Ships Against Tanks: Naval Gunfire and the Fritz X

USS Savannah is struck by a German radio-guided bomb off Salerno, 11 September 1943. U.S. Navy photograph NH 95562, Naval History and Heritage Command, public domain.

Operation Avalanche · Chapter 4 of 9

Ships Against Tanks: Naval Gunfire and the Fritz X

For eight days the Allied fleet fought the German army ashore with its guns, and the Luftwaffe answered with a new weapon: the radio-guided bomb.

8–19 September 1943Gulf of Salerno · Paestum · Sele River · Montecorvino · Malta~25 min read

At about 1000 on 11 September 1943, a German Dornier Do 217 flying some 18,000 feet above the Gulf of Salerno released a bomb its crew could steer. It weighed about 3,000 pounds. As it fell, the bomber held straight and level while the bomb was guided by radio toward a ship far below. About ten minutes earlier, the same kind of weapon had narrowly missed the cruiser USS Philadelphia.

This one found the light cruiser USS Savannah. It struck the roof of her No. 3 turret, drove deep into the hull and vented below the waterline. The blast killed 197 men and seriously wounded 15. Savannah lay dead in the water for about eight hours. Somewhere forward, four sailors were sealed in a compartment, and no one could reach them for 60 hours, until the wrecked cruiser limped into Malta under her own power.

The bomb was a Fritz X, and it was the Luftwaffe’s best answer to the weapon that was quietly costing Germany the battle: the naval gun. Two days earlier, Savannah’s six-inch guns had silenced a railway battery with 57 rounds. By 17 September, cruisers, destroyers and finally battleships had fired more than 11,000 tons of shell in direct support of the troops ashore. This chapter is the story of that contest, and of the price the fleet paid for staying close.

Hewitt’s armada: the Western Naval Task Force at Salerno

The naval side of Avalanche belonged to Vice Adm. H. Kent Hewitt, commander of the Western Naval Task Force, Task Force 80, serving under the Allied naval commander in the Mediterranean, Adm. Sir Andrew Cunningham. From his flagship, the command ship USS Ancon, Hewitt commanded the whole operation until Lt. Gen. Mark Clark set up Fifth Army headquarters ashore on 12 September. Clark spent the night of the approach on Ancon’s bridge, and his diary caught the mood: “Hewitt and I on bridge… helpless feeling–all out of my hands until we get reports.”

Below Hewitt, the fleet split along the line of the Sele River, just like the army it carried. The Northern Attack Force (TF 85, mostly British) under Commodore G. N. Oliver, RN, carried X Corps to the beaches south of Salerno. The Southern Attack Force (TF 81, mostly American) under Rear Adm. John L. Hall Jr. carried VI Corps to Paestum. Cunningham’s despatch simply calls them Force N and Force S.

Two more British forces stood farther out. Force H, the covering force under Vice Adm. Sir Algernon Willis, brought battleships and the fleet carriers Illustrious and Formidable. Force V, the carrier air support force under Rear Adm. Sir Philip Vian, brought the small carriers whose fighters would patrol the beaches.

Gunfire support off the American beaches fell to Rear Adm. Lyal A. Davidson, flying his flag in Philadelphia, with Savannah, four destroyers, the British monitor Abercrombie and, from 12 September, the cruiser Boise. In the British sector, Rear Adm. Richard L. Conolly commanded the American element from USS Biscayne. He took three Hunt-class destroyers to within about a mile of the beaches, which earned him the nickname “close-in Conolly.”

Counts of the armada differ. The Naval History and Heritage Command says nearly 600 units sailed on 5–6 September from Oran, Algiers, Bizerte, Palermo, Termini and Tripoli in 16 convoys. The Army’s planning figure, in Martin Blumenson’s official history, is about 450 vessels; the gap probably reflects whether small landing craft are counted. The Northern Attack Force alone had 90 LSTs, 84 LCTs and 96 LCI(L)s, about half of them American. German aircraft struck the convoys from 6 to 8 September; five or six Ju 88s were shot down.

