Sergeant Bates

I was sitting in my office in the British Council Naples one evening in the autumn of 2001, idly leafing though a book about the Salerno landings of 1943. Franco – our late-night duty guard – appeared at the door to tell me I had a visitor, who wanted some information about exam registration. My visitor was ushered in and, speaking fluent English, told me her name was Lidia and asked if I was also English. By return I asked her where she was from and how I could help. She told me she was from Angri .. a small town south of Naples on the Salerno road. I immediately warmed to the conversation, since Angri was a town I had been intending to cover for my research and I told her as much. I was slightly interested in how an English woman could have ended up in a place like Angri. She began explaining – it was a long story about her father who had been there during the war. I could hardly believe it. But my excitement turned to disbelief when she espied on my desk the front cover of the book I had been reading and told me in a rather matter-of-fact way, as if I had been waiting for her to show up all evening – “Ah yes there’s a photograph of my dad in that book!” It transpired that her father, now an old man, was very sick with cancer but was living, or dying, at her home in Angri. I immediately arranged to take the next morning off work and raced down to Angri in my battered Toyota. The old man was indeed very sick indeed. I hesitated before speaking to him, before switching on the tape-recorder. But it was clear that he was eager to speak, and to set down his personal story. Sergeant John Bates was born in in Marylebone, London in 1916. He played football at Wembley for the London Schoolboys against the Glasgow Schoolboys. After he left school he became a pathologist’s assistant; on one occasion he remembers cycling over to a hospital with a large biscuit tin to pick up a brain. When he tired of this he went to work for Ford motor company. When war broke out he could have stayed to work in the motor industry but decided to join up. He served in India and Irak, North Africa and then landed in Pontecagnano near Salerno with the 56th Division, 64th Field Artillery Regiment, with a crew manning a 25-pounder field gun. He remembers landing about 4.30 am in semi-daylight near the River Tusciano in the Spineta area and that the landing craft next to his, carrying troops from the 8th London Fusiliers, got hit. . The Germans were on the beach. He remembers trying to dig a hole in the sand with his helmet but then got told to move forward. The first obstacle was a machine-gun nest. They lobbed a grenade and one German was killed, another badly wounded (calling for his mother) while they dragged the other one away. This was the famous photograph. It was quite spontaneous. An officer-looking type just walked up to them and took it. John says “in that first hour you can live a lifetime.” They crossed the “little” railway line but got shot at by an 88mm which was in the Spineta stronghold, which they had actually got behind, so the 88 was firing backwards towards them. It got taken out by a destroyer. They then moved on to the Tobacco factory (very large) – it must have been the Baratta place at Bellizzi. The factory was shelled by corvettes. “Everybody was doing their own thing.” He remembers most of the fighting was there and around Montecorvino airport. In a farmhouse near Bellizzi he remembers Capt. Mayne (son of a General) getting his head shot off, while he saw the body of another captain, again the son of a general (Capt. Maxwell) up near Castelluccia above Battipaglia. But Battipaglia was taken and lost three times. He can’t remember on which occasion he saw Maxwell. He moved from Bellizzi to Fratte (there was a bridge blown there) back to Salerno and then Baronissi, Nola, Maddaloni, Marcianise, S. Maria C.V, Capua across the bailey bridge, Sparanise, Teano, Roccamonfina (nearly got captured) and Monte Camino (with 201st Guards Brigade). At Roccamonfina he remembers three little girls, sisters, Rosa, Lidia and Immacolata, who was about 4 or 5. Their father had been taken away by the Germans.

They had a house next to their gun position, overlooking Monte Camino, not far from the battery where Spike Milligan, future, writer and TV personality and early colleague of Peter Sellers, was lance bombardier. I later visited Roccamonfina – a small village set on the slopes of a chestnut covered extinct volcano crater about 50 kilometres north of Naples - in order to find the three sisters. Rosa and Immacolata had by then passed on, but Lidia, now owner of a small dress-making shop just off the main square, remembered the presence of Inglesi soldiers outside her house, although it was the hunger and the cold of that winter that is still uppermost in her memory. While John Bates was Angri they were billeted in the Cotoniere, the cotton mill. The chimney is still there. In the morning the townswomen came down to do their washing. At Monte Camino they slept rough, like most of the time. It was too dangerous to sleep in houses. Once he went into a cave in a river bed and found loads of Italians from San Clemente. After the war was over, he returned to the South of Italy for a holiday in 1948 with his friend Frank. When re-visiting Angri one day they saw a pretty girl walking along the street, and they followed her until she disappeared into her house. One of the girl’s sisters came down into the street to find out what they wanted and Frankie, who was a bit bolder than John, asked her if John could write to her sister. She agreed and after a lot of corresponding John asked her to marry him. Her parents were initially very much opposed to the idea but she liked John and eventually, after her parents had procured the services of a religious order in England to verify his marital status, they relented and invited him over to Italy for a two-week holiday. Because John was Anglican, and the catholic Bishop in Angri would not consent to marrying them in his diocesis, they had to go to England, where, unlike many war-marriages, they raised a family and lived together until his wife died in the early nineteen nineties. Only then did John moved back to Italy to be with his daughter, Lydia, who had choen to move back earlier. John Bates died of cancer in Angri two weeks after my interview, on 19th December 2001 at the age of 85.