James Kerr 🇺🇦🇬🇧

Peter Wright took over his company when every officer had been shot down, and then, near Salerno, went forward alone under fire to clear three German machine gun posts one after another with grenades and a bayonet, opening the way for his men to take a hill that had stopped them cold. He was a Coldstream Guards sergeant major, and he won the Victoria Cross in the hard fighting just after the Salerno landings I told you about today. Wright was a company sergeant major, the senior non-commissioned officer, in the Coldstream Guards, part of the Allied push inland from the Salerno beachhead in late September 1943. His company was attacking a steep, wooded hill, a strong German position, and it ran into a storm of fire, mortars and the fast-firing German Spandau machine guns raking the slope. In a matter of minutes every single officer in the company was killed or wounded. The attack stalled, the men pinned down on the hillside, leaderless, taking casualties. Wright took command on his own initiative and refused to let the attack die. He went forward himself, alone, to break the positions that were holding them up. He crawled and worked his way up to the German machine gun posts, and single-handedly he cleared them, three of them in succession, using grenades and his bayonet at close quarters, killing the crews and silencing the guns one after another. With the machine guns knocked out, he reorganized the leaderless company and led it on to take the crest of the hill. Then, having captured the position, he helped hold it, moving about under fire to organize the defense against the German counterattacks that inevitably followed. For taking over a shattered, leaderless company and single-handedly clearing the guns that had stopped it, Peter Wright was awarded the Victoria Cross. He survived the war. A guardsman who stepped up when all the officers were down and cleared three machine gun nests by himself so his men could take the hill above Salerno.