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the night the Germans had positioned mortars and spandaus to cover the whole perimeter. The first sign of the impending bombardment was the familiar tung, tung, tung, tung, tung, tung of mortar bombs being dropped down the barrel and fired. We waited tensely and in seconds came the screaming whoosh-bang, whoosh-bang, whoosh-bang as the bombs exploded among us. At the same time the spandaus opened up with long bursts of rapid fire over our heads, tearing through the vines. The mortaring was very accurate and soon we had many wounded and a few killed. It was very difficult to go to the help of the wounded because of the intense machine-gunning. We fired our Bren guns and rifles to give cover as they crawled or were manhandled to a cave which we had found. The exchanges of fire continued all day. I had persuaded myself into a state of resignation. I did not see how we could sustain a prolonged attack and just hoped that whatever fate awaited me would be quick. I always carried the Army Prayer Book, and I gained enormous comfort and solace from reading through the order of Matins and Evening Prayer, the familiar canticles, psalms and prayers.

After days of heavy fighting, Kesselring’s counterattack was beaten off. ‘In the first grey hints of light, we buried the German dead,’ wrote Michael Howard. ‘These were the first corpses I had handled: shrunken pathetic dolls lying stiff and twisted, with glazed blue eyes. Not one could have been over 20, and some were little more than children. With horrible carelessness we shovelled them into their own trenches and piled on the earth. The scene remains etched in my mind: the hunched, urgent diggers, the sprawling corpses with their dead eyes in a cold dawn light that drained all colour from the scene, leaving only mournful blacks and greys. When we had finished, we stuck their rifles and bayonets above the graves and scuttled quickly back under cover. It was a scene worthy of Goya.’

Once again, Allied firepower had turned the scale. ‘The heavy naval barrages were especially unpleasant,’ noted a German officer. Every movement by Kesselring’s forces was met by a storm of shelling and air attacks. If Allied soldiers were appalled by Salerno, the Wehrmacht scarcely enjoyed the experience. ‘Here we got our first taste of what superior material force really meant,’ said panzer gunner Erich Dressler ruefully. ‘First came low-flying bombers in such close formation that one could not distinguish the individual squadrons, whilst artillery and mortars plastered us for hours.’ Again and again the panzers thrust forward, and again and again they were halted. Kesselring’s casualties in the battle totalled only 3,500, including 630 killed, against 5,500 British and 3,500 American, but the Germans lacked sufficient combat power to reach the sea. They mauled the invaders, as they would do later at Anzio and in Normandy. But they could not expel them in the face of devastating artillery and air support.

The 1943 Landings in Italy

The unimpressive Allied showing, against smaller Axis forces, nonetheless exercised a decisive influence on the subsequent campaign. Kesselring began to withdraw northwards, but Salerno convinced him that the Wehrmacht’s skills could keep up a long delaying action in the Italian peninsula, terrain ideally suited to defence. Hitler agreed, and scrapped his earlier plan for a strategic withdrawal to the northern mountains. The Allies’ Mediterranean assault was thus far successful, to the extent that it persuaded him to withdraw sixteen divisions from the Eastern Front to reinforce Kesselring. But the stage was set for eighteen months of slow and costly fighting in some of the most unyielding country in Europe. ‘The Tommies will have to chew their way through us inch by inch,’ a German paratrooper wrote in an unfinished letter found on his corpse at Salerno, ‘and we will surely make hard chewing for them.’

Kesselring settled himself to conduct a series of defensive battles, which the Allies found painfully repetitive. At each stage they bombed and shelled the German