For the men who fought the battles, Salerno was hell. At some points the Germans let the first forces come smoothly ashore and cluster on the white beaches, then blanketed them with artillery fire from the near hills. At others, naval landing craft bore the troops landward in the face of continuous fire. Everywhere the men of the Fifth Army had to establish themselves on the beaches, make their first moves inland amid shells, bombs, confusion, fear.
Twelve days after the landings, no connected, firsthand account of all the battles in the British, U.S. and Canadian sectors had reached the U.S. Like the soldiers, the front-line correspondents saw only the shapes of their particular hells. Of the accounts which did arrive, the clearest told of the crisis in an American sector, near the juncture of the Sele and Galore Rivers, where Field Marshal Albert Kesselring's forces almost pushed to the sea.
TIME Correspondent Will Lang was with a U.S. regiment in that sector. Many of its officers and men were Oklahomans. The regiment was one of several units ordered to march inland, seize high ground commanding a key bridge on the Sele and forestall what finally happened—the German thrust which almost split the beachhead. Said the regiment's Colonel, explaining the orders to his battalion officers: "It's pretty far inland and we don't know exactly what the enemy's got in that area. But it must be urgent to get that high ground, or we wouldn't be sent off with so little information."
The Trick. At sundown the regiment set off. As the soldiers trudged through a moonlit town, a civilian in a long coat gestured and jabbered something about Germans. The soldiers paid no attention. But they remembered later.
In the early morning a German plane bombed the regiment, dispersed for two hours' sleep in the fields. Three wounded men were sent to the rear; the regiment marched on. By 6 a.m. Lieut. Colonel Earl Taylor's 3rd Battalion was near the bridge on the Sele.
A German machine gun chattered. Colonel Taylor, a company commander and an artillery captain stood on the road, scanning the tree-screened way to the bridge.
Rifle and machine-gun fire suddenly swept the road. The three officers dropped. The company commander was dead, the artillery captain wounded. Colonel Taylor was unhurt, and he bawled: "Put some artillery on those bastards! Let's get them!"
Private Louis Fadel looked out of his foxhole, saw men in khaki shorts, khaki shirts and pith helmets across the river. They looked like British soldiers. A faint voice called: "Don't fire on us. We're friends. We're friends." Fadel's sergeant ordered his men to hold their fire.
A violent stream of artillery and machine-gun fire tore the platoon positions. Said Private Fadel: "We weren't fooled any longer. Our artillery started knocking hell out of the houses across the river, and when men in pith helmets came rushing from the buildings, screaming for mercy, we opened up at them with everything we had. We wouldn't let them go after that trick."