Stretcher bearers carry a wounded soldier to an advanced dressing station at Salerno, 21–23 September 1943. Imperial War Museums photograph (Crown copyright expired), via Wikimedia Commons.
Operation Avalanche · Chapter 8 of 9
The Human Cost: Casualties, the Salerno Mutiny, Civilians and Crimes
Soldiers, sailors, nurses, mutineers, Italian prisoners and the villagers of Campania: an attributed accounting of what the battle of Salerno cost, and who was never brought to justice.
Shortly after 0500 on 13 September 1943, the British hospital ship Newfoundland lay offshore, some 30 to 40 miles from the Salerno beaches. She was painted white and marked with red crosses. German aircraft had already attacked her twice the day before. This time they hit her.
Six British nursing sisters of Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service died: Matron Agnes McInnes Cheyne and Sisters Una Cameron, Dorothy Mary Cole, Phyllis Gibson, Mary Lea and Margaret Annie O’Loughlin. All of the ship’s doctors died with them. A 1943 report in the British Medical Journal put the dead at 23. Nurses of the U.S. 95th Evacuation Hospital, aboard to reach the beachhead, survived; one of them later wrote home that about 70 people had crowded into a lifeboat built for 30. On 14 September the wrecked ship was sunk deliberately by the American destroyer Plunkett.
The Newfoundland was a small share of what Operation Avalanche cost, but her story belongs at the head of this chapter. The earlier chapters follow the maneuvers. This one counts the people who paid for them: soldiers and sailors of three nations, the doctors and nurses who tried to keep them alive, British veterans court-martialed for mutiny, Italian soldiers caught between two armies, and the civilians of Campania, who were bombed and shelled and, in some towns, murdered by retreating German troops.
Counting the cost: Salerno casualty figures and why they disagree
The U.S. Army’s official historian, Martin Blumenson, closes the beachhead battle on 19 September 1943. By then, he writes, “the battle of Salerno, and with it the first phase of the invasion, had come to an end.” For those ten days he gives American ground losses of about 3,500 men: approximately 500 killed, 1,800 wounded and 1,200 missing. British losses he puts at “somewhere around 5,500,” without a breakdown.
The Naval History and Heritage Command gives different totals: 5,259 British and 1,649 American casualties, the American figure described as Army and Navy combined. The page gives no date range and no definitions, and its American number is less than half of Blumenson’s Army figure alone. This collection uses Blumenson’s chapter IX for the Army and treats the Navy page’s ground figure as an outlier.
The Navy’s own losses are clearer. The NHHC counts 296 U.S. Navy men killed, 551 missing and 422 wounded. Almost all of the missing were later declared dead. The director’s H-Gram says the Navy lost “over 800” men at Salerno, a total that includes the destroyers Buck and Bristol, torpedoed in October.
Widen the frame and the numbers climb. From 9 September to early October, through the capture of Naples and the advance to the Volturno, Blumenson counts “more than 12,000 British and American casualties”: about 2,000 killed, 7,000 wounded and 3,500 missing. His footnote does not split that total by nation.
Behind the totals: battalions that bled
Totals hide how unevenly the losses fell. The 36th Division lost about 500 men on D-Day, roughly a fifth of them killed. The 141st Infantry alone counted 51 killed, 121 wounded and 31 missing; the 142nd, 32 killed, 109 wounded and 8 missing. On 13 September, when the German thrust broke into the Sele–Calore corridor, only 9 officers and 395 men of the 2nd Battalion, 143rd Infantry got back, and the 1st Battalion, 142nd Infantry was reduced to about 60 men. Chapter 6 tells that story.
The British Commandos on the mountain flank paid at one of the steepest rates. In about ten days No. 2 Commando and No. 41 (Royal Marine) Commando lost 13 officers and 54 other ranks killed, 15 officers and 225 other ranks wounded, and 1 officer and 59 other ranks missing: about 48 percent of the strength landed, according to the Royal Marines’ history. The Commando Veterans Archive counts 367 casualties of 738 landed. Darby’s Rangers at Chiunzi lost 28 killed, 9 missing and more than 66 wounded in September, about a tenth of their strength. Of the roughly 600 men of the 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion dropped at Avellino, 118 were still listed as captured or missing on 8 October.
