The Crisis: Altavilla, Hill 424 and the Sele–Calore Corridor

Altavilla Silentina, the hill town fought over by the 36th Division and the 16th Panzer Division in September 1943. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Operation Avalanche · Chapter 6 of 9

The Crisis: Altavilla, Hill 424 and the Sele–Calore Corridor

For forty hours the Salerno beachhead came closer to breaking than at any other moment, and its commander ordered plans to put his army back aboard ship.

11–14 September 1943Altavilla · Hill 424 · Persano · Sele–Calore junction · La Cosa Creek~25 min read

Late on the afternoon of Monday, 13 September 1943, cooks, clerks and drivers from American headquarters units walked down to the south bank of the Calore River with their rifles and began building a firing line. Across the water, in the flat fields where the Calore runs into the Sele, German tanks were feeling their way forward. Behind the improvised riflemen lay four or five miles of open plain, then the beaches, then the sea.

Between the Germans and the shore, the Army’s official historian wrote later, “stood only a few Americans, mainly the 189th and 158th Field Artillery Battalions.” Their howitzers sat on a slope overlooking the base of the corridor. As the light failed, the gunners were firing at point-blank range, straight across the river.

This chapter covers roughly forty hours, from the dawn attack on Altavilla on 13 September to the evening of the 14th. In that window the Salerno beachhead came closer to breaking than at any other point in Operation Avalanche. A hill town was taken, lost and fought for again. Three Medals of Honor were earned around it in a single day. One American battalion “ceased to exist as a unit,” and the army commander told his staff to plan for putting his troops back aboard ship. Then the line held.

The British side of these same days, at Battipaglia and the Tobacco Factory, is told in Chapter 5, and the war at sea in Chapter 4. This chapter stays south of the Sele, with the Texans of the 36th Infantry Division, the Thunderbirds of the 45th, and the gunners who saved them both.

The Sele–Calore corridor: the ground where the beachhead nearly broke

To understand the crisis, start with two rivers. The Sele comes down out of the mountains to the northeast and crosses the Salerno plain to the sea. The Calore joins it short of the coast. According to the Army’s 1944 terrain study, the two rivers run roughly parallel for about seven miles and meet about four miles from the coast; Blumenson puts the junction at about five miles. Between them lies a narrow, low flood plain that reaches from about twelve miles inland almost to the beach.

That strip of ground was the seam of the whole operation. The Sele was the boundary between McCreery’s British X Corps to the north and Dawley’s U.S. VI Corps to the south. On the evening of D-Day there was a seven-mile gap between the two corps along the river, and that night the Germans blew the Highway 18 bridge over the Sele. Neither corps truly owned the corridor. Whoever drove down it would come out behind both of them, almost on the beaches.

The high ground on the American side made matters worse. East of Paestum the plain gives way to a chain of hills. Hill 424, named for its height in meters, stands at Altavilla Silentina, about halfway up that chain. Whoever held it could watch the southern plain below and direct artillery onto the roads, crossings and batteries there. It also looked toward the upper end of the corridor.

North of the Sele stood the other key landmark: the Tabacchificio Fiocche, five large buildings set in a circle on a flat hilltop, which the Americans called simply the Tobacco Factory. It controlled the road between Battipaglia and Eboli. Near it lay Persano, with a crossing over the Sele, and farther upstream Ponte Sele, where the highway bridged the river. Take those points and the corridor opened like a funnel aimed at the sea.

By 12 September the 36th Division, which had come ashore at Paestum on 9 September (see Chapter 2), was holding a front that the Army’s campaign brochure gives as thirty-five miles. That was far too much ground for one division. The 45th Division, landed as the floating reserve, had been fed into the gap between the corps. Its 157th Infantry was at the Tobacco Factory. Its 179th had pushed up the corridor toward Ponte Sele, then fallen back toward Persano. There were not enough men to hold every hill and every crossing, and the Germans knew it.

