On 3 September 1943, General Bernard L. Montgomery’s British 8^th Army crossed the Straits of Messina under no opposition, carving a new stronghold in the foot of the Italian boot.[3]  The newly established US 5^th Army under Lt. Gen. Mark W. Clark would make another landing at the Gulf of Salerno south of Naples on 9 September to coincide with the announcement of the Italian surrender.  Codenamed, Avalanche , three divisions would hit the beach with a floating division in reserve. In the Mediterranean Allied Air Force’s (MAAF) preparation for Operation Avalanche, many B-26 squadrons were tasked with saturation attacks against Luftwaffe airbases in the region that could respond to the invasion. Although much damage was done, not all the Luftwaffe units capable of responding were taken out.[4]

With a larger invasion up the Italian boot imminent, the Luftwaffe’s Ju-88 strike force of Luftflotte 2 (Air Fleet 2) concentrated on Allied port facilities that would support such an invasion and the buildup of supply and material required to launch it. Long-range raids were mounted on North African ports like Algiers and Bizerte, with 35 aircraft attacking coastal convoys on 2/3 September and 80 attacking Bizerte on the night of 7 September.[5] As the invasion fleet approached the Gulf of Salerno on the night of 8 September, Luftwaffe reconnaissance aircraft spotted them, and Ju-88 Kampfgruppen bombers launched 150 sorties against the approaching fleet throughout the night.[6] Ju-88 crews taking off out of Foggia would mount one to two sorties a night, making their 136-mile round trip to attack shipping in the Gulf of Salerno throughout the coming campaign despite heavy Allied air attack against their airbases.[7] At any rate, by the morning of 9 September, any element of surprise was lost as the armada approached the Gulf of Salerno.

On the 8^th and into the early hours of the 9^th of September, as the announcement of the Italian capitulation hit the air waves, the Germans initiated Asche and quickly began confronting confused and disorganized Italian units and smashing many instances of armed resistance. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, known by many opponents as Smiling Albert and commander of all German forces in Southern Italy, had placed Generaloberst Heinrich von Vietinghoff’s Armeeoberkommando 10 (AOK 10 or 10^th Army) on alert alongside many Luftwaffe units of Luftflotte 2 (2^nd Air Fleet) to resist the impending invasion. While many units were occupied with securing the country and disarming Italian garrisons, the immediate units within the vicinity of the beachhead were placed on alert, including the 16^th Panzer Division, re-established after being destroyed at Stalingrad the previous year.  Holding the high ground overlooking the landing beaches, the 16^th Panzer, who had just replaced and disarmed the Italian 222^nd Coastal Division’s sector, would hold the responsibility of the initial resistance to Clark’s landing while others would rush to the scene.[8] The order of battle for Avalanche consisted of the following units and commanders: General of Panzer Troops Herman Balck’s XVI Panzer Corps and General of Panzer Troops Traugott Herr’s LXXVI Panzer Corps driving their attacks against the Sele River which split Lt. Gen. Richard McCreery’s X Corps to the North beachhead and Maj. Gen. Ernest J. Dawley’s VI Corps on the South Beachhead.[9]

The Battle Ashore 

At 0310 hours on 9^th September, the assault units hit the beaches and immediately began taking heavy fire from artillery, tank, and machine gun emplacements spread along the beaches and surrounding heights.[10]  Soon, elements of eight motorized and combat-veteran Panzer, Parachute, and Panzergrenadier Divisions would converge on the British and American beachheads.  The ability for the Allies to call in firepower on concentrations of attacking armor was essential to their survival.  Naval gunfire and reinforcements to the beachhead proved vital in achieving a culmination point at which the counterattacking Germans could not dislodge the defenders without unacceptable losses.  Kesselring’s approach centered upon releasing as many units as possible to immediately rush into the attack on the fledgling beachhead to drive Clark’s 5^th Army back into the sea.  With the Germans making pushes within a mile to the water’s edge, the Luftwaffe, commanded by Field Marshal Wolfram von Richthofen, was called upon to make constant attacks on the amphibious supply and fire support vessels providing cover and lifelines to the troops ashore.[11] Messerschmidt Bf-109 G-6 (Trop) fighters, Ju-87D Stuka dive bombers, FW-190 Jabos , and Ju-88 Junkers medium bombers swept back and forth along the beaches strafing the troops and attacking landing craft slogging through the surf into the teeth of the 16^th Panzer Division’s beach defenses.[12] In the U.S. Army official history, Martin Blumenson outlines the Luftwaffe’s situation on the beachhead stating,

