The British Battle: Battipaglia, Montecorvino and the Tobacco Factory

A German Panzer IV knocked out at Pasanara in the British sector, 9 September 1943. Imperial War Museums photograph NA 6698 (Crown copyright expired), via Wikimedia Commons.

Operation Avalanche · Chapter 5 of 9

The British Battle: Battipaglia, Montecorvino and the Tobacco Factory

North of the Sele, British X Corps took an airfield it could not use and a town it could not hold, and fought ten days for both.

9–20 September 1943Montecorvino airfield · Battipaglia · Tusciano · Persano · Tobacco Factory~25 min read

On 10 September 1943, the day after the landings, two Royal Engineers were at work on Montecorvino airfield, preparing it for the Royal Air Force. The field was one of the reasons the Allies had come to this stretch of coast. It lay about three miles inland, it could hold four fighter squadrons, and Allied bombers had spared it before the invasion so that it could be put to use at once. German 88-mm fire killed them both. The war diary of the 2/6th Battalion, The Queen’s Royal Regiment, records their deaths in a single line.

That line sums up the British battle at Salerno. North of the Sele River, Lt. Gen. Sir Richard McCreery’s X Corps took the ground it had been sent to take, or nearly so, and then found that the Germans on the hills could still deny it. The airfield was overrun and could not be used. Battipaglia was entered twice and lost twice. Between the British right flank and the Americans lay a seven-mile gap along the Sele, and into that gap the U.S. 45th Division sent two regiments that fought for a hilltop tobacco factory near Persano.

The American crisis on 13 September has drawn most of the attention since 1943. The British sector, however, held more men, took more casualties and faced three German divisions in turn. This chapter follows X Corps from the beaches to the fall of Battipaglia on 18 September, with the 45th Division’s fight at the Tobacco Factory on its right.

McCreery’s X Corps: the British half of the Salerno beachhead

Operation Avalanche put two corps ashore under Lt. Gen. Mark W. Clark’s Fifth Army. The American VI Corps landed south of the Sele at Paestum. The British X Corps, the larger of the two, landed north of the river on the beaches below Salerno town. The plan called for about 100,000 British and nearly 70,000 American troops, which made the British corps the heavier half of the operation. The story of how both corps reached the gulf, and why they came to Salerno at all, begins in the collection hub.

X Corps had changed commanders shortly before it sailed. Its first commander, Horrocks, was wounded before the invasion, and McCreery replaced him. Under McCreery were two infantry divisions. The 46th Division, under Maj. Gen. J. L. T. Hawkesworth, landed on the left, nearest Salerno; its 128th (Hampshire) Brigade was made up of the 2nd, 1/4th and 5th Battalions of the Hampshire Regiment. The 56th (London) Division, under Maj. Gen. Douglas Graham (Blumenson names G. W. R. Templer, who in fact took over the division in October 1943), landed on the right. The 7th Armoured Division was to follow, and Rangers and Commandos held the mountain flank (chapter 3).

Commander, British X Corps

Lt. Gen. Sir Richard McCreery

A cavalryman educated at Eton and Sandhurst, McCreery joined the 12th Lancers in 1915 and served in France for the rest of the First World War. He commanded the regiment as an armored-car unit in the 1930s and was Chief of the General Staff, Middle East, in 1942. He took X Corps when Horrocks was wounded on the eve of Avalanche, and in 1944–45 he commanded the Eighth Army in Italy.

Born

1898 (died 1967)

At Salerno

Commanded X Corps from the landings to the advance on Naples; asked Clark to narrow his front and fought the battle without a corps reserve

The ground explains much of what followed. The Salerno plain is a crescent about 10 miles wide at its center. Mount Eboli, more than 8 miles long, splits it into a northern half, which was the British zone, and a southern half, which was the American. Hills close in on the northern half from the north and east. Battipaglia was a road and rail town on the way inland to Eboli, and Allied air planners counted its rail yards, along with Eboli’s, as “the two principal centers of enemy transportation” in the Avalanche area.

