In the Footsteps of Wally Binch - Salerno Memories Thirty-Five Years On

As far as I know, there are no contemporary photographs of the Sherwood Foresters in the front line at Salerno in September 1943.  However, in 1991, Wally Binch, the secretary of the 2/5th Sherwood Foresters Battalion Association organised a trip for a group of veterans to visit some of the locations where they had fought in Italy in 1943-44.  Some of the photographs the group took appear in On Active Service, one of three compilations of personal accounts by the veterans produced by Wally.  Three years ago I was in Salerno but unable to identify some of the locations, specifically those which Wally and Ernie Boultby had identified as the positions held by the Anti-Tank Platoon.

This year I went back to Salerno, and stayed in a different part of the town near the river Irno.  The Irno valley was one of the main axes of attack for the German forces attacking from the north.  I realised that while I had been trying to find the locations near the town cemetery, they were in fact some 500 yards to the south (and about a five-minute walk from our hotel).  And while much of this area is now covered over by the new autostrada and its slip roads, the buildings and features seen in Wally’s photographs still exist 35 years on.

The key location is a ditch and bridge which was the site of one of the gun teams, both an excellent anti-tank obstacle and cover for the Foresters.  This drains into the Irno itself.

It is not possible to exactly reproduce Wally’s photo, taken from the northern (German) side of the ditch, since where he stood to take it is now fenced off private land, but nevertheless it can be clearly identified from the buildings on the southern (British) side which largely still exist.  Wally’s picture of the bridge itself can also be replicated almost exactly, as can his picture of the bank which he climbed nightly to maintain contact with troops on the northern bank.

Just north of the ditch is a large villa, the site of another of the battalion’s anti-tank guns. Wally identified this in 1991 as the house where he had given away the platoon’s position when he had carried away two wounded men on his motor-cycle (he was the platoon’s dispatch rider).  In 1991 this appears to have been a single property with distinctive gates identified by Wally.  It is now subdivided into two, and the entrance has been substantially modified as a result, but it can still be identified from its location, balconies and wall, there is nothing similar anywhere in the area.

A fifth photo is simply titled ‘The same houses are still there’.  These are just south of the ditch and can be identified precisely not just from the doors, windows and balconies but from the external cabling which is exactly as it was in 1991!

The last image from 1991 is the house where the Foresters found a gramophone player and records which they used to play even when under mortar fire.  The distinctive door in the photo is no longer to be found – presumably either the builing has been demolished or the façade altered significantly.  Now that there are no living veterans to the events of September 1943, it is going to be difficult to place this location.

From a military history perspective, what is most significant about this is just how far back the Foresters had been pushed by the original German counterattack.  Much is made in accounts of the Salerno landings of the attacks made on the American positions in the south, which drove to within two miles of the beaches.  The position occupied by Wally and his comrades is almost exactly one mile from the mouth of the Irno river.  Had the Germans (who included troops from the elite Herman Goering Panzer Division) reached the sea here, it could equally have spelt catastrophe for the landings.  I covered the importance of the northern flank of the invasion, and how it has been largely forgotten, in an article I wrote three years ago for the eightieth anniversary on the website Occupied Italy