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senior officers comfortably installed, when the alarm was raised that spearheads of an armoured German column were within three miles. With this, a hasty evacuation of the villa began and General Clark moved into a mobile caravan. He was reported to have pressed US Admiral Hewitt to agree to re-embarkation, but his plea had been rejected by both Hewitt and the British Navy, because it was too reminiscent of Dunkirk, and also on the score of the thousands of tons of supplies that would have to be abandoned.
    At the villa a ‘last-stand’ defence-line was organised, and MPs began a forceful mobilisation of all members of the villa’s staff considered capable of firing a gun. These included office clerks, maintenance personnel, electricians and bakers, and—outstandingly—members of a military band who had ill-advisedly volunteered to entertain guests at the headquarters’ formal opening. The defenders were given a choice of guns or spades. Heroic military rituals such as this, we were told, had been inherited from the American Civil War.
    Having completed the enforced recruitment of the headquarters’ staff, the MPs dashed about in jeeps in search of other slackers and inevitably we fell into the net. They arrived while we were enjoying the last of the afternoon sun behind a sand dune. Light carbines were shoved into our hands and we were ordered to be ready to join the nearest resistance group, should the feared emergency arise. The news of General Clark was that he had ordered a tank landing-craft to stand by in case he and key members of his staff needed to escape to British General McCleary’s headquarters in Salerno.
    Shortly after nightfall, and in bright moonlight, the battleship Warspite arrived offshore and began bombarding the German tanks in the Sele Corridor. Shells from its fifteen-inch guns passed overhead in clusters of fiery points, and as they struck home the trench shuddered, as if struck by the waves of a distant earthquake. At one point a major arms dump blew up and a great pulsating halo spread, twinkling with sparks and throwing out sensitive feelers of fire, across a half-mile of sky. At some time in the early hours three tanks came into sight a mile away at the edge of the beach, moved towards us, then turned back.
    At 4 a.m., notwithstanding our conviction that we had been forgotten, an armoured car arrived to lead us on our motorcycles to an olive grove two miles to the south. This short journey involved us in the only serious danger we had encountered in the battle. Obliged to skirt a last-stand line, we were fired at by the defenders, who believed that they were being infiltrated by the enemy. There were blood-curdling screams from those hit by the bullets.
    In the olive grove we joined a rabble of shocked, demoralised and even weeping soldiery. Our hope was to find just one senior officer who could perhaps calm them and convince them that they would neither be captured nor killed. But there were no officers here. Demoralised too, they had abandoned their men in a sauve qui peut panic and taken refuge on the ships, and it was late in the morning of the next day before they began to reappear. While these depressing happenings had been taking place, 500 paratroopers of the American 509th Parachute Regiment had been flown in to save the battle by creating a diversion in the enemy’s rear, being dropped up to twenty-five miles off target and a number on the roofs of buildings in Avellino from which, unable to disentangle themselves from their gear, they fell to their deaths.
    Salerno was advertised and planned as one of the decisive battles of the Second World War, linked with the huge prestige of the return of the Allied armies to Europe. But with the collapse of the Italians, the Germans had no interest in remaining in southern Italy and, having fought no more than a series of delaying actions at Salerno, withdrew in good order. It was a withdrawal no more than accelerated by the news of the