The Gothic Line

by Mark Zuehlke

  SIMULTANEOUS WITH the Cape Bretoners’ attack, Major Harold Snelgrove had signalled the Perths’ ‘B’ Company to cross the Foglia and advance up a narrow gravel track towards the antitank ditch and the lateral road. Immediately beyond the road a twenty-degree slope ascended to Point 111. Lieutenant D.L. Thompson of the Perths’ scout platoon walked alongside Snelgrove as the company advanced. Thompson had reconnoitered the attack route that morning and was to guide the company through the minefields he had earlier identified. The company advanced in line with a platoon commanded by Lieutenant A.W.D. Robertson several hundred feet ahead of the company’s other platoons.

  As Robertson’s men reached a T-junction where the track joined the lateral road, they were engaged by heavy machine-gun and rifle fire from Germans dug in on Point 111. An intense barrage of mortar and machine-gun fire that swept the lower slope and valley floor struck the rest of Snelgrove’s company. The company fell back to the river to reorganize, but the intense fire quickly broke every renewed attempt.25 By 1900 hours, the Perth attack appeared as stalemated as those mounted by the Cape Breton Highlanders and the West Nova Scotia Regiment.

  Lieutenant Colonel William Reid sent a runner barrelling into ‘D’ Company’s position in a shell-torn vineyard south of the river behind Montelabbate with orders for Captain Sam Ridge to take over the attack at 2030 hours with ‘A’ Squadron of the 8th Hussars in support. Private Stan Scislowski was, like everyone else in the company, buttoned down inside a shallow slit trench. When he heard the breathless runner repeating the order, Scislowski “felt a hard knot of fear hit the pit of my stomach.”26

  Off to the right, he could hear the constant explosion of mortar rounds, mines, and the screeching rip of German machine guns. Scislowski knew the West Novas were taking a hell of a beating. To the front, ‘B’ Company was receiving similar treatment. Now ‘D’ Company must enter the bloody fray.

  Ridge led the men at a dogtrot along a road littered by foliage scythed from the bordering trees by shrapnel, blast, and bullets. After 150 yards, they came to the river crossing in front of Montelabbatte. ‘A’ Squadron was milling in front of the crossing point; great clouds of dust and exhaust fumes boiled up around the Shermans. Snarled among the tanks were dozens of jeeps, trucks, and transporter flatbeds all competing for access to the crossing. Men were running about shouting and flapping their arms ineffectually.27 Tangled among the Hussars were elements of 5 CAD’s Governor General’s Horse Guards reconnaissance regiment, which were also trying to get forward, and the supporting arms of the Cape Breton Highlanders and the Irish Regiment of Canada. When the Hussars finally extracted themselves from this tangle and crossed the river, a wrong turn further delayed the tanks.28

  As Scislowski trotted towards the crossing, he could make no sense of the chaos ahead. Ridge didn’t bother slowing to find out whether his tanks were across the river or not. He led the men at a run into the riverbed, where the stream was merely a three-foot-wide trickle that the soldiers jumped without even getting damp feet.

  ‘D’ Company tore through the dazed-looking ranks of ‘B’ Company and up the road past the three tanks of a troop that was deploying on the right-hand side of the road. Ahead lay the slope up to the ridge—a thousand yards of open ground. Ridge signalled for Scislowski’s platoon, No. 18, to lead the way in extended order up the right side of the road. In front of the men was a wire fence and strung along it “at eight-foot intervals were these triangular signs with the death’s-head insignia and the words ‘Achtung! Minen!’ painted on them. Mines! ‘Holy Jeezus!’ I blurted out. They’re not sending us in there! We’re as good as dead!”29 Even as he thought this, Scislowski and the rest of the platoon climbed the fence. Ridge was gambling that the extensive marking of the minefield was a ruse and there were no mines inside the fenced area. Scislowski prayed his captain was right.

