H-Hour in the Gulf: The Landings of 9 September

Troops bring artillery ashore at Salerno, September 1943, as a military policeman ducks from a German shell. U.S. Army photograph, National Archives.

Operation Avalanche · Chapter 2 of 9

H-Hour in the Gulf: The Landings of 9 September

No bombardment, no surprise: the British and the untested Texans of the 36th Division fight their way ashore against the 16th Panzer Division.

8–9 September 1943Paestum · Magazzeno · Sele River · Montecorvino · Battipaglia~25 min read

Off Paestum, in the dark early hours of Thursday, 9 September 1943, the landing craft of the U.S. 36th Infantry Division ran in toward a shore that no warship had shelled. The transports had stopped nine to twelve miles out, beyond the mines, and the assault boats had a long ride to the beach. Ahead lay a flat strand, a line of dunes and, somewhere in the blackness beyond, three Greek temples that had stood on that plain for more than twenty-four centuries.

H-hour was 0330. Most of the men in the boats had heard the news the evening before: Italy had surrendered. Some expected to walk ashore. They belonged to a Texas National Guard division, federalized in November 1940, that had spent nearly three years in federal service and had never been in combat. It was the only assault division at Salerno without battle experience.

When the leading boats were about 300 yards from the sand, the beach came alive with German fire. The Italians were out of the war, but the Germans were not. The 16th Panzer Division had taken over the coast, and it had been waiting. To the north, beyond the mouth of the Sele, British X Corps was already fighting its way ashore under the guns of its own fleet. By nightfall Fifth Army would be on the mainland of Europe, but only just, split in two by a river, and facing a German army that was gathering to throw it back into the sea. This is the story of that first day, part of our Salerno collection.

The Gulf of Salerno: 26 miles of beach under a ring of mountains

The Army’s 1944 battle pamphlet described the ground in plain terms. The beach ran about 26 miles from Salerno to Agropoli, almost straight from northwest to southeast. The surf was light and the offshore slope gentle, which is why planners liked it. Behind the sand lay a crescent-shaped plain about ten miles wide at its center, where the Sele River came down to the sea.

Everything else about the place favored the defender. A ridge called Mount Eboli, more than eight miles long, split the plain into a northern half and a southern half, and the Allied plan followed that split: the British north of the Sele, the Americans south of it. The Sele and its tributary, the Calore, ran roughly parallel for about seven miles and joined a few miles from the coast. The rivers were fordable in places, but they cut the beachhead into compartments.

Around the plain rose a wall of mountains. To the north, the steep and rocky Sorrento peninsula blocked the road to Naples except through a few narrow passes. Above the Paestum beaches, Monte Soprano climbed to over 3,000 feet, with cliffs that looked straight down on the 36th Division’s landing area. Halfway up a chain of hills to the east stood the village of Altavilla and the height the Americans would come to know as Hill 424. Whoever held those heights could look down on the beaches.

The two prizes on the plain were an airfield and a road net. Montecorvino airfield, about three miles inland, could base four fighter squadrons and was the first major objective of the British. The town of Battipaglia lay just beyond it. In the south, the railway ran close by the ancient walls of Paestum, nearly 5,000 yards around. You can read the ground for yourself in the Army’s terrain chapter. For why the Allies accepted this ground at all, see Chapter 1.

The night approach: armistice news, convoys and mines

The invasion fleet had sailed on 5 and 6 September from Oran, Algiers, Bizerte, Palermo, Termini and Tripoli. The Naval History and Heritage Command counts nearly 600 units in 16 convoys. The Army’s official history gives about 450 vessels; the difference is mostly whether small landing craft are counted. The plan called for about 100,000 British and nearly 70,000 American troops, with 20,000 vehicles. The British Northern Attack Force alone counted 90 LSTs, 84 LCTs and 96 LCI(L)s, about half of them American.