Losses at sea: the ships that never came home
Some of the worst single losses of the battle happened offshore, in seconds. Shortly after midnight on 10/11 September, a German E-boat torpedoed the destroyer USS Rowan as she escorted empty transports back toward Oran. She sank in under a minute. According to her history in the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, 202 of her 273 officers and men were lost. The destroyer Bristol picked up 70 survivors.
About 1000 on 11 September a Fritz X guided bomb struck No. 3 turret of the cruiser USS Savannah. The NHHC gives 197 killed and 15 seriously wounded. Four sailors trapped in a forward compartment were not reached for 60 hours, when the ship reached Malta under her own power.
The list runs on. The fleet tug Nauset was bombed at about 0510 on D-Day; 18 of her 113 men were killed and 41 seriously wounded. Her captain, Lt. Joseph Orleck, died after going back aboard and received a posthumous Navy Cross. The British cruiser Uganda lost 16 men to a Fritz X on 13 September. The Liberty ship Bushrod Washington was bombed and sunk on 14 September, and the James W. Marshall suffered heavy casualties. In all, the NHHC estimates that about 100 Allied ships and craft were sunk or damaged.
The first great loss of life at sea was Italian. On 9 September, the day of the landings, German bombers sank the battleship Roma as the Italian fleet sailed to surrender under the armistice. The NHHC counts 1,393 dead, including Admiral Carlo Bergamini; Italian commemorations cite about 1,700. Chapter 4 follows the naval war in full.
Mines added their own toll. Allied sweepers cleared 275 mines in the Gulf. LST-386 was destroyed by one, and the monitor Abercrombie struck another and withdrew. After the battle ended, engineers were still sweeping the beaches for mines.
From aid post to hospital ship: the medical chain at Salerno
A wounded man at Salerno passed from stretcher bearers to dressing stations, then to the beach and out to the ships. On the American beaches the Navy’s 4th Beach Battalion handled casualty evacuation along with its other jobs. A HistoryNet account based on veterans’ recollections says it moved more than 1,400 wounded off the beaches in twelve days.
Hospitals followed the troops ashore. The 95th Evacuation Hospital is said to have landed at Paestum on 9 September and is often described as the first U.S. hospital established on the European continent in the war; that claim rests on Wikipedia, drawing on Zachary Friedenberg’s history of the unit, Hospital at War. The Liberation Route sheet for the Paestum archaeological zone records a field hospital a few meters from the Greek temples. No source found for this collection shows that a temple itself served as an aid station or headquarters.
More units came in as the beachhead grew. The med-dept.com database of Army hospitals places the 94th Evacuation Hospital at Battipaglia from about 15 September; it moved to Maddaloni on 11 October. The 16th Evacuation Hospital began operating on 15 September, and a storm leveled its tents on 28 September. The 93rd, 8th and 38th Evacuation Hospitals arrived on 16, 21 and 29 September, and Field Hospitals 32 through 35 were in Italy from early September.
Disease was the quieter enemy. The 11th Malaria Survey Unit was in Italy from 1 September 1943, and two malaria control units followed on 18 October. This collection found no admission rates specific to Salerno.
The British chain ran on the same lines. Stretcher bearers carried men along the roads to advanced dressing stations, and in late 1943 and early 1944 the 59th General Hospital stood near Bellizzi, beside the ground chosen that November for the Commonwealth war cemetery. American medics also treated enemy wounded, as a Signal Corps photograph taken at Altavilla shows.
The Salerno mutiny: veterans who asked to rejoin their own divisions
What Wikipedia calls the largest number of men accused of mutiny at one time in British military history began in a transit camp behind the beaches on 16 September 1943, the day the last German attacks went in. In the judgment of historians such as Richard Holmes, it was not a refusal to fight. It was a refusal by veterans to fight with strangers, after a promise they believed they had been given was broken.
The men and their grievance
In September 1943 about 1,500 men sailed from Tripoli for Salerno. Many were veterans of the 50th (Northumbrian) and 51st (Highland) Divisions, Eighth Army formations that had fought across North Africa. Many were recovering from wounds or illness, and they understood they were going back to their own battalions. Instead, at Salerno, they were told they would go as replacements to X Corps’ 46th and 56th Divisions.