  Private Jimmy Heaton was on point just ahead of Scislowski as the eight-man section entered the field in single file. Scislowski’s heart was in his mouth. It was getting dark, making the ground difficult to see. All he could do was take one step after another, trying to place his feet precisely in Heaton’s footsteps. Off to the left, there was a sharp explosion as somebody tripped a Schümine. Two more explosions and two more men down with mangled legs. Heaton froze. Everyone in the section was afraid to go on. From behind them Sergeant K.M. “Blackie” Rowe bellowed, “Get your goddamn asses moving! Come on! Move! Move! Haul your asses!” Scislowski looked over his shoulder at Private Gord Forbes and hissed, “Holy shit! The crazy son of a bitch is determined to get us all killed!” They crept forward. “I can’t see us getting out of here alive,” Scislowski whispered back to Forbes just as the man tripped a mine and went down. Scislowski instinctively began stooping to help his friend, but Rowe admonished the men to keep moving. Reluctantly, Scislowski left Forbes lying there.30

  Three more men were lost on mines covering another thirty yards. Scislowski was angry at having to die this way, terrifled at the inevitability of being maimed, proud that he pressed on in the face of terrible danger. And then the platoon crossed another band of wire and the minefield was behind it. The men passed the “twisted and torn bodies lying scattered on the road” of ‘B’ Company’s leading platoon. Rowe directed his company off the road into a narrow channel of ground bordered on one side by the road’s drainage ditch and on the other by a fence line. Scislowski realized the sergeant hoped the German machine guns only had the road and adjoining drainage ditches zeroed in.

  They came up to the wide antitank ditch and saw that the road crossing it had not been blown. Scattered in front of the road crossing were more bodies of ‘B’ Company troops, grim testimony to the dangers facing anyone trying to use the road to get over the ditch. The platoon lay down behind a wire fence and waited for Rowe to decide what to do. A burst of MG42 fire from Point 111 ripped across the road, plucking the dead soldiers with bullets. Twenty seconds passed and nobody moved. Another burst of fire raked up and down the length of the crossing. Twenty seconds later, the machine gun spoke again. Each burst lasted about three seconds. In typical Teutonic manner, the German gunner was following a fixed routine.

  Rowe passed the word. The moment the next burst of searching fire stopped, two men would run like hell across the fifteen-foot-long crossing. Ray Welsh and Johnny Humphrey went first. They made it. Scislowski and Heaton were next. By twos, No. 18 platoon crossed. Then Ridge fed the other two platoons over the same way. In fifteen minutes, the entire company had crossed the antitank ditch and were huddled in the protection of a steep embankment at the bottom of the slope running up to Point 111. Ridge spent fifteen more minutes forming up his assault. As the men waited, a Sherman tank rolled up close to the ditch crossing and started pumping 75-millimetre shells towards the summit.

  Ridge blew his whistle and the platoons ran up the slope with bayonets fixed—the regiment’s first charge. On the right was No. 17 Platoon, led by Lieutenant Bill Hider, to the left Lieutenant Dooley’s No. 18 Platoon. Lieutenant George Till’s No. 16 Platoon followed. Fifty yards from the summit, a German machine gun opened fire. All three platoons hit the dirt. Scislowski could hear Ridge yelling at them to keep the charge going. For a few seconds the men remained frozen. Then, as one man, the platoons were up, screaming at the top of their lungs, charging the chattering gun, while firing their own weapons from the hip. Beside Scislowski, Private Jim Heaton ripped off a couple of bursts with his Bren.

  Just as Scislowski neared the summit, an exploding grenade bowled him and Private Walt Thomas over like tenpins. The two men were so high on adrenaline they bounced right back onto their feet and took up the charge again. By the time they followed the rest of No. 18 Platoon over the ridgeline, thirty Germans were standing up in a trench with their hands up and shouting, “Kameraden!” repeatedly. Point 111 was taken.31

  Major Jack Tipler quickly brought ‘A’ Company into ‘D’ Company’s position. A half-mile north of Point 111 lay Point 147. Between the two points was a sp
iny ridge and to the right a draw. Tipler realized that the Germans must have machine guns covering both the draw and the spine. Off to the left, however, was a rugged series of cuts and draws too numerous to easily defend. He led his company that way, executing a left-hook manoeuvre that brought his platoons up on the hill from behind. At 2300 hours, his company surprised the defending Germans and cleared the objective.