The Luftwaffe found the convoys early. German aircraft attacked from 6 to 8 September, most heavily on the 8th, when torpedo bombers went for the ships and five or six Ju 88s were shot down. The landing craft LCT 624 was sunk that day.

At 1830 on 8 September, the news reached the fleet. Eisenhower had broadcast Italy’s surrender from Radio Algiers, and the word spread through the troop decks. Hewitt’s account and the Navy’s histories note that some troops expected an unopposed landing. The Germans heard too: Generaloberst Heinrich von Vietinghoff, commanding the new German Tenth Army, caught a London broadcast at about 2000, and German units set about disarming their former allies that night. Near Eboli, on the edge of the battlefield, Gen. Ferrante Vincenzo Gonzaga of the Italian 222nd Coastal Division refused to give up his division’s weapons and was shot dead by a German officer. His story is told in Chapter 8.

Clark spent the night aboard Hewitt’s flagship, the command ship USS Ancon. Hewitt commanded the whole operation until Clark could set up his headquarters ashore.

Hewitt and I on bridge… helpless feeling—all out of my hands until we get reports.

— Lt. Gen. Mark W. Clark, diary, night of 8/9 September 1943, quoted in Blumenson, Salerno to Cassino

Mines shaped the whole approach. Because the gulf had been sown with them, the transports anchored nine to twelve miles offshore, which meant a long run in for the boats. In the American sector, Task Group 81.8 under Cdr. A. H. Richards worked ahead with 12 motor minesweepers of the YMS type and 10 smaller craft. In the north, the channels were declared clear at 0150. Over the course of the operation, Allied sweepers cleared 275 mines, and on D+1 alone, 66 were detonated or destroyed in the southern area. Not every ship was lucky: LST-386 was destroyed by a mine.

At 0200 the German shore batteries opened on the X Corps ships. LST-357 was hit with what the record calls “severe casualties.” Any hope of surprise in the north was gone.

No bombardment at Paestum: the decision for silence

The two halves of the invasion went in under very different rules. Hewitt had prepared a list of 275 targets for naval gunfire before the landing. In the American sector, Clark and Maj. Gen. Fred L. Walker of the 36th Division turned it down. They wanted surprise. Walker also worried about killing Italian civilians a day after Italy had laid down its arms.

Hewitt had argued that surprise was impossible. Salerno was the obvious choice, the closest beach to Naples within reach of fighters from Sicily, and the Germans would be watching it. He lost the argument, and the order went out on the evening of 8 September.

The British took the opposite view. In the northern sector, Blumenson describes a 15-minute naval gun and rocket preparation that began about five minutes after the Rangers landed. Hewitt dated the northern fire support from 0315, fifteen minutes before H-hour, and the gun landing craft LCG(L) 8 reported opening fire at 0324. The Army’s campaign brochure says simply that X Corps landed “under a heavy naval bombardment.”

The American admiral in the British sector, Rear Adm. Richard L. Conolly, pushed the idea further. Flying his flag in USS Biscayne, he took three Hunt-class destroyers to within about a mile of the beaches, which earned him the nickname “close-in Conolly.” Off Paestum, by contrast, the cruisers and destroyers held their fire as the first waves went in.

X Corps at H-hour: Uncle, Sugar and Roger beaches

The first troops ashore anywhere in the gulf were the special forces on the Sorrento coast. At 0310, twenty minutes before H-hour, Lt. Col. William O. Darby’s Rangers came ashore unopposed at Maiori, and British Commandos landed at Vietri sul Mare. “We are here. Let’s go,” Darby said, and his 1st and 3rd Ranger Battalions started up the mountain road toward the Chiunzi Pass. By mid-morning they held the heights on both sides of it. Their two-day mission would last more than two weeks; that story belongs to Chapter 3.

The main British landing went in at 0330 on the beaches south of Salerno town. Lt. Gen. Sir Richard McCreery’s X Corps put two divisions ashore side by side: the 46th Division on the left, nearer Salerno, and the 56th (London) Division on the right, toward the mouth of the Sele.

