Nine-Day Nightmare

SALERNO (260 pp.)--Hugh Pond--Lif-tle, Brown ($5.95).

There was every reason to expect that the Allied landing at Salerno in September 1943 would be a quick success. The Allies had an invasion force of 450 ships, mostly American, and 100,000 British and 69,000 American troops. The Italians had just surrendered, and the Germans could muster only 20,000 troops. But this first full-scale invasion of continental Europe in World War II floundered into confusion and almost failed--dashing Allied hopes of winning the war in a hurry.

Many military writers have tried to explain the Battle of Salerno, among them Naval Historian Samuel Eliot Morison and the battle commander, Mark Clark. But this book by Hugh Pond, former military correspondent of the London Daily Express, reconstructs the nine-day battle in all its vivid and confused detail.

Hot Welcome. Allied troubles, writes Pond, began at sea. The British forces under the command of Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, and the Fifth Army under Lieut. General Mark Clark never did reach final agreement on battle plans. So many last-minute revisions of battle plans were made that finally nobody even bothered to read them. Clark's idea was to take the enemy by surprise; therefore, over the objections of the British, he forbade any bombardment of the coast before the troops were landed. But German planes spotted the armada, and German troops, ably commanded by Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, swiftly took over the Italian batteries in the hills ringing the beach.

Allied troops were pinned to the beach by murderous fire. Many had been put ashore at the wrong place, and officers desperately pored over out-of-date maps trying to get themselves oriented. The British, assigned the north sector of the 20-mile stretch of beach, found themselves ten miles from the nearest Americans to the south, and the Germans soon filled the gap. Cried a dismayed U.S. artilleryman: "We've got them just where they want us."

Battle lines shifted crazily. A British commando received a message from headquarters: "You must retake Marina Beach." He wired back: "This is impossible. I've never lost it." In the dark, German Mark IV tanks were confused with U.S.-made Shermans. "D'you know,'' a British soldier muttered, "I actually peed against one of those tanks, thinking it was British. Blimey!"

High Cost of Victory. In the chaos of battle, many soldiers panicked and ran. A serious revolt occurred when 700 Scots, exhausted from three years' fighting in North Africa, sullenly refused to go into battle. By the fifth day ashore, Mark Clark was so discouraged that, says Pond, he gave preliminary orders to withdraw the American troops from the beachhead and use them to reinforce the British; stunned by the order, the British simply ignored it.

Eventually, the big naval guns in the hay decided the battle, knocking out one German emplacement after another. Heroism in the hills helped. Under heavy fire, an American sergeant maneuvered his antitank gun to the top of a ridge, demolished six tanks in half an hour. A British major given up for lost behind enemy lines reappeared with an enemy halftrack in tow, plus an 88-mm. gun and a dozen prisoners. A fiery British commando lieutenant colonel named Jack Churchill,* waving a sword in one hand, took 30 prisoners singlehanded. When an admiring if puzzled superior asked why the sword, Churchill replied: "In my opinion, any officer who goes into action without a sword is improperly dressed."

The price of victory was high: 7,811 Allied casualties. Worse, the defense at Salerno revitalized the Germans, delighting Hitler and encouraging him to pour more German troops into Italy. What was expected to be a triumphal march north through a beaten Italy became a slogging, tortuous, year-long campaign that repeatedly stalled and finally sputtered to a stop just north of Florence, cost 350,000 Allied lives before it was over.

*No kin

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