American Signal Intelligence in Northwest Africa and Western Europe

Chapter 7. Salerno to Rome

Preliminaries

The third major amphibious assault in the Mediterranean area, that at the Gulf of Salerno, was much smaller than that at Sicily. It did not go wholly "according to plan," as the saying goes, and one might well ask, "What plan?" Not that it was unplanned, but, because the planning was subject to so many contingencies, it bristled with amendments of alterations of changes. Before the invasion of Sicily, the nearest that Allied leaders could come to an agreement on the next operation in the West was to charge General Eisenhower with drafting a plan for reaching certain conflicting goals. They would then review the plan and decide later what should be tried.

The operation that followed Sicily, they prescribed, ...