The Gothic Line

by Mark Zuehlke

  Having rushed his tank troop over to join the charge, Lieutenant Cahoon’s Sherman was also struck by an antitank round and started sliding backward. Fearing this tank was about to overturn and follow Bell’s down the hillside, the crew bailed out. When the tank skidded to a halt, Cahooon got his men back inside. Of the nineteen tanks that had started out for Monte Marrone, only nine remained operational. Having lost radio contact with regimental headquarters, Blanchet sent one tank back to Point 111 for reinforcements. Another, which had been struggling up the hillside, staggered to a halt as its engine broke down. Left with just seven tanks still in the fight, and fearing an imminent counterattack, he circled them on the little hilltop so they could meet an attack from any direction. Blanchet was red-eyed and sunken faced, almost debilitated by his illness.21 ‘A’ Squadron had knocked out one Mark V Panther, two antitank guns, and killed about twenty-five Germans in exchange for ten dead, six wounded, and four tanks destroyed. At 1900 hours, the tankers were relieved to see Canadian infantry marching up the hill instead of Germans.22 The Cape Breton Highlanders arrived with ‘B’ Squadron in support.

  A few minutes later, the infantry and tanks of the new squadron pressed on towards Monte Marrone, while Blanchet led his weary squadron back to Point 111. Before the attacking force really got moving, however, brigade ordered it to assume a defensive position because of a feared German counterattack. The infantry dug in around the tanks, but after a three-hour wait the enemy failed to materialize. In the late afternoon, tanks and infantry set out again, but the going was slow over rough ground. At 2200 hours, ‘B’ Squadron withdrew because of the approaching darkness and the Cape Breton Highlanders marched on alone.23 At midnight, they climbed Monte Marrone and found an extensive system of abandoned fortifications.

  WHEN THE REMNANTS of ‘A’ Squadron rumbled into the Hussars’ harbour on the reverse slope of Point 111, Major G.R.H. Ross strolled over to Blanchet’s tank for a chat. Finding Blanchet huddled on the ground beside the Sherman, “so sick he could hardly raise his head,” Ross had him taken immediately to the Regimental Aid Post.24

  While ‘A’ Squadron’s foray towards Monte Marrone had met fierce German resistance, an equally determined defence of Point 120 failed to deter the Irish Regiment’s attack there. At noon, ‘D’ Company had struck from Point 111 in a straight-on frontal attack while ‘A’ Company hooked around to the north to take up position on a low hill from which it could bring fire to bear on the German positions. ‘A’ Company would also block the German line of retreat. Meanwhile, ‘C’ and ‘B’ companies remained in reserve on Point 111 and provided covering fire for the two attacking companies.25

  By running hard on the heels of an artillery barrage and using all available ground cover to conceal their movements, ‘D’ Company, under Captain F. E. Southby, crossed the half-mile gap between Point 111 and the objective without being detected and gained complete surprise. The Germans surrendered with barely a shot fired and the company took four officers and 117 enlisted men prisoner.26

  Having to follow the road, ‘C’ Squadron’s Shermans had swept right through Montecchio en route to the hill and destroyed two anti-tank guns and a self-propelled gun along the way. Six of the squadron’s tanks were disabled by thrown tracks, but there were no other casualties. Although the Irish had pulled off the attack on Point 120 with the loss of only one man, the regiment’s total casualties for the day were eighteen killed and thirty-two wounded. Most of these were in ‘A’ Company, which had been hard hit by the German shelling of Point 111. Of the attack on Point 120, the Irish war diarist wrote: “31 August was a day in which the Irish proved they need take second place to no other infantry regiment.”27

  AT 0930 HOURS, the PPCLI’s ‘C’ Company headed due west out of Osteria Nuova to secure the junction point where one of the best roads running north from the Foglia met the lateral road. A hundred yards to the east of this junction, a deep natural re-entrant was overlooked by Point 115. The ground inside the re-entrant was the designated assembly area for the B.C. Dragoons to form for their scheduled attack in support of the Perth Regiment against Point 204. The re-entrant and junction, through which the tanks must pass to reach it, were still in German hands. Even as the Shermans of ‘A’ Squadron, which led the column of Dragoons, approached from the south, the PPCLI advanced on the junction from the east.