The airfield was the first prize. The official Army Air Forces history calls Montecorvino the “first major objective of the ground forces,” three miles inland and ten miles below Salerno. Beyond it lay Battipaglia, and fourteen miles to the east, through Battipaglia and Eboli, lay Ponte Sele, the bridge over the upper Sele. Within two days McCreery would judge that distance beyond his corps’ strength.

1. 0330 · 9 SepH-hour; 46th and 56th Divisions land on Uncle, Sugar and Roger beaches; X Corps has its beaches secure by 0445
2. 9 SepBritish patrols enter Battipaglia and are thrown out; the attempt on Montecorvino airfield fails; the Germans blow the Highway 18 bridge over the Sele, leaving a seven-mile gap between the corps
3. 10 SepBattipaglia entered again and lost; the 45th Division’s 179th and 157th Infantry land to fill the gap
4. 11 SepMontecorvino airfield overrun but under German fire; seven tanks lost at the Tobacco Factory
5. 12 SepThe 56th Division is driven from the edge of Battipaglia; the 157th takes and holds the Tobacco Factory
6. 13 SepThe 157th is driven from the factory; the German thrust down the Sele–Calore corridor begins (chapter 6)
7. 14 Sep7th Armoured Division starts to land; “The British had held”
8. 16 SepLast German attacks at Battipaglia and Vietri are beaten off
9. 18 SepBritish armor enters Battipaglia without opposition
10. 20 SepWork begins on repairing Montecorvino airfield

Landing north of the Sele: Uncle, Sugar and Roger beaches

Unlike the Americans at Paestum, the British went in behind a naval bombardment. Vice Adm. H. Kent Hewitt dated the northern fire support from 0315, fifteen minutes before H-hour. Rear Adm. Richard L. Conolly, commanding the U.S. ships in the British sector, took three Hunt-class destroyers to within about a mile of the beaches, which earned him the nickname “close-in Conolly.” The full landing story is in chapter 2.

The 46th Division landed on Uncle beach, in the Magazzeno area later called “Hampshire Beach.” The 56th Division landed to its right on Sugar and Roger. A scout boat placed too far south left a gap in the 46th Division’s landing, and an enemy strongpoint that should have been dealt with was left untouched. That mistake cost the division dearly over the following days. On the 56th Division’s front, the 8th and 9th Battalions, Royal Fusiliers, of the 167th Brigade came ashore at Spineta, south of the Tusciano River. According to the Liberation Route site sheet, they landed about a kilometer south of their planned point, directly opposite a German strongpoint. A company of the 8th Battalion attacked from the flank and silenced a gun battery.

The 5th Hampshires had a worse morning. They landed on the wrong side of the Asa River, and two companies were overrun in a narrow lane the regiment afterward called “Hampshire Lane.” The regimental museum records that a tank ran over the dead and wounded and that a shell killed three officers and the battalion’s wireless signallers. Maj. P. R. Sawyer rallied the survivors. By nightfall the battalion had lost 5 officers and 35 other ranks killed and more than 300 wounded or captured.

By 0445, according to Blumenson’s official history, X Corps had secured its beaches. Holding the plain behind them proved much harder.

Montecorvino airfield: the prize that could not be used

Salerno had been picked partly because of this airfield. Planners noted that Montecorvino, about three miles inland, could hold four fighter squadrons. Spitfires flying from Sicily could stay over the beaches for only about 20 minutes, and an airfield on the plain would end that problem. The bombers that hit Battipaglia’s rail yards before the landing left Montecorvino alone because the Allies, in the words of the Army Air Forces history, “wished it left unscathed for early use after the landings.”

The 2/6th Queen’s, part of the 56th Division’s 169th (Queen’s) Brigade, landed as a reserve battalion and was sent straight for the airfield. Its war diary records the first day in brief entries.

Blumenson’s account of the same ground is more cautious. He writes that the British attempt on the airfield failed on D-Day, while the 46th Division partly surrounded it, and that the British captured it only at the end of 11 September. The two accounts can be reconciled. Companies of the Queen’s reached the airfield buildings on the first day, but the airfield could not be called captured while German tanks could cross it and German guns could hit it.

