No. 2 and No. 41 (Royal Marine) Commando at Salerno

Vietri sul Mare, where No. 2 Commando and No. 41 (Royal Marine) Commando landed. Photo: Bernard Gagnon, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Special Units · Operation Avalanche, 1943

No. 2 and No. 41 (Royal Marine) Commando at Salerno

Two British Commandos landed at Vietri on 9 September 1943, fought for Salerno, Dragone, Pigoletti and the Pimple, and lost 367 of 738 men in ten days.

The landing craft grounded on the little beach below Vietri sul Mare in the last hour of darkness on 9 September 1943. Blumenson’s official history puts the Commandos ashore at 0310, with the Rangers a few miles to the west; Bob Bishop of No. 2 Commando, writing from the war diary, remembered it as 3:30 a.m. Either way, nobody fired. The beach was empty, and the men of No. 2 (Army) Commando and No. 41 (Royal Marine) Commando ran inland toward the road junction above them.

Lt. Col. Jack Churchill took his men straight for the guns. Bishop’s account says No. 2 Commando “speedily captured a battery of German field artillery guns” that could have fired on the invasion fleet. It was the easiest thing the two Commandos would do at Salerno. Over the next ten days they fought as line infantry in the hills above the city, retook ground more than once, and lost about half of the men who had landed.

Raiders on the left flank: why the Commandos landed at Vietri

Salerno’s great weakness, for an army trying to reach Naples, was the mountain wall of the Sorrento peninsula. Blumenson names three ways through it: the Vietri–Nocera pass, the Salerno–San Severino pass and the smaller road over the Chiunzi Pass. British X Corps, under Lt. Gen. Sir Richard McCreery, had a zone stretching nearly 25 miles from Maiori to the mouth of the Sele, so the corps owned both the beaches and the mountain doors behind them.

The doors went to special-service troops. Lt. Col. William O. Darby’s Rangers landed at Maiori and climbed to Chiunzi (see the 1st Ranger Battalion page). The two Commandos took Vietri, the hinge of the flank, where the coast road from Amalfi met the road into Salerno and the road north through Cava toward Nocera. The Royal Marines History account says they were then to be held in reserve for the 46th Division, which landed on the beaches south of the city.

The two units were different in origin. No. 2 Commando was an Army unit; No. 41 was a Royal Marine Commando. At Salerno they fought side by side under the Special Service Brigade, and the war diary counts their losses together. The full story of the mountain flank, Rangers included, is told in Chapter 3: The Mountain Flank.

Marina and Vietri, 9–12 September: the landing and the fight for Salerno town

The quiet did not last. Blumenson writes that the Commandos landed unopposed at Vietri, but German troops quickly infiltrated the town and mortared the beach. Gun craft offshore had already fired on the shore in the British sector; a Royal Marines History page reproduces the report of LCG(L) 8, which records a direct hit that killed the Royal Artillery officer aboard and wounded seven others, among them her commanding officer.

From Vietri the Commandos, helped by Rangers, fought east into Salerno itself. The city became the left anchor of the British beachhead, and the 46th Division’s infantry marched through its streets on 10 September. The Commandos’ hold was never comfortable. The enemy opposite was the Hermann Göring Division, which held the northern sector against X Corps, the same formation the Americans had met in Sicily (see its record page).

The Royal Marines paid early. 41 Commando’s roll of honour begins with Marine Harry Brotton, 22, killed on 9 September. On 10 September the list lengthens: Marine Alexander Kennedy, 21; Marine Robert Felstead, 22; Lance Cpl. George Bowering, 24; Capt. Ronald Stott, 22; Colour Sgt. James Twigger, 30; Marine Robert Ball, 19. That same day, according to his record in the Commando Veterans Archive, the Commando’s commanding officer, Acting Lt. Col. Bruce Lumsden, suffered severe shrapnel wounds to the thigh and foot.

Dragone, 13 September: No. 2 Commando’s worst day

On the evening of 12 September No. 2 Commando moved into Dragone, in the hills near Salerno. Bishop estimates that 150 to 160 men were there and notes that the war diary gives no count. Just before 0600 on 13 September the Germans opened with what he calls “a saturation coverage” of Nebelwerfer rockets, then attacked.