The Army’s need was real. X Corps had been bled hard at Battipaglia and in the hills above Vietri, and on 14 September General Sir Harold Alexander, visiting the beachhead, asked for 1,500 British infantry replacements. To the men in the camp, though, the issue was a broken promise. As the pardon campaign later put it, they had been misled into believing they would rejoin their own units, and they were at Salerno because of an administrative error.
The numbers come mostly from Saul David’s study, Mutiny at Salerno 1943: An Injustice Exposed. As Wikipedia summarizes them, about 1,000 newer soldiers accepted their postings, leaving about 500 veterans. About 300 were assembled in a field; after addresses by officers, 108 agreed to go, and 192 still refused. An Early Day Motion in the House of Commons and the Company of Heroes history site give 191, of whom three were sergeants and 16 corporals. Saul David’s own page says “almost 200.”
Lt. Gen. Richard McCreery, commanding X Corps, came to speak to them. By the accounts drawn on here, he admitted that an administrative mistake had brought them to Salerno, promised they would rejoin their old units once the beachhead was secure, and warned them what mutiny in wartime meant. Some men were still refusing their postings on 20 September.
The mutiny stemmed from the men’s reluctance “to fight amongst strangers,” not from any reluctance to fight at all.
— Paraphrasing Richard Holmes, military historian, reviewing Saul David’s book in the TLS, as quoted on sauldavid.co.uk
The Army’s position, the trials and the sentences
The Army’s position was simple, and the government restated it in 2000: in wartime a soldier does not choose his unit, and a collective refusal of a lawful order is mutiny, whatever the grievance behind it. The men who refused were held in a prisoner-of-war cage next to German prisoners, according to the Company of Heroes account, and then shipped back to North Africa.
Courts-martial opened in French Algeria, in the Constantine area, toward the end of October 1943. Saul David writes that “within six weeks, all but one had been found guilty of mutiny,” with sentences ranging from “five years’ penal servitude to death.” Wikipedia says all were convicted. The three sergeants were sentenced to death. Those sentences were commuted (to 12 years, in Wikipedia’s account) and then suspended, and the men were sent back to units.
The papers were closed for decades. The Company of Heroes account says a 75-year ban on the court-martial files was lifted early, in 1993.
The 2000 refusal
On 16 December 1999 Anne Begg, Labour MP for Aberdeen South, tabled Early Day Motion 211, which 107 MPs signed. In a Commons debate recorded in Hansard on 22 March 2000, she asked for a pardon, arguing that the men had not refused to fight but had asked that a promise be kept. John Spellar, Minister for the Armed Forces, refused. However unfair the order had seemed, he said, refusing it in wartime was a grave offense, and a pardon would be unfair to the men who had obeyed. By then many of the veterans had died.
- About 1,500 men, many of them 50th and 51st Division veterans, sail from Tripoli expecting to rejoin their units.
- The first refusals of postings to the 46th and 56th Divisions at Salerno.
- Men are still refusing their postings; about 192 will be charged with mutiny.
- Courts-martial open in the Constantine area of Algeria; three sergeants are sentenced to death, later commuted and suspended.
- The 75-year closure of the court-martial papers is lifted early.
- Anne Begg tables EDM 211 calling for a free pardon; 107 MPs sign.
- In the Commons, the Minister for the Armed Forces refuses a pardon.
- Saul David publishes Mutiny at Salerno 1943: An Injustice Exposed.
The Salerno mutineers refused to fight.
The record shows they refused postings to strange units and asked to rejoin their own divisions. The pardon motion of 1999 and historian Richard Holmes both make the point.
Five or six hundred men mutinied.
About 500 veterans were in the wider group at the camp, and Wikipedia’s Operation Avalanche article, citing Hansard, mentions about 600 reinforcements. The men charged numbered 191 or 192.
The death sentences were carried out.
No one was executed. The three sergeants’ sentences were commuted and then suspended.
