The regiment took part in all the major battles of the North African Campaign including the Relief of Tobruk in November 1941. The regiment, then serving as the armoured car reconnaissance regiment of Lieutenant General Richard McCreery's X Corps, landed at Salerno during the Allied invasion of Italy in September 1943 against concentrated enemy opposition and were the first Allied unit into the city of Naples in early October 1943. The Welsh writer Norman Lewis, in his celebrated account of life in Naples claimed that the King's Dragoon Guards was the first British unit to reach Naples in 1943, and that many of its officers immediately went on a looting spree, cutting paintings from their frames in the prince's palace. The regiment later took part in the Battle for Monte la Difensa in December 1943 and the advance to the Gothic Line in late 1944.