The 56th (London) Division at Salerno

A PIAT anti-tank team of the 9th Royal Fusiliers, 56th Division, in action, 10 September 1943. Imperial War Museums photograph NA 6683 (Crown copyright expired), via Wikimedia Commons.

Special Units · Operation Avalanche, 1943

The 56th (London) Division at Salerno

The 'Black Cats' of the 56th (London) Division landed on X Corps' right, reached Montecorvino airfield and fought ten days for Battipaglia and the hills above the plain.

At 0445 on 9 September 1943 the 2/6th Battalion, The Queen’s Royal Regiment, came ashore as a reserve battalion on the beaches south of Salerno. Its war diary records “No immediate opposition” and two mines found near the beach. Within hours the battalion was on its way to the main prize of the British sector, Montecorvino airfield, and by nightfall its A Company held the airfield buildings and about fifteen German prisoners.

Then German tanks came across the field. They attacked A and B Companies, the battalion was pinned, and three of its officers, Maj. J. R. Walker, Lt. R. J. Heaton and Lt. T. H. G. Harris, were dead by the end of the day. The diarist summed up the first night in one line: the position “was to everyone rather obscure and most uncomfortable.” For the 56th (London) Division, that line would serve for most of the next ten days.

The Black Cats come ashore: Sugar and Roger beaches

The 56th was a London division, and in the Second World War it wore a black silhouette of Dick Whittington’s cat on a red ground, which gave it the nickname the Black Cats. It had fought in the last weeks of the Tunisian campaign that spring, the same campaign that included Kasserine Pass, and in September it sailed for Salerno as one of McCreery’s two assault divisions.

Unlike the Americans at Paestum, X Corps went in behind a naval bombardment. The 46th Division landed on the left on Uncle beach; the 56th landed on the right, on Sugar and Roger, toward the mouth of the Sele. The 8th and 9th Royal Fusiliers of the 167th Brigade came ashore at Spineta, south of the Tusciano, about a kilometer south of their planned point, and one brigade landed south of its beach and became mixed with another. The landings themselves are told in Chapter 2.

The Germans answered quickly. Blumenson writes that “the 56th Division (Maj. Gen. G. W. R. Templer) received a strong tank attack,” which naval gunfire helped break up. The tanks belonged to the 16th Panzer Division, the only German division on the gulf that morning.

Montecorvino airfield: the Queen’s take the buildings

Montecorvino was one of the reasons the Allies had come to Salerno. It lay about three miles inland and could hold four fighter squadrons, and Allied fighters flying from Sicily had only minutes over the beaches. The 2/6th Queen’s reached it on the first day. Blumenson’s more cautious account says the British attempt on the airfield failed on D-Day; the two can be reconciled, since companies held the buildings while German tanks could still cross the field.

The second day showed why the airfield could not be used. At 0820 on 10 September a Spitfire landed on it and was shot up by machine-gun fire; the pilot made it to D Company. Later that day two Royal Engineers preparing the strip for the RAF were killed by 88-mm fire. X Corps captured the field at the end of 11 September, but German guns on the hills kept it closed, and repair work began only on 20 September. The air side of the story is in Chapter 4.

“Position was to everyone rather obscure and most uncomfortable”

— War diary of the 2/6th Battalion, The Queen’s Royal Regiment, 9 September 1943

Battipaglia entered and lost, 9–12 September

Battipaglia, the road and rail town on the way inland to Eboli, was the division’s objective, and the Germans meant to keep it. Blumenson says that loss of the town and its commanding ground would give the Allies good access to the interior, and the threat so alarmed Generalmajor Rudolf Sieckenius that he pulled units of his 16th Panzer Division from both flanks of his coastal front to hold it.

British patrols entered Battipaglia on 9 September and were driven out. On 10 September the British went in again and were thrown out at nightfall. The Royal Fusiliers’ fight in the town is told in Chapter 5. On 12 September the Germans drove units of the 56th Division back from the edge of Battipaglia with heavy losses, which left the northern flank of the American VI Corps exposed on the eve of the crisis described in Chapter 6.