Altavilla and Hill 424: taken with deceptive ease, lost in a day (11–12 September)

On Saturday, 11 September, the 1st Battalion of the 142nd Infantry marched up into the hills and took both Altavilla and Hill 424 without opposition. The 36th Division’s own history says the attack on the hill “succeeded with deceptive ease.” The battalion was in the village shortly after noon. That afternoon its patrols pushed east toward the Calore and found no Germans at all.

The Germans had not gone far. During the night they slipped into the gaps between the battalion’s scattered positions, and soon after daylight on Sunday, 12 September, they opened fire. The ground favored them: around Altavilla it is broken by ravines, which limited fields of fire and visibility and made it very hard for one commander to control his companies. Colonel Forsythe, the regimental commander, could not find the trucks to rush another battalion forward.

Moving up to help a hard-pressed company, the battalion commander was cut down by German fire. German troops pushed into the village and split the battalion in two. The survivors fell back from Altavilla and from the hills around it. Blumenson counts only about 260 men left in the battalion afterward. In a single morning, the best observation point on the American half of the plain had passed back into German hands.

That same Sunday, German tanks and infantry forced their way through to Persano, north of the Sele. The 157th Infantry held on at the Tobacco Factory. Across the river, the British 56th Division had been pushed back from the edge of Battipaglia, which left VI Corps’ northern flank in the air. Clark, who came ashore that day and found the 45th Division “badly bruised,” set up his command post near Paestum. Hewitt sent his flagship Ancon back to Algiers and moved to a smaller ship.

Monday, 13 September: the counterattack on Altavilla

The guns opened at 0545. Fifteen minutes later the infantry stepped off. Two battalions went in: the 3rd Battalion, 142nd Infantry, advancing along the ridge from Albanella, and the 3rd Battalion, 143rd Infantry, under Lt. Col. Barnett, climbing the ridge northwest of the town.

Companies I and K of the 3/142nd reached the crest at 0730. There they stopped. German infantry, now backed by artillery, held the higher ground beyond, and the American companies spent the rest of the day fighting without reaching the village. On the other side, Barnett’s battalion got a company into Altavilla. Company K went in to cover the right flank, but the battalion as a whole was stopped short of Hill 424.

Then the Germans struck back. Around 1700, fifteen minutes before the 3/143rd was due to jump off again, a German counterattack drove it off its line of departure. Germans infiltrated around the flanks of both battalions. Wire and radio links failed, so calls for artillery came late or not at all. Colonel Martin, directing the attack, ordered a withdrawal. The 3/142nd pulled back without much trouble. The 3/143rd waited for dark. Company K was surrounded in Altavilla and could not get out until the following night.

1. 0545 · 13 SepArtillery preparation on Altavilla; infantry of the 3/142nd and 3/143rd step off fifteen minutes later.
2. 0730 · 13 SepCompanies I and K, 3/142nd, reach the crest and are stopped.
3. During the day · 13 SepOn Hill 424 and in Altavilla, Bjorklund, Crawford and Kelly earn the Medal of Honor.
4. Morning · 13 SepVietinghoff discovers the gap between the Allied corps and concludes they have “split themselves into two sections.”
5. About 1530 · 13 SepMore than twenty German tanks, an infantry battalion and towed guns move from the Eboli area against the 1/157th at the Tobacco Factory.
6. About 1700 · 13 SepA German counterattack drives the 3/143rd off its line of departure; Company K is trapped in Altavilla.
7. By 1715 · 13 SepAfter overrunning the 2/143rd near Persano, a large German force is in the corridor, unopposed.
8. About 1730 · 13 SepVietinghoff telegraphs Kesselring that “enemy resistance is collapsing.”
9. About 1830 · 13 SepFifteen German tanks advance toward the Sele–Calore junction. The 158th and 189th Field Artillery fire point-blank across the Calore.
10. About 1930 · 13 SepClark calls Dawley, Walker and Middleton to the VI Corps command post. Staff draw up plans SEALION and SEATRAIN.
11. Nightfall · 13 SepThe Germans pull back toward Persano. The 36th Division withdraws about two miles to the La Cosa Creek line.
12. Night 13/14 SepUSS Philadelphia fires 921 six-inch rounds; the 504th Parachute Infantry drops inside the beachhead (first stick at 2326).
13. 0800 · 14 SepEight German tanks and a battalion attack; seven tanks are destroyed almost at once and the eighth immobilized.
14. 0930 · 14 SepSix tanks of the 751st Tank Battalion knock out eight Mark IVs near Mt. San Chirico for the loss of one.
15. 1043 · 14 SepGerman tanks and self-propelled guns try to cross the Calore at the “burned bridge.”
16. Evening · 14 SepEvacuation is off: “There would be no retreat.” Company K slips out of Altavilla after dark.