Of the 625 German planes based in southern France, Sardinia, Corsica, and the Italian mainland, no more than 120 single-engine fighters and 50 fighter-bombers were immediately available at bases in central and southern Italy. Yet their short distance from the Allied beachhead made it possible for a plane to fly several sorties each day. Thus, on 11 September Allied observers reported no less than 120 hostile aircraft over the landing beaches. Barrage balloons, antiaircraft artillery, and Allied fighter planes markedly reduced the effect of the German air raids, but the threat could not be ignored–even though the lack of mass air attacks seemed to indicate that the Germans were not holding a large air fleet in reserve to repel the invasion. [13]

The ships offshore balanced the life and death struggle to fend off attacks from above while attempting to provide much needed fire support to the ground units holding on for life against Kesselring’s Panzers. The Panzers penetrated to within less than a mile from the water’s edge with some reaching the waterline itself, annihilating an entire US infantry battalion in the process.[14]  The situation was in so much doubt that General Clark contemplated re-embarking the American force and re-landing them in the British X Corps sector.[15]  In fact, by the end of the day on 13 September, German units pushed so close to the water’s edge that General von Vietinghoff’s 10^th Army official war diary stated, The battle for Salerno appears to be over. [16] Many B-26 medium bomber crews of the 12^th Air Force were briefed that the situation at Salerno was growing desperate with Kesselring’s Panzer Divisions threatening to overrun the beachhead. Round the clock missions were flown by the B-26s with some crews flying 4 sorties within a 48-hour period, striking enemy troop and tank concentrations converging on the beachhead.[17] A desperate reinforcement airdrop of elements of the 82^nd Airborne Division was needed to stabilize the front and the floating reserve was committed.  Scratch units of rear echelon troops and small detachments of artillery batteries and tank destroyers fired point blank at advancing German Kampfgruppe ( Battle groups ).  Warships, under heavy attack by the Luftwaffe, sailed close to the beach to bring their guns to bear. The crisis of the 13^th of September prompted Admiral Hewitt to stop all unloading in the American sector, ordering his ships ‘to keep steam at short notice’, and sent an urgent telegram to Admiral Cunningham saying,

The Germans have created a salient dangerously near the beach. Am planning to use all available vessels to transfer troops from southern to northern beaches, or the reverse if necessary. Unloading of merchant vessels in the southern sector has been stopped. We need heavy aerial and naval bombardment behind enemy positions, using battleships or other naval vessels. Are any such ships available? [18]

The Battle Afloat

After 0900 hours on 9 September, minesweepers finished clearing the inshore channel allowing warships to creep closer to shore.  Rick Atkinson, author of The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, describes the scene for the fleet offshore the Salerno beaches stating,

 

Fire control parties, whose operations had been hampered for hours by balky radios, smoke, enemy aircraft, and utter confusion on the beach, now began sprinkling gunfire around the beachhead rim.  By late morning, destroyers steamed within a hundred yards of shore, pumping 5-inch shells into the face of Monte Soprano.  The cruiser U.S.S. Savannah soon opened on German tank concentrations with scores of 6-inch shells.  Her sister Philadelphia flushed three dozen panzers detected by a spotter plane in a copse near Red Beach; salvo upon salvo fell on the tanks for nearly an hour, reportedly destroying half a dozen and scattering the rest.  Eleven thousand tons of naval shells would be fired at Salerno, almost comparable in heft to the bombardments at Iwo Jima and Okinawa later in the war, but no barrage was more timely than the D-Day shoot. [19]

 

