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The Advance. The dead were avenged. At the height of the German threat, warships, including two British battleships (Warspite, Valiant), shelled the Nazi positions. Allied air forces threw many hundreds of planes at the same positions, flew 2,000 sorties in one day. At the extreme crisis, artillerymen under Lieut. Colonel Hal Muldrow, one of the many Oklahomans, were the only forces facing German tanks and infantrymen. Muldrow stripped his gun crews, gave them rifles and machine guns. The German spearhead was stopped, enveloped, thrown back. Near the northern end of the bridgehead the British stopped a German advance, seized the town and airfield of Montecorvino Pugliano. On the eleventh day a reporter flying over the lines saw columns of Germans retreating inland.
The extent of that retreat became apparent this week: the Germans had given up their best positions for the defense of Naples. Fifth Army troops turned westward from Salerno, occupied the lower coast and the heights of the Sorrento peninsula overlooking the port and its bay. Twelve miles off, midway between the troops and Naples, Vesuvius loomed. Other troops already held Capri, the storied island just off the peninsula, the islands of Ischia and Procida in the Bay of Naples, Ponza and Ventotene northwest of the bay.
Just how, or whether, the Germans now proposed to defend Naples remained to be seen. Certainly the time was near when they would have to retire northward and choose some other point for their next delaying action on the road to Rome.