Medal of Honor on Hill 424: Bjorklund, Crawford and “Commando” Kelly

The 36th Division earned four Medals of Honor at Salerno. The first went to Sgt. James M. Logan for his fight on the beaches on 9 September. The other three were earned on 13 September, two on the slopes of Hill 424 and one in Altavilla itself. Each citation describes the same kind of fight: a small unit pinned by machine guns in broken ground, and one man who went forward anyway.

Medal of Honor · 142nd Infantry

1st Lt. Arnold L. Bjorklund

Bjorklund led his company’s first platoon in the attack on Hill 424. When machine-gun and rifle fire pinned the platoon down, he crawled forward carrying only three hand grenades. With them he destroyed two machine-gun positions, killing five Germans, and then knocked out a heavy mortar that was stopping the advance, killing two more. His platoon took its objective.

Born

Clinton, Washington; entered service at Seattle

At Salerno

Hill 424 near Altavilla, 13 September 1943. Medal of Honor by General Orders No. 73, 6 September 1944; the Texas Military Forces Museum says President Roosevelt presented it at the White House.

Medal of Honor · Co. I, 142nd Infantry

Pvt. William J. Crawford

A squad scout in the 3rd Platoon, Crawford went forward alone, without orders, against a dug-in machine gun that had pinned his platoon, and destroyed it with a grenade, killing three. When fire stopped the platoon again, he crawled between two more nests, knocked out one and then took the other, turning its gun on the retreating Germans. He was then captured, and the Army declared him killed in action.

Born

Pueblo, Colorado

At Salerno

Hill 424 near Altavilla, 13 September 1943. Posthumous Medal of Honor, citation signed by President Roosevelt on 11 May 1944 and presented to his father; presented to Crawford himself by President Reagan at the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1984.

Crawford’s story did not end on Hill 424. After knocking out the guns, he stopped to help a wounded comrade and was taken prisoner. He spent most of the rest of the war in a German prison camp. The Army listed him as killed in action. President Roosevelt signed his citation on 11 May 1944, and the medal went to his father.

After the war Crawford served on in the Army and retired as a master sergeant in 1967. He went back to Colorado and took a job as a janitor at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. Cadets described him as “unimpressive.” In 1976 a cadet named James Moschgat read about the Hill 424 action in a book on the war and told his roommate, “I think our janitor is a Medal of Honor recipient.” He was. At the Academy’s 1984 commencement, President Ronald Reagan presented Crawford with the Medal of Honor in person, forty years after his father had accepted it for him.

The 36th Division’s own wartime history adds a detail of its own: Kelly “heaved 60mm. mortar shells from a second story balcony.” It also calls him the first man decorated with the Medal of Honor for action on the European continent. That is a claim about the order of presentation, not of the deeds. Kelly’s general order came in February 1944, months before the awards to Bjorklund and Crawford, but Logan’s action on the beaches came four days before Kelly’s.

The German thrust down the corridor and the end of the 2nd Battalion, 143rd Infantry

While the Texans fought for Altavilla, the real blow was gathering to the north. At about 1530, roughly an hour after Vietinghoff ordered the attack, more than twenty German tanks, a battalion of infantry and towed artillery moved out of the Eboli area toward the Tobacco Factory, where the 1st Battalion, 157th Infantry, was dug in.

