Reporting War by Ray Moseley

Author:Ray Moseley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300224665
Publisher: Yale University Press

Before the Italian surrender, correspondents heard reports it was near. “I expected that,” Reynolds Packard told Quentin Reynolds. “I have complete faith in the Italians. They’ve double-crossed every ally they ever had. Now it’s Hitler’s turn.”18

Packard, Reynolds and Leonard Shapiro were aboard the ship carrying Gen. Mark Clark, commander of the U.S. Fifth Army, for the landing at Salerno. Forty German bombers appeared and their bombs narrowly missed the ship. The correspondents made it safely ashore. Three days later, the Germans began a counterattack and broke through to within 2,500 yards of the headquarters camp. “Instinct kept pounding words of panic into my mind,” Shapiro wrote. “Why not run? Anywhere. Just run.” Then he decided panic would be disastrous. He, Packard and Herbert Matthews sat down on a log. Capt. John Boettiger, son-in-law of President Roosevelt, strolled over and said he had an extra revolver. “One of our group took it,” Shapiro wrote. The German attack was repulsed and on September 14 a huge air and naval bombardment “tore German forces from their moorings.”19

“Normandy was a picnic compared with Salerno,” wrote Monks. He denounced the “crass stupidity” of announcing Italy’s surrender before the men hit the beaches and called it “the greatest psychological blunder of the war.” The Germans had 300,000 men on Italian soil when the “shoestring” U.S. Fifth Army of 75,000 landed. The Germans let the first wave of troops ashore, “then opened up with everything they had … The sea was a cauldron of bursting shells and exploding bombs.”

As German planes appeared, a young soldier ran past Monks, shouting, “Nazi plane … strafing.” Monks shouted to him to get down but he kept running until he was struck by machine-gun fire from a Messerschmitt 109. A tank appeared in front of Monks and he thought: “I’ll be joining this poor chap any second now.”

“I found myself wishing I had a gun, a revolver, anything legal … to defend myself with.” He fell into a hole where two dead GIs lay. The German tank passed by two yards away. Someone fired an anti-tank gun and it blew up.

A landing craft was returning to Monks’s ship and he got aboard, hoping to file from there, but was refused permission. The ship was leaving for Oran, Algeria, and there was no way he could return to the beach. He went to Cairo, just in time for a secret conference of Churchill, Roosevelt and Chiang Kai-shek, held November 22–6, 1943. None of the nearly one hundred correspondents on hand even glimpsed the three leaders and dispatches were held up for ten days as the leaders went on to Tehran to meet with Stalin. On return to Cairo, Churchill gave correspondents a half-hour meeting but no questions were allowed.20

Whitehead would have had one of the great scoops of the war at Salerno had it not been for Navy censors. An Italian officer coming from Rome told him Mussolini had been arrested and imprisoned but escaped with German help. Whitehead filed a dispatch but censors held it for a week.

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