Even after the field was taken, it was of no use. Blumenson says German infantry on the nearby hills and German artillery denied it. The Army Air Forces history says that on D+2 the airfield was “not available for Allied planes, as it was under artillery fire from the near-by hills.” Fighter cover had to keep coming from Sicily, and Maj. Gen. Edwin House of XII Air Support Command radioed that his squadrons were “suffering losses that cannot be replaced.” The airfield story from the Navy’s side, including the carrier Seafires and the Paestum strip, is in chapter 4.

The British made other arrangements. Airfield construction companies working behind X Corps had a landing ground at Tusciano usable on 11 September and another at Asa on the 13th. Spitfires of the RAF flew from Tusciano to cover the beachhead. Montecorvino itself stayed under fire until the Germans pulled back. On 19 September the 56th Division pushed its lines inland to stop the shelling, and on 20 September service troops of XII Air Support Command began repairing the field. An Imperial War Museums photograph (NA 6704) shows what they found: abandoned German aircraft and oil drums scattered across the field.

Battipaglia entered and lost: the Royal Fusiliers at the crossroads town

Battipaglia was the 56th Division’s objective, and the Germans knew it. On D-Day the threat to the town alarmed Generalmajor Rudolf Sieckenius, commander of the 16th Panzer Division, enough that he pulled units off both flanks of his long coastal front to hold it. For the British, that meant a German counterattack as soon as they reached the town.

Blumenson’s version is brief. British patrols entered Battipaglia on 9 September and were forced out. On 10 September the British entered a second time and were driven out at nightfall. German troops also held the high ground east of the town, overlooking both Battipaglia and the airfield.

The Royal Fusiliers’ regimental history gives a fuller and grimmer account. As summarized from C. Northcote Parkinson’s Always a Fusilier (1949) and the British official history, the 9th Battalion met little opposition after the beach and set up its headquarters in the town by nightfall on 9 September. The neighboring battalions, including the 8th Fusiliers, had not got as far, and the 9th was left dangerously isolated. German counterattacks began at first light on 10 September. 88-mm guns knocked down the buildings one by one, and the commanding officer, Lt. Col. Hillersdon, was wounded. Tanks and infiltrating infantry followed.

By 1300, according to the same account, every anti-tank gun in the battalion had been knocked out. The carriers and the 3-inch mortars of the support company were thrown in. By 1600 Maj. Cedric Delforce, in temporary command, had few men left. An attack by the 3rd Battalion, Coldstream Guards, of the 201st Guards Brigade failed to retake the town, and the survivors of the 9th Fusiliers fell back to the blocked bridge at Fosso. One platoon of 37 men was cut off inside Battipaglia. It hid for a couple of days and sniped at the Germans during Allied air raids, and most of its men were captured while searching for food and water.

The fighting went on around the edge of the town. On 12 September the Germans drove units of the 56th Division out of the outskirts of Battipaglia, causing heavy casualties and exposing the northern flank of the American VI Corps. A secondary account claims that about 450 Fusiliers were captured there; no official source we checked confirms the figure, and we have left it out of our totals. German claims for the day before were already large: Tenth Army reported almost 1,500 prisoners on 11 September, most of them British.

On the German side, the front was reorganized around the British sector. On 11 September Generaloberst Heinrich von Vietinghoff split his Tenth Army’s front at the Sele, giving XIV Panzer Corps the sector north of the river and LXXVI Panzer Corps the south. The Hermann Göring Division, which had held the coast from the Volturno to Castellammare, came down against the 46th Division around Salerno and Vietri. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring sent Vietinghoff a blunt message about the battle.

“Every man must know this.”

— Field Marshal Albert Kesselring to Vietinghoff, on why Salerno had to be won, September 1943; quoted in Martin Blumenson, Salerno to Cassino (CMH, 1969)

The Hampshires’ crossroads and White Cross Hill

The Hampshire Regiment had four battalions at Salerno. Two companies of the 2/4th Hampshires, C and D, landed early on 9 September with the 56th Division as part of the beach organization. On 10 September they came under the 167th Brigade and took over the defense of a crossroads on the road to Battipaglia.

