The Battle of Catarelto: September/October 1944

below Left Waffen SS Panzergrenadier. German forces in general and the SS in particular had a huge variety of clothing and equipment. Here a sturmann (corporal) wears ‘oak leaf’ pattern camouflage, into which he would have changed as the season changed from summer to autumn. The slightly dated MP40 submachine-gun he carries was heavy and underpowered, but reliable and popular. below Scots Guardsman. His opponent at Catarelto, on the other hand, would have worn the standard serge battledress common to all Commonwealth troops. Blankets and ground sheets, here roughly folded, were all that British troops had to sleep in though there was not much of that in the chaos of Catarelto! He carries the hard-hitting, accurate No.4 .303-inch Lee Enfield rifle, its short ‘pig sticker’ bayonet fixed for close combat.

July 10, 2021

The valley that leads away from Castaglione towards Bologna in north-east Italy is just as beautiful today as it must have been in the autumn of 1944. Yet the shell holes on the Catarelto Ridge which bounds the valley are still visible, and hidden among the young fir-trees slit trenches can still be found. My Italian guide had a little handheld metal-detector with him, and it buzzed away happily as we grubbed fragments from the ground – mortar splinters, bully-beef tins, and Mauser cases, along with the ubiquitous metal links for German MG42 machine-guns. Catarelto marked the central part of the Germans’ final defensive position in Italy: the Gothic Line. In the eastern sector, the

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