Minesweepers first

For fear of mines, the transports anchored 9 to 12 miles offshore, which gave the assault craft a long, wet run to the beaches. Task Group 81.8 under Cdr. A. H. Richards, with 12 YMS and 10 small motor minesweepers, worked the American approaches; the northern channels were reported clear at 0150 on 9 September. Allied sweepers cleared 275 mines in all, and on D+1 alone 66 were detonated or destroyed in the Southern Area. Even so, LST-386 was destroyed by a mine, and the monitor Abercrombie struck one after her D-Day shoot and had to withdraw.

The fighter range problem: air cover at the edge of reach

Every planner knew the weakness of Avalanche before a ship sailed. The Combined Chiefs had asked for landings “as far north as shore-based fighter cover” would allow, and that phrase did as much as anything to pick Salerno. Naples lay just outside effective single-engine fighter range from Sicily. Salerno lay barely inside it.

The numbers were unforgiving. Salerno is 226 miles from Trapani, 224 from Gerbini and 178 from Messina. The Army Air Forces history gives combat radii of 350 miles for the P-38, 200 for the A-36, 180 for the Spitfire and 150 for the P-39 and P-40. That bought a P-38 about an hour over the beaches, an A-36 about 30 minutes and a Spitfire about 20. The Tactical Air Force’s own report gives Spitfires carrying 90-gallon drop tanks about 25 minutes, with the nearest Sicilian field about 150 miles away; five new airfields were built around Milazzo to shorten the trip.

There would be no extra help. On 31 July Air Chief Marshal Tedder told Lt. Gen. Carl Spaatz of the Northwest African Air Forces that Avalanche would get only the resources NAAF already had. Blumenson judged the air plan “less closely integrated” than the ground and naval plans. Beach cover fell to XII Air Support Command under Maj. Gen. Edwin J. House.

Over the beaches on D-Day, House stacked a standing patrol: 12 A-36s low, 24 P-38s at medium height and 12 Spitfires on top. XII Air Support Command flew almost 700 sorties that day, and the carrier Seafires more than 250. Four enemy aircraft were shot down for the loss of two P-38s in combat.

The Germans did not need to win the air to do damage. Captured documents show 82 fighter and 26 ground-attack sorties on D-Day. On each of 10 and 11 September more than 100 enemy aircraft attacked, most of them fighter-bombers, and in the first three days Luftflotte 2 flew more than 450 fighter and fighter-bomber sorties and almost 100 heavy-bomber sorties. They came at the shipping in small formations of four to six aircraft. By the 11th the strain showed.

Force V: Seafires from the escort carriers off Salerno

The answer to the range problem was to bring the airfield with the fleet. On 26 July the Combined Chiefs allotted Avalanche one light carrier and four escort carriers, and Vian took them to sea as Force V: HMS Unicorn with Battler, Attacker, Hunter and Stalker. Between them they carried about 106 Seafire L.IICs, the naval Spitfire, in 11 squadrons. The fleet carriers Illustrious and Formidable of Force H flew top cover over Force V itself.

The Seafires flew hard, as the Armoured Carriers history of the Seafire details. On D-Day they put up 265 sorties, starting at 0615 and going on for about 13 hours, each sortie lasting about 85 minutes. On the second day, 65 serviceable Seafires flew 232 sorties and broke up more than 40 attacks. By the third day only 39 were serviceable, and they managed 160 sorties. At the peak, each aircraft was flying 4.1 sorties a day. In air combat they destroyed two enemy aircraft and damaged four; Lt. Cdr. W. C. Simpson of 897 Squadron shot down two Bf 109s on the second day.

The real enemy was the flight deck. The escort carriers could make only 17 knots, and in near-calm air that left little wind over the deck for landing. Of 713 fighter sorties, 32 ended in deck-landing crashes that wrote off the aircraft. Estimates of total Seafire losses to accidents range from about 70, an early figure, to 42 in a later analysis, with none lost to enemy action. Cunningham blamed the accident rate largely on too little deck-landing practice.

Force V stayed on station about three and a half days while land-based cover thinned, then withdrew to Palermo. Before leaving it flew 26 aircraft ashore to the new strip at Paestum, where the Seafires operated from 12 to 15 September.

Montecorvino airfield and the Paestum strip: getting fighters ashore

The planners had a cure for the range problem waiting on the plain. Montecorvino airfield, about three miles inland and ten miles below Salerno, could hold four fighter squadrons, and it was the first major planned objective of the operation. The British X Corps attacked toward it on D-Day and failed to take it. By the end of 11 September they had overrun it, but German artillery on the hills above made it unusable. Rehabilitation did not begin until 20 September. The British fight for the airfield belongs to Chapter 5.