On 12 September the two companies advanced, were stopped by mortar fire and fell back to the crossroads. They held it for the next four days against German motorized infantry. On 15 September ten armored fighting vehicles that the regiment identifies as Hermann Göring Division overran D Company’s position. D Company re-formed, and its 6-pounder anti-tank guns destroyed the vehicles one at a time. Cooks and drivers joined the counterattack that retook the position.

Nearer Salerno, the 128th (Hampshire) Brigade held the hills above the town. Its task had been to land on a front of about a mile between the Picentino and Asa rivers and take the hills overlooking the Salerno road so the 138th Brigade could take the town. After Hampshire Lane, the 5th Battalion re-formed as two companies and held White Cross Hill against a counterattack on 13 September. On the night of the 14th the 1/4th Battalion’s position on the feature known as The Crag was overrun and most of that battalion escaped to White Cross Hill. Counterattacks by the 5th Battalion from 15 September did not succeed; Capt. W. Follit was killed, and Lt. J. Hillman died attacking a German machine-gun post. Sgt. G. A. F. Minnigin held San Nicola with a handful of men and won the DCM. White Cross Hill was retaken only when the Germans withdrew on 20 September.

The seven-mile gap at the Sele

The Avalanche plan had a weak point built into it. The Sele River divided the two corps, and the British were supposed to hold a flank along its north bank. On the first day they did not. Blumenson describes “a gap of seven miles” between the British and the Americans on the evening of 9 September, and the gap became clearly marked that night when the Germans blew the Highway 18 bridge over the Sele.

Clark’s answer was to give the gap to the Americans. At 1740 on D-Day Maj. Gen. Fred L. Walker of the 36th Division asked for a regiment of the floating reserve, the 45th “Thunderbird” Division, and Clark agreed. On 10 September he shifted the VI Corps boundary north of the Sele, making Maj. Gen. Ernest Dawley responsible for closing the gap between Battipaglia and the river. Dawley gave the job to the 45th Division’s 179th and 157th Infantry.

Clark visited McCreery the same day, and McCreery told him that the German concentration “made it doubtful” that X Corps, at its present strength, could advance the fourteen miles through Battipaglia and Eboli to Ponte Sele. Clark promised help. On the evening of 11 September McCreery asked him to move the boundary again and narrow the British front still further, and Clark agreed.

Only the 2nd and 3rd Battalions of the 157th Infantry were on hand on 10 September, because of a shortage of shipping; Blumenson says the 1st Battalion would not arrive from Sicily until 15 September. Hewitt’s order unloaded the regiment just south of the Sele, although Clark had meant it to land north of the river on the British right. With the Highway 18 bridge gone, engineers built a new one overnight, and on 11 September the 157th crossed into what had been the British zone.

The 179th Infantry went in on the other side of the gap. On 11 September its 3rd Battalion pushed to within a mile of Ponte Sele before pulling back at dark, while German tanks and artillery drove its 2nd Battalion back almost three miles to La Cosa Creek.

The Tobacco Factory at Persano: the 45th Division’s fight, 11–13 September

The Tobacco Factory was a farm-processing plant, the Tabacchificio Fiocche. Blumenson describes it as “five large buildings constructed in a circle” on a flat hilltop just north of the Sele. From it a defender could control the approaches to Eboli, four miles away, and to Ponte Sele, as well as the road from Battipaglia to Eboli.

On the morning of 11 September a battalion of the 16th Panzer Division moved into the buildings. That day the tank company of the 191st Tank Battalion led the two battalions of the 157th Infantry across the Sele toward Eboli. The Germans met the column with machine guns and anti-tank weapons. Seven American tanks were knocked out. By evening the infantry was digging in short of the factory, and both the factory and Eboli remained in German hands.