The 46th Division and the wrong beach

Maj. Gen. John Hawkesworth’s 46th Division landed on Uncle beach, in its Red and Green sectors, around the hamlet of Magazzeno. The spearhead was the 128th (Hampshire) Brigade, made up of the 2nd, 1/4th and 5th Battalions of the Hampshire Regiment. The stretch of sand was later renamed “Hampshire Beach.”

It did not go to plan. A scout boat, which was supposed to mark the landing point, took station too far south. The mistake left a gap in the 46th Division’s landing, and the 2nd Hampshires came ashore on the wrong beach. Cunningham’s despatch adds that the misplaced boat left a German strongpoint unneutralized, which caused the division serious trouble later. The Royal Hampshire Regiment Museum has the regiment’s own account.

The 56th Division drives for Montecorvino

To the right, the 56th Division landed on Sugar and Roger beaches, in their Amber and Green sectors. Its objectives were the first big prizes of the British plan: Montecorvino airfield and the town of Battipaglia, so that Allied fighters could fly from Italian soil instead of from distant Sicily.

Here too, troops came ashore off target. The 8th and 9th Battalions of the Royal Fusiliers, in the 167th Brigade, came ashore at Spineta beach, south of the Tusciano River and about a kilometer south of their planned landing point. Cunningham’s despatch notes that one brigade landed south of its beach and became mixed up with another. The 169th (Queen’s) Brigade, three battalions of the Queen’s Royal Regiment, also landed on the first day.

The attack on Montecorvino airfield failed on D-Day. British patrols got into Battipaglia but were driven out. The airfield would fall two days later, only to sit useless under German guns. That long, bitter fight for the northern plain is the subject of Chapter 5 and of the 56th (London) Division page.

VI Corps at Paestum: the 36th Division on Red, Green, Yellow and Blue

Twenty miles south of Salerno, Maj. Gen. Ernest J. Dawley’s U.S. VI Corps had one division in the assault. The 36th “Texas” Infantry Division was to land on four beaches strung along the shore below Paestum, code-named from north to south Red, Green, Yellow and Blue. The 142nd Infantry would take Red and Green, the 141st Infantry Yellow and Blue, and the 143rd Infantry would follow in reserve over Red.

The division landed with a heavy load of attachments: the 751st and 191st Tank Battalions, the 601st and 645th Tank Destroyer Battalions, five field artillery battalions and the 531st Engineer Shore Regiment. The 45th “Thunderbird” Division, veterans of the invasion of Sicily, waited offshore as a floating reserve.

The first waves touched down within about seven minutes of one another, at about 0335. German fire had begun when the boats were roughly 300 yards out. Then the schedule began to slip. The 2nd Battalion, 141st Infantry, reached Yellow Beach at about 0530, roughly fifty minutes late. The 1st Battalion, 142nd Infantry, landed on Red about an hour after that. Two battalions of the 143rd came in over Red between 0640 and 0800. Even so, all six assault waves were ashore by 0610, and the division was pushing inland.

The amphibious trucks added to the crowding. Blumenson records about 60 DUKWs reaching Green Beach around 0500, while about 125 more were circling off Red Beach by 0530, waiting for a safe place to land.

“Come on in, we have you covered”: the Paestum loudspeaker legend

One story of the Paestum landing is told again and again. As the 36th Division’s first wave neared the beach, so the tale goes, a German loudspeaker boomed out across the water in English: “Come on in and give up. We have you covered.” It is a perfect story, and it is probably not true.

Martin Blumenson, the Army’s official historian, looked into it and called it “fanciful.” He gives the words as “Come on in, we have you covered,” and suggests in a footnote to his chapter on the landings that the voice may have come from American beach-party loudspeakers directing landing craft, not from the Germans. The Navy’s history repeats the tale of German loudspeakers inviting surrender without saying where. Treat it as legend. More common questions like this are answered in the Salerno FAQ.