Civilians under the guns: Battipaglia, Eboli, Campagna and Altavilla
The towns of the Salerno plain were bombed before a single soldier came ashore. Allied aircraft first struck Eboli on 26 July 1943, killing three people, one civilian and two soldiers. On the evening of 4 August a second raid killed seven Capuchin friars sheltering in a grotto at the convent of San Pietro alli Marmi, and a five-year-old boy. The Liberation Route sheet on Eboli says 70 percent of the town’s houses were destroyed.
The decision not to bombard the American beaches on 9 September was partly about civilians. General Fred Walker of the 36th Division, who joined Clark in turning down a preliminary naval bombardment to keep surprise, also worried about killing Italians one day after their country’s surrender. Once the fighting began, that restraint could not last. The battle was fought through villages and farms, and the guns of both sides fired into them.
Battipaglia was all but destroyed. British patrols entered on 10 September and were thrown out; the 56th Division was driven back from its edge on 12 September; and British armor entered unopposed only on 18 September (Chapter 5). Allied bombing razed most of the town in 1943. Wikipedia, citing the official Army Air Forces history by Craven and Cate, puts the civilian dead at 117; this collection could not confirm that figure from an official Italian source, and it should be read as an estimate.
Campagna, a hill town north of Eboli, was bombed by two American planes on 17 September. A memorial at the Largo della Memoria marks the raid. The source consulted for this chapter gives no death toll, and none is offered here.
Altavilla Silentina changed hands repeatedly between 11 and 19 September. During the crisis Blumenson records naval vessels putting 100 rounds on Altavilla alone, and the Liberation Route sheet for the Quota 424 memorial says the village was shelled by naval guns on 15 September. The same sheet counts more than 200 German and American casualties in about a week of fighting there. No count was found for the villagers themselves.
For Salerno city, this collection found no reliable civilian death toll. The best leads are the Comune’s own archives and Salerno’s historical institutes. The photographers’ record shows another side of civilian life on the plain: Italian families near the Paestum beach meeting the newcomers within days of the landings, and by 1 October women running an outdoor laundry for American soldiers beneath the temples.
Naples: a city bombed some 200 times
Naples, the objective of the whole operation, took about 200 Allied raids between 1940 and 1944, 181 of them in the first nine months of 1943. Estimates of the civilian dead, which rest on Wikipedia and on the Napoli Sotterranea association, run from “over 20,000” to 25,000. About 40,000 people lived in the city’s underground shelters.
The raid of 4 August 1943 almost destroyed the church of Santa Chiara. On 28 March the ammunition ship Caterina Costa exploded in the port; Napoli Sotterranea gives 600 dead and more than 3,000 injured, but the figures for that disaster vary widely. The German demolitions, the Four Days uprising and the time bomb in the central post office came later and belong to Chapter 9.
Between two armies: Italian soldiers after 8 September
When Eisenhower announced Italy’s surrender on Radio Algiers at 1830 on 8 September, Italian soldiers across the south did not know whose side they were on. The German plan to seize Italy, Operation Achse, went into effect that evening. Wikipedia, drawing on the operation’s literature, puts the number of Italian troops disarmed at about 1,006,370. Kesselring’s attitude was plain.
“No mercy must be shown the traitors.”
— Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, Commander-in-Chief South, after the armistice, as quoted by Blumenson, Salerno to Cassino, ch. V
Near Salerno the first test came within hours. General Ferrante Vincenzo Gonzaga commanded the Italian 222nd Coastal Division. On 8 September the Germans demanded that he surrender his division’s weapons. Gonzaga refused. At Buccoli di Conforti, near Eboli, he was shot by a German escort officer; Sergeant Giuseppe Maenza was killed with him. The Atlante delle stragi naziste e fasciste names the 16th Panzer Division as the suspected unit.
Commander, Italian 222nd Coastal Division
Gen. Ferrante Vincenzo Gonzaga
Ordered by the Germans to give up his division’s weapons on the night of the armistice, Gonzaga refused and was shot. German accounts first claimed suicide and later self-defense. His men were held in caves and deported. A German investigation was closed in the late 1960s.