Given the fleet’s key role in supporting Fifth Army, German air leaders made it a major target. The Luftwaffe attacks grew more frequent and intense by the hour. In the first three days of the battle, von Richthofen’s airmen flew over 550 sorties over the beaches and invasion fleet.[20] Admiral Hewitt requested more air cover as more and more attacks throughout the day and night caused the nerve of many a ship’s captain and swabs to crack alike. An LCT (Landing Craft Tank) skipper noted in his diary, All are jumpy and nervous and washed out now. [21] The light cruiser, USS Philadelphia, reported that the ship’s crew was drinking on average a whole gallon of coffee per man per day and that the crew was given nerve pills by the ship’s surgeon to ease the tension.[22] In The Day of Battle, Rick Atkinson writes,

 

The demand for pills must have spiked at 9:35 A.M., when an enormous explosion fifteen feet to starboard caused a very marked hogging, sagging, and whipping motion from Philadelphia’s bow to her fantail. Nine minutes later, as Clark and Hewitt stood on Ancon’s flag bridge sorting through frantic reports of the mysterious blast, a slender, eleven-foot cylinder dropped from a Luftwaffe Do-217 bomber at eighteen thousand feet. Plummeting in a tight spiral and trailing smoke, the object resembled a stricken aircraft. In fact, as Hewitt surmised, it was a secret German weapon: a guided bomb with four stubby wings, an armor-piercing delayed fuse, and a six-hundred-pound warhead. [23]

 

Admiral Kent Hewitt woke on the morning of 11 September to more intelligence that the Luftwaffe’s attacks on his fleet were only going to get worse. Radio intercepts had indicated that the crews of the attacking bombers were specifically targeting Hewitt’s flagship, the Ancon, with its concentrated collection of antennas which stuck out like a sore thumb , Hewitt frustratedly noted.[24] In 36 hours, 30 red alerts had sounded across the fleet with hails of anti-aircraft splinters forcing sailors to flatten their bodies against the floor and bulkheads to avoid spent misses returning to Earth or a missed shot at an arc.[25] The threat of marauding U-Boats was also with the sailors as the ships sailed straight towards or away from the moon light to minimize their silhouette making it difficult for any submarines to target them. In fact, U-616 of the 29^th U-Boat flotilla, based out of La Spezia, managed to sink a US destroyer using an acoustic homing torpedo in the Gulf of Salerno after midnight on 9 October 1943.[26]

The guided bomb contained a radio receiver capable of processing a downlink from the controlling bomber. The bombardier, seated in the front nose of the bubble cockpit/nose could then control the weapon with downlinked commands through a joystick and visually guided using a flare visible from the rear of the bomb. After four years of development, the FX-1400, known commonly as the Fritz X or Smoky Joe struck its first blow in the Bay of Biscay in late August 1943 sinking a British sloop.[27] These weapons were available to be used during Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily, but Hitler wished for them to remain a secret.[28] They were also used against the defecting Italian battle fleet as it sailed from La Spezia to Malta. The Fritz X claimed several hits on Italian battleships including a crippling strike on battleship Roma causing an explosion in her magazines and sinking her in the Tyrrhenian Sea.[29] Allied intelligence operatives would be sent as far north as Norway and as far south as Greece to attempt to capture one of the new weapons calling it, The Holy Grail .[30] Until a countermeasure could be developed against the Fritz X, the only defense Hewitt and his sailors had in the Gulf of Salerno was the hope that the weapons would miss their targets. Many did not.

A special naval attack squadron had been formed from the Luftwaffe to use their Do-217 K-2 bombers armed with the new guided munitions and as the Allied combined bomber offensive was still attempting to wrestle air control over Europe from Goering’s Luftwaffe at a high price, any amphibious fleet in 1943 to early 1944 would face a hail of attacks from above without full air superiority established over the beaches. In a typical Luftwaffe raid on the amphibious force the Do-217K-2s would preceded the strike force by flying in a kette (translated as a chain) of three aircraft attacking with their glide bombs first to draw the attention of allied gunners and force the focus of the fleet away from other avenues of approach by the dive bombing Ju-87D Stukas, Fw-190/Bf-109 Jabo fighter-bombers, and level or torpedo bombing Ju-88 Junkers . The choreographed dance of this type of attack could inflict heavy damage if naval flak coordination and fighter direction was not perfect.[31] At Salerno, III/KG100, would mount coordinated attacks with target priorities being amphibious assault ships, command and control (C2) ships, and supply vessels; however, as the Panzer thrusts against the beachhead met stiffening naval gunfire support, the Luftwaffe was ordered to re-direct target priorities to the big guns stopping the panzers.

