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 British Eighth Army were bludgeoning through the coastal plain, while here in the Apennines Mark Clark’s US Fifth Army were trying to left hook into the Germans’ flank in an effort to cut their lines of communication from the Po Valley and seize the nerve-centre of Bologna before winter set in.