- Died
- 8 September 1943, Buccoli di Conforti, near Eboli
- Also killed
- Sgt. Giuseppe Maenza
- Honor
- Medaglia d’oro al valor militare, posthumous
- Record
- Atlante delle stragi naziste e fasciste in Italia
The fate of Gonzaga’s division was the fate of hundreds of thousands. The historian Brunello Mantelli, quoted by the newspaper Avvenire, counts more than 650,000 Italian soldiers and NCOs interned in Germany after 8 September as Italian Military Internees, or IMI, in an article on the labor they were made to perform for the Reich. For the Italian army in the south, the armistice that brought the Allies ashore also brought deportation, and soldiers who had fought beside the Germans in Sicily only weeks before were now treated as traitors.
Reprisals in Campania: Nola, Acerra, Bellona and Caiazzo
As the Germans fell back from Salerno toward the Volturno, they left behind a trail of killings. The historian Daniele Susini argues that Nazi violence against civilians in the south began in the summer of 1943, before the armistice. The facts below come from the case sheets of the Atlante delle stragi naziste e fasciste in Italia, the national atlas of Nazi and Fascist massacres, and from the German research database ns-taeter-italien.org. The perpetrators named are those the sources name. Several attributions rest on historians’ expert reports for Italian prosecutors, and the Acerra sheet notes that its names still await judicial verification.
Nola, 11 September 1943
At Nola, east of Naples, the Italian garrison at the Caserma Principe Amedeo tried to negotiate. On 10 September Lt. Aldo Carelli was killed while going to the German command under a white flag, and Giuseppe De Luca, a 16-year-old civilian recorded as a partisan, was killed in the Piazza d’Armi. On 11 September German troops entered the barracks, chose ten officers from about seventy by decimation, and shot them.
The Atlante sheet names the dead officers: Colonel Michele De Pasqua of the 48th Artillery; Colonel Amedeo Ruberto, the garrison commander; Captain Mario De Manuele; and Lieutenants Consolato Benedetto, Roberto Berninzone, Enrico Forzati, Gino Iacovoni, Pietro Nizzi, Alberto Pesce and Giuseppe Sidoli. With Carelli, eleven officers died. The sheet attributes the killings to the 2nd Company, II Battalion, Hermann Göring Panzer Artillery Regiment, and names Lt. Gerhard Tschierschwitz. The other soldiers were deported.
Lt. Forzati, who some sources say took a comrade’s place, received the Medaglia d’oro; the sheet notes that the award to him alone has been disputed by those who say no officer had any chance to volunteer. A plaque in the Palazzo Orsini, the former military district headquarters and now the courthouse, carries the eleven names, and in 2010 the town named a street “XI Settembre 1943.”
Acerra, 1–3 October 1943
At Acerra, northeast of Naples, the killing lasted three days. On 1 October German troops set fire to the historic center and rounded up men for deportation. On 2 October, after partisans attacked a German motorcycle, the troops came back with tanks and fired into crowds, courtyards and homes. The Atlante sheet records 84 dead, 83 civilians and one partisan, among them women and children; the named list includes three young sisters of the De Sena family. The sheet itself warns that sources differ on the total and on which deaths were reprisals rather than combat.
“Una spietata e sanguinosa reazione dell’occupante tedesco.” (A ruthless and bloody reaction by the German occupier.)
— Citation of the Medaglia d’oro al merito civile awarded to Acerra, June 1999, as given in the Atlante case sheet
Bellona, 7 October 1943
On 6 October, at Bellona near Capua, German soldiers tried to abduct two young women. Their uncle was shot and wounded; another family member fought back, and a German soldier was killed by a grenade. The next day 54 men were shot in an abandoned tuff quarry on the road to Vitulazio. Twenty-two more bodies were found nearby. The ns-taeter-italien.org account says about 70 people died between 5 and 15 October, including boys in their early teens and six clergy. It names Oberst Wolfgang Maucke, commander of Panzergrenadier Regiment 115 of the 15th Panzergrenadier Division, as the officer who ordered the reprisal.