  Captain L.G. Burton’s riflemen were caught in a short, intense firefight with several Germans as they came up to the junction. Schümines and small-arms fire wounded five men, but the company quickly seized the vital intersection. The situation remained anything but secure, though, as German paratroopers held positions both in the re-entrant to the company’s left and on Point 115 above it. Burton could see no way of clearing the area without the assistance of tanks.28 The 48th Royal Tank Regiment that was supposed to have supported the PPCLI had yet to start crossing the river, so he figured it would be afternoon before they arrived.29

  Shortly after the PPCLI seized the junction, however, a jeep bearing an advance party of Dragoons intent on preparing the assembly area for the regiment’s imminent arrival drove through their hidden positions too quickly for the infantry to flag them down. The jeep contained Captain Jack Letcher, Lieutenant H.J. Russell, Sergeant Bill Grainger, and Trooper George Bentley. Blocked by a heavy barbed-wire entanglement at the re-entrant, the men calmly cut an opening sufficiently wide to permit the passage of tanks.

  While they waited for the first tanks to arrive, Letcher walked over to several PPCLI soldiers holding a nearby position. They told him they had some wounded men about a hundred yards away who needed to be evacuated. Letcher and Russell followed one soldier towards the wounded men, but suddenly the infantryman “let out an ungodly scream of pain” as a mine exploded underfoot. When Russell jumped to the stricken man’s side, he tripped another Schümine that tore his leg right off. A fragment struck Letcher above his left eye and knocked him unconscious.30

  Major Gerald Eastman’s ‘A’ Squadron was meanwhile passing the junction en route to the re-entrant. Eastman noticed some infantrymen lying in ditches alongside the road and saw that the Bren gunners were firing short bursts as if engaging enemy infantry. Eastman stopped and called down to them for directions to the Dragoons’ reconnaissance party. A frazzled-looking soldier shrugged, said nobody had passed by, and went back to his measured shooting. Puzzled, Eastman signalled his squadron to follow, turned right onto the lateral and clanked towards the assembly area. As the tanks rolled up to the wire fence, Eastman was relieved to see Grainger and Bentley waving them in. The two men then returned to their work of checking the ground with minesweepers. The re-entrant was riddled with German trenches and dugouts that Eastman presumed were abandoned. All seemed calm. Eastman’s orders were to assemble his squadron on the left, and ‘C’ Squadron would form to his right. As the squadron moved to the left, a Faustpatrone charge exploded against Captain Richard Sellars’s Sherman. The burning tank rolled back several feet to collide with the Sherman immediately behind it. The two tanks locked tracks and the fire quickly spread from one to the other. Both crews managed to escape without serious injury.

  Sellars, who had armed himself with a Thompson submachine gun before abandoning his tank, “started blazing away at the trench in front of him.”31 When Eastman tried depressing his main gun to fire into the trench, he realized his tank was too close. The Germans in the trench hurled stick grenades at Eastman, who sat up high in the open turret hatch to lob Type 36 grenades back at them. A lot of grenades were going off, but neither Eastman nor the Germans seemed able to hurt the other. Finally, Eastman had his driver back up a few yards and the gunner punched a couple of high-explosive rounds into the trench. Out popped a white handkerchief fixed to a long pole and Sellars quickly accepted the surrender of forty paratroopers.32

  As the firefight ended, Letcher stumbled out of the minefield into the assembly area. He had awakened to find the maimed Russell and the similarly injured infantryman gone, presumably ev
acuated by the PPCLI. Whoever evacuated the two men must have either not seen him or had assumed the unconscious man was dead. Seeing the tanks blasting away at Germans in trenches he had thought empty, Letcher realized the paratroopers must have remained hidden while his party cut the wire and started sweeping for mines, in the hopes of bagging bigger game. Letcher thought it had probably been a rude surprise when the bigger game proved to be a squadron of Shermans.33

  A Sherman tank commanded by Sergeant Weber escorted the prisoners back to the river. On the return trip, an armour-piercing round punched into the tank turret and exploded inside. Everyone but the driver, Trooper Tom Blake, was killed. Shrapnel had, however, penetrated the driver’s compartment and passed through his chair, peppering his back with a mix of metal and shredded horsehair from the seatback. Painfully dragging himself towards the open turret hatch, Blake saw the tank’s main compartment was lathered in blood and gore. Arms and legs lay everywhere. Only Weber seemed in one piece, his corpse sort of leaning in a sitting position against the back wall. Blake crawled out of the turret and fell to the ground. Because of infection from the horsehair, his wounds would take two months to heal.34

  In the re-entrant, ‘A’ Squadron was now being fired on by German infantry in positions on their flanks and to the front. The tankers shot back with their main guns and machine guns.35 When ‘C’ Squadron arrived, it joined the fray. Soon the Dragoons silenced the opposition in the re-entrant and started ranging out of the assembly area to assist the PPCLI at the road junction and at Osteria Nuova, where Major Colin McDougall’s ‘B’ Company was trying to repel a German counterattack. The tanks, McDougall wrote, “got behind the enemy and copped them.”36 A total of ninety-six prisoners were rounded up in the wake of this brief action.