So the engineers built a field from scratch. On the morning of 10 September the 817th Engineer Battalion (Aviation) began scraping a strip near Paestum. The Army Air Forces history says it was operational by 0600 on 11 September, and four P-38s made emergency landings there that day. Blumenson’s dates run later, with a stopgap strip ready at dawn on 12 September and others opening on the 13th and 14th; the likeliest reading is several strips opening in stages.

The work turned up something no one expected. According to the Liberation Route Europe sheet for the archaeological zone, building the Paestum strip uncovered the first evidence of the prehistoric Gaudo culture. Within days American fighters were flying from fields a few miles from Greek temples; Wikipedia, citing Maurer, has the P-40s of the 33rd Fighter Group operating from Paestum from 13 September to 18 November 1943.

Ships against tanks on D-Day: Philadelphia, Savannah and the Blue Beach destroyers

The order of 2035, 8 September

The cruisers off Paestum began D-Day in silence by order. Hewitt had identified 275 targets for fire before the landing. Clark and Maj. Gen. Fred L. Walker of the 36th Infantry Division refused, to keep surprise; Walker also worried about killing Italian civilians a day after the armistice. Hewitt doubted there was any surprise to keep, since Salerno was the obvious choice, the closest beach to Naples inside fighter cover. The decision is told in Chapter 1; the order went out that evening.

The British sector was different. There, Blumenson describes a 15-minute naval gun and rocket preparation starting about five minutes after the Rangers landed at 0310. Hewitt later dated the northern fire from 0315, and the gun landing craft LCG(L) 8 opened fire at 0324. The Army’s campaign brochure says X Corps landed “under a heavy naval bombardment.” In the south, the 36th Division went in at 0330 without one, as Chapter 2 describes.

Thirty-five tanks in a thicket

Once the troops were ashore, the ships needed eyes. Blumenson puts the first naval fire-control contact with the shore at about 0900, with shells landing about 15 minutes later. Savannah opened first, silencing a railway artillery battery with 57 rounds. By the end of the day she had answered 11 calls for fire and expended 645 rounds of six-inch. At 1131 she engaged German tanks at 17,450 yards, nearly ten miles, and drove them back.

Philadelphia began shore bombardment at 0943. Her scout plane, flying over the plain, found 35 German tanks hidden in a thicket beside Red Beach. Her guns destroyed seven before the rest escaped. It showed the system that would carry the battle: a spotter in the air or on the beach, a radio, and a cruiser several miles offshore.

On Blue Beach, the southernmost, the system nearly failed. Four of six tank-carrying LCTs off the beach were hit by 88-mm guns, and LST-389 had to rig her pontoon causeway under fire to get tanks ashore. For about three hours Blue Beach was isolated as German tanks came toward it, until destroyer gunfire drove them away. Signalman Fred Bingaman of the 4th Beach Battalion used handkerchiefs to signal the ships. He received the Silver Star.

The destroyers earned their reputation that day. USS Ludlow led a section of the assault wave through a known minefield, and the Navy’s ship history records that she and her sisters were “warmly commended by the commanding general ashore” for close-range fire. One general ashore, unnamed in Hewitt’s 1953 account, sent Admiral Davidson a message that said it plainly.

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, as quoted by Hewitt, U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, 1953

By nightfall, naval gunfire support ships had engaged at least 132 targets, with 53 percent accuracy, according to the Navy’s history of naval gunfire at Salerno. North of the Sele, British cruisers and Conolly’s destroyers were doing the same work against the batteries in the hills behind the X Corps beaches.

Holding the ring: naval gunfire in the Salerno crisis, 10–17 September

After D-Day the cruisers became the beachhead’s heavy artillery. The Navy’s H-Gram credits Savannah’s gunfire on 10 September with helping halt an attack down the Sele valley that it attributes to the 29th Panzergrenadier Division. Blumenson, however, has most of that division still stalled for lack of fuel near the Gulf of Policastro that day, so the identity of the attackers is uncertain.

