to find itself isolated when the infantry and tanks pulled back. When the company tried to extricate itself, two M10s got stuck in ditches and one was destroyed by artillery fire. The company claimed to have knocked out two Mark IV tanks, one Mark VI, and an 88mm gun, but the battalion’s first real contact with the enemy had not gone well.
The next morning, the newly arrived 29th Panzergrenadier Division tore into the 45th Infantry Division and the left end of the 36th Infantry Division line at Altavilla. The panzergrenadiers pushed the 36th off the strategic high ground at Altavilla and tried to drive to the sea. Over the next four days, a total of three panzer and three panzergrenadier divisions struck all along the perimeter of the tenuous Allied beachhead.10
Even as the men of the 36th Infantry Division fought desperately to hold their line, the crews of the 191st Tank and 645th Tank Destroyer battalions launched a second effort to reach the hard-pressed 45th Infantry Division doughs through Persano and this time succeeded. By 1500 hours, the infantry reported that the town was cleared.11 The Shermans and M10s then supported a hard-fought attack by the 157th Infantry Regiment that pushed the Germans out of a “tobacco warehouse” (actually five stone storage sheds) on the high ground above Persano, where the defenders a day earlier had knocked out seven Shermans.12 The men of the 645th had helped stop what a worried Fifth Army CG, LtGen Mark Clark, viewed as a spear pointing at the heart of the beachhead.13 But the Germans controlled more firmly than ever the corridor between the American and British toeholds.
The first elements of the 36th Infantry Division’s daughter unit, the 636th Tank Destroyer Battalion, began landing on 12 September. The transports bearing the green battalion had approached the Bay of Salerno under constant German air attack.14 As Sgt Thomas Sherman waded through armpit-deep water from the landing craft, he was glad for the bath after being cooped up on a jam-packed transport for ten days. His joy ended abruptly when the recon men formed up on the beach. The roar of a plane and chatter of machine guns announced a German air raid, and Sherman dove for a depression in the sand as bullets kicked up sand around him.15
Among the first ashore with Sherman were some thirty men—all multilingual soldiers who had excelled at tank hunting and commando tactics during training—who were grouped together in what the outfit called the “Ranger Platoon.” Second Lieutenant William Walter, who spoke fluent German and several other languages, led the platoon off the beach and into the hills. Doubtless guided by the hand of Providence, they soon found themselves in an Italian wine cellar. Their joy dissipated when they heard German voices around the building and realized they were surrounded and well behind German lines. The men would spend the night hiding, killing the occasional German soldier who wandered in to snoop around, and capturing an oberleutnant.16
A see-saw battle raged along the 45th and 36th Infantry division fronts on 13 September. The TDs of the 645th in midafternoon rushed forward to support the doughs when a dozen German tanks struck the left flank of the 157th Infantry Regiment and another fifteen struck the right. But the attackers drove to within one hundred fifty yards of the 1st Battalion headquarters, and the line began to give way. The panzers and panzergrenadiers threw the Americans back out of Persano and the tobacco warehouse.17
The hungry men of the 636th’s Ranger Platoon, meanwhile, were trying to make it back to American lines. The men, who were wearing the uniforms of the German soldiers they had dispatched, spotted a German SP gun and infantry in a field. Lieutenant Walter decided to use their one bazooka round to knock out the vehicle when the time was right. About this time, doughs from the 142d Infantry Regiment attacked the Germans, who returned fire. To their consternation, the Germans came under fire themselves from three MG42 machine guns and from machine pistols at their flank and rear. The single antitank round hit the self-propelled howitzer—earning Walter the nickname “Bazooka Red”—and incapacitated the gun and crew. The bewildered Germans surrendered. Fortunately for the German-uniformed Ranger Platoon, the GIs had witnessed the action and did not cut them to pieces.18
Panzers penetrated the line in several places—at one point coming within half a mile of the beach.19 A provisional 636th company consisting of six M10s from Company B and six from Company C—joined by Recon and the Ranger Platoon—rushed to reinforce men of the 158th and 189th Field Artillery battalions. The artillery crews had been just about all that stood in the path of an advancing German tank company and panzergrenadier battalion. One battery of 105mm howitzers had knocked out five panzers with six rounds at ranges of only two hundred to three hundred yards, according to a VI Corps observer.20 Clark’s Fifth Army headquarters was located just behind the thin line, and cooks, clerks, and drivers hastily established a firing line when it appeared the Germans might break through.21
The attack was narrowly stopped, but the official U.S. Army history concluded that Fifth Army at this point “found itself at the edge of defeat.”22 Clark mulled withdrawing VI Corps from the beachhead. He decided instead to add the 82d Airborne Division to the hard-pressed VI Corps sector, and the paratroopers made an administrative drop into the beachhead that evening.
The German counteroffensive reached its crescendo on 14 September.
The 636th Tank Destroyer Battalion was defending a fifteen hundred-yard wide sector in the critical area barely off the beach. Battalion CO LtCol Van Pyland and his staff worked through the night to prepare for a renewed German attack at dawn. The twelve available M10s were dug into firing positions south of the junction of the Calore River and F. La Cosa Creek. Reconnaissance Company dug in on the left flank, while the Ranger Platoon strengthened positions on a rocky mass dominating the right flank. An artillery barrage struck about noon, and the first German infantry came into view shortly thereafter. About the same time, eight Sherman tanks from Company C, 751st Tank Battalion, arrived and deployed to support the Ranger Platoon.23
Walter’s Ranger Platoon and some infantry volunteers opened up first on the advancing enemy with machine guns, Browning Automatic Rifles (BARs), rifles, and bazookas while artillery rounds exploded about them. Germans fell, and the Shermans accounted for four advancing panzers. But several Mark IVs overran part of the Ranger Platoon’s position, killing one man and wounding several others. The Shermans reported that they were receiving fire from 88mm guns and pulled back.
Pyland ordered five M10s out of their positions and moved to the right to save his collapsing flank.24 The 2d Platoon of Company C maneuvered through the artillery fire to engage the panzers. Sergeant Edwin A. Yosts’s M10 “Jinx” reached the crest of a ridge and opened fire. The first round was short, but the second disabled a Mark IV, and the third exploded an ammunition truck. Jinx backed away to escape artillery fire, only to reemerge in a nearby hull defilade position. Yosts’s gunner, T/5 Alvin Johnson, knocked out four panzers with his next four shots. Other M10 crews in the company, meanwhile, accounted for two more Mark IVs.25 Company B’s tank killers were just as busy; they KO’d seven tanks by the end of the day. The battalion lost only two men killed in action.26
Further inland, elements of the 16th Panzer and 29th Panzergrenadier divisions at 0800 hours advanced again near the tobacco warehouse at Persano. The American forces had adjusted their lines during the night, and the Germans unknowingly advanced across the 179th Infantry Regiment front. M10s from the 645th Tank Destroyer Battalion joined in raking the Germans with flanking fire that knocked out all of the panzers and forced the infantry to retreat.27 The crews of B/645th got their revenge for their losses at Persano when a German tank attack struck their defenses late in the afternoon. These tank killers destroyed eight confirmed panzers for the temporary loss of only one M10.28
All Allied strategic and tactical air assets in the Mediterranean Theater were redirected against German troop concentrations and lines of communication. Allied aircraft flew more than nineteen hundred sorties during the day. Naval gunfire, meanwhile, pounded German positions close to the beach.29
By the evening of 14 September, Allied commanders concluded that the crisis was past. The beachhead would hold.
Within days of landing, the tank destroyer battalions in Fifth Army found themselves scattered across the map despite the brass’s professed intentions not to repeat their mistakes in handling TDs in North Africa. Reconnaissance Company of the 601st, for example, had been sent to the 180th RCT, and both the 45th Infantry Division artillery CP and 141st RCT tried to issue orders to the battalion. The 601st operations report noted, “At this stage, no one seemed to know to whom the battalion was attached…. Officers and men of the 601st Tank Destroyer Battalion were rather perturbed by the attachments and detachments of companies and platoons to various organizations for support, not even in one division, but in several divisions, including British…. During most