As General Clark looked upward, a Fritz X accelerated at over six-hundred miles per hour seemingly right at him and the Ancon with a terrific screeching noise and it sailed over top the flagship straight for a cruiser 500 yards to the flag’s starboard. The light cruiser USS Savannah found herself as the working end of the weapon. An observer onboard Ancon stated, It didn t fall like bombs do it came down like a shell. At 9:44 A.M. at a nearly 80-degree vertical impact angle, Smoky Joe struck forward of the cruiser’s bridge, penetrating a 22-inch hole in the armored roof of number 3-gun turret. The armor penetration and delayed fuse caused the bomb to detonate in the lower handling room 36 feet down and through 3 steel decks. Never had an American vessel been struck by a guided missile and during the war no other US warship would be struck by a larger bomb. A witness to the strike stated, That hit wasn t natural. Another observer on the Ancon described the flame produced by the explosion as flared like a sulfur match from the turret. The witness continued stating, The flame must have shot eighty feet into the air and then, as it receded, men who had been blown skyward fell with it, mingling with the flame and the orange smoke. Hewitt watched the calamity play out before his eyes as he watched his former flagship that had brought him across the Atlantic in late 1941 explode. A 30-foot hole had been ripped through the bottom of the ship and all sailors inside turret number 3 had been killed, along with others nearby being incinerated by shots of flame moving through ventilation shafts and ducts. Toxic gases overwhelmed a gun room and killed 21 sailors before they could escape. Explosives and powder had been strewn all over due to the impact and explosion. A similar fate had led to the disaster on USS Arizona’s magazines at Pearl Harbor and Roma. The only factor that saved Savannah from a similar fate was the massive flooding that followed the hit. The cruiser settled 12 feet in the bow and listed 8 degrees to port. The detonation of 6-inch shells made firefighting and crew rescue difficult. Heroism and maximum effort saved the ship, with counter-flooding and constant fighting. 206 sailors had died. Savannah and her precious guns were knocked out of the fight at Salerno, and she retired under tow to Malta. It would be a year before she could return to full readiness. [32]

Hewitt and his commanders desperately attempted to mitigate the effect of the new glide bombs. He pleaded for more smoke generators and instructed all sailors to turn on their electric razors and other appliances during air attacks to create the illusion of jamming the downlink that guided the bombs.[33] This experiment was described to improve morale without affecting the accuracy of the missiles. [34] More Fritz X attacks in the coming days would seriously damage the British battleship HMS Warspite and light cruiser HMS Uganda. The light cruiser HMS Uganda suffered a strike by their Fritz X when at 1440 hours on 13 September, a glide bomb smashed through seven decks and through the keel of the ship, exploding below the hull. 16 sailors were killed, and the cruiser was out of action requiring a tow back to Malta for major repairs.[35] After 1400 on the 16^th, HMS Warspite was attacked by 12 Fw-190 fighter-bombers. The FWs were engaged by Warspite’s anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) batteries, but with no success. The FWs failed to hit the Jutland veteran, but their objective to distract the gunners with a matador’s cloak succeeded in opening the door for the glide bombers perched above.[36] At 1427, lookouts spotted three Fritz X bombs with their dim blue lights at each tail and streaming blue smoke behind them as their bombardier steered them downward towards the battlewagon with the radio downlink. AAA fired back and upward towards the bombers but fell short as the bombers were far beyond the range of the AAA fire. The commanding officer of HMS Delhi wrote in his ship’s log, "1425 hours. Attacked by five FW 190s – one shot down by Delhi (pom-pom) – this coincided with rocket bomb attack on Warspite. I was the first to observe the vapor trial of the three bombs at some 15,000 feet turn together into the vertical with the result known."[37]

By the end of the Salerno campaign, nearly 100 Allied ships were damaged or sunk. The air assault on the Allied fleet during Operation Avalanche was the most intense effort made by the Luftwaffe against an amphibious force in the Mediterranean Theatre.[38] The US Navy lost three destroyers and over 800 sailors at Salerno, making the campaign one of the deadliest naval engagements of the war in Europe.[39] It would be months until US Navy research laboratories would produce jammers capable of severing the downlink between the bomber crew and the Fritz X, but for Salerno, the fleet would be at the mercy of Kesselring’s airmen.