  Major T.H. White then moved ‘C’ Company out onto the spine towards Point 115, but was forced to retreat to a point just ahead of ‘D’ Company by heavy machine-gun fire.32 Snelgrove brought the survivors in ‘B’ Company up behind Ridge’s men. By midnight, the regiment formed a strong salient deep inside the Gothic Line, although its flanks were, noted the Perths’ war diarist, “threatened… due to the failure of our friends on the right and left.”33 The Perths were the first Allied unit to break into the Gothic Line.34

  At 0200 hours, ‘A’ Squadron of the 8th New Brunswick Hussars clanked up onto Point 111. Their commander, Major P.M. “Frenchy” Blanchet, was deathly ill with jaundice. But he refused to relinquish command. A mine had disabled one tank en route. Lieutenant George Cahoon took a troop off to the left of the Perths’ position and set up in a sunken road. When the tankers tried climbing out of their Shermans, they came under fire from Germans hiding inside haystacks scattered around the tanks. Thinking Point 115 had been taken by the Perths, Cahoon tried going there on foot. Hearing loud German voices on the summit, he beat a hasty retreat back to his tank and buttoned up tight for the night.35

  AS A PALE, nearly full moon rose over the battlefield, a massive artillery concentration, summoned by Cape Breton Highlander Lieutenant Colonel Boyd Somerville, poured down on Point 120. The shelling stopped at 0115 hours on August 31 and Captain O.J. Price’s ‘A’ Company and ‘D’ Company, under Major T.M. Lowe, marched towards the enemy. Even as the artillery fell silent, ‘B’ Squadron of the 8th Hussars started firing from just behind the Highlanders. ‘A’ Company advanced on the point with two platoons up and one in reserve. ‘D’ Company was to press on past the summit and seize a house about four hundred yards to the northeast.

  The attack proved a repeat of the earlier effort, with ‘A’ Company driven to ground by heavy machine-gun fire at the hill’s base. From his position behind the leading company, Lowe determined from the tracer flight patterns that the Germans were firing their Spandaus on fixed lines. He tried to advise Price of this by radio, but ‘A’ Company’s No. 18 set had failed. Lowe pushed his company forward, intent on assisting. When he tried to contact Somerville to report, he was unable to raise a response on the company radio. Lowe passed his company through Price’s and pressed up the hill despite the German fire. His leading platoon was just thirty yards from the crest when it confronted a sheer cliff draped in tangles of barbed wire with mine-warning signs posted beside it. Germans started dropping stick grenades down on the Canadians. Lowe sent men to find a route up the cliff but all they found were more tangles of wire and mine-warning signs. Finally, Lowe was forced to fall back to the base of the hill and rejoin Company ‘A’. As dawn was approaching, Somerville decided to pull the badly battered companies back to consolidate for another allout try by daylight. The regiment had suffered sixty-three casualties, nineteen fatal.36

  VOKES AND HOFFMEISTER both realized that I Canadian Corps was locked in a race with their German counterparts. They had struck just as the 26th Panzer Division and the 4th Regiment of the 1st Parachute Division had begun relieving the 71st Infantry Division. Some German companies were well emplaced, others still getting settled, and even more not yet in their assigned positions. If the Canadians moved quickly, Eighth Army commander General Oliver Leese’s gatecrash could just happen. But more men were needed.

  Vokes had expected the West Nova Scotia Regiment to open up a salient, but the minefield they had stumbled into and Lieutenant Colonel Ron Waterman’s apparent failure of command had scotched that plan. He had the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry from 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade on hand awaiting a signal to push through to Osteria Nuova and from there onto Point 115, which lay about four hundred yards beyond. From Point 115, he wanted the PPCLI to drive over another height of ground identified on military maps as Point 137 and advance to Point 204 astride a lane that extended from the lateral road behind the Foglia north to Tomba di Pesaro. It was an ambitious plan and Vokes kicked it into action just before midnight.37

  The failure of the Cape Breton attack on Point 120 had thrown Hoffmeister’s original plan into disarray. Originally, once the Cape Bretoners had cleared Point 120, the Irish Regiment of Canada was to have passed through Montecchio and secured Monte Marrone, part of the rearmost extent of the Gothic Line. Realizing that continued frontal attacks against Point 120’s defences must only end in further fruitless slaughter, he directed Lieutenant Colonel Bobby Clark to cross the brigade’s front and hook through the Perth Regiment on Point 111 to attack Point 120 from the rear. Marching across the brigade front brought Clark’s Irish Regiment into the midst of the traffic jam building on the south side of the Foglia, resulting in his companies becoming separated. A frustrated Clark told Hoffmeister he could not reach Point 111 until after daybreak.38

  The PPCLI meanwhile was set up in Ginestreto, ready to advance forward on signal from division. Lieutenant Colonel David Rosser would not be in command. At 1400 hours the previous day, his staff had noticed that he was shivering, sweating, and nearly delirious—suffering an outbreak of malaria.39 Rosser was confined to bed and Major R.P. “Slug” Clark—the brother of the Irish Regiment’s commander—took over.

