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By Root 1757 0

in their vicinity, much of the Italian Navy sailed from Spezia to Malta, allowing Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham on 11 September 1943 to make his splendid signal to the Admiralty Board in London: ‘Be pleased to inform Their Lordships that the Italian Battle Fleet now lies at anchor under the guns of the fortress of Malta.’12 In all five battleships, eight cruisers, thirty-three destroyers, thirty-four submarines and scores of other war vessels surrendered, as well as 101 merchant ships totalling 183,591 tons. A further 168 merchant ships were scuttled to avoid capture by the Germans. On their arrival in Spezia, the Germans shot all Italian captains responsible. ‘That’s the way to treat your late Allies!’ remarked Cunningham. The Italian Navy was subsequently used against Germany, especially its brave special underwater section, the 10th MAS Flotilla, with no less an authority than Admiral Cunningham paying tribute to their ‘cold-blooded bravery and enterprise’.

Although Clark showed personal bravery on the beach-head at Salerno, nonetheless in the words of Anzio’s historian, ‘He had a momentary wobble and had to be dissuaded from re-embarking VI Corps,’ although Clark denied this in his memoirs.13 With German artillery observation points in the hills surrounding the beach-heads, and attacks from no fewer than six German divisions, it took the dropping of three battalions of the US 82nd Airborne almost on the water’s edge, the bombardment of German positions by strategic bombers from the North-west African Air Force, and close supporting fire from the 15-inch naval guns of specially diverted naval forces, but above all the grim determination of the Fifth Army on the beach-heads, to stay in place. ‘If the Germans had pushed on to the sea’, Alexander commented with characteristic sangfroid, ‘their arrival might have caused us some embarrassment.’14 The position was not secured until 16 September, and it was only four days later – once the Germans had successfully extricated their forces from the south of Italy – that the attacks abated, and a further eleven days after that before the Allies could enter an abandoned Naples. By then the Fifth Army had got 170,000 troops and 200 tanks ashore, and Montgomery was coming up from the south. The Salerno operation in all had cost 15,000 Allied casualties against 8,000 German, and it is hard to take issue with the historian who concludes that ‘The outstanding feature of the battle had been the foresight, skill and initiative of Kesselring, and the efficiency of his troops.’15 It was a phenomenon that was to be repeated as the fighting moved northwards up the peninsula.

Meanwhile, on the other side of Italy, the 1st Canadian Division of the Eighth Army took the Foggia airfields on 27 September and reached the Adriatic Sea on 3 October. From those flat plains, General Ira C. Eaker’s Mediterranean Allied Air Forces could then dominate the air war in the south of Europe. Within three weeks the USAAF Fifteenth Air Force was roaming at will all over southern Germany, Austria and the Balkans, and in particular they could bomb the Romanian oilfields of Ploesti, from where much of the Reich’s fuel flowed. The US 12th Air Support Command bombed the German forces in Italy itself, forcing them to move largely at night. From the spring of 1944, the Allies had more than ten times as many warplanes in Italy – at 4,500 – as the Luftwaffe.16

The situation in Naples was appalling, with bread riots, typhus, Mafia crime, water shortages, totally corrupt local authorities, prostitution-for-food (special military VD hospitals had to be set up) and a general breakdown in law, order and morality. Even the papal legate’s car was found to be driving on stolen tyres.17 Most serious for future operations further north, the German scorched-earth policy had devastated the docks. Allied military experts, engineers, police and administrators moved in en masse under the auspices of the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories, but it was to be months before anything approaching normality or decency could