The Canadian division commander, Major General Christopher Vokes, was a burly engineer who had been born in Ireland to a British officer and his wife but educated in Ontario, Quebec, and England. “A tough old bird, great boxer, tall, wide, and built like a bulldog, which also summed up his personality perfectly,” said one aquaintance. Given to roaring through his red pushbroom mustache, Vokes at age thirty-nine was described as “a roughneck” by a Canadian reporter, who added, “I never knew a more profane man.” Others considered him “a pompous bully” who imitated Montgomery by carrying a fly whisk and affecting a British accent. He preached a bracing stoicism, claiming that “a man’s fate is written the day he is born and no amount of dodging can avoid it.” The tactical corollary of this eschatology appeared to be the frontal assault, which Vokes ordered in sufficient numbers at Ortona to be known thereafter as the Butcher.
As commanded, the Canadians attacked across the Moro, a mustard-hued creek that emptied into the sea two miles south of Ortona. A lunge on the left flank gained sufficient surprise to find food abandoned on German mess tables. Other thrusts met stout resistance; when a Canadian gunner yelled that he was out of ammunition, his company commander yelled back, “Why, you stupid bastard, make military noises.” So intense grew the shell fire that one corporal declared, “It was like a raving madhouse.” Sweating artillerymen stripped to their bare chests, as blood trickled from their concussion-ruptured eardrums and gun barrels glowed a “translucent red.” “The situation was undoubtedly confusing to the enemy as well as to ourselves,” a staff officer wrote. But on December 9 the Moro line was breached, with 170 Germans killed in a single day. Montgomery sent Vokes “hearty congratulations.”
The plaudit was premature. Beyond the Moro lay a ravine running northeast to southwest, and labeled Torrente Saraceni on Italian maps. Just south of the ridge road that offered the only access to Ortona, this gulch was more than three miles long, two hundred yards wide, and two hundred feet deep. Italian farmers had planted the bottoms with grain and olives; German sappers replanted with mines and booby traps. Troops from the 90th Panzer Grenadier Division, many of whom had escaped from Sardinia and Corsica in September, dug into the slopes and barricaded the stone farmhouses along the north lip. Vokes failed to sense how formidable was the barrier posed by the Gully—as Canadian troops called it—and beginning on Saturday, December 11, he flung a sequence of piecemeal attacks into the breach. Of eight assaults on the Torrente Saraceni, five were made by single battalions, and only the last involved as many as three. When Montgomery dispatched a messenger to ask why the Canadians had stalled, Vokes snarled, “You tell Monty if he would get to hell up here and see the bloody mud he has stuck us in, he’d know damn well why we can’t move faster.”
For nine days the Gully held the Canadians in what infantry officer Farley Mowat called a “filthy limbo.” A corporal with a notebook sketched the configuration of slit trenches around him, then listened to the shriek of an approaching shell and placed a pencil tick on the trench where he guessed it would land; he called the game “Dots and Spots.” Horribly burned by white phosphorus, a sergeant cried to those rushing to help him, “Don’t come near me, boys, don’t let this stuff get on you.” In agony he died, alone.
The limbo grew filthier on December 14, with the discovery of a German corpse wearing a round helmet and a Luftwaffe uniform—evidence that panzer grenadiers had been replaced by the 1st Parachute Division. Commanded by a corpulent, gray-eyed major general named Richard Heidrich, whose uncanny resemblance to Churchill extended to a fondness for enormous cigars, the paratroopers were “the best German troops in Italy,” in Alexander’s estimation. Their presence suggested to Allied intelligence that Kesselring intended to hold Ortona and not simply delay the Canadian advance.
On and on went the primordial struggle across this boggy rent in the earth. Heavy losses and exhaustion beset both sides of the Gully, now also known as Dead Man’s Gulch for the bodies bricking the scorched heath. “You feel nothing,” a Canadian soldier reported. “Only a weariness so great you couldn’t sleep if they let you.” Inexact maps led to errant Canadian shelling, including a barrage that straddled the Gully to hit friendly regiments on either side. So many shells puckered the landscape that one tanker was reminded of “a large porridge pot bubbling.” An intrepid captain managed to capture Casa Berardi, a farm at the west end of the Gully, but Vokes lacked reserves to exploit the flank and instead launched another bootless frontal assault. “He frittered away everything, and everything was committed and he had no reserves, which is a terrible thing,” the Canadians’ chief engineer lamented.