Caiazzo, 13 October 1943
On the slopes of Monte Carmignano above Caiazzo, on 13 October, 22 civilians were killed, among them 15 women, children and teenagers at the Albanese farm. The record names Lt. Wolfgang Lehnigk-Emden and Sgt. Kurt Schuster of the 3rd Company, Grenadier Regiment 29 (motorized), 3rd Panzergrenadier Division. Of the cases in this chapter, Caiazzo is the only one in which a court named a guilty man.
| Place | Date | Victims | Perpetrators (per the Atlante / ns-taeter) | Later justice |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Buccoli di Conforti, Eboli | 8 Sep 1943 | Gen. Ferrante Gonzaga and Sgt. Giuseppe Maenza | 16th Panzer Division suspected; a German escort officer | German investigation closed in the late 1960s |
| Nola, Caserma Principe Amedeo | 10–11 Sep 1943 | 11 officers (10 chosen by decimation) and a 16-year-old civilian | 2nd Co., II./Pz.Art.Rgt. Hermann Göring; Lt. Gerhard Tschierschwitz named | Naples military tribunal file 1860/99 with expert report; no outcome recorded |
| Acerra | 1–3 Oct 1943 | 84 dead (83 civilians, 1 partisan), incl. women and children; sources differ | Pz.Div. Hermann Göring units incl. III./Fallschirmjäger-Rgt. 1 and Kampfgruppe Becker | Naples military prosecutor investigations, 1999 and 2013; no further developments |
| Bellona, tuff quarry | 7 Oct 1943 | 54 shot, 22 more bodies found; about 70 dead, 5–15 Oct | Oberst Wolfgang Maucke, Pz.Gren.Rgt. 115, 15th Pz.Gren.Div. | Traunstein inquiry closed (1967 or 1971); Naples inquiry 1994–2000 closed; Maucke died 1963 |
| Caiazzo, Monte Carmignano | 13 Oct 1943 | 22 civilians, incl. 15 women, children and teenagers | Lt. Wolfgang Lehnigk-Emden, Sgt. Kurt Schuster, 3rd Co., Gren.Rgt. 29 (mot.), 3rd Pz.Gren.Div. | Koblenz, Jan 1994: responsible but time-barred; Santa Maria Capua Vetere, Oct 1994: life in absentia |
Sources: Atlante delle stragi naziste e fasciste in Italia (straginazifasciste.it) case sheets for Buccoli di Conforti, Nola, Acerra and Caiazzo; ns-taeter-italien.org entries for Bellona and Caiazzo. Several attributions rest on historians’ expert reports; only Caiazzo reached a verdict.
Justice delayed
An American Fifth Army officer investigated Bellona in November 1943, but no action on his report is recorded. A prosecutor at Traunstein, in Bavaria, closed an inquiry because the crime could not be reconstructed; the record dates the closure to 1967 in one place and 1971 in another. Italian military prosecutors in Naples reopened the files in the 1990s, but Maucke had died in Hamburg in 1963, and another officer under investigation, Hans Sandrock, could not be found; he had died in Cologne in 1995.
Only Caiazzo produced verdicts. In January 1994 a court at Koblenz found Lehnigk-Emden responsible but ruled the case barred by time. In October 1994 the assize court at Santa Maria Capua Vetere sentenced him and Schuster to life imprisonment in absentia. For the families of Nola, Acerra and Bellona, the record is the memorial, not a judgment.
German losses and the prisoners of Salerno
German losses in the beachhead battle were lighter than the Allies’. Blumenson estimates that German casualties “probably totaled about 3,500 men,” including about 1,000 in the Hermann Göring Division and about 1,300 in the 16th Panzer Division. The NHHC’s figure, 3,472, is almost the same. Wikipedia, citing Angus Konstam, breaks the total into 840 killed, 2,002 wounded and 603 missing. This collection found no authoritative total for German Tenth Army losses from 9 September to 6 October.
Those figures concealed real damage. The 16th Panzer Division began the battle with about 17,000 men, more than 100 tanks and 36 assault guns; by the end of D-Day only 35 tanks were still fit to fight. By 17 September, Blumenson notes, Tenth Army was 6,000 men under strength. The divisions’ own records are covered on the unit pages for the 16th Panzer Division and the Hermann Göring Division.
Prisoners flowed both ways. On 10 September the 142nd Infantry took Albanella and, by 1100, had captured only 40 Germans. German Tenth Army claimed about 1,500 prisoners, mostly British, by 11 September, and about 5,000 in all. When the 2nd Battalion, 143rd Infantry was overrun on 13 September, the National WWII Museum counts “hundreds of prisoners.” Among the Americans taken prisoner at Salerno was Pvt. William J. Crawford of the 142nd Infantry. His Medal of Honor for Hill 424 was awarded posthumously in 1944, but he was in fact alive in captivity, and he received the medal from President Reagan in 1984.