Blue Beach and the 88s: tanks, landing craft and the LST-389 causeway

The southernmost beach had the hardest morning, and the 141st Infantry paid for it. The tanks that were meant to support the infantry came in aboard six tank landing craft. German 88-mm guns hit four of the six.

For about three hours, Blue Beach was cut off. German tanks moved toward it. On the beach with the infantry were sailors of the Navy’s 4th Beach Battalion, and one of them, Signalman Fred Bingaman, used handkerchiefs to signal the destroyers offshore. The ships answered, their fire drove the tanks away, and Bingaman received the Silver Star.

Getting heavy equipment ashore was the other problem. The offshore slope at Paestum was gentle, and the Navy brought floating pontoon causeways to bridge the water between the tank landing ships and the sand. Off Blue Beach, LST-389 rigged its causeway under fire so that tanks could at last roll ashore.

The 141st’s toll on D-Day shows how hard the southern beaches were. The regiment lost 51 men killed, 121 wounded and 31 missing on 9 September. A general ashore sent the fire-support commander, Rear Adm. Lyal A. Davidson, a message that summed up what the ships had meant to the men on Blue and Yellow.

Thank God for the fire of the Blue Bellies’ Navy Ships. Probably could not have stuck it out on Blue and Yellow beaches.

— An unnamed U.S. general ashore to Rear Adm. Lyal A. Davidson, 9 September 1943, quoted by Adm. H. Kent Hewitt, USNI Proceedings, 1953

Nauset and the air battle over the anchorage

While the infantry fought for the dunes, the Luftwaffe went for the ships. At about 0510, a large bomb hit the fleet tug USS Nauset (AT-89). Her skipper, Lt. Joseph Orleck, and two others went back aboard to try to save her, and she was then destroyed, probably by a mine. Of the 113 men aboard, 18 were killed and 41 seriously wounded. Orleck was among the dead. He received a posthumous Navy Cross, and the destroyer USS Orleck (DD-886) was named for him, according to the Navy’s H-Gram history.

Allied air cover over the beaches was thin because of distance. Salerno lay 226 miles from the fighter fields at Trapani, 224 from Gerbini and 178 from Messina. By the Army Air Forces’ official history, a P-38 could stay over the beaches for about an hour, an A-36 for about 30 minutes, and a Spitfire for only about 20. The standing patrol on D-Day was stacked in three layers: 12 A-36s low, 24 P-38s at medium height and 12 Spitfires on top.

Maj. Gen. Edwin J. House’s XII Air Support Command flew almost 700 sorties on 9 September. The Royal Navy’s escort carriers of Force V, under Rear Adm. Sir Philip Vian, added more than 250 Seafire sorties, starting at 0615. That day the Allied fighters shot down four German aircraft for the loss of two P-38s in combat. Captured German documents later showed 82 fighter and 26 ground-attack sorties against the beachhead that day, a modest effort that would grow quickly.

The day’s worst news at sea came from far to the north. That afternoon, at about 1545, German Do 217s using Fritz X radio-guided bombs struck the Italian battleship Roma as the Italian fleet sailed to surrender. She sank by 1615, and the Navy’s history gives 1,393 dead; Italian commemorations cite about 1,700. The same weapon would soon be turned on the ships off Salerno. That story, and the naval battle as a whole, is told in Chapter 4.

The 16th Panzer Division strikes back: tank attacks on the Paestum plain

The enemy along the whole gulf was a single German division, spread thin. The 16th Panzer Division, under Generalmajor Rudolf Sieckenius, had about 17,000 men, more than 100 tanks and 36 assault guns. It held a front of more than 20 miles, with eight strongpoints between Salerno and Agropoli. The Navy’s history says it reached the Salerno plain on 6 September; Blumenson has it deployed along the gulf as far south as Agropoli by the 8th.

Allied intelligence had expected about 39,000 German troops to meet the landings on D-Day and 100,000 by D+3. On the morning of 9 September, the 16th Panzer had to hold alone. The division struck back with its tanks, in groups of eight to sixteen at a time.