  At 1030 hours, the PPCLI’s ‘D’ Company jumped off from Osteria Nuova towards Point 115, which looked down upon the Dragoons’ assembly area. A sharp gunfight broke out between the Patricias and the defending Germans that lasted until 1330 hours, when twenty-three paratroopers surrendered. The PPCLI suffered six casualties.37

  Once Point 115 was reported secure, PPCLI Major R.P. Clark ordered ‘A’ Company to advance to the right and seize Point 133—the last feature in this sector that dominated both the lateral road and the Foglia River. Its capture would “create a definite breach in the Gothic Line through which spearheads could be pushed and the famous Gothic Line rolled up,” wrote the regiment’s war diarist.38

  Supported now by ‘B’ Squadron of the 48th Royal Tank Regiment, Major E. Cutbill led his company forward. No sooner had the tanks crossed the road than Teller mines disabled two. The infantry marched doggedly onward through a hail of artillery and mortar fire, with the remaining tanks following close behind. They climbed a thousand-yard-long forward slope into the face of the Germans’ defending fire. As the infantry and tanks rolled over the crest onto Point 133, ninety-seven Germans threw down their guns and surrendered. The position that the West Nova Scotia Regiment had tried to reach at terrible cost was finally taken. Despite the murderous fire they had passed through, the PPCLI suffered only six casualties.39

  Their triumph was soured, however, by news that the regimental chaplain, Captain Kenelm Eaton, had been fatally wounded near Osteria Nuova when he knelt on a Schümine while trying to assist an injured soldier. Originally too young to qualify for a chaplaincy, Eaton had signed up as a stretcher-bearer and served in that capacity until reaching the required maturity.40

  [ 15 ]

  A Bitter Day

  IN THE RE-ENTRANT, the situation by mid-morning of August 31 was still chaotic, with the British Columbia Dragoons trying to group by squadrons in the midst of persistent heavy mortar and artillery fire. As Sergeant Eric Waldron of No. 4 Troop rolled the last ‘C’ Squadron tank through the gap in the wire, a mortar round exploded on his Sherman’s front deck. The concussion banged Waldron’s face against the hatch rim, breaking his nose and blackening both eyes. Blood gushing from his nostrils, Waldron fell to the bottom of the tank in a heap. “Are you dead, sarge?” his loader/signaller called down softly. Waldron moaned that he was okay and crawled back into the turret’s cupola. When he looked out of the hatch, Major Jack Turnley, his squadron commander, was standing nearby. “You all right?” he called up to the sergeant. “I think I’ll live,” Waldron replied. Turnley told him to move his tank up to the top of the eastern ridge to guard the regiment’s flank.

  From a position hull-down behind the ridgeline, Waldron observed some kind of German depot—heavily camouflaged in netting—set up in an open basin. Waldron suspected it was an ammunition dump. He radioed Turnley for permission to fire on the depot, but the major curtly refused. Waldron cursed his major’s consistent reluctance to permit ‘C’ Squadron to fire on unidentified targets. While seconded for six months during the North African campaign to the British 5th Lancers, Turnley had once shot up several armoured cars that turned out to be British. He had been at pains since not to repeat that mistake.1 Waldron sat in his tank, sweating under the hot sun, German shells exploding nearby, and glared impotently down at the depot.

  Down in the re-entrant, Lieutenant Colonel Fred Vokes waited impatiently for the Perth Regiment. He had been advised the Perths would soon join the Dragoons for a joint assault on Point 204.2 Perth commander Lieutenant Colonel William Reid, meanwhile, was near Point 111 still waiting for the Princess Louise Dragoon Guards to relieve his regiment and did not expect to rendezvous with the Dragoons until after 1000 hours.3 The Perths were going to be coming, but definitely not as quickly as Vokes expected.