The crisis came on 13 September, when German tanks and infantry drove down the Sele–Calore corridor toward the beaches, the story of Chapter 6. The Army’s own guns, above all the 158th and 189th Field Artillery Battalions, did much of the killing at the river junction. But naval gunfire helped repel that first major counterattack, and through the night of 13/14 September Philadelphia alone fired 921 rounds of six-inch. Blumenson’s chapter on the crisis notes that ships put 100 rounds on the hill town of Altavilla alone.

At 0800 on 14 September eight tanks and a battalion of the 16th Panzer and 29th Panzergrenadier Divisions attacked again; seven tanks were destroyed and one immobilized. Further probes against the 1st Battalion, 157th Infantry, and the 3rd Battalion, 179th Infantry, were stopped with naval help. Meanwhile, on 13 or 14 September (Blumenson and Hewitt disagree on the date), Clark asked Hewitt to prepare a re-embarkation. Hewitt halted VI Corps unloading and put ships on half-hour notice, but he called the plan technically impractical, Commodore Oliver called it “suicidal,” and the H-Gram credits Hewitt with helping persuade Clark not to go through with it.

The destroyers fired just as hard. A gunner’s mate from USS Mayo, writing in Naval History in 2003, recalled that on 15 September his ship fired more than 1,200 rounds of five-inch, over 300 per gun, mostly at German armor along the Sele, from about 5,000 yards off the beach. About 2,400 brass cases went over the side afterward. It is a veteran’s memoir, not an official count.

Philadelphia fought both the shore and the sky. On 15 September she shot down one of 12 attacking aircraft and helped drive off a second attack near Altavilla. On the 17th she shot down two more, then left for Bizerte that night.

The battleships come up from Malta

Around D+5, with the Germans close to the beaches and unloading stopped, Cunningham ordered the battleships Warspite and Valiant up from Malta; he also sent the cruisers Aurora and Penelope. When they opened fire is disputed. Hewitt’s 1953 article and Cunningham’s despatch have them arriving on 15 September, and Hewitt credits Warspite with “three highly successful bombardments” for VI Corps. A naval chronology on uboat.net has them returning on 16 September, Warspite firing 32 rounds near Altavilla and Valiant 19 at Nocera. Wikipedia gives Warspite 29 rounds and Valiant none on the 15th, out of 2,592 naval rounds fired that day.

Either way, the 15-inch guns arrived after the worst of the crisis: the Army’s campaign history says it had passed by the evening of 14 September. Cunningham’s despatch records naval gunfire shelling enemy positions all through D+7 and states that “the situation was restored by 1400 on D+8.” The arrival of the battleships, and of the paratroopers who dropped into the beachhead that week, is told in Chapter 7.

The totals are staggering. By 17 September the ships had fired more than 11,000 tons of shell in direct support. By 28 September, the Navy calculated, they had delivered the equivalent of 71,500 rounds of 105-mm artillery on 556 or more targets.

Fritz X and Hs 293: the radio-guided bombs of KG 100

The Germans had a new answer to the ships, and they had shown it to the world on the first day of the landings. On the afternoon of 9 September, the Italian fleet was sailing from La Spezia and Genoa to surrender. Do 217s caught it at sea. The first Fritz X hit the flagship, the battleship Roma, at about 1545 and a second about seven minutes later. A magazine explosion followed, and by 1615 she was gone.

Among the dead was the fleet commander, Adm. Carlo Bergamini. The NHHC gives 1,393 dead and notes that some accounts leave out Bergamini’s staff and give lower totals; Italian commemorations cite about 1,700. Her sister Italia was damaged by a near miss. The sinking is told in Chapter 1; for the Allied fleet off Salerno, it was a warning of what was coming.

Both weapons were carried by the Do 217s of the bomber wing KG 100, the subject of our record page on the unit. The weakness of the system was built in: a bomber flying steady at 18,000 feet was exposed while it guided its bomb, and a ship hidden in smoke was hard to hit. Photographs of the anchorage show cruisers and sub-chasers laying smoke against air attack.

Not everyone thought the new bombs as decisive as they looked. The air staff of the Mediterranean Allied Tactical Air Force concluded that the radio-controlled bombs “were less successful than the Army and Navy believed.” The Navy’s historians, counting the ships hit, call the Fritz X the dawn of precision-guided warfare; the full technical story is told in the NHHC’s H-Gram on the Fritz X.