The first counterattack came between 0700 and 0730. The sources disagree on its size. The Army’s campaign brochure gives about 15 tanks; Blumenson gives about eight, striking at a gap near the 1st Battalion, 141st Infantry.

The heaviest blow fell at 1120, when 16 Mark IV tanks attacked. Blumenson records that six were destroyed. By then naval gunfire had begun to answer the infantry’s calls. The Panzer IV in the photograph above was knocked out by a bazooka beside the old Paestum railway station.

The fighting was a series of small, separate battles, and individual soldiers counted for a great deal. The Texas Military Forces Museum records that S/Sgt. Manuel “Ugly” Gonzales of the 142nd Infantry, wounded and with his pack on fire, knocked out a machine gun, an 88, an ammunition dump and a mortar on D-Day. He received the Distinguished Service Cross. On the 141st’s front, one soldier’s fight earned the first Medal of Honor of the Salerno battle.

By evening, the 16th Panzer Division had paid heavily. Blumenson reckons that only about 35 of its tanks were still fit to fight at the end of D-Day, about a third of those it had started with. The division had not broken the beachhead, but it had kept the Americans pinned close to the shore, and help was on the way from the south and the north.

Naval gunfire finds its targets: Savannah, Philadelphia and the destroyers

Because there had been no preliminary bombardment, the American ships had to wait for targets. Naval gunfire needed spotters, and the shore fire-control parties had to land and make contact with the ships. Blumenson puts the first naval fire-control contact at about 0900, with the first shells landing about fifteen minutes later.

The destroyers had not waited. USS Ludlow led a section of the assault wave through a known minefield, and she and her sisters closed the beach to fire at close range. The ship histories record that they were “warmly commended by the commanding general ashore.”

The cruisers came into it as soon as they had targets. The Navy credits USS Savannah with opening first: she silenced a German railroad artillery battery with 57 rounds. Over the day she answered 11 calls for fire and shot 645 rounds of six-inch ammunition. At 1131 she fired on German tanks at 17,450 yards and drove them back.

USS Philadelphia, flagship of the fire-support group, began her shore bombardment at 0943. Her scout plane found 35 German tanks hidden in a thicket beside Red Beach, and her guns destroyed seven of them before the rest escaped. The British monitor HMS Abercrombie also bombarded on D-Day until she struck a mine and withdrew. By nightfall, the gunfire-support ships had engaged at least 132 targets, with 53 percent accuracy.

Those numbers were only a beginning. In the crisis four days later, Philadelphia alone would fire 921 six-inch rounds in a single night, and German generals would name naval gunfire as a main reason they failed.

Beach battalions, Seabees and DUKWs: the people who ran the beaches

An amphibious landing is also a traffic problem. At Paestum, that work fell largely to the U.S. Navy’s 4th Beach Battalion, which put nine platoons across Red, Green, Yellow and Blue beaches.

The beach battalion marked the beaches, controlled traffic, salvaged wrecked craft, ran signals and evacuated casualties. In its first twelve days it evacuated more than 1,400 wounded. Its commanding officer, Lt. Cdr. James E. Walsh, stayed aboard Ancon. According to HistoryNet’s account of the battalion, all troops and vehicles of the initial lift were ashore by 2200 on 10 September.

Alongside the sailors came the Army’s 531st Engineer Shore Regiment. Its men landed with the beach parties in waves two through six, and they helped storm the Torre di Paestum, the old tower near the beaches.

The Navy’s construction battalions, the Seabees, handled the causeways. In the north, the 1006th Seabee Causeway Detachment helped land the British 46th Division from LSTs; in the south, Seabee pontoon crews laid the causeways for the Americans. The Seabee Magazine history says the Seabees lived on the beaches for ten days, unloading under fire, and that the detachment took 28 percent casualties. Lt. Carl M. Olson was killed on 10 September with seven of his men; he was the first officer of the Navy’s Civil Engineer Corps killed in action.

