by Mark Zuehlke
AT ROYAL CANADIAN Horse Artillery’s ‘C’ Battery, Canadian Press correspondent Doug How stared fixedly at the movement of his watch’s second hand. Earlier the battery commander, Major D’Arcy Doherty, had briefed him on the mechanics of artillery fire. “It had all been there on paper,” the reporter wrote afterwards, “sheet after sheet of mathematics, of map references, of target heights, of plus and minus signs, of times from and times to, of rates and types of fire.” There were eight 25-pounder artillery pieces in ‘C’ Battery, with each gun dug into a deep pit in front of the farmhouse that served as Doherty’s command post. During the day, camouflage netting had rendered the guns virtually invisible. Now the netting had been stripped away and the starlight silhouetted the big barrels reaching towards the sky. The shadowy shapes of the gunners moved purposefully around their weapons. Then How’s second hand swept up to midnight. “There had been silence over these farmlands between the Apennines and the Adriatic,” he wrote. “But now, as one, the hundreds of guns hurled forth their shells and for three hours they dominated the night.”6
The reporter had witnessed other Eighth Army massed artillery operations, but none such as this. “For three hours the medium and field and self-propelled and the heavy anti-aircraft guns gave their thunderous interpretation of the concentrations and counter-battery task tables. There was no barrage this night. For once stealth had ruled out that violent prelude to an infantry attack. They had given the infantry an hour to get across the river. Then the guns beat forth their assistance… to establish a bridgehead.”7
Just minutes after the first mighty gun blasts rent the air, How’s ears were battered numb by the concussion and noise. He retreated to the command post. Here lieutenants J.B. Black of Kingston and D.F. Ryan of Ottawa calmly and quietly passed orders by phone to the gun crews. They worked from a fixed schedule. “Their targets were marked on an artillery board gridded like the map of the area they were shooting at. Their eight guns would fire 1,700 rounds in the three hours. Everything was precision and experience and drill. Lieutenant Black would say the word and eight guns would fire 312 rounds in 13 minutes into an area 150 yards long and 80 yards wide. That was a ‘murder’ concentration in close support of the infantry timed in advance on spots picked by aerial reconnaissance and plotting of enemy… gun flashes.
“If Lieutenant Black said ‘intense’ the guns would fire five rounds per gun per minute. If he said ‘slow’ they would fire two. . . . In a matter of seconds he could have all hell pouring down on one machine-gun post, then switch it to another. They could support their own division or the divisions on their flanks. Everything was simplicity and certainty and violence in expression. That is modern artillery.”8
Much farther behind the front lines than How, Eighth Army commander General Oliver Leese watched the artillery light up the sky with none other than British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill at his side. Churchill had arrived in Italy three days earlier and General Harold Alexander, Deputy Supreme Commander, Mediterranean, had flown with him to Jesi airport just that morning to enable the prime minister to witness Operation Olive’s launch. Leese and his guests had dined late that evening, enjoying a festive, optimistic spirit. There had been whiskey before dinner, champagne during, and Kümmel, an anise-caraway flavoured liqueur, as a postprandial. Churchill held forth throughout the evening on a wide variety of subjects that repeatedly circled back to the folly of the southern France invasion. “We then sat out—a glorious starlight night,” Leese wrote his wife the next day, “and he was thrilled to see the barrage open. In some ways the flashes that rent the whole sky reminded me of Alamein.” Churchill watched the artillery “flashes [while] smoking his enormous cigars” until shortly after 1:00 a.m. and then went to bed.9
While Churchill and CP correspondent Doug How recognized only well-orchestrated professionalism at work on the night of August 25–26, neither was aware of how closely the artillery operation had come to proving a fiasco. For most of the day prior to the attack, the artillery regiments—such as 3rd Canadian Field Regiment—had been incapable of firing a single round with any accuracy. “Still no fire plan, no registration… and no indication as to what will be required of us,” the regiment’s war diarist complained late that morning. By early afternoon, he noted, “we were getting worried about the fire plan. We didn’t know what we were going to shoot. . . . Finally, early in the evening a [fire plan] arrived… and there it was: hostile mortar and hostile battery lists, target lists, prearranged [defensive fires] and—one copy of the concentration task table.” The single copy was frantically copied and rushed to each battery to “get the command posts working. FOOS [Forward Observation Officers]… had to rely on the infantry—who received large numbers of copies—for their knowledge of the fire plan. At any rate, when the infantry pushed off across the valley and shallow stream at 2300 hours, the guns were ready, and the first rounds crashed into the hills on the other side at 2359 hours. From then on the guns blazed steadily. We waited for news of the attack.”10