A flanking attack from the west, code-named MORNING GLORY, finally unhinged the German line and by dusk on December 19 the Gully belonged to Canada. To plant the Maple Leaf flag had cost a thousand casualties. Two Canadian battalions were reduced to the size of companies, and one company was commanded by a corporal. The reporter Christopher Buckley entered a battered cottage to find “an old woman, her eyes closed, her face the colour of old parchment, moaning and keening to herself…. Stretched out on the floor lay the corpses of four young children.”
A mile to the north, Ortona town still belonged to Germany. Any illusions that the enemy planned to quietly decamp should have been dispelled by a captured German paratrooper. Blinded by his wounds, he told his captors, “I wish I could see you. I’d kill every one of you.”
A man’s fate is written the day he is born and no amount of dodging can avoid it. Perhaps that also held true for towns, and if so Ortona had been doomed from the moment those fabled Trojans shipped their oars off the beckoning promontory. As the burning towers of Troy presaged Ortona’s ashes, so did Ortona’s fate offer auguries for a hundred towns to come. For here was fought the first large, pitched urban battle in the Mediterranean—not a skirmish against Italians as in Gela, or a village brawl as in San Pietro, but a room-to-room, house-to-house, block-to-block struggle that foretold iconic street fights with heavy weapons from Caen to Aachen, and from Nuremberg to Berlin.
Ortona had been spared razing because of a wan hope in Montgomery’s headquarters that it would fall quickly to become an Allied port and winter hostel for weary troops. That fantasy vanished in a great roar at dawn on Tuesday, December 21, when German demolitionists blew up a watchtower adjacent to the cathedral, leaving St. Thomas’s dome “split in half like a butchered deer,” in one witness’s description. At the same hour, Canadian infantry and Sherman tanks rushed the town from the southwest, sirens wailing and every gun blazing. Machine-gun bullets chipped the cobblestones in a spray of orange sparks as riflemen crouched in the doorways and fired at every window. Just after noon Kesselring’s chief of staff rang Tenth Army headquarters to report that Berlin assumed the town was lost. “The high command called me on the phone. Everybody was very sad about Ortona,” he said. “Why?” a Tenth Army staff officer replied. “Ortona is still in our hands.”
So it would remain for another week. Side streets proved too narrow for tanks, and German sappers blew up stone buildings to block the intersections and canalize Canadian attackers down the Corso Vittorio Emanuele. Antitank guns hidden in alleys shot the Shermans in the flank as they passed; others, tucked in the rubble, shot the tanks in the belly when they crawled over street barricades. Booby-trap trip wires seemed to stretch across every stairway and from every doorknob. Two Canadian regiments—the Loyal Edmontons on the left and the Seaforth Highlanders from British Columbia on the right—inched forward on a five-hundred-yard front in fighting described as “a gangster’s battle” that raged “from cellar to loft, from one rubble pile to the next.” Progress was “measured in a house or two gained every hour,” wrote the historian Mark Zuehlke. No-man’s-land was measured in the width of an alley, and sometimes the width of a bedroom wall. “For some unknown reason,” a New York Times reporter noted, “the Germans are staging a miniature Stalingrad in hapless Ortona.” Soldiers told one another, “Only three more shooting days till Christma
s.”
Rather than clear buildings conventionally, from the ground floor up, Canadian engineers perfected the art of “mouseholing” from one adjoining building to the next without setting foot in the street: a beehive explosive charge was placed on a chair next to a top-floor wall; after the blast blew a hole into the abutting building, infantrymen stormed through the dust, spraying all cupboards and bedsteads with “speculative fire” from tommy guns, then fought their way downstairs, floor by floor, grenading “any room which gave reason for suspicion.” Sheets draped from designated windows indicated a cleared house, which then required a small garrison to prevent Heidrich’s paratroopers from reinfesting it at night. Farley Mowat observed that his men soon developed an architectural “capacity to estimate the relative strength of a building at a single glance…the wall thickness, the firmness of the mortar, the number of rooms.”
