It is quite possible with Baldwin's fine sense of tactics and logistics that he puzzled it out for himself. Baldwin, unlike many reporters, understood the importance of logistics. As he points out in today's piece, there aren't any ports in the South capable of supporting a large army until you get to Naples with its fine harbor. He also has discussed several times the tactic of using, as he calls it, "hops" to advance in Italy's mountainous terrain, as Patton did in Sicily. So, he may have come to the conclusion on his own that the prize of the port of Naples would be worth the risk of a daring "hop" to a nearby shore.
Another possibility is that to be right so much of the time he must have had many highly placed sources and even innocuous tidbits of information could be put together to get the big picture.
I’m leaning toward Baldwin piecing it together from his own instincts and insight. A lot of what he has written about what he thinks will happen will actually happen, such his predictions a month ago of the course of war in Russia in the next year. I can guarantee he had no sources of inside information for that piece.
Also, keep in mind that whatever he wrote had to pass scrutiny of a censor. It’s possible he wrote this a month ago, but it wasn’t cleared for publication until the forces have almost hit the beach and its too late for the Germans to react.
I’m going to have to lend this to Baldwin’s intuition. The port at Naples is definitely more attractive than the one at Salerno and certainly looks like the more logical landing point (much like the Pa de Calais in France).
Interestingly too, is that Naples was one of the initial landing points discussed by Ike, Marshal and the War Plans Department. The initial strategic concept was submitted back on July 16th outlining an attack on Naples.
The target shifted south to Salerno based in large by the range of the single engine fighters they had available in the theater at the time. A month later on August 16th, Ike had made his decision and pressed forward with the decision to land at Salerno instead of Naples.