On 17th Field Regiment’s gun lines, the 25-pounders opened fire at 0013 hours and shooting was continuous until 0300. “It was a good feeling,” wrote the regiment’s war diarist, “to hear the guns roaring forth again and the sky a red glow with flashes of 25-pounder, mediums, and heavies.”11
THE CANADIAN INFANTRY’s immediate task was to strengthen the small toehold they had established north of the Metauro. At 0120 hours, PPCLI commander Lieutenant Colonel David Rosser sent ‘C’ and ‘D’ companies over to link up with his leading element. ‘D’ Company was accompanied by the regiment’s machine-gun platoon, which broke down its 40-pound Vickers .303 Mark 1 medium machine guns and carried them up on their shoulders and backs. Although following the same route used by the two leading companies, one of ‘D’ Company’s platoons stumbled into a field of Schümines—small, wooden box-type mines fitted with pressure-triggered igniters. Nine pounds of pressure was all it took to set off the seven-ounce charge of TNT or picric acid packed within. The resulting explosion usually amputated the leg of the man triggering the mine just below the calf. Three men were so wounded in mere seconds. Despite this, the two companies quickly leapfrogged ‘A’ and ‘B’ companies and, by 0300 hours, reached their preliminary objectives. While ‘D’ Company and the machine-gunners covered them, ‘B’ Company started up a winding track towards the small village of Serrungarina—the PPCLI’s final bridgehead objective. At 0345 hours, after filtering through the smouldering wreckage of the shell-blasted village, ‘B’ Company set up a perimeter on the northern outskirts, still without firing a shot.
Back at the river, engineers had opened one diversion and the company’s jeeps and Bren carriers were jockeying for priority. Fearing a bottleneck, Rosser jumped out of his jeep to direct the vehicles over in single file. The third vehicle Rosser signalled across was his own, driven by his signals officer, Lieutenant J. Rachlis. As the jeep entered the stream, it struck an Italian box mine that the first two vehicles had somehow missed, and was blown apart. The blast threw Rachlis into a roadside ditch, from which he emerged shaken but otherwise unscathed.12
Across the entire Canadian front, the bridgehead was being rapidly expanded. By first light, all four regiments had reached their final objectives. The Edmontons detected no sign of recent German habitation on Points 233 and 241. At Saltara, the RCR entered a hamlet as badly worked over by artillery as Serrungarina. It fell to the 48th Highlanders, at the very end of the longest Canadian advance, to trip the first German gun position. When they were within two hundred yards of the road running from Borgo Lucrezia to Cartoceto, a machine gun opened up on their right and three men in one section fell wounded. A flurry of gunshots erupted from the darkness ahead. After hitting the dirt, the Highlanders formed for a hasty attack only to see the Germans beat a hasty retreat. The Canadians crossed the road and started digging in.13
A few teenage German stragglers were rounded up who said they had somehow been left behind when their companies had
withdrawn the previous night.14 On hearing this news, 48th Highlander Captain Pat Bates shouted triumphantly to one of his platoon leaders, “They’ve gone right back to the Alps!”15
THE GERMANS WERE actually close by, digging into a series of linked ridges and hills running out of the foothills through the village of Mombaroccio almost to the Adriatic. Commander-in-Chief Southwest Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring had ordered a withdrawal to this rugged terrain on August 20. By the time the Canadians struck, almost a week later, the 71st Infantry Division and the 4th Regiment of the 1st Parachute Division were in the final stages of conducting an orderly withdrawal.16
Although propitious for the Germans, the move had not been ordered in response to the imminent Eighth Army offensive, of which Kesselring had had no inkling. He merely sought to shorten the German line so that half of LI Mountain Corps’s 334th Infantry Division could drop back from its front-line position well west of the Adriatic and be formed into a small mobile reserve—something Tenth Army presently lacked. The Germans deemed the front so quiet that Tenth Army’s commander, Generaloberst Heinrich von Vietinghoff, went on leave. So, too, did General Richard “Papa” Heidrich, the eccentric but brilliant tactician commanding 1st Parachute Division.17
On the morning of August 25, Tenth Army Chief of Staff General-major Friedrich Wentzell reported to Kesselring that not much was happening and it was unclear what mischief the Allies might be making. His main concern was the army’s supply situation, which had been badly disrupted by Desert Air Force’s destruction of the Po River bridges. Wentzell told Kesselring that the ordered withdrawal was underway.