USS Savannah, 11 September: 197 dead and four men in the dark

Savannah (CL-42) belonged to Davidson’s gunfire group, and on 11 September she was on station off the American beaches. About ten minutes after a near miss on Philadelphia, a Fritz X dropped by a Do 217K-2 from about 18,000 feet struck the roof of her No. 3 turret. It penetrated deep into the hull and vented below the waterline. A specialist account says it killed the turret crew and a damage-control party.

The NHHC counts 197 killed and 15 seriously wounded. Some non-Navy accounts give slightly different totals, but 197 is the Navy’s figure. The NHHC’s Salerno page even lists Savannah among the ships lost. She was not sunk, but she was “barely kept afloat,” and she lay dead in the water for about eight hours while her crew made hasty repairs.

Under Capt. Robert W. Carey, Savannah’s crew got her moving again. The fleet tug Hopi came to help, and the cruiser made Malta under her own power. Only there were four sailors trapped in a forward compartment finally reached, 60 hours after the bomb hit. Philadelphia, near-missed again that day, had 15 men wounded; over the course of the battle she was also near-missed on 9, 13, 16 and 17 September.

Night losses off Salerno: the tug Nauset and the destroyer Rowan

Not every loss came from the new weapons. The losses had begun before H-Hour: on 8 September LCT 624 was sunk. At about 0510 on D-Day, the fleet tug USS Nauset (AT-89) was hit by a large bomb. Her captain, Lt. Joseph Orleck, and two others went back aboard to try to save her, and a probable mine then destroyed the ship. Of 113 aboard, 18 were killed and 41 seriously wounded. Orleck received a posthumous Navy Cross, and the destroyer DD-886 was later named for him.

The worst single American loss came in the dark. The destroyer USS Rowan (DD-405) was screening emptied transports on their way back toward Oran when a German motor torpedo boat, an E-boat or S-boat, put a torpedo into her. According to the Navy’s ship history, the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, she sank in less than a minute; the H-Gram says under 40 seconds.

DANFS records that “202 of her 273 officers and men” were lost, leaving about 71 survivors; the destroyer Bristol rescued 70 of them. Even the date is disputed. The H-Gram places the sinking on the night of 10 September, while DANFS says “shortly after midnight,” which makes it the early hours of 11 September, the date the NHHC’s Salerno page and Hewitt’s 1953 article also use.

1. 0510 · 9 SepFleet tug Nauset bombed, then destroyed by a probable mine; 18 killed.
2. 1545 · 9 SepFirst Fritz X hits the Italian battleship Roma; she sinks by 1615.
3. Night 10/11 SepUSS Rowan torpedoed by an E-boat; 202 lost.
4. ~1000 · 11 SepFritz X hits USS Savannah’s No. 3 turret; 197 killed.
5. 13 SepHospital ship Newfoundland hit (press reports say about 0500); six nursing sisters and all her doctors killed.
6. 1440 · 13 SepGuided bomb hits HMS Uganda; 16 killed.
7. 14–15 SepLiberty ships Bushrod Washington and James W. Marshall hit.
8. 1410–1427 · 16 SepGuided bombs strike HMS Warspite.

13 September: HMS Uganda and the hospital ship Newfoundland

On the day the beachhead nearly broke, the Luftwaffe hit the fleet twice more. At 1440 on 13 September a guided bomb struck the British light cruiser HMS Uganda. It passed through seven decks and exploded beneath the ship, killing 16 men and knocking out her boilers; about 1,300 tons of water came aboard. USS Narragansett, leaving at about 0700 the next morning, towed her to Malta, and she was out of action for months. Hewitt’s 1953 article calls the weapon a “rocket bomb.” The same day, Philadelphia narrowly evaded two Fritz X.

The hospital ship HMHS Newfoundland was painted white and marked with red crosses. She was lying some 30 to 40 miles offshore after bringing American nurses to the beachhead; the British Army Nurses record says she and another hospital ship landed 103 U.S. nurses on 12 September, and the nurses of the U.S. 95th Evacuation Hospital survived. Newfoundland had already been attacked twice on the 12th. Early on 13 September she was hit.