Two companies of the 2/4th Hampshires, C and D, had landed with the division as part of the beach organization. On 10 September they came under the 167th Brigade and took over a crossroads on the road to Battipaglia. The regimental museum records that they held it for four days against German motorized infantry. On 15 September German armored vehicles overran D Company, which re-formed and, with cooks and drivers joining in, took the position back.

Point 210 and the long defense, 12–16 September

On 11 September the 2/6th Queen’s moved to Point 210, a hill above the plain; a carrier patrol “reported no opposition on top of hill.” At 1800 the next day smoke, high explosive and mortar fire fell on the position, and at 1900 about 100 Germans with many automatic weapons attacked from D Company’s front. The diary’s verdict is brief: “Attack beaten off.” Maj. S. W. Peet was slightly wounded, and A Company took over B Company’s positions at 2100.

The pressure moved along the line. On 13 September, as the Americans fought for their lives in the Sele–Calore corridor, the Hermann Göring Division threatened Vietri on the British left, and McCreery had no reserve. On 14 September Allied bombers pounded the Battipaglia area, and by evening the 7th Armoured Division had begun to land. General Alexander, visiting that day, asked North Africa for 1,500 British infantry replacements for X Corps.

On 16 September came the last German blow against the division. The 26th Panzer Division attacked northwest from Battipaglia toward Salerno, and the 56th Division, with elements of the 7th Armoured Division, held it. The 2/6th Queen’s diary records about 100 German infantry marching toward the tobacco factory at 1300 and being heavily shelled, and by 1750 small pockets of Germans “retreating in disorder.” That night Vietinghoff asked to break off the battle (Chapter 7).

Six Queen’s battalions, and Battipaglia taken: 17–20 September

The 169th Brigade’s three Queen’s battalions had landed on the first day. Six days later, the Queen’s Royal Surrey Regiment’s history records, three more Queen’s battalions, the 131st Brigade of the 7th Armoured Division, came up and relieved them. For a short time all six, the 1/5th, 1/6th, 1/7th, 2/5th, 2/6th and 2/7th, were at Salerno together. The regiment calls it a “unique event” and keeps it as a special Regimental Day.

The Germans pulled back. On 18 September a 2/6th carrier patrol met the 201st Guards Brigade advancing from the tobacco factory, and British armor entered Battipaglia without opposition. The 2/7th Queen’s found the hill village of Torello “more strongly held than supposed” and were still fighting for it on 19 September, the day the 2/6th received word that the 1/6th Queen’s of the 131st Brigade would take over its positions.

What the division entered was a ruin. Allied bombers had hit Battipaglia’s rail yards before the landing and again during the crisis, and the official air history says that Battipaglia and Eboli were all but obliterated. A civilian death toll of 117 is often repeated but has not been confirmed in the official text; the civilian cost is examined in Chapter 8.

The road north was slow. When X Corps attacked into the Sorrento passes on 23 September, Blumenson says the 56th Division made “hardly any progress”; on one 17-mile stretch the Germans destroyed 25 major bridges. Naples was entered on 1 October, and on 2 October the 56th Division met the U.S. 3rd Division (Chapter 9). The division went on to cross the Volturno in October. Before that crossing, on 10 October, Graham broke his shoulder when his jeep overturned into a shell crater, and Templer arrived to take command on 15 October.

What the sources disagree on

The men sent to make good those losses have their own story. Accounts of the so-called Salerno mutiny say that veterans of other divisions, expecting to rejoin their own units, were posted instead as replacements to the 46th and 56th Divisions, and about 192 refused. That episode, and the courts-martial that followed, are told in Chapter 8.

The British dead of the battle lie in the Salerno War Cemetery, on the coast road just past Bellizzi, in the ground the 56th Division held: 1,851 Commonwealth servicemen of the Second World War, 109 of them unidentified. Montecorvino airfield, where the Queen’s companies stood on 9 September, is now Salerno Costa d’Amalfi Airport.