On the British beaches, Royal Naval Beach Commandos did the same jobs. Their work paid off. From D+2, according to Cunningham’s despatch, about 3,000 tons of supplies a day were landed over the British beaches alone.

Nightfall on D-Day: casualties, the Sele gap and what came next

The command picture filled in through the afternoon. Dawley went ashore at 1300 to take charge of VI Corps on the ground. At 1740, Walker asked for a regiment of the 45th Division, and the 179th Infantry began landing that night and early the next morning. At 2045, Clark reported that the whole 36th Division was ashore.

Ashore, but not secure. The 36th Division had lost about 500 men on D-Day, about a fifth of them killed. The 141st Infantry’s figures have already been given; the 142nd lost 32 killed, 109 wounded and 8 missing. Some units had landed late, and others on the wrong beach.

The larger danger lay in the shape of the beachhead. The two corps had landed on either side of the Sele, and by evening a gap of about seven miles separated them. That night the Germans blew the Highway 18 bridge over the Sele. In the north, Montecorvino airfield was still in German hands and Battipaglia was still German. In the south, the Americans held the beaches and part of the plain, but the hills that overlooked them were not yet in American hands.

The commanders knew it. Eisenhower cabled the Combined Chiefs of Staff that “we are in… for some very tough fighting.” He was right. The German Tenth Army was already moving. The 29th Panzergrenadier and 26th Panzer Divisions were withdrawing from Calabria toward the gulf, though fuel shortages would stall the 29th, and the Hermann Göring Division, posted between the Volturno and Castellammare, would be thrown against the British.

1. 1830 · 8 SepItalian armistice announced to the fleet; some troops expect an unopposed landing
2. 2035 · 8 SepOrder forbidding shore bombardment in the U.S. sector
3. 0200 · 9 SepGerman shore batteries fire on X Corps ships; LST-357 hit
4. 0310 · 9 SepRangers land at Maiori and Commandos at Vietri
5. 0330 · 9 SepH-hour: X Corps lands on Uncle, Sugar and Roger; 36th Division at Paestum
6. 0510 · 9 SepFleet tug USS Nauset hit by a bomb and lost
7. 0610 · 9 SepAll six of the 36th Division’s assault waves ashore
8. 0700–0730 · 9 SepFirst 16th Panzer counterattack, about 8 to 15 tanks
9. About 0900 · 9 SepFirst naval fire-control contact in the U.S. sector
10. 1120 · 9 Sep16 Mark IV tanks attack; six destroyed
11. 1740 · 9 SepWalker asks for a regiment of the 45th Division
12. 2045 · 9 SepClark reports the whole 36th Division ashore

Walking the Salerno landing beaches today

The southern beaches are the easiest part of the battlefield to visit, because they lie at the doorstep of one of the great archaeological sites of Europe. In 1998 UNESCO listed the archaeological sites of Paestum and Velia, together with the Cilento and Vallo di Diano National Park and the Certosa di Padula, as a World Heritage Site. The beaches where the 36th Division landed lie less than a mile to the west.

1943Today

No source shows that the temples themselves served as a headquarters or a hospital. The Liberation Route Europe guide records that a field hospital stood a few meters from them and that Clark lived at the Villa Salati nearby. Building the wartime airstrip near Paestum turned up the first evidence of the prehistoric Gaudo culture, an unexpected gift from the engineers to archaeology.

Stand on the sand below Paestum and look east: the flat fields, the temple columns and, above everything, the long grey mass of Monte Soprano. It is easy to see why those heights mattered so much to both sides.

Fifth Army had won the first day. On 10 September, the Americans would push inland to Albanella and the British would try Battipaglia again. Within two days the 36th Division would take Altavilla and Hill 424 with what Blumenson calls “deceptive ease,” and lose them. German reinforcements were already on the roads, and the gap at the Sele was waiting for them. The mountain flank comes next, in Chapter 3, and the crisis on the plain in Chapter 6.