  Vokes paced outside the regimental command tank, his headset linked by a long wire to the turret, so he could communicate with his signaller without being hemmed up inside the Sherman. From his nearby tank, ‘B’ Squadron commander Major David Kinloch watched Vokes’s growing restlessness. Finally, in what Kinloch thought was an independent action, Vokes ordered ‘C’ Squadron to head for Point 204 with ‘A’ Squadron in trail. The lieutenant colonel would remain in the re-entrant with Kinloch’s squadron and the regimental HQ tanks until the Perths arrived and then bring them forward at the double.4 Back at brigade headquarters, 5th Canadian Armoured Brigade commander Brigadier Ian Cumberland had no idea that the Dragoons were going to attack without infantry support.* In fact, one of his general staff officers, Lieutenant Colonel Harry Angle, who had commanded the Dragoons until being transferred to brigade headquarters, understood that Cumberland had told Vokes that the combined operation would not begin until early morning of September 1.5

  * All contemporary accounts written by 5 CAB HQ staff, including the brigade’s war diary, cite the attack as having been launched as a joint tank-infantry operation with the Perths accompanying the B.C. Dragoons towards Point 204, and the two units eventually becoming separated.

  ‘C’ SQUADRON HEADED out in an arrowhead formation with Lieutenant R.W. “Bud” Green’s No. 4 Troop right, Lieutenant Tony Romanow’s No. 1 Troop left, and Lieutenant Z.M. “Zeke” Ferley’s No. 3 Troop centre. Tucked inside the arrowhead was No. 2 Troop under Lieutenant Jack Saville and Turnley’s HQ section.6 The squadron rolled down the ridge into a wide valley of grain fields, where the shoulder-high wheat provided excellent cover for snipers and gun emplacements. A confusing array of ridges and hillocks cut across the valley this way and that, making it difficult for the tankers to keep their objective in view. Halfway between Point 204 and the re-entrant stood a hill marked on their maps as Point 156. Once ‘C’ Squadron reached this initial objective, ‘A’ Squadron was to leapfrog to the lead.7

  The ground under Ferley’s tank tracks was “loose and dry. On the least slope, one had to be extremely careful, or the tank would slip sideways and throw a track, immobilizing the tank. It was necessary to hit each upward or downward slope square on with the tank,” he wrote.8 Saville’s troop had started out with only two tanks, having lost the third to a breakdown. Now one of the two remaining tanks threw a track. Turnley ordered Saville to attach himself and the remaining
Sherman to Ferley’s troop, which was also a tank short. The loss of these tanks reduced the squadron to twelve Shermans, four below standard strength.9

  Not only was the terrain difficult to traverse, but the advancing squadrons were being intensely shelled by the Germans and sporadically, it seemed, also by Canadian artillery. When the shelling grew too severe, the tank commanders buttoned up their hatches and resorted to using their periscopes to guide the drivers forward—a difficult undertaking in even the best tank country. Despite these problems, ‘C’ Squadron reached Point 156 without serious difficulty at about 1100 hours.10

  The ground ahead, Ferley saw, “was undulating and irregular—there was no definite pattern to the rise and fall of the ground. This even applied to the squadron position.” Ferley was unable to see either No. 1 or No. 4 troops, despite the fact that he knew they should be just off respectively to his left and right. He sensed the Germans were out ahead, barring the way to Point 204. “I knew that they would probably get the first crack at us—they were hidden, we were not, a usual situation.”11

  About six hundred yards ahead, a two-storey farmhouse stood on the long slope running up to Point 204 with a large green tree growing fifty yards behind it. The tree had a wide base and a trunk that tapered off very gradually like a child’s drawing might. To the left of the farmhouse was a dense grove of trees. From his map, Ferley knew Point 204 was obscured from view by these woods. Beyond the trees rose another higher hill, identified as Point 253 or Monte Peloso. This hill was a bit to the southeast of Tomba di Pesaro.

  As Ferley scanned the ground to the front, his attention kept being drawn back to the tree behind the farmhouse. It seemed so out of place there, almost surreal. As he considered what was odd about the tree, the bright flash of a heavy gun jetted out of the tree’s base. The muzzle flash and gun recoil shook off some of the camouflaging and suddenly the tree was transformed into a cleverly concealed self-propelled 88-millimetre gun. Ferley called out firing coordinates to his gunner and laid the tank’s 75-millimetre on the SPG. The first shot was high, the high-explosive shell exploding far beyond the crest of the facing hill. While Ferley’s crew reloaded, the German gun fired another shot at some target the troop commander could not see. Ferley’s gunner snapped off another round, which exploded below the German position. Once again the German gun fired, still apparently seeking the same invisible target. Ferley’s gunner raised his sights a bit and this round struck home, causing the German gun barrel to tilt slightly upward.