“The stench here is dreadful,” one soldier wrote. “I can’t understand why the Germans decay differently.” Christopher Buckley spied a dead paratrooper with postcards spilling from his tunic, each featuring a photo of Hitler. An enemy sergeant, shot in the head and dying in a side street, told a Canadian in English, “We could beat you.”
Not for want of effort did they fail. Two dozen Edmontons were buried alive when a booby-trapped building near St. Thomas’s collapsed. Germans showered would-be rescuers with stick grenades; only four men were saved that day—a fifth, a corporal from Alberta, was pulled from the rubble three days later—and Canadian engineers retaliated by demolishing two buildings in which German voices were heard.
“We do not want to defend Ortona decisively,” Kesselring complained to General Joachim Lemelsen, who had taken temporary command of Tenth Army after Vietinghoff fell ill. “But the English have made it appear as important as Rome.”
“It costs so much in blood it cannot be justified,” Lemelsen replied.
“No,” Kesselring said, “but then you can do nothing when things develop in this manner.”
And then, as such things do, the battle ended. Squeezed into the old quarter around the shell-torn castle, Heidrich’s men waited until nightfall before slipping up the coastal road toward Pescara, leaving dead comrades spread-eagled on staircases and the grass-grown ramparts. “There is no town left,” a German officer told his diary. “Only the ruins.”
A new sign posted at the city limits disagreed: “This is Ortona, a West Canadian town.” Tacking up that sign had cost General Vokes another 650 casualties; Canadian battle losses for the month of December would exceed 2,300, including 500 dead. “Everything before Ortona was a fairy tale,” Vokes said. In one typical battalion, of forty-one officers who had landed on Sicily in July, only nine remained, and six of them had been wounded, according to the historian Daniel G. Dancocks. A Canadian psychiatrist who made his rounds from camp to camp on a motorcycle reported an alarming number of “gross hysterias with mutism [and] paralysis.”
Alexander’s plan had miscarried. In five weeks, Eighth Army had moved just fourteen miles, averaging less than thirty yards an hour. Pescara still lay ten miles to the north; Rome lay beyond the snowy Apennines, on the other side of the world. Montgomery recommended that the Adriatic campaign come to a halt, and Alexander agreed.
In Ortona, above the purple sea, a Seaforth piper played the threnodic “Skye Boat Song” in memory of those fallen. A Canadian combat artist who prowled the rubble with his sketch pad later summarized his aesthetic assessment: “The familiar world had disappeared.”
Too Many Gone West
A few minutes past sunrise on Saturday, December 11, a four-engine British York skidded to a stop on a bleak, deserted landing strip forty miles from Tunis. As crewmen tethered the propellers and chocked the wheels, a short, thick figure stumped down the metal stairway and sat heavily on a packing crate next to the runway. Removing his hat, Winston Churchill daubed the perspiration from his scowling gray face. A chill breeze teased his wispy hair, and sand swirled around the luggage now being unloaded from the aircraft belly, including the crated gifts he had recently received for his sixty-ninth birthday: a porcelain bowl from President Roosevelt; a silver drachma coin, minted in 300 B.C., from his daughter Sarah; a silver Isfahan cigar box; and, from the traveling press, a Persian astrakhan hat, which the prime minister had taken to wearing with his air commodore’s uniform.
Nearly an hour passed. Churchill’s physician, Lord Moran, entreated him to escape the wind and reboard the aircraft; the scowl simply deepened. The prime minister had planned to spend a single night with Eisenhower at Carthage before pressing on to inspect the battlefield in Italy with General Brooke, yet this diversion—Where was Eisenhower? Why had they landed here?—taxed both his patience and his strength. “I want to sleep for billions of years,” he had recently told Moran. Churchill had logged more than 100,000 miles since the beginning of the war, but the last thousand, since leaving the strategy conferences in Teheran and Cairo, seemed especially cruel. In Egypt he had felt too exhausted to dry himself after a bath, and simply flopped sopping on the bed. “We are only specks of dust that have settled in the night on the map of the world,” he told Moran.
At length the mystery was solved: through misunderstanding, the specks had settled on the wrong Tunisian strip. Baggage and shivering passengers were bundled back into the square-windowed York, and fifteen minutes later Churchill felt the grip of Eisenhower’s hand at El Aouina field, where the worried general had been pacing for two hours. As he settled into the rear seat of Eisenhower’s sedan, Churchill confessed, “I am afraid I shall have to stay with you longer than I had planned. I am completely at the end of my tether.”