Shells fell among the Americans. Then tanks hit both flanks of the battalion at once. American tanks, tank destroyers and antitank guns struck back, and the division artillery fired almost without pause. It was not enough. German tanks briefly surrounded the battalion headquarters, control broke down, and the 1/157th was driven out of the Tobacco Factory. The Germans reached the Persano crossing and pushed on into the corridor.

Waiting there, without knowing it, was the 2nd Battalion of the 143rd Infantry. It had been placed badly, near Persano, and told to stay under cover. Its men fired few shots of their own. When they called for artillery, the calls arrived at the same moment as calls from the fight at Altavilla, and the gunners were not sure where the battalion was. The Germans came in behind it near Persano and cut around its right flank near Ponte Sele.

Hit from three sides, the battalion, in Blumenson’s words, “ceased to exist as a unit.” More than 500 officers and men were lost, most of them captured. Only 9 officers and 395 men eventually made their way back to American lines. The National WWII Museum gives about 500 casualties and “hundreds of prisoners.” In the same hours, the 1st Battalion, 142nd Infantry, already cut down at Altavilla the day before, was reduced to sixty men.

By 1715 a large German force was in the corridor and nobody was in front of it. By 1800 German guns were emplaced around Persano. At about 1830, fifteen German tanks rolled toward the junction of the Sele and the Calore, and German tanks and infantry reached the north bank of the Calore. On the other side of the river stood the 45th Division’s guns, the command post of Fifth Army, and, a few miles beyond them, the beaches.

The guns at the river junction: how the 158th and 189th Field Artillery stopped the panzers

The 158th and 189th Field Artillery Battalions were 45th Division units, National Guard gunners who had fought in Sicily with the Thunderbirds. Their batteries were dug in on a slope overlooking the base of the corridor, just south of the Calore. In a normal battle they would have been miles behind the infantry. On the evening of 13 September there was no infantry left in front of them.

So the howitzers fired at point-blank range, straight across the river into the German tanks and infantry on the far bank. Tank destroyers of the 636th Tank Destroyer Battalion, just coming ashore, raced to the river junction to join them. Other howitzers and tanks added their fire. Behind the guns, cooks, clerks and drivers from nearby headquarters built a rifle line on the south bank, the last line between the Germans and the sea.

The guns fired 3,650 rounds in about four hours. A battery of the 27th Armored Field Artillery Battalion added 300 more. One secondary account says the Germans were stopped about two miles from the beaches, though Blumenson gives no such figure. Offshore, the Navy’s cruisers and destroyers were firing too; the Navy’s own history credits naval gunfire with helping to repel the attack at the Sele–Calore junction. The attack was stopped at the Calore. With no fresh troops close enough to exploit their gains, the Germans pulled back toward Persano at nightfall.

Field artillery is built to fire from behind a screen of riflemen. At the Calore it became the front line. The full story of the two battalions, their guns and their men is on our unit page, The Guns of the Sele–Calore.

Vietinghoff’s mistake: “The battle of Salerno appears to be over”

On the German side of the hills, 13 September looked like victory. That morning Generaloberst Heinrich von Vietinghoff, commanding the German Tenth Army, discovered the gap between the two Allied corps along the Sele. He concluded that the Allies had “split themselves into two sections.” Two days earlier he had divided his own front at the river, with XIV Panzer Corps to the north and Traugott Herr’s LXXVI Panzer Corps to the south. Now he meant to drive into the seam.

Everything Vietinghoff saw seemed to confirm his hopes. Ships were arriving in the bay, smoke screens hung over the anchorage, a radio message had been intercepted, and German propaganda was already talking of “another Dunkerque.” He read it all as an army getting ready to leave. At about 1730, as his tanks were pouring into the corridor, he telegraphed Kesselring that “enemy resistance is collapsing” and that Tenth Army was pursuing on a wide front.

