story of the armistice and the Taylor mission is in Chapter 1.

The cancellation came too late to put the 82nd back into the landings. So on D-Day the airborne division sat in Sicily. Five days later, it became Clark’s answer to the crisis.

Commanding general, 82nd Airborne Division

Maj. Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway

A 1917 graduate of West Point, Ridgway had led the 82nd into Sicily two months before Salerno. He protested the Rome drop strongly, then, when Clark’s appeal came on 13 September, accepted a same-night drop on one condition: that every gun in the beachhead hold its fire. On 17 September he was named deputy commander of VI Corps. He went on to command the XVIII Airborne Corps and the Eighth Army in Korea, and to serve as Supreme Allied Commander Europe and Army Chief of Staff.

Born

3 March 1895

At Salerno

Organized the 504th and 505th drops of 13/14 and 14/15 September; deputy VI Corps commander from 17 September

Died

26 July 1993

“This is a must”: Clark’s call for paratroopers on 13 September

The afternoon of Monday, 13 September, was the low point of the battle. German tanks and infantry had smashed the 2nd Battalion, 143rd Infantry, which “ceased to exist as a unit,” and had driven down the corridor between the Sele and Calore rivers until the 45th Division’s guns stopped them near the river junction. Clark had asked Vice Adm. H. Kent Hewitt to prepare plans for taking troops off the beaches. Maj. Gen. Fred L. Walker had told the 36th Division to “fight it out on this position.” Clark needed fresh infantry, and he needed it before the Germans attacked again.

The 82nd Airborne was still waiting on its airfields in Sicily. That day Clark wrote to Ridgway, and he did not frame the letter as a request.

Ridgway’s first worry was not the Germans. Two months earlier, over Sicily, antiaircraft gunners of the invasion fleet and of the troops ashore had shot down American transport planes full of paratroopers. Blumenson writes that Ridgway’s first concern was to prevent “a recurrence of the tragic incident at Sicily.” (The Sicily story is told in our Invasion of Sicily collection.) His reply to Clark was blunt.

Rigid control of antiaircraft fire is absolutely essential for success.

— Maj. Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway to Lt. Gen. Mark W. Clark, 13 September 1943, quoted in Blumenson, Salerno to Cassino

Clark gave him what he asked. From 2100, all antiaircraft guns in the Salerno area were to be silenced and all barrage balloons lowered. Ridgway had asked that all ground and naval forces be told to hold their fire. For a fleet that had seen the cruiser Savannah crippled by a guided bomb two days earlier, as Chapter 4 describes, that took discipline.

Giant I Revised: the 504th Parachute Infantry drops south of Paestum

The mission went by the code name GIANT I (Revised). It was organized in hours. Col. Reuben H. Tucker’s 504th Parachute Infantry, less its 3rd Battalion, loaded in Sicily for a flight to a field south of Paestum, inside the 36th Division’s lines. The Sainte-Mère-Église Airborne Museum counts the pathfinder teams who marked that field as one of the first uses of pathfinders. Blumenson describes a pathfinder group setting up radar equipment to lead the planes toward the jump field.

The 2nd Battalion went first, from thirty-five planes at 2326. The second serial, forty-one aircraft, had started from Sicily several hours late because of mechanical trouble and dropped its troops at about 0130 on 14 September. Fourteen more planes came after that. Because the men jumped low, onto ground held by their own side and marked for them, most landed close together. Blumenson counts seventy-three men injured in the jump.

The air forces counted differently. Craven and Cate’s Army Air Forces in World War II gives 82 C-47 and C-53 transports rather than 90, no planes or men lost, and only one man injured. Neither history explains the gap.

Tucker reported to VI Corps headquarters at 0300 on 14 September. Within hours his two battalions moved into the line in the Monte Soprano sector, the mountain that rises behind the Paestum beaches, attached to Walker’s 36th Division. The evening before, they had been on airfields in Sicily. Now they were infantry in the line. Their story continues on the 504th Parachute Infantry unit page.

The 505th, the 325th and the sea lift: the beachhead fills up (14–15 September)

On Tuesday, 14 September, the German attacks came again and the line held, with naval gunfire breaking up probes against the 45th Division and VI Corps claiming about thirty tanks knocked out by evening. That night the 82nd sent its second regiment. Under the code name GIANT IV, 125 planes dropped Col. James M. Gavin’s 505th Parachute Infantry into the beachhead south of Paestum. The men, Blumenson writes, “jumped successfully, assembled quickly,” and moved by truck to positions on the southern flank near Agropoli.

