The 504th Parachute Infantry at Salerno

Altavilla Silentina, the hill town fought over by the 36th Division and the 16th Panzer Division, 11–18 September 1943. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Special Units · Operation Avalanche, 1943

The 504th Parachute Infantry at Salerno

Dropped into the threatened beachhead on the night of 13/14 September 1943, Tucker's paratroopers went straight into the line and fought for Altavilla and Hill 424.

At 2100 on 13 September 1943, every antiaircraft gun around the Salerno beachhead was ordered to fall silent, and the barrage balloons were hauled down. For gunners who had been bombed for four days, it was a strange order. At 2326, four minutes early, the reason appeared: men of the 2nd Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry, jumping from thirty-five transport planes at 800 feet over a field about five miles north of Agropoli.

That morning the regiment had still been waiting on its airfields in Sicily. By dawn on 14 September they were moving into the line beside the battered 36th Division. Within a week Col. Reuben H. Tucker’s paratroopers had fought their way onto the Altavilla heights and Hill 424, the ground that had cost the Texans so dearly. This page tells their part of the battle; the wider airborne story is in Chapter 7.

Rome cancelled, Sicily waiting: how the 504th came to Salerno

The 82nd Airborne Division was never meant to fight at Salerno. Under the armistice plan called GIANT II, it was to drop around Rome and secure the city with Italian help. On 3 September it was taken off the AVALANCHE troop list “despite General Clark’s shocked protest.” On 8 September, after Brig. Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor’s secret mission to Rome, the drop was cancelled, too late to put the division back into the landings. The armistice story is told in Chapter 1.

By 13 September, Clark needed every man he could find. German armor had broken into the corridor between the Sele and Calore rivers, a battalion of the 36th Division had been destroyed, and Fifth Army staff were drawing up evacuation plans (see Chapter 6). That day Clark wrote to Ridgway, and he did not frame it as a request.

“I want you to make a drop within our lines on the beachhead and I want you to make it tonight. This is a must.”

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

Ridgway’s first fear was his own side. Over Sicily two months earlier, Allied gunners had shot down transports full of paratroopers. “Rigid control of antiaircraft fire is absolutely essential for success,” he answered, and Clark silenced the guns.

Giant I Revised: the night drop south of Paestum

The mission, code-named GIANT I (Revised), was put together in hours. Blumenson writes that it was possible only by using staging and loading plans already prepared for a cancelled drop at Capua. The aircraft followed the Italian coastline to the drop zone. On the ground, a pathfinder group set up radar equipment to lead the flights in; the Airborne Museum at Sainte-Mère-Église counts this as one of the first uses of pathfinders.

The 2nd Battalion went first, from thirty-five planes at 2326. A second serial of forty-one aircraft, held up in Sicily by mechanical trouble, dropped its men at about 0130 on 14 September, and fourteen more planes followed. One company came down eight to ten miles away. Otherwise, Blumenson writes, most troops “landed within 200 yards of the jump zone and all within a mile of it.” In all, ninety planes brought about 1,300 men into the beachhead within fifteen hours of Clark’s request. Blumenson counts 73 injured in the jump.

Into the line: Monte Soprano, the 505th and the sea lift

Tucker reported to VI Corps headquarters at 0300 on 14 September. Later that morning his two battalions moved into the line in the Monte Soprano sector, on the mountain that rises behind the Paestum beaches. Attached to the 36th Division, the regiment gave Maj. Gen. Fred L. Walker a fresh reserve at the moment he most needed one. The 36th Division page tells what the Texans had been through.

The next night the 82nd sent Col. James M. Gavin’s 505th Parachute Infantry into the beachhead south of Paestum, about 2,100 men in Blumenson’s count (1,900 in Craven and Cate’s). Its Sicily story is on the 505th Parachute Infantry page. The same night the 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion jumped far behind the German lines at Avellino.

Not all of the 504th came by air. Its 3rd Battalion had gone to Licata in Sicily to be attached to the 325th Glider Infantry, which sailed for the beachhead. The regimental association says H Company landed by sea behind the Rangers at Maiori, held a hill there for eighteen days and earned a Presidential Unit Citation. Exactly which elements came by sea, and when, is not settled between the sources.

The Altavilla heights and Hill 424, 16–18 September

Altavilla Silentina and Hill 424 had already changed hands twice: taken by the 36th Division on 11 September, lost on the 12th, attacked in vain on the 13th. On 16 September Walker proposed another attack with “the two battalions of the 504th Parachute Infantry,” and directed Tucker to jump off from near Albanella and seize the dominating hills, “Hill 424 in particular.”

The paratroopers went in during the night of 16 September and ran into heavy German artillery fire. Tucker was driven from his observation post, and on the morning of the 17th German troops surrounded his command group on the hill. Walker and Ridgway moved the 3rd Battalion of the 504th to Albanella as a backup and had artillery and naval guns shell the Altavilla area heavily; Blumenson records that naval guns alone put 350 rounds into the village that day.

Then the Germans let go. Kesselring had agreed to break off the battle, and the troops around Altavilla began to withdraw. The 504th waited until the next day and entered the village unopposed, on 18 September in Blumenson’s account and the 19th in the Texas Military Forces Museum’s. Blumenson credits the paratroopers’ pressure around Altavilla on 17 September with hastening the German withdrawal. Tucker and Majors Robert B. Acheson and Don B. Dunham were later awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.

The village paid heavily. The Liberation Route’s memorial sheet counts more than 200 German and American casualties in about a week of fighting there, and its civilians lived under the shelling. Walker himself later doubted that the bombardment of what he called “a village full of helpless civilian families” had been any real help.

“Retreat, Hell!”: tradition, record and what came next

Every regiment has its line, and the 504th found its own at Altavilla. The regimental history tells how, after a German counterattack, a general suggested pulling the unit back, and Tucker answered: “Retreat, Hell! — Send me my other battalion!” It is a treasured tradition. The wording varies between accounts, and no official record of the exchange was found for this page.

On 17 September Ridgway was named deputy commander of VI Corps. On 20 September Clark attached a battalion of the 504th, less a company, to Darby’s Rangers in the Chiunzi Pass for the push to Naples, and on 1 October the 82nd Airborne entered the city. That road is the subject of Chapter 9. The drop zones south of Paestum lie in farmland toward Agropoli; no marked monument to the drop was found, but the memorial at Quota 424 outside Altavilla stands on the ground the 504th took.