On 12 September the 157th tried again, and this time it took the buildings and the high ground they stood on. The Germans counterattacked through the day. At one point eight German tanks and about a battalion of infantry forced a battalion of the 157th out of its positions; the Americans counterattacked and won them back. By evening the regiment held the factory and was blocking the Sele crossing west of Persano. To the south, tanks and tank destroyers reached Persano and restored contact with the 179th, but no farther advance was possible.

The position was not as strong as it looked. The loss of Altavilla on 12 September exposed the 179th’s right flank, and the regiment moved north of the Sele to join the 157th. Clark saw the German strength near Persano as a “spear” pointed at the center of the beachhead and judged the 45th Division “badly bruised.” The 2nd Battalion, 143rd Infantry, of the 36th Division relieved the 179th that night and took over the ground northeast of Persano, with no contact on either flank.

On 13 September more than twenty German tanks, a battalion of infantry and towed artillery came out of Eboli toward the factory. They drove the 157th’s defenders from the buildings and pushed on to the Persano crossing, and from there into the Sele–Calore corridor. What happened next, the destruction of the 2nd Battalion, 143rd Infantry, and the stand of the 45th Division’s guns at the river junction, belongs to the crisis told in chapter 6 and on the page for the 158th and 189th Field Artillery.

Holding the line, 13–15 September: “The British had held”

While the Americans fought the corridor battle on 13 September, X Corps had troubles of its own. Units of the Hermann Göring Division entered Vietri and threatened to cut the British off from the Rangers in the mountains to the west. McCreery had no reserves. Blumenson puts it plainly: “Without reserves, General McCreery could only make a hopeful request.” He asked for a Ranger battalion to counterattack from Maiori. The first troops of the 7th Armoured Division were on their way to the beachhead, but they might arrive too late to matter.

The 2/6th Queen’s spent these days on Point 210. At 1900 on 12 September about 100 Germans with many automatic weapons attacked from D Company’s front and were beaten off with heavy German losses. A Company rushed up at 2100 to take over B Company’s positions. At 1045 on 14 September, its diary notes, Allied aircraft heavily bombed the Battipaglia area.

14 September was the day the beachhead steadied. Heavier German artillery fire came before an attack from the Vietri area, which gave McCreery, as he later said, “several anxious moments.” The 46th Division put every unit it had into the defense of the hills around Salerno. When the Germans shifted their attack to the Battipaglia area, the 56th Division “fought tenaciously on open ground in full view of the enemy.” At the end of the day the line was where it had been in the morning.

Blumenson’s verdict for the day is four words long: “The British had held.” The seam between the two corps southeast of Battipaglia, the old seven-mile gap, was now “solidly knit.” The 7th Armoured Division began coming ashore in the X Corps area. On his first visit to the beachhead that day, General Alexander judged that the crisis had passed and asked North Africa for “an additional 1,500 British infantry replacements” for X Corps.

The 7th Armoured Division’s 131st Brigade was itself a Queen’s formation. Its arrival put all six battalions of the regiment, the 1/5th, 1/6th, 1/7th, 2/5th, 2/6th and 2/7th, at Salerno together, an occasion the regiment still marks as a Regimental Day.

16 September: the last German attacks at Battipaglia and Vietri

Vietinghoff made one more effort. Kesselring wanted the Allies driven into the sea, and new German formations had reached the front from Calabria. The 26th Panzer Division had reached Eboli on 14 September at about regimental strength. On 16 September the Germans attacked in three places, and two of the three were against the British.

• Battipaglia toward Salerno. The 26th Panzer Division attacked northwest from Battipaglia. The 56th Division, which Blumenson says “fought valiantly,” held it with help from elements of the 7th Armoured Division.
• Battipaglia toward the sea. The 16th Panzer Division drove southwest from Battipaglia and was turned back by the 45th Division, which “was hardly aware that it was turning back a German effort.”
• Vietri. In the afternoon the Hermann Göring Division, with parts of the 3rd and 15th Panzergrenadier Divisions, attacked in the Vietri area and made “little progress” against the 46th Division, now backed by armor.

The attacks failed, and Vietinghoff knew why. Late on 16 September he reported that his attacks were “unable to reach their objective owing to the fire from naval guns and low-flying aircraft,” as well as the slow approach of the Eighth Army from the south. He asked to break off. How the battle turned, and why, is the subject of chapter 7.