“Otherwise nothing of importance?” Kesselring asked.
“Otherwise nothing,” Wentzell responded.18
Even on the morning of August 26 with the Allies across the Metauro, Wentzell remained calm. Eighth Army’s massive artillery assault had struck vacated ground and consequently inflicted few casualties. As for the reported river crossings, LXXVI Panzer Corps commander, General der Panzertruppen Traugott Herr thought this a localized tactical operation intended to drive a wedge between 1st Parachute Division and the 71st Infantry Division.19
As the day developed, however, Herr and Wentzell became increasingly suspicious that something bigger might be afoot. Wentzell duly called Kesselring. “It seems that it is going to be quite an affair on the Adriatic coast,” he said. “The English have appeared on the front… and at this very moment I have received the report that the Canadians have appeared at the joint between [1st Parachute and 71st Infantry divisions].”
“What is the situation and what do you make of it?” Kesselring demanded.
“I feel that we have been lucky with our withdrawal since it preserved us from being caught in the artillery barrage. I expect that he will follow with strong forces.”20
Kesselring was less sure. Everywhere along the German line reports indicated heavy Allied movement. In the central Apennines, the U.S. Fifth Army was reported massing and air activity there was intensifying. Even more confusing, a just captured document appeared to be ordering a major offensive on the Adriatic front. “We have moved right across Italy an Army of immense strength and striking power—to break the Gothic Line,” the alleged order began. Kessel-ring could scarcely believe Eighth Army could have done so undetected. He suspected this was a clever deception and the real attack—if there was to be one at all, given the invasion of southern France and the resultant stripping of Allied divisions from Italy—was forming elsewhere.21
DECEPTION OR NOT, the Adriatic attack had caught 71st Infantry Division and 1st Parachute Division still engaged in the act of redeploying in their new ridgeline positions. Suddenly the two divisions had to whirl around and face a determined attack. Barely pausing for breath after the night’s successful advance, 1 CID’s leading regiments were on the march again by 0730 hours. Speed was paramount, Major General Chris Vokes warned both 1 CIB’s Brigadier Allan Calder and 2 CIB’s Brigadier Graeme Gibson.22 Vokes hoped to catch the Germans so off-balance that he could drive right up to the Gothic Line and bounce it without pause, something he had tried and failed to achieve at the Hitler Line in May. That failure had forced the division to break the line in a bloody set-piece attack. Perhaps this time fortune and circumstance would be on his side.
The country ahead promised rough going. Blocking the left-hand flank of the advance was the 1,600-foot-high Monte della Mattera with a lesser summit—Monte San Giovanni—guarding its western slope. The eastern slope of Monte della Mattera was equally covered by Point 393, atop which perched an old convent—Convento Beato Sante. Vokes ordered 1 CIB to seize the convent, with the 48th Highlanders out front and the RCR behind and off to the left. Meanwhile, 2 CIB’s Seaforth Highlanders of Canada would strike directly at Monte della Mattera while the Loyal Edmontons hooked out from behind the Seaforths’ line of march to deal with Monte San Giovanni. Once these three positions fell, the Canadians would be on the southern edge of the Arzilla River valley. Beyond this river lay one more spur of land and then the Foglia River and the Gothic Line.23
On a map, the whole enterprise looked relatively straightforward, the stuff of staff college exercises. The Canadians knew that, unfortunately, Italian terrain seldom correlated with the maps. On August 26, this proved as true as ever. The infantry pushed into a confusing maze of hills and ridges. It was anybody’s guess which hill corresponded with which map reference. Gullies and an endless number of unmarked roads and tracks crisscrossed their path. Streams and irrigation ditches followed seemingly random paths little related to a general flow seaward. The ground was thickly overgrown with olive groves, small woods, vineyards, and pocket-sized grain fields. Had there not been a war on, had there not been a pressing need for haste, had there not been the constant danger of German ambush, the chaotic countryside would have been charming. Instead, the men cursed it. They moved forward warily, wanting to go slowly and carefully, but always their commanders goaded them to make haste.