  Five minutes after midnight, Major Clark sent Captain L.G. Burton’s ‘C’ Company off with ‘D’ Company in trail. Both companies crossed the river and headed up a track that led almost to Osteria Nuova without mishap or betraying their presence. Clark then ordered ‘B’ Company, under Major Colin McDougall, to pass through and secure Osteria Nuova. McDougall was warned he must be snug in the village by first light. The Germans had demolished Osteria Nuova weeks earlier in order to clear fields of fire, but the scattered piles of rubble would provide his company with good cover from which to launch further advances after dawn.

  Lieutenant E.E. Chambers and his No. 11 Platoon were leading when the company came upon a marked minefield about four hundred yards deep, lying just in front of the lateral road. This was part of the same massive minefield that had crippled the West Nova Scotia Regiment. Some of the mines in this section were poorly concealed and, from the visible pattern they presented, it seemed there was a mine planted in every two-foot square of ground. The only way to reach Osteria Nuova was to cross the field. Chambers led the entire company into it, everyone following him in single file by platoons and trying to put their feet precisely in his footsteps. There was a narrow dirt path, which Chambers followed despite the fact that it was heavily mined. But so too was the rest of the minefield, and at least the path was free of roots and branches. Three men who strayed from Chambers’s footsteps triggered mines. The rest pressed on, passing through the minefield and across the also-mined antitank ditch parallelling the road. They entered the town’s ruins without meeting serious resistance, the handful of defenders surrendering the moment their commander was shot in a short exchange of gunfire.40 It was 0600 hours. With the village in its hands, the PPCLI had succeeded by first light in adding more weight to the Canadian presence inside the Gothic Line.

  [ 14 ]

  A Definite Breach

  IN THE PREDAWN light of August 31, the West Nova Scotia Regiment renewed its efforts to reach Point 133. Major Allan Nicholson’s ‘D’ Company led, followed by ‘C’ Company, under Captain S.D. Smith. As these companies passed the apex of the bridgehead held by Captain J.H. Jones’s shredded ‘B’ Company, German mortar and machine-gun fire smothered the entire front despite the effort of supporting artillery to force the enemy to take cover. Jones’s men fired their rifles and Bren guns at the German positions, desperately trying to support the two advancing comp
anies.1

  Nicholson headed up a narrow gully that petered out just short of the road. Although protected from the worst of the heavy fire, several men tripped Schümines in the trenchlike channel. As ‘D’ company emerged at the gully’s end with ‘C’ Company still in trail, they became tangled in the minefield that had earlier maimed so many ‘B’ Company men. They were also nakedly exposed to the Germans on Point 133. Bullets cut men down, shrapnel from mortar rounds tore into bodies, and mines exploded underfoot. Schümines tore legs off both Nicholson and Smith. Soldiers hugged the ground or sought any bush or depression for cover. When some men hit the dirt, they landed on mines that detonated, ripping their chests or stomachs open or tearing off arms. Others were similarly wounded trying to crawl to safety.2

  Waterman ordered a withdrawal at 0630 hours, but the men were unable to comply. They lay helpless under the German fusillade for two and a half more hours until Waterman, still behaving with unusual sluggishness, finally arranged for a smokescreen to cover their withdrawal to the gully. At 0840 hours, the Royal 22e Regiment finished forming up in the bridgehead’s rear and received orders to take over the attack from the chewed up and utterly demoralized West Novas.3 In just over twenty-four hours, the West Novas had lost three men killed, seventy-two wounded, and three men missing. Three of the wounded subsequently died. Everyone thought it a miracle that so few soldiers had actually been killed in the debacle.4