How many men jumped is disputed. Blumenson and the Airborne Museum give about 2,100; Craven and Cate give 1,900. Either way, in two nights Ridgway had put somewhere between 3,200 and 3,400 paratroopers on the ground inside the beachhead. The 505th had already fought in Sicily; that battle is told on the 505th Parachute Infantry in Sicily page.

The rest of the division came by sea. Blumenson says the 325th Glider Infantry was scheduled to sail on 15 September and reach the beachhead late that night. The 504th’s missing 3rd Battalion had gone to Licata in Sicily to be attached to the 325th. The Airborne Museum’s timeline has part of the 325th and the 3rd Battalion, 504th, landing by sea about 15 September. The 504th’s regimental association adds that its H Company landed by sea behind the Rangers at Maiori, held a hill there for eighteen days, and earned a Presidential Unit Citation. Which 504th elements came by sea, and exactly when, is not settled between these sources. The 82nd’s division headquarters, Blumenson notes, was air-landed at Paestum.

Conventional reinforcements were pouring in too. The 180th Infantry, the last regiment of the 45th Division, arrived on 14 September and went into army reserve. The British 7th Armoured Division began landing in the X Corps sector the same day. On 18 September the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division began coming ashore.

Giant III: the 509th’s scattered drop on Avellino

The third drop of those two nights was a different kind of gamble. While the 505th jumped into friendly territory, the 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion, commanded by Lt. Col. Doyle R. Yardley, was sent to Avellino, a mountain town and road center about twenty miles behind the German lines. Its mission, as the battalion’s veterans describe it, was to cut German communications feeding the battle on the plain.

Everything that had made the 504th’s drop work was missing. There was no marked field held by friends, and the planes dropped from about 2,000 feet rather than 800, over mountains, at night. About forty planes carried roughly 600 men. Blumenson’s count of where they landed is stark: eleven planes put their men about ten miles from the drop zone, twelve others between eight and twenty-five miles away, and only fifteen transports placed troops within four or five miles of the target. Two planeloads were still unaccounted for a month later.

In small groups, the scattered men set out to work their way back to Allied lines. Blumenson’s verdict is that “more than 400” eventually trickled back and that the drop had no effect on the battle. Craven and Cate report that on 8 October, 118 of the roughly 600 were still listed as captured or missing.

The 509th’s veterans tell a fuller story. Their association lists 640 jumpers: 599 men of the 509th and 41 of the 1st Platoon, Company C, 307th Airborne Engineer Battalion. It says about 510 had returned within three weeks. It also says German commanders believed a whole regiment had landed and diverted a reserve infantry regiment to hunt for it, a claim the official histories do not test. The returns began after the U.S. 3rd Division took Avellino on 30 September. More on the battalion is on the 509th at Avellino unit page and in our Special Units hub.

The air forces’ all-out effort: bombers over the Salerno plain, 14–15 September

The paratroopers came in the dark. The bombers came by day. On 11 September, with fighter cover thinning over the beaches, Maj. Gen. Edwin J. House of XII Air Support Command had radioed, “Suffering losses that cannot be replaced.” In the crisis Eisenhower diverted heavy bombers to close support of the troops, and on 14 and 15 September the Northwest African Air Forces flew an effort on a scale the beachhead had not yet seen.

Craven and Cate give the figures. On 14 September the Northwest African Air Forces flew more than 2,000 sorties. Fighters and fighter-bombers flew more than 1,000 of them and dropped 159 tons. Bombers of all types flew more than 1,200, including 187 B-25s, 166 B-26s and 170 B-17s over the Salerno plain. That night 126 Wellingtons flew, the largest night-bomber force yet sent out in the theater. On 15 September came about 1,400 more sorties. Of 850 fighter and fighter-bomber sorties that day, 550 went against ground targets and claimed more than 300 vehicles destroyed.

Between 12 and 15 September, Craven and Cate calculate, Allied aircraft dropped more than 3,000 tons, an average of 760 tons per square mile in the target areas. Blumenson gives the wider picture: more than 9,000 tactical sorties in the first nine days, more than 5,000 of them on 14–16 September, and more than 1,000 tons of bombs a day falling within about fifteen miles of the front. Eisenhower believed that without the combined naval and air effort the troops might have been pushed into the sea.