Despite German efforts against the beachhead and the fleet offshore, Clark’s 5^th Army held. Kesselring decided to disengage, fighting a rear-guard action to his new Winter defensive lines. The new primary position was codenamed the Gustav Line , which stretched from the Adriatic to the Tyrrhenian across the spine of the Apennines north of the Volturno River. The Italian Campaign was underway and would last until 2 May 1945.

 

Trying to Stop the Avalanche: An Analysis

The near disastrous German counterattack against Clark’s two corps split along the Sele River, and the Allied contemplation of re-embarkation marks a key moment in battle command that requires attention for modern day practitioners of joint warfare. If the German units dealing with the Italian defection had been able to concentrate their forces on crushing the beachhead, rather than attempting to hold the amphibious assault while occupying all former Italian positions, the outcome could have been more decisive in Kesselring’s favor. Had the 2^nd Parachute and 3^rd Panzergrenadier Divisions been released from the task of securing Rome from 4 weak Italian divisions, perhaps General Clark’s re-embarkation plan may have faced the real possibility of being put into practice. Overall, Operation Avalanche resulted in approximately 3,500 Axis casualties with over 12,000 Allied total casualties.[40]

Despite numerous recommendations by Allied naval officers, the landings at Salerno were not preceded by naval bombardment. The reason for no naval bombardment was to achieve tactical surprise, but the element of surprise had been lost while the invasion force was at sea. Further, a key aspect to the defense of the beachhead was an organic naval air power component to provide on call fire support or short-range fighter cover to the fleet and troops during the battle. A key naval unit formed to provide on call air cover to the beachhead came in the form of Force Five . This mobile force comprised of fleet carrier HMS Unicorn, Attacker-Class escort carriers HMS Battler, Attacker, Hunter and Stalker, along with the anti-aircraft light Dido class cruisers Charybdis, Euryalus, and Sylla, and ten destroyers. Under the command of Admiral Sir Phillip Vian, Force Five would provide air cover with modified RAF Spitfire fighters, renamed Seafires for their new RNAS configuration. This force faced Ju-88 torpedo bomber attacks nightly, forcing the carriers and covering force to constantly maneuver within a tight space inside and outside the Gulf of Salerno. The Seafires suffered heavy operational losses due to the difficulty in landing the modified land-based fighter on the small moving decks of the Attacker-Class carriers with approximately 40 Seafires lost to mishaps and 10 lost to enemy aircraft and flak.[41]

Both the offensive and defensive characteristics of the German 10^th Army’s mobile defense plan and the Luftwaffe’s introduction of long-range precision guided munitions against the invasion fleet should be examined through the lens of our modern worst case conventional scenario in the Western Pacific. As Beijing contemplates the possibility of launching a cross-channel invasion of the democratic and autonomous island of Taiwan, the American led regional security coalition must look to applied historical case studies such as Operation Avalanche rather than the norms of Operation Overlord. Balanced forces with no guarantee of air or naval superiority, accompanied by a stout and mechanized defense, provides students of amphibious warfare with a more candid glimpse into the conditions and realities which may exist in a hypothetical PLA operation to conquer Taiwan. From an American land-based air power point of view, we must look to the efforts and results of the Luftwaffe at Salerno to examine how best to impede the amphibious assault force at sea using long-range precision fires and how that use will affect the survival or collapse of the PLA beachhead. If one wishes to understand the challenges of using land-based air power against an amphibious assault while experiencing limited resources and dwindling airbase, aircrew, and groundcrew availability, one must look to the Luftwaffe of 1943 to influence Air Force counter-naval readiness today.

