Salerno landings

Operation Avalanche opened before dawn on 9 September 1943, when British and American forces landed on the beaches around the Gulf of Salerno. Italian forces had surrendered the previous evening, but German troops defended the landing area. The Allies went ashore without a preliminary naval or aerial bombardment, hoping to preserve surprise. German artillery, machine-gun posts, mines and tanks instead met the assault, and progress inland was slow.

The British X Corps (46th and 56th Divisions) landed north of the Sele River, while the U.S. VI Corps (36th Division) landed south of it near Paestum. U.S. Rangers and British Commandos landed farther west, at Maiori and Vietri sul Mare, to hold the mountain passes toward Naples. The 16th Panzer Division counterattacked at about 07:00, but the Allies beat it back. At nightfall a gap of about seven miles still separated the two corps along the Sele. The 45th Division came ashore to fill it, and on 12 September engineers at Bivio Cioffi made the first patrol contact with the British. By then the lodgement ran along about 35 miles of coast, from Amalfi to Agropoli.

From 12 to 14 September, German forces mounted a larger counterattack with six divisions of motorized troops. Their objective was to drive the Allies back into the sea before the beachhead could be reinforced and connected with the British Eighth Army advancing from Calabria. The main blow, on 13 September, came down the corridor between the Sele and Calore rivers, at the boundary between the two corps, and reached the junction of the rivers a few miles from the beaches. Allied commanders withdrew exposed troops to shorten the line, while naval gunfire and air support helped hold the reduced perimeter. Naval guns had supported the troops from the landing days onward; they also played an important role in repelling the major counterattack on 13 September.

German attacks continued on 15 and 16 September, including a thrust by the newly arrived 26th Panzer Division from Battipaglia toward Salerno, but they were held. On the evening of 16 September General von Vietinghoff, commanding the German Tenth Army, asked Field Marshal Kesselring for permission to break off the battle, and on the same day patrols of the Eighth Army's 5th Division made contact with the 36th Division. The Germans began to pull back on 18 September: British armor entered Battipaglia and American troops moved past Altavilla and Persano. The fighting had secured a landing area for the advance toward Naples, but the landings had not achieved the surprise their planners had sought, and the beachhead had come close to being overwhelmed during the German counterattack.

The reported casualty figures depended on the scope used. For Operation Avalanche, one account gave Allied losses of 2,149 killed, 7,365 wounded and 4,099 missing, and German losses of 840 killed, 2,002 wounded and 603 missing. These figures covered the operation rather than every force involved in the wider invasion of Italy. The battle’s end date in this account was 16 September, although some sources gave the broader operation dates as 9–17 September.