Some of that air power now flew from the beachhead itself, from a strip the 817th Engineer Battalion (Aviation) began building near Paestum on 10 September. Craven and Cate have it operational the next morning; Blumenson dates its opening to 12 or 13 September. By mid-month P-40s of the 33rd Fighter Group were flying from it.

The Luftwaffe was still dangerous. German bombers attacked shipping in small formations of four to six aircraft. On 14 September the Liberty ship Bushrod Washington was sunk by a bomb, and on 15 September the James W. Marshall was hit by what Blumenson calls a “rocket bomb,” most likely an Hs 293 glide bomb. One more heavy blow from the guided bombs was still to come.

Battleships in the gulf: Warspite and Valiant join the fight

The Navy’s answer to the crisis was 15-inch guns. Around D+5, Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham’s despatch records, with the Germans close to the beaches and unloading stopped, he ordered the battleships HMS Valiant and HMS Warspite up from Malta; Blumenson says the order came from Alexander and Cunningham together. Cunningham also sent the cruisers Aurora and Penelope, which had been asked for on 11 September.

When the battleships fired, and how much, is a small puzzle. Hewitt’s 1953 article in the Naval Institute Proceedings and Cunningham’s despatch have them arriving on 15 September, and Hewitt credits Warspite with “three highly successful bombardments” for VI Corps. A figure repeated on Wikipedia gives Warspite 29 rounds and Valiant none on 15 September, out of 2,592 naval rounds fired that day. The daily naval chronology reproduced on uboat.net instead has the battleships returning at about 0530 on 16 September, with Warspite firing 32 rounds near Altavilla at 1309 and Valiant 19 rounds at Nocera between 1648 and 1728. Until the ships’ logs are checked, both dates and round counts should be read as a range.

The smaller ships fired far more. A gunner’s mate on the destroyer USS Mayo, writing sixty years later, recalled that she fired more than 1,200 five-inch rounds on 15 September, more than 300 per gun, mostly at German armor along the Sele from about 5,000 yards off the beach, and that about 2,400 brass cases went over the side afterward. By 17 September Allied ships had fired more than 11,000 tons of shell in direct support of the troops.

It was Naval gunfire, incessant in effect, that held the ring.

— Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, despatch on the Salerno landings, London Gazette, 1950

The gunfire had a price. At about 1410–1427 on 16 September, Warspite was struck by guided bombs, two direct hits and a near miss in Cunningham’s account. More than 5,000 tons of water came aboard and her steam failed at about 1500. U.S. Navy tugs towed her to Malta, a passage through the Strait of Messina that took about five hours against the current, and she arrived about 0800 on 19 September. She was repaired and fired again off Normandy. The guided-bomb campaign, and the losses of Savannah, Uganda and the hospital ship Newfoundland, are the subject of Chapter 4.

Tucker’s paratroopers on the Altavilla heights and Hill 424

The hill town of Altavilla Silentina and the height above it, Hill 424, had changed hands twice already. The 36th Division had taken them unopposed on 11 September, lost them on 12 September, and failed to retake them on 13 September, when Company K of the 143rd Infantry was cut off in the village.

On 16 September Walker proposed another attack, and Dawley agreed. This time Walker gave it to the paratroopers. He directed Tucker to “seize the dominating hills in the Altavilla area, Hill 424 in particular.” The 504th started during the night of 16 September under heavy German artillery fire. On the morning of 17 September German troops surrounded Tucker’s command group on the hill.

Here, too, the 504th found the line it still quotes. The regimental history tells how, after a German counterattack, a senior officer suggested pulling the regiment back, and Tucker answered: “Retreat, Hell! — Send me my other battalion!” The words have become a regimental tradition. The exact wording varies from account to account, and no official record of the exchange was found for this chapter.

The German attack that would have tested him never came. Instead the Germans around Altavilla began withdrawing. Kesselring had just agreed to break off the battle, asking only that Vietinghoff make a last attack with the paratroopers, and Vietinghoff decided not to commit more troops at Altavilla. In Blumenson’s account the 504th waited until the next day, 18 September, and entered the village unopposed. The Texas Military Forces Museum dates the recapture of Altavilla by 82nd Airborne troopers to 19 September.