The infantry also moved this morning without support from the promised tanks. At the river, the engineers had run into problems. First, a bulldozer working on the south bank had triggered a mine and been disabled. Then the riverbed proved too mucky for a graded diversion to suffice. A bridge was needed. Not until 0700 hours was the work finished. The 12 Royal Tank Regiment squadrons assigned to the 48th Highlanders started rolling north only to run afoul of concealed mines and road demolitions.24 The tanks did not marry up with the infantry until noon, four-and-a-half hours after Calder had ordered the Highlanders to advance on the first objective.25
Lieutenant Colonel Don Mackenzie learned at 0730 hours that the tanks would be late, but he had his orders. So he simply turned to ‘C’ Company commander Major Ed Rawlings and said, “Clean them out in front of us.”26
Up ahead, a large red building stood on a hill to the south of a sunken road. Rawlings thought it a good initial objective. With two platoons out front and two in trail, the company started walking. At first, it looked like a repeat of the night’s uneventful exercise, but then a section from Lieutenant Court Benson’s platoon on the right flank was fired on at close range by a well-camouflaged self-propelled gun. While this section took cover in a fold of ground, Benson brought Sergeant Joe Gauthier’s section up on the left in support. Through a thicket of bamboo, Benson noticed a small house that might be a German fortification and charged it with Gauthier’s men following. They went in firing from the hip, ignoring the return fire pouring from fighting pits dug into the base of the building. The gun battle ended abruptly when the eight Germans who survived the initial Canadian volley promptly surrendered. Private Rex Waddell had, however, been shot in the nose. Six more Germans were sprawled out dead in the pits. The fall of the house convinced the nearby SPG crew to flee. Refusing evacuation, Waddell had a mate cover his nose with a field bandage, picked up his rifle, and rejoined his section.27
Meanwhile, on the company’s left flank, a five-man section under Corporal Jack O’Brien’
s command flushed another SPG. The panicked crew fled without offering a fight. As O’Brien’s party checked out their prize, German infantry counterattacked. The ensuing firefight left all five men wounded. While the two least injured managed to escape, the others were taken prisoner. Later that day, however, they were liberated by Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment troops mopping up the area.
Although he could hear the gunfire from his right flank platoon, Rawlings had no information on how the fight there was developing. Lieutenant Stew Reid’s platoon and the company commander’s tactical headquarters had reached the red building without incident and that led Rawlings to think the advance was proceeding pretty much as expected. He set up a tactical HQ in a covered German trench near the building, while Reid set off to clear three buildings on the hill’s north slope. No sooner had Reid’s platoon departed than Rawlings’s section came under fire from previously hidden positions on his left flank.
Meeting no opposition at the first house they cleared, Reid’s platoon headed towards the second one up the slope. They were just approaching it when a large number of Germans erupted from the third house and launched a counterattack. The platoon scattered. Cornered in the courtyard of the second house, Reid was taken prisoner along with Private Bill Heasman.*
With everyone pinned down, Rawlings tried to withdraw his infantrymen behind a covering screen of smoke rounds fired by the company’s two-inch mortar. But the yellow smoke blew the wrong way. When Rawlings reported ‘C’ Company’s situation, Mackenzie told him to sit tight. The Highlanders must wait for the tanks, after all.
* The two men were subsequently interrogated by intelligence officers from the 1st Parachute Division, but refused to answer any questions. The paratroopers were convinced they were Canadian, but when this was reported to Wentzell, he was less certain. Consequently, it was another day before Tenth Army realized that the Canadians were without doubt involved in the Adriatic sector offensive. (Beattie, 609–10)