Some captured Germans were held aboard the transports offshore, as the Coast Guard photograph above shows. The 509th’s paratroopers, scattered across the hills around Avellino, worked their way back as best they could; the battalion’s veterans say German commanders believed a regiment had landed and sent a reserve infantry regiment to hunt it. Returns began only after Avellino fell on 30 September.
The German dead lay at first in scattered graves. In 1959 and 1960 those from the Salerno beachhead were moved to the German war cemetery at Cassino, which the Volksbund says holds about 20,100 German war dead, about 3,100 of them unnamed. It was inaugurated on 4 May 1965.
Campagna’s camp and the Palatucci dispute
Campagna, the hill town bombed on 17 September, held another story. From 1940 to 1943 the former Dominican convent of San Bartolomeo served as an internment camp for Italian and foreign Jews under the Fascist regime. Since 2008 it has housed the Museum of Remembrance and Peace.
The museum honors Giovanni Palatucci, long celebrated as a rescuer of Jews. In 2013, research by the Centro Primo Levi in New York challenged that reputation, as reported by La Voce di New York. Others answered that the case against him was not proven; Avvenire headlined its reply “Contro Palatucci mancano le prove,” or “the evidence against Palatucci is lacking.” The question remains open.
Where the dead of Salerno lie
The British and Commonwealth dead of Salerno lie at the Salerno War Cemetery, on the coast road just past Bellizzi. The site was chosen in November 1943 and designed by Louis de Soissons. It holds 1,851 Commonwealth burials of the Second World War, 109 of them unidentified. The war still gives up its dead here: the remains of two British soldiers found in the Giovi hills in 2017 were buried there in 2019.
There is no American cemetery at Salerno. The American dead were moved to the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery at Nettuno or sent home. The American Battle Monuments Commission counts 7,845 burials there and 3,095 names on the Tablets of the Missing, including men of the Salerno landings and the fighting that followed. Men of the 36th Division who fell at Paestum and Altavilla are among them.
The beachhead battle ended on 19 September, but for the people of Campania the worst weeks were still ahead. North of the Sorrento passes, Naples was about to rise against its occupiers, and the Germans were preparing to wreck its port before they left. Chapter 9 follows the road to Naples, the Four Days and the Volturno, and ends where travelers can stand today. For the battle in brief, see the collection hub and the Salerno FAQ.
Sources and further reading
- Martin Blumenson, Salerno to Cassino (U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1969), chapters V–X (casualties ch. IX, Fifth Army totals ch. X), HyperWar transcription.
- Naval History and Heritage Command, The U.S. Navy and the Landings at Salerno, Italy, and H-Gram 021-2.
- Naval History and Heritage Command, Rowan III, Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships.
- British Army Nurses, HMHS Newfoundland; and HistoryNet, An Army Nurse Describes a Deadly Attack on a Hospital Ship.
- WW2 U.S. Medical Research Centre, U.S. Army hospitals database (med-dept.com).
- Saul David, Mutiny at Salerno 1943: An Injustice Exposed (Conway, 2005); Early Day Motion 211, Mutiny at Salerno (House of Commons, 16 December 1999); Salerno mutiny stories (Company of Heroes history).
- Atlante delle stragi naziste e fasciste in Italia, case sheets: Buccoli di Conforti, Nola, Acerra, Caiazzo.
- NS-Täter in Italien, Bellona and Caiazzo.
- Liberation Route Europe, The bombing of Eboli, Memorial at Quota 424, Museum of Remembrance and Peace and Operation Avalanche in the archeological zone.
- Avvenire, Quelle braccia italiane che servirono al Reich (13 December 2021) and Contro Palatucci mancano le prove; La Voce di New York, Da eroe a criminale (20 June 2013).
- Commonwealth War Graves Commission, Salerno War Cemetery; Volksbund, Cassino German war cemetery; ABMC, Sicily-Rome American Cemetery.
- Napoli Sotterranea, napolisotterranea.org (English pages), on the wartime bombing and the shelters.
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