The village had paid heavily. Altavilla had been shelled from the sea on 15 September, and the Liberation Route’s memorial sheet counts more than 200 German and American casualties in about a week of fighting for the hill and the town. The photograph below, taken at an American medical station at Altavilla on 20 September, shows a medic giving a German prisoner a drink of water.

Vietinghoff gives up: the last German attacks and the withdrawal (14–18 September)

On the German side, the turn came more slowly. On 13 September Generaloberst Heinrich von Vietinghoff, commanding the Tenth Army, had signaled that “enemy resistance is collapsing.” On the 14th, Blumenson writes, he “was loath to abandon his belief that Fifth Army was evacuating.” Field Marshal Albert Kesselring urged “a final effort to drive Fifth Army into the sea.”

He still had men to make it. The 26th Panzer Division, coming up from Calabria, reached Eboli on 14 September at regimental strength. The same day a regiment of the 1st Parachute Division, near Foggia, was ordered to Salerno. The 29th Panzergrenadier Division had been fully on hand since 12 September.

Wednesday, 15 September, was quiet enough that the VI Corps operations staff reported only “minor contacts and engagements.” On Thursday the 16th, Vietinghoff made his final try, in three places at once:

• The 26th Panzer Division attacked from Battipaglia toward Salerno and was held by the British 56th Division and elements of the 7th Armoured Division.
• The 16th Panzer Division attacked southwest from Battipaglia and was held by the U.S. 45th Division.
• The Hermann Göring Division, with elements of the 3rd and 15th Panzergrenadier Divisions, attacked near Vietri and made little progress against the British 46th Division.

None of the attacks got through. The fighting on the British front, from Battipaglia to Vietri, is told in Chapter 5. Late on 16 September Vietinghoff gave Kesselring his own explanation of the failure.

[The attacks were] unable to reach their objective owing to the fire from naval guns and low-flying aircraft, as well as the slow but steady approach of the Eighth Army.

— Generaloberst Heinrich von Vietinghoff, Tenth Army, 16 September 1943, quoted in Blumenson, Salerno to Cassino

He asked to break off the battle and withdraw “no later than the night of 18 September.” In Blumenson’s account Kesselring gave his “reluctant consent” on 17 September. Other accounts, including the Navy’s H-Gram history, the Royal Hampshire Regiment Museum and a Mayo veteran’s memoir, have Kesselring ordering a fighting withdrawal on 16 September. By 17 September the Tenth Army was 6,000 men under strength. Blumenson puts German casualties in the beachhead battle at about 3,500, close to the Navy’s figure of 3,472.

The withdrawal showed along the whole front. British armor entered Battipaglia unopposed on 18 September, in Blumenson’s account; the Royal Hampshire Regiment Museum says the town had been taken by the 19th. The Commandos found the Pimple abandoned on 19 September, and the Germans left the Hampshires’ White Cross Hill on the 20th. The Germans pulled back north toward the mountains and Naples, blowing bridges as they went.

Link-up with the Eighth Army: from Calabria to Auletta

The “slow but steady approach” that worried Vietinghoff had begun on 3 September, when the British XIII Corps crossed the Strait of Messina to Reggio behind about 600 guns in Operation BAYTOWN. The toe of Italy was too far from Salerno for the two armies to support each other at first, one of the drawbacks the planners had accepted. For two weeks the Eighth Army worked north through Calabria while Fifth Army fought for its life.

The first to arrive were not soldiers at all. On 15 September, Blumenson records, a press party of three correspondents traveling with the British 5th Division met an American scout car about seven miles south of Ogliastro.

The military contact came on the evening of 16 September. A 5th Division patrol, “probably a platoon” in Blumenson’s words, reached the 36th Division’s right flank about thirty-five miles south of Paestum. Vallo had been named in advance as a meeting place, but Blumenson does not say the meeting happened there. On 19 September a British reconnaissance company reached Rocca d’Aspide, and the two armies met at Auletta. Blumenson places that meeting in his account of 20 September; the Army’s campaign brochure, Naples-Foggia, dates it to 19 September.