It was the same morning that the Germans began the attacks that brought the American sector to its crisis on the Sele–Calore plain, told in Chapter 6. At Dragone the cost was brutal. Bishop lists 26 men of No. 2 Commando killed and 53 wounded; two of the wounded, Pte. John Barry and Pte. Alfred Blower, died later. Blumenson records that units of the Hermann Göring Division entering Vietri that day threatened to split the British main body from the Rangers in the mountains, and McCreery had no reserves to send.

41 Commando lost men the same day. Its roll of honour lists Warrant Officer Norman Tierney, 35, Sgt. Donald Charles Bullock DCM MM and Marine Joseph Betts among those killed on 13 September. The line above Salerno bent but did not break.

Pigoletti, the Pimple and 41 Commando Hill: 15–18 September

German troops had seized hills overlooking the 46th Division, and the two Commandos were sent to clear two of them. On 15 September No. 2 Commando relieved a company of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry on a knoll called the Pimple, was ordered back down, and watched the Germans walk back onto it.

The night sweep below Pigoletti was the Commandos’ best-known action at Salerno. No. 2 and No. 41 went in together. Bishop says Churchill went far ahead with only his runner and took “42 prisoners virtually by himself,” while Capt. Tom Hemming “grabbed nearly 40” more. Bishop puts the night’s haul at about 150; the Royal Marines History account gives 135, “more than the 46th Division had taken in the previous five days.”

The Pimple was harder. Two troops of No. 2 Commando attacked it before dawn. No. 2 Troop, under Capt. the Duke of Wellington, ran into what the Royal Marines account calls “withering enemy fire” and was ordered to withdraw. The Duke was killed; Bishop dates his death to 16 September. A later attempt was called off when Allied artillery fell among the men waiting on the start line and caused many casualties.

To the right of the Pimple, No. 41 Commando took a second hill under heavy artillery fire as night fell. The Marines called it “41 Commando Hill.” Their chaplain, the Revd John Wallis RN, and their medical officer, Surgeon Lt. Ernest Davies, both received the Distinguished Service Cross for caring for the wounded under fire.

On 16 September the Hermann Göring Division, with parts of the 3rd and 15th Panzergrenadier Divisions, made its last attack near Vietri and gained little against the 46th Division. On 17 September the war diary records that the Commando was reinforced by seven 4.2-inch mortars of the U.S. mortar battalion, placed under the Special Service Brigade. On 18 September a neighboring brigade attacked White Cross Hill and the Pimple with Commando support and achieved “only a very limited success.” The two Commandos were relieved that evening and went into reserve around Mercatello.

“evacuated and strewn with enemy dead.”

— No. 2 Commando war diary, 19 September 1943, on the Pimple as fresh troops found it; Commando Veterans Archive

Counting the cost: 367 of 738

The Commandos had come as raiders, few in number, and spent ten days holding exposed hills like infantry battalions. The war diary’s tally for both units is stark: 13 officers and 54 other ranks killed, 15 officers and 225 other ranks wounded, and one Royal Marine officer and 59 other ranks missing.

The British share of the Salerno battle cost X Corps about 5,500 men, by Blumenson’s estimate, and the Commandos’ losses are part of that total. The rest of the British story is on the 56th (London) Division page and in Chapter 5. After their relief, Bishop writes, the men awaited removal to Sicily, where they would “recruit and rebuild once again.”

Where they lie, and where to stand today

The Commonwealth dead of the Salerno battle lie in the Salerno War Cemetery, on the north side of the SS18 coast road just past Bellizzi, among 1,851 Commonwealth servicemen of the Second World War, 109 of them unidentified. The cemetery is open at all times; the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s page lists the exact address and access.

Vietri sul Mare sits just west of Salerno on the Amalfi Coast road, and the little beach at Marina below the town is where the landing craft came in. Stand on the coast road above it and the logic of 9 September is plain: the road to Amalfi runs west, the road to Salerno east, and the road through Cava climbs north toward Nocera and Naples. A full battlefield itinerary is in Chapter 9, and common questions are answered in the Salerno FAQ.