The German divisions that fought X Corps paid a price as well. Blumenson estimates German losses in the beachhead battle at about 3,500 men, including about 1,000 in the Hermann Göring Division and about 1,300 in the 16th Panzer Division, the two formations that bore the brunt of the fighting north of the Sele. The Hermann Göring Division had fought the Allies in Sicily only weeks before.

Battipaglia taken, Battipaglia destroyed: 17–20 September

On 17 September McCreery was “still anxious” about the “very tired” battalions of the 46th Division around Salerno and Vietri. He expected a German covering attack and wanted to keep the 7th Armoured Division fresh for the advance on Naples, so he asked Clark for the 180th Infantry, the 45th Division regiment in army reserve. He used part of his armor to relieve troops in the Battipaglia sector. He also told Clark that a 45th Division attack to clear the Tobacco Factory would help a great deal in cleaning up Battipaglia.

No covering attack came. The Germans pulled back from the British right, and on 18 September British armor “entered Battipaglia without opposition.” On 19 September the 2/4th Hampshires advanced with the 131st Brigade into the captured town. Patrols of the 2/7th Queen’s pushed into the hill villages above the plain, and on the same day the 2/6th Queen’s received orders that the 1/6th Queen’s of the 131st Brigade would relieve it.

What the British found in Battipaglia was a ruin. Before the landings the town’s rail yards had taken, in the words of the Army Air Forces history, “the third hardest pounding” of the pre-invasion bombing, from 54 Wellingtons and 107 B-25s and B-26s. On the night of 8/9 September another 37 Wellingtons dropped 86 tons on the Battipaglia yards. Then, during the crisis, Allied heavy and medium bombers turned on the German concentrations in the Battipaglia–Eboli sector.

“The towns of Battipaglia and Eboli were all but obliterated.”

— Craven and Cate, The Army Air Forces in World War II, vol. II, chapter 15

The official air history says nothing about the people who lived there. Italy’s national tourism site says simply that Battipaglia was destroyed by the bombing of 1943. A figure of 117 civilian dead is often repeated; Wikipedia attributes it to the same Army Air Forces history, but we could not find it in that text, and it should be treated as unconfirmed. In Eboli, an Allied raid on 4 August 1943 had already killed seven Capuchin friars sheltering in a grotto at their convent, and a five-year-old boy. The civilian cost of the whole campaign is examined in chapter 8, along with the so-called Salerno mutiny, the refusal of reinforcements to join X Corps units that began on 16 September.

The cost of Salerno to X Corps

The British paid more for Salerno than the Americans did. Blumenson puts British casualties in the beachhead battle at “somewhere around 5,500,” against about 3,500 for the U.S. Army. The Navy’s history page gives 5,259 British. Either way, the X Corps total is larger, and it includes the Commandos’ heavy losses on the mountain flank.

The British dead lie in the Salerno War Cemetery, on the coast road just past Bellizzi. The site was chosen in November 1943, when the 59th General Hospital stood nearby. In 2019 the remains of two British soldiers found in the Giovi hills two years earlier were buried among them.

Salerno’s British sector today: then and now

1943Today

Montecorvino airfield is now Salerno Costa d’Amalfi Airport, at Pontecagnano Faiano. Il Post reported in 2024 that scheduled passenger flights would resume that July. Travelers landing there come down on the same field the Queen’s companies reached on 9 September 1943.

A full itinerary for the whole battlefield, from Vietri to Agropoli, is in chapter 9, and the Salerno FAQ answers the most common questions about the campaign.

By the evening of 13 September, X Corps was holding and the 157th had lost the Tobacco Factory. German tanks were moving south from Persano into the low ground between the Sele and the Calore, toward the American guns and the beaches. The next chapter follows them there. It tells how a battalion of the 36th Division was overrun and how the 45th Division’s guns stopped the German tanks at the river junction, and how close Clark came to evacuating the beachhead. Continue to chapter 6: The Crisis, or return to the collection hub.