The Gothic Line

by Mark Zuehlke

  “Repeat and maintain fire for ten minutes,” Poulin shouted. “A deluge of fire and steel followed. The air was filled with the smell of gunfire and pulverized masonry. Shock waves whipped my face. The blasts were so strong I thought my head would be blown in. Several shells went astray, killing one man and wounding another.”20

  When the last shell exploded, Poulin ordered a charge. Although the shelling had killed all the Germans in one of the casemates, the remaining three were still intact and the men inside opened up with a hail of machine-gun fire. The attack crumbled. Poulin had run out of ideas. Then Laflèche crawled over. “Major, we are almost out of ammunition,” he reported, and there were no more grenades or mortar rounds. The men were counting out and sharing the remaining bullets.

  When Poulin cast about frantically for CSM Roy, intending to send him back to Borgo Santa Maria for ammunition and reinforcements, he could find no trace of the man. So he sent two privates instead. It was 1042 hours and ‘D’ Company had been engaged more than three and a half hours. Under Allard’s operation’s officer, Captain Simard, ‘B’ Company was crawling painfully towards Poulin’s company through persistent sniper fire and one encounter after another with hidden machine-gun positions.21

  Meanwhile, the men sent to get ammunition returned empty-handed, having been driven back by snipers lurking in the woods behind ‘D’ Company. Lieutenant Laflèche volunteered to run this gauntlet and Poulin, knowing “nothing but death could stop” the twenty-one-year-old lieutenant, agreed.22

  Ten minutes after Laflèche set out, Captain Guy Vaugeois, Poulin’s towering six-foot-two friend from Montreal and commander of the Bren carrier platoon, calmly walked out of the woods. When he recognized Poulin, the captain’s mouth dropped in surprise. “Aren’t you dead?”

  “Sorry to disappoint you,” Poulin laughed. “But you’ll be the dead one if you don’t take cover.” Dashing into Poulin’s little redoubt, Vaugeois dropped down on the earth floor and handed the major a cigarette. Poulin took a grateful drag that relaxed him despite the exploding mortar rounds and the machine-gun slugs hammering against the surrounding walls. There was nothing more to do. ‘D’ Company could only wait for Laflèche to return with ammunition and reinforcements. Out of the original eighty-five men, Poulin figured he had at most fifty capable of fighting and most of these sported one or more minor wounds.23

  At 1240 hours, CSM Roy strode into Allard’s HQ and demanded some tanks. Having realized the peril of ‘D’ Company’s position and unable to reach Poulin safely to get permission to seek reinforcement, the old veteran had set off on his own initiative. He had crawled and dashed through German sniper fire and now offered to guide tanks back to Poulin.24

  Allard said he had no tanks. The best he could offer was the regiment’s four Bren carriers. Fifteen minutes later, the carriers, mounting Vickers medium machine guns, rattled out of Borgo Santa Maria stuffed to the brim with ammunition and with instructions to break through to Poulin at all costs. Roy and Laflèche were both aboard. Meeting virtually no opposition, the carriers clanked into Poulin’s position just before 1400 hours.25

  A delighted Poulin ordered the carriers “to deploy in a half-circle and advance gradually until their machine gunners could shoot right into the firing ports of the casemates. The hail of two hundred bullets a minute would keep the Germans from firing. With this support, we would attack in two waves with automatic weapons and grenades. Before the Germans could recover from the carriers’ fire, we would dash up, throw our grenades at the ports and fire into them at point-blank range.”26

  The attack went precisely as planned. At 1425 hours, after a fierce firefight of less than twenty-five minutes, Point 131 was taken. Seven prisoners were captured and an unknown number of paratroopers killed. Poulin’s battered company dug in atop the hill while the carriers set up in nearby defensive positions. When a German Panther Mark V started pounding the hill with its heavy gun from a range of just three hundred yards, Allard hastily reinforced Poulin with the six-pounder guns of the regiment’s anti-tank platoon. The Van Doos had paid in blood to capture Point 131 and Allard was determined not to lose it. In the aftermath of the battle, the Van Doos were surprised to find their casualties were not as bad as originally feared. The two companies had suffered only six men killed, twenty-seven wounded, and two men missing, with one of these believed killed. They had captured thirty-one prisoners.27 The French Canadians had also cleared a mile-and-a-half-wide swath of the Gothic Line’s front defences to a depth of about a half-mile. Allard recommended Poulin for a Military Cross, but by the time the recommendation wended its ponderous route up the chain of command the award was reduced to Mentioned in Despatches.

  FROM A HILLTOP south of the Foglia River, U.S. correspondent Martha Gellhorn had watched the Canadian battle on September 1. Ernest Hemingway’s wife was a leading war correspondent for the magazine Colliers. She sat amid a patch of thistles near 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade’s headquarters, watching the fight in the company of Brigadier Graeme Gibson and some staff officers. Gibson had been told Gellhorn would be with the brigade for several days.28

  Through binoculars, Gellhorn viewed a battle rendered in miniature. Beetle-sized tanks scuttled up hills or ducked behind a crest for cover. Occasionally, one flared into a ball of flame. Overhead, airplanes circled like dragonflies and then zipped down to unleash their bombs on the breadloaf-shaped Monte Luro. Cottonball-shaped smoke puffs marked the explosion of fresh artillery rounds. “The battle, looking absolutely unreal, tiny, crystal-clear, spread out before us. But there were men in the tanks, and men under those trees where the shells landed, and men under those bombs. The noise was so exaggerated that nothing like it had been heard since the movies,” Gellhorn later wrote. “All that day… the noise of our guns was physically painful.”29

  Gibson entertained his guest by describing an imaginary postwar garden party. Dinner would be served on a long wooden table over which a dirty, white cloth was carelessly tossed. A monotonic voice would drone incessantly from a radio transmitter placed in one corner of the garden. Bulldozers in another corner would clank back and forth to simulate the racket and vibration of tanks. A Hollywood dust-machine would create the illusion of a dusty Italian road. Just before dinner was served, a waiter would set a thousand flies loose in the garden. Then cold bully beef appetizer would precede a lukewarm dish of meat and beans with hardtack on the side. Dessert? More hardtack, but with jam and tea that had been brewed that very morning. Being as this was virtually the meal Gibson offered this evening, Gellhorn was suitably amused.

  But it was hard to remain gaily chatting with this seemingly carefree brigadier when a battle raged before her. Gellhorn found herself thinking, “It is awful to die at the end of summer when you are young and have fought a long time and when you remember with all your heart your home and whom you love, and when you know that the war is won anyhow. It is awful and one would have to be a liar or a fool not to see this and not to feel it like a misery, so that these days every man dead is a greater sorrow because the end of all this tragic dying seems so near.”30

  WHILE GIBSON ENTERTAINED his thirty-six-year-old correspondent, his brigade spent September 1 deepening 1st Canadian Infantry Division’s breakthrough. Stymied the night before from capturing the village of Pozzo Alto, the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada’s ‘B’ and ‘D’ companies had tried again at 0900 hours and taken the village in just fifteen minutes. While Lieutenant Colonel Syd Thomson moved his tactical headquarters and ‘A’ and ‘C’ companies into the town, the two leading companies drove several hundred yards northward to secure a low ridge and again met virtually no opposition.31 As had been the case throughout the gatecrashing Canadian offensive, the Germans were proving incapable of meeting I Canadian Corps’s offensive with a consistent, sustained, and