A monument was unveiled in the southern Italian town of Scafati in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius on Sunday to honour the late Major-General Michael Forrester, regarded as a local hero for his role in liberating the town during the Second World War with minimal destruction and loss of civilian life.

The town, near Pompeii, held a day of events commemorating the 65th anniversary of the Battle of Scafati, a decisive engagement in the progress of Allied forces to Naples and up the Italian peninsula after the landings at Salerno on the coast near by. General Forrester, who was a lieutenant-colonel at the time, captured a strategically vital bridge over the River Sarno at Scafati at the head of a battalion of the Queen’s Royal Regiment.

The monument on the bridge records Italy’s “ever grateful remembrance” of Forrester’s achievement as a highly distinguished soldier whose “considerate leadership” had saved the town. Professor Angelo Pesce, the local historian, was a boy of 11 at the time; he lived in a block of flats overlooking the bridge and remembered the battle.

He said that with the help of local partisans, Forrester had circumvented German forces holding the bridge, attacking them from behind and removing mines placed under the bridge. “In doing so he avoided an artillery exchange and aerial bombardment which would have caused massive loss of life and flattened the town.”

Forrester won repeated praise during his military career as a frontline commander during the Second World War and was awarded two DSOs and two MCs in four theatres.

Pasquale Aliberti, the mayor of Scafati, recalled that the town had sent General Forrester a message of thanks every year until his death in 2006 (obituary, October 18, 2006). He announced that he was instituting an annual journalism prize in the general’s name to honour not only the British troops who fought in the battle in September 1943 but also three British war reporters who lost their lives.

“It is important for the young people of this area to know what happened and to remember the battle for all time,” the mayor said. He added that he hoped that the commemorations would revive the identity of the town and offer a message of hope in a region too often blighted by unemployment, pollution and organised crime.

Michael Burgoyne, the British Consul-General in Naples and Southern Italy, said that whereas many Second World War commemorations were sad occasions, this time the mood was joyous.

Forrester’s brilliant strategy had been to enlist the help of the partisans, Burgoyne said. A plaque at the other end of the bridge records the intrepid patriots who were “the first in Italy to take up arms against the Nazi-Fascist oppressor”.

Colonel Charles Darell, military attaché at the British Embassy in Rome, said he found it “very moving that so many Italian towns and villages take care to keep alive the memory of British soldiers who died in Italy to bring them peace and democracy”.

The ceremony was attended by General Forrester’s two sons, Simon and Nicholas, and his grandsons, Nick and James, the England and Gloucester rugby player, as well as by Forrester’s companion, Denise Patterson, formerly Denise Woosnam, to whom the Spitfire pilot Richard Hillary dedicated his book The Last Enemy. Major Tony Russell represented Forrester’s regiment, now the Queen’s Royal Surrey Regiment.

Simon Forrester said that although his father, like many of his generation, had spoken little about his wartime exploits, it was clear he had held Scafati in great affection, and that this was returned. He told a crowd by the bridge that although the Sarno River had been the scene of a battle between Goths and Byzantines in the sixth century, the battle in which his father had fought was different because it was “a battle for freedom in a campaign which brought democracy to Italy after two decades of dictatorship”.

Flavia Nappi, a local resident, pointed out the house overlooking the river which her grandfather and uncle, Ubaldo and Vittorio Nappi, had made the partisans’ headquarters during the fighting and from which General Forrester guided the battle.

The celebrations included a display of photographs taken during the battle, a wreath-laying ceremony at the town’s war memorial, a parade of military vehicles of the period, and open-air concerts by bands from the carabinieri and bersaglieri and the City of Rome Pipe Band, a group of Italian and British expatriate bagpipe enthusiasts.