Lieutenant, Royal Sussex Regiment
Born: July 22nd 1923
Died: October 7th 1944
Age at Death: 21
Killed in action, October 7th 1944
John was born on 22 July 1923 to James Fleetwood and his wife Gertrude (née Halliday). He enlisted in the Royal Sussex Regiment during the war, but was later attached to the 15th Battalion of the Hampshire Regiment, which took part in the invasion of mainland Italy at Salerno in 1943, and then in the slow and bitter struggle up to the north of the country.
In August 1944 the battalion participated in the assault on the German forces’ Gothic Line, in heavy rain and mud. The line was breached, and the battalion made it across the River Rubicon, just as Caesar famously had almost two millennia before, though in the other direction. However, Fleetwood died in the last days of this campaign, and is buried at the Assisi Military Cemetery.