Ringed by sentries and antiaircraft guns, the La Marsa seaside cottage in December was a study in melancholy. Churchill collapsed in a chair, and was ordered to bed after Moran found that he had a fever of 101 degrees and a “shabby” pulse. “I feel much disturbed,” the physician wrote. That evening, the lethargic prime minister complained of a sore throat. “It’s pretty bad,” he said. “Do you think it’s anything?” At four o’clock on Sunday morning, Brooke awakened to a dolorous voice in his room, crying, “Hullo, hullo, hullo.” Bolting upright—“Who the hell is that?” he demanded—Brooke switched on a flashlight to find the prime minister in pajamas with his head bound in a brown bandage, wandering the room in search of Moran and complaining of a headache.
“My master is unwell,” one of the prime minister’s servants wrote home, “and future movements remain uncertain.” Harold Macmillan found a portable X-ray machine in a Tunis hospital, and a pathologist arrived from Cairo, followed by a cardiologist and two nurses from Algiers. Chest film on Monday showed “a considerable opaque area at the base of the left lung,” the telltale sign of pneumonia, and Moran prescribed sulfonamide antibiotics. The patient’s pulse grew irregular and spurty, and the edge of his liver could be felt beneath his ribs. Churchill complained that his heart “feels to be bumping all over the place.” The heart specialist administered digitalis.
More specialists were summoned, as well as the Churchill family and a Coldstream Guards battalion to protect the house. “He’s very glad I’ve come,” Clementine Churchill told Moran, “but in five minutes he’ll forget I’m here.” Randolph Churchill insisted on discussing French politics with his father. To daughter Sarah, the prime minister murmured, “If I die, don’t worry—the war is won.” Confessing to being “tired out—body, soul, and spirit,” he flung out his arms and cried, “In what better place could I die than here, in the ruins of Carthage?” More heart fibrillations followed, and more digitalis. Moran, who found the patient “very breathless and anxious looking,” feared that Winston Churchill had indeed come to the end of his mortal tether.
The preceding fortnight could have killed anyone, particularly a proud, aging Tory whose overarching war aim—to preserve the imperial construct of His Majesty’s realm—now seemed jeopardized less by Britain’s enemies than by her friends. The Allies had met in three distinct sessions: first in
Cairo, where Churchill and Roosevelt were joined by the Chinese leader, Chiang Kai-shek; then in Teheran, where the Anglo-Americans met for four days with Stalin; then in Cairo again, in a conference exclusive to Yanks and Brits. The epicurean excess had taxed even Churchill’s iron constitution. There were bottomless glasses of vodka and cognac with the Russians, of course, but the Cairo conferees also consumed 22,000 pounds of meat, 78,000 eggs, 4,600 pounds of sugar, and 1,500 cigars, as well as curried prawns, Turkish delight, and ice cream with chocolate sauce. Quartermasters reported an average daily consumption of 80 bottles of whisky, 34 of gin, 12 of brandy, 528 of beer, and 20,000 cigarettes.
If Egyptian and Persian excesses contributed to Churchill’s physical malady, surely the diplomatic developments indisposed his soul and spirit. That Britain’s senior role in the Grand Alliance was irrecoverable had never been more obvious than in the presence of the emerging superpowers personified by Roosevelt and Stalin. Even Churchill could see the tracings of a bipolar world that had no room for nineteenth-century empires. He and his small nation were overshadowed; no wonder he was sick at heart.
Much had been achieved in two weeks, but as usual all progress first required the spilling of fraternal blood. “Brooke got nasty and King got good and sore,” one witness in Cairo, Lieutenant General Joseph W. Stilwell, wrote in his journal. “King almost climbed over the table at Brooke. God, he was mad. I wished he had socked him.” When Churchill urged a British and American invasion of Rhodes—“muskets must flame,” he thundered, grasping his lapels in both hands—Marshall replied, “Not one American soldier is going to die on that goddamned beach.” Roosevelt archly presented U.S. and British manpower statistics showing the inexorable American preponderance: large as the American military overseas had grown, an even larger force still awaited deployment at home. “Our manpower is now fully mobilized for the war effort,” Churchill told his advisers. “We cannot add to the total. On the contrary, it is already dwindling.”
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