Six British nursing sisters of Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service died: Matron Agnes Cheyne and Sisters Una Cameron, Mary Lea, Dorothy Cole, Phyllis Gibson and Margaret O’Loughlin. All her doctors and some of the ship’s officers were killed too. A 1943 report in the British Medical Journal, quoted by the British Army Nurses site, gives 23 dead. She was abandoned and, on 14 September, sunk by gunfire from USS Plunkett.

How she was hit is still argued: the NHHC says a guided bomb, 1943 press reports say dive-bombing at “5 a.m. on September 13,” and the British Army Nurses entry says a torpedo. What happened to her medical staff, and to the wounded who filled the hospitals ashore, is part of Chapter 8.

16 September: HMS Warspite hit, and the last guided-bomb strikes

The Liberty ships off the beaches were easier prey. On 14 September the SS Bushrod Washington was bombed and became a total loss, along with an LCT alongside her. The SS James W. Marshall suffered heavy casualties; Blumenson dates the hit to 15 September and blames a “rocket bomb,” most likely an Hs 293. Her hulk was later scuttled as part of a Mulberry harbor breakwater at Normandy.

Then came the most famous target of all. On 16 September HMS Warspite, Cunningham’s old flagship, was returning from fire-support duty when she was attacked between about 1410 and 1427. Wikipedia says three Do 217s of KG 100 made the attack. The bombs let in more than 5,000 tons of water, and her steam failed at about 1500.

The American tugs Hopi and Moreno, later joined by Narragansett, took her in tow. The tow through the Strait of Messina took about five hours against the current, and she reached Malta at about 0800 on 19 September. Wikipedia, citing Hoyt, gives 9 killed and 14 wounded; that figure was not confirmed in official sources. Warspite was repaired and fired again at Normandy.

The verdicts: what Germans and Allies said about naval gunfire at Salerno

The most telling testimony came from the other side. Generaloberst Heinrich von Vietinghoff, whose Tenth Army tried for a week to drive Fifth Army into the sea, reported “the naval gunfire from at least 16 to 18 battleships, cruisers and large destroyers lying in the roadstead.”

With astonishing precision and freedom of maneuver, these ships shot at every recognized target.

— Generaloberst Heinrich von Vietinghoff, German Tenth Army, as quoted in NHHC H-Gram 021

Late on 16 September, Vietinghoff concluded he could no longer destroy the beachhead. His attacks, he reported, were “unable to reach their objective owing to the fire from naval guns and low-flying aircraft,” as well as the steady approach of the British Eighth Army from the south. Gen. Siegfried Westphal was blunter: “The greatest distress suffered by the [German] troops was caused by the fire of ships’ guns of heavy caliber.”

The Allied commanders agreed. In his despatch, published in the London Gazette in 1950, Cunningham wrote the line that has defined the naval battle ever since. Hewitt, writing in 1953, said “the margin of success at Salerno was carried by the naval gun.” Eisenhower believed the troops might have been pushed into the sea without the combined naval and air effort, and the Army’s campaign brochure agrees: “The AVALANCHE force could have been thrown into the sea.”

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

— Adm. Sir Andrew Cunningham, despatch on the Salerno landings, London Gazette supplement 38899, 2 May 1950

The price was high. The NHHC estimates that about 100 Allied ships and craft were sunk or damaged, and it gives U.S. Navy casualties of 296 killed, 551 missing and 422 wounded; almost all the missing were later declared dead. The H-Gram’s summary, three destroyers and over 800 men lost, counts Rowan together with USS Buck, torpedoed by U-616 south of Capri on 9 October with 168 killed, and USS Bristol, torpedoed by U-371 on 13 October with 52 lost. Those two losses came weeks after the beachhead battle, but they are often counted among the Salerno naval losses.

The lessons were plain in the reports. The jammers had not been ready, and the first ones had jammed the wrong frequency. Smoke had worked. Fighter cover flown from distant fields had been thin. And the ships, firing close inshore on spotters’ calls, had held the ring. For the whole campaign, start at the Operation Avalanche collection hub or the Salerno FAQ, and compare it with the naval gunfire at Gela in our Invasion of Sicily collection two months earlier.

The ships had held the ring. But the ring itself, the beaches and roads north of the Sele, still had to be held by men on foot. While the cruisers fired, British and American infantry were fighting north of the Sele for Battipaglia, the Tobacco Factory and an airfield no plane could use. That is the story of Chapter 5: The British Battle.