Visitors and verdicts: Alexander, Eisenhower and the relief of General Dawley

The generals came to see for themselves. Gen. Sir Harold Alexander made his first visit on 14 September. He felt the crisis had passed and asked for 1,500 British infantry replacements. He also judged Maj. Gen. Ernest J. Dawley, the VI Corps commander, “not meeting the required standard.” Clark had already reached a similar view. On 16 September he told Eisenhower that Dawley “should not be continued in his present job.”

Eisenhower came on the afternoon of 17 September, and, Blumenson writes, “he had reason to be cheerful. The battle seemed won.” That day Ridgway was named deputy commander of VI Corps. Eisenhower is reported to have said of Clark’s doubts: “Well, why doesn’t he relieve Dawley?”

Clark later recalled a night phone call during the battle that summed up his complaint. Dawley described the situation, and Clark asked, “Well, Mike, what are you doing about it?” Dawley answered, “I’m praying.” Clark replied, “That’s OK, but you better do something else besides.” Blumenson gives the exchange without a date.

On 20 September, after the battle of the beachhead had come to an end, General Clark relieved General Dawley from command of the VI Corps.

— Martin Blumenson, Salerno to Cassino (CMH, 1969), ch. IX

Maj. Gen. John P. Lucas took VI Corps the same day. In the British sector another painful episode was under way: from 16 to 20 September, veterans sent to X Corps as replacements refused their new postings, the affair remembered as the Salerno mutiny and covered in Chapter 8. On 20 September work began on making Montecorvino airfield usable, and Clark attached a battalion of the 504th, the rest of the 325th Glider Infantry and other units to Darby’s Rangers in the Chiunzi Pass, giving Darby about 8,500 men for the push to Naples.

1. 2100 · 13 SepAll antiaircraft guns in the Salerno area silenced; barrage balloons lowered
2. 2326 · 13 Sep2nd Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry, jumps from 35 planes south of Paestum
3. 0130 · 14 SepSecond serial of 41 planes drops; Tucker reports to VI Corps at 0300
4. 14 SepHeaviest Allied air effort yet; Alexander visits; 180th Infantry and 7th Armoured Division land
5. Night 14/15 Sep505th drops south of Paestum; 509th drops around Avellino; 126 Wellingtons bomb
6. 15 SepWarspite and Valiant arrive (or 16 Sep); 325th Glider Infantry due by sea
7. 16 SepLast German attacks fail; Warspite hit; evening contact with the Eighth Army; Vietinghoff asks to withdraw
8. 17 SepKesselring’s reluctant consent (Blumenson); Eisenhower visits; Ridgway named deputy corps commander
9. 18 Sep504th enters Altavilla unopposed; British armor enters Battipaglia; 3rd Division begins landing
10. 19–20 SepThe beachhead battle ends; link-up at Auletta; Clark relieves Dawley, and Lucas takes VI Corps

What turned the battle of Salerno, and where to see it today

Blumenson closes the beachhead battle on 19 September: “The battle of Salerno, and with it the first phase of the invasion, had come to an end.” Asking what won it starts a long argument. The admirals had no doubt. Hewitt wrote in 1953 that “the margin of success at Salerno was carried by the naval gun.” Cunningham credited naval gunfire with holding the ring. Eisenhower believed the combined weight of ships and aircraft had kept the troops from being pushed into the sea. Vietinghoff, who saw it from the other side, listed naval guns, low-flying aircraft and the Eighth Army, in that order.

The paratroopers’ part was different but real. The 504th and 505th were used not as a strike force but as an emergency reserve, flown in overnight and fed into the line within hours. That worked because Ridgway insisted on rigid control of friendly fire and pathfinders marked the drop zone. Avellino showed the other side: scattered over mountains at night, a battalion could vanish into the hills and come back a few men at a time. Both halves of that record are part of the story told across the Operation Avalanche collection.

None of it would have mattered if the 36th and 45th Divisions and the British divisions to the north had not held on through 13 and 14 September. For answers to common questions about the battle, including how close Clark came to evacuating, see our Salerno FAQ.

The German withdrawal did not mean the Germans had given up. They fell back to the mountain wall north of the plain, where the passes to Naples could be held by small forces and every bridge could be blown. On 23 September X Corps attacked through the Sorrento passes and made, at first, “hardly any progress.” The 82nd Airborne would soon go through the Chiunzi Pass, and by 1 October paratroopers would be in Naples. That road, and the city at the end of it, are the story of Chapter 9.