The prioritization of targets in the heat of battle must also be a consideration for modern land-based air power in a counter-amphibious campaign. The measured and calculated decision to switch targeting priorities from amphibious and supply vessels to warships or vice versa must be made with the understanding that the constant uninterrupted flow of supply to any fledgling beachhead is paramount in a cross-channel invasion attempt across the 90-mile stretch of water that separates mainland China from Taiwan. During the 1982 Falklands War between great Britain and Argentina, Argentine fighter-bomber pilots made a fundamental mistake in target selection at the Battle of San Carlos Water by using up munitions, sorties, and limited numbers of highly trained air crews to attack escorting warships rather than the supply and amphibious ships carrying the British ground forces tasked with securing the physical islands required to achieve the political objective.[42] If the naval gunfire support element becomes highly impactful to the overall success of the beachhead’s defense then it is understandable why the Luftwaffe changed their target priorities to support a Panzer breakthrough at Salerno; however, in a modern naval conflict in the Western Pacific, it may be wise to have a channelized focus on target type throughout the campaign to create a lasting and irreplaceable impact on the landing force.

Furthermore, it must be noted that many of the ships hit by Luftwaffe attacks during the battle at Salerno were not sunk but were damaged enough to be taken out of action and withdrawn from combat for long-term repairs. During a global conflict like World War II and considering the 1943 Allied production rates, these casualties can be mitigated if losses are not severe, but in a modern conflict such losses may prove to be catastrophic. If an amphibious force made up of highly technical and expensive ships takes major damage that forces dry dock repairs, it cannot participate in resupply operations for the immediate future. The lasting impact of losing a large portion of amphibious and supply ships from battle damage, rather than destroyers and cruisers, may prove to be far more critical to the eventual destruction of the beachhead.

Innovative concepts for increasing long-range lethality such as the Air Force’s Rapid Dragon concept, places a hypothetical enemy amphibious force at further risk beyond localized anti-shipping assets. The Rapid Dragon concept places palletized munitions in the rear storage compartments of historically cargo-style aircraft such as C-17 and C-130 variants, turning these platforms into long-range bombers, like innovations in Luftwaffe aircraft armed with the Fritz X.[43] U.S. Air Force Air Mobility Command (AMC) commander, Gen. Mike Minihan stated to Aerospace Daily, Now the adversary has an infinitely higher problem to worry about. [They] don t need to worry just about the bombers, [they] have to worry about this C-130 and every other C-130 on the planet, Minihan continues saying, C-130s can do it. All of our partners and allies fly them, so you can give the adversary an infinite amount of dilemmas that they need to worry about. [44] With the introduction and implementation of agile combat employment (ACE), forward and rear basing, innovative deception, and the proper use of applied historical analysis, the land-based air component can provide a timely and effective deterrent to maximize the joint and combined forces counter-amphibious capabilities. The protection of island airbases and the land-based aircraft armed with rapid Dragon capability is paramount to deterrence in the Pacific. Any enemy understanding the mystery cargo these aircraft types may or may not possess could inspire a range of attacks against them to eliminate them on the ground prior to their use in the early moments of hostilities. Adequate anti-missile air defenses and long-range airborne anti-submarine warfare techniques should be strengthened to ensure our conventional land-based air deterrent. If the current joint land-based air component is to develop modern countermeasures against a cross-channel threat in the Western Pacific, studying the amphibious campaigns in the Mediterranean can provide the contemporary context necessary to spark innovative and adaptive tactics to achieve victory.

 

Author Bio:

Lieutenant Willis is an U.S. Air Force officer stationed at Cannon AFB, NM, and a Fellow with the Consortium of Indo-Pacific Researchers (CIPR). He is a distinguished graduate of the University of Cincinnati’s AFROTC program with a B.A. in International Affairs, with a minor in Political Science. He has multiple publications with the Consortium, United States Naval Institute’s (USNI) Proceedings Naval History Magazine, Air University’s Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs (JIPA), and Air University’s Wild Blue Yonder Journal. He is also a featured guest on multiple episodes of Vanguard: Indo-Pacific, the official podcast of the Consortium, USNI’s Proceedings Podcast, and CIPR conference panel lectures available on the Consortium’s YouTube channel.

 

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