Not everyone agreed. About half an hour later Herr, whose corps was doing the fighting south of the Sele, reported that resistance was stiffening and that Allied tanks were counterattacking. Hermann Balck, commanding XIV Panzer Corps, saw no sign of an Allied withdrawal. Kesselring, though, reported that radio intercepts seemed to confirm the evacuation. Vietinghoff stayed convinced.

“The battle of Salerno appears to be over.”

— German Tenth Army war diary, evening of 13 September 1943, quoted in Blumenson, Salerno to Cassino, chapter VII

He was wrong. The Allies were not leaving. But that same evening, in a command post near Paestum, the American army commander was asking his staff to work out how they might.

SEALION and SEATRAIN: Clark’s evacuation plans and the admirals who said no

Lt. Gen. Mark W. Clark had been ashore for only a day. What he saw on the 13th frightened him. He judged the situation “extremely critical” and thought his forces “may sustain a severe defeat in this area.” He arranged to move his own headquarters on ten minutes’ notice, by PT boat, to the British zone, where conditions seemed better for keeping what he called a “clawhold” on Italian soil.

At about 1930, word reached him that the tank destroyers at the river might soon have to pull back. Clark called Dawley, Walker and Middleton to the VI Corps command post. Then, in Dawley’s presence and over his protest, Clark told his chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Alfred M. Gruenther, “to take up with the Navy” the job of evacuating the beachhead. Blumenson records that the staff “drew two plans, code-named SEALION and SEATRAIN, one for each corps.” One would re-embark VI Corps and land it north of the Sele; the other would bring X Corps south.

The Navy’s answer was swift and unanimous. Commodore G. N. Oliver of the Royal Navy, who commanded the Northern Attack Force, thought it would be “suicidal” to shorten the front and let German artillery “rake the beaches.” Vice Adm. H. Kent Hewitt judged the idea technically impractical. He halted VI Corps unloading and put his ships on half-hour notice, but he made plain his “thorough dissatisfaction with the withdrawal idea.” The Navy’s own history credits him with helping persuade Clark not to evacuate.

Re-embarking the troops was “suicidal,” and would let enemy artillery “rake the beaches.”

— Commodore G. N. Oliver, RN, Northern Attack Force, quoted in Blumenson, Salerno to Cassino, chapter VIII

Two details need care. Blumenson places this planning on the evening of 13 September, while Hewitt’s 1953 account dates Clark’s request to the Navy to the 14th. And Clark, according to Wikipedia, later denied that he ever seriously considered evacuation. The official record shows that he ordered the plans drawn.

“Fight it out on this position”: Walker’s La Cosa Creek line

Maj. Gen. Fred L. Walker meant to stay. On the night of 13 September the commander of the 36th Division set about saving what he could of his battered regiments. He pulled the division back about two miles to a new line along La Cosa Creek.

Walker split the division area into three defensive sectors and put a brigadier general in charge of each: Wilbur on the left, O’Daniel in the center and Lange on the right. All night long the men dug. His orders left no room for doubt. The new line was to be dug in, wired in, mined, and held at all costs. The division was to “fight it out on this position.”

Tuesday, 14 September: Jinx, the burned bridge and bombers over the plain

Kesselring was not finished. On the 14th he urged Vietinghoff to make “a final effort to drive Fifth Army into the sea.” The 26th Panzer Division, coming up from Calabria, reached Eboli that day at about regimental strength. A regiment of the 1st Parachute Division was ordered to Salerno from the Foggia area. And at 0800 the first attack of the day came in.

Eight tanks and a battalion of infantry from the 16th Panzer and 29th Panzergrenadier Divisions struck the American line. This time the defenders were ready. Seven German tanks were destroyed almost at once and the eighth was immobilized. Further probes against the 1st Battalion, 157th Infantry, and the 3rd Battalion, 179th Infantry, were turned back with the help of naval gunfire. Offshore, ships put 100 rounds on Altavilla alone.

Along the 36th Division’s new line the fighting went the same way. At 0930, as German infantry and a company of Mark IV tanks approached Mt. San Chirico, six tanks of the 751st Tank Battalion moved up to meet them and knocked out eight Mark IVs for the loss of one. At 1043 at least three more German tanks, backed by a battery of self-propelled guns, tried to cross the Calore at what the division history calls “the burned bridge” and the road beyond it. They did not get across.

On the La Cosa line, a tank destroyer of the 636th Tank Destroyer Battalion named “Jinx” had the fight of its life. In about half an hour (the division museum’s accounts give 25 and 30 minutes), its crew knocked out five Mark IVs, an armored half-track, an ammunition truck, a pillbox and a house sheltering Germans. Every man in the crew, among them S/Sgt. Raymond G. Murphy of Jacksonville, Florida, received the Silver Star. By the end of the day the division artillery had fired more than 4,100 rounds, and VI Corps could claim almost thirty German tanks knocked out.

Above them, the sky filled with Allied aircraft. Eisenhower had diverted his heavy bombers to close support of the beachhead. 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. A total of 187 B-25s, 166 B-26s and 170 B-17s operated over the Salerno plain that day. That night 126 Wellingtons followed, the largest night-bomber force yet sent out in the theater. The Luftwaffe hit back at the anchorage: a bomb struck the Liberty ship Bushrod Washington and an LCT alongside her, destroying both.

The beachhead was also growing. During the night of 13/14 September the 504th Parachute Infantry had dropped inside the lines, some 1,300 men, its first stick jumping at 2326 after Clark silenced every antiaircraft gun in the area from 2100. That story, and the drops that followed, belongs to Chapter 7. On the 14th the 45th Division’s 180th Infantry came ashore as army reserve, and the British 7th Armoured Division began to land in the north.

By evening the mood at Fifth Army headquarters had changed completely. Blumenson, drawing on the 45th Division’s after-action report, puts it simply: “There would be no retreat. The line would be held at all costs.” The Army’s campaign brochure says that by the evening of 14 September “the crisis had passed.” Eisenhower cabled the Combined Chiefs that he had “every confidence that we will come out all right.” When Alexander visited the beachhead, he found the defense impressive and felt the danger was over. After dark, Company K finally slipped out of Altavilla.

Even then, Vietinghoff “was loath to abandon his belief that Fifth Army was evacuating the beachhead.” He had two more days of hard attacks in him before he would admit the truth.

Myth, record and memory: Black Monday, the burned bridge and Hill 424 today

The cost to Altavilla itself is easy to forget. The village was fought over for about a week and shelled by naval guns, and more than 200 German and American casualties fell there. Its people were caught in the middle; their story is part of Chapter 8. Blumenson has Americans entering the abandoned village on 18 September; the 36th Division history credits 82nd Airborne troopers with retaking it on the 19th.

Why the Salerno beachhead held

The Germans had the right idea on 13 September. They found the seam between the corps, drove into it with tanks, and destroyed a battalion. What they lacked was a second wave. With no fresh troops at hand to follow up, the attack ran out of strength at the Calore, under the fire of two artillery battalions, a few tank destroyers and a rifle line of cooks and clerks.

The Americans, for their part, reacted fast. Walker shortened his line and dug in. The artillery and the Navy kept firing through the night, Eisenhower threw his bombers into the battle, and the admirals argued hard against evacuation.

Readers who know the Sicily collection will recognize the pattern from Gela two months earlier: a counterattack aimed at a half-landed army, stopped by guns on land and at sea. It was the same summer as Kursk, and at Salerno, too, German armor found it could break into an enemy position without breaking through it. The German side of the story is told on our record page for the 16th Panzer Division.

But on the night of 14 September, nobody on the plain knew the worst was over. The Germans still held Hill 424. More panzer and parachute troops were on the roads toward Eboli. And out of the dark sky, a second regiment of American paratroopers was about to come down south of Paestum. The battle for Salerno had not yet been won. It had only been saved. What happened next, from the 504th’s fight for Altavilla to the battleships’ arrival, is the subject of Chapter 7.