Where It Hurts

>An English-speaking Italian in Calabria heard planes, looked up, and said to a British officer:

"Good. They are ours."

"No," the officer said, "they are British."

"Yes," said the Italian, "they are ours."

> The Germans seized Rome.

> At the port of Taranto, after the British occupied it last week, a correspondent asked an Italian merchant-marine captain and an Italian army lieutenant what they thought of their Government's surrender. "Ah," said the lieutenant, "we had not heard of that."

> At Salerno, below Naples, from positions behind one of the loveliest of coasts, guns spoke in the early morning. The guns were Italian. The gunners were German. The bodies on the beach were American.

>At an Allied command post, General Dwight D. Eisenhower spoke in American idiom:

"We're playing in the big leagues now. You can't hit a home run by bunting. You have to step up there and take your cut at the ball. The time has come to discontinue nibbling at islands and hit the Germans where it hurts. I don't believe in fighting battles to chase someone out of somewhere. Our object is to trap and smash them."

Up the Long Leg. Only the outlines of the campaign for Italy could be seen on the tenth day. Of the losses, of the deeds done and the blood shed--of the things that made the battles real to the righting men--the official accounts and the correspondents had told very little. But something could be told of the German method of defense, the immediate Allied method and aims, the tremendous consequences of the Allies' mere presence in Italy.

By the highest estimates, the Germans had consigned some 200,000 men in 18 divisions to Italy. The bulk of these were probably in the north, under the command of that master of delay, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. His first task: to preserve from Italian sabotage and Allied air attack the three railway, routes into upper Italy from Austria and Yugoslavia, the interior railways, roads and airdromes without which the German armies could not long be supported. Rommel's eventual task: to hold the mountains and passes of northern Italy against Allied armies at these gates to the Reich.*

Commanding in central and southern Italy was Air Marshal and General Albert Kesselring, who just missed death last week when his headquarters near Rome was bombed. His task was to resist, at a chosen point, the Allied penetration of lower Italy.

Endurance at Salerno. This point was the area of Naples. To the south, in the Calabrian peninsula, where the British Eighth army had begun the landings, the Germans' chief effort was to extract what troops and planes they could. When, on the seventh day, the British arrived to take the great port of Taranto, the Germans had deserted it to confused, volubly embarrassed Italians. As the British marched eastward to Brindisi on the Adriatic, they met only the rear guard of a retreating German Panzer division.

So the fight was at Salerno and its approaches to Naples. That fight was fierce and slow. There, for the first time since the Allies moved across the Strait of Messina, German planes attacked in force. British carriers and U.S. and British fighters from Sicily covered the landings. But the Germans sometimes broke through; an Allied communique said that the air opposition was "serious." The Germans said that they had sunk warships offshore. One U.S. observer said that his ship dodged three aerial torpedoes. The one fact which emerged was that the soldiers pouring on to the beaches from great convoys had to endure bombs, gunfire and many tank attacks.

They endured. They pushed inland toward the hills behind the coasts. They pressed toward the famed Amalfi Drive from Salerno to Naples, a shimmering highway cut into the high edges of the hills. Behind them Allied aircraft bombed railway junctions which, if clogged or destroyed, would isolate Naples. West of that port, south of the Gulf of Gaeta, an Allied force seized the tiny island of Ventotene. But landings on the beaches north of Naples, or a frontal assault, were yet to be attempted--or announced. Up to early this week, the object was to expand a beachhead below Naples, secure a maximum force there, and perhaps wait for the British to come up from the south.

The men making this effort were the soldiers of Lieut. General Mark Wayne Clark's Fifth Army. As an organization, it was in combat for the first time. Some of its units were British. Some of its Americans (evidently of the 9th or 34th Infantry Divisions or the 1st Armored Division) had seen action in Tunisia. Within five days, General Clark had landed a formidable and constantly increasing force--a notable achievement under such opposition, in such an area. Part of the credit belonged to his Chief of Staff, tall, 44-year-old Alfred M. Walter Gruenther, one of the youngest major generals in the army.

Other Landings? General Eisenhower, author of the Italian invasion, still had at hand and unused: some 200,000 Frenchmen; the divisions banded for Sicily into the Seventh Army under Lieut. General George Smith Patton Jr.; the British First Army (unless its troops were those which took Taranto and Brindisi). Also hidden from the world view last week were General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson's Ninth and Tenth British armies in the Middle East.

The campaign in southern Europe was just beginning. The hidden armies might not be hidden for long.

* Fighting there, he will have history and great predecessors to guide him. Hannibal with his Carthaginian infantry, cavalry and elephants succeeded in breaking through the western mountains into Italy. Napoleon, in his first great campaign, also fought through and around the mountains of the west, drove the Austrians' across upper Italy. The mad Russian Czar Paul's great 18th-Century Field Marshal Alexander V. Suvorov, for whom the Soviet Union's highest military award is named, led a Russian and Austrian coalition through the eastern mountains which Rommel now holds. Italy's armies in the last war never did succeed in driving the Austrians back from these same mountains.

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