Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [159]
Such an offer was not very attractive; the Italians did not know the Germans planned to pull out, and an Allied landing south of Rome seemed only to guarantee the kind of fighting they were seeking to avoid in Italy. Yet as the Germans moved more troops into northern Italy—officially in response to the Sicilian situation, actually because of Mussolini’s fall—the Italians felt more and more forced to accept the Allied deal.
There was confusion right up to the end. On September 3, 1943, the fourth anniversary of the declaration of war, British and Canadian troops of 8th Army made an assault crossing of the Straits of Messina and landed on the European continent, this time to stay. The same day, the Italian government signed a secret armistice with the Allies. The Germans started to pull out of Calabria; the Italian field command, still uninformed of the armistice, did not know what to do, and ended by doing nothing.
Meanwhile, the U. S. 5th Army, British and American troops under General Mark Clark, was preparing to invade south of Naples. Their choice of Salerno as a landing site was a compromise between their desire to get a major port, Naples, as soon as possible and their equally strong desire to have air cover while they made their landings. Allied naval leaders had assigned only light aircraft carriers to the Mediterranean, because of the demands of the Pacific, and therefore the planners had to rely on land-based air cover flying from Sicily. Naples was just out of reach for effective combat air patrols, so they had instead to settle for Salerno, a few miles south of it.
Only as the invasion fleet made its final run in toward the coast was the Italian armistice publicly announced. The troops were jubilant, believing this meant no opposition on the beaches. What it actually meant was that they would encounter Germans instead of Italians.
Field Marshal Kesselring seemed to be the last man in Europe who still believed in Italian protestations of good faith. He had a contingency plan to cover an Italian defection and one to cover an Allied invasion; he did not have a plan to cover both events at once. Now, stunned but quickly recovering, he ordered his units to continue falling back from Calabria, as the British advanced, and he ordered other troops to hold up the Allied landing at Salerno until the southern forces were safely by. Hastily, local German units around the Gulf of Salerno moved into position, just in time to meet the Allied troops coming ashore.
The Allies landed in the early pre-dawn hours of September 9, British on the left and Americans on the right. Both ran into sporadically heavy resistance, but by the end of the day there were several thousand troops ashore. The Allies thought they had done well to get on land in the face of heavy German defenses; the Germans thought they had done well with their scratch forces to hold the enemy to a shallow beachhead. The crisis did not come for three days; by the 12th the Germans had rushed units south from Rome and had made contact with those retreating from Calabria, and they hit the beachhead hard. For a few hours it looked as if the Americans might be pushed back into the sea, and Kesselring had hopes of staging another Dunkirk. He might well have done so, but when he had asked Rommel in northern Italy for the release of reserves, Rommel said no. The Desert Fox saw no sense in sending troops all the way down past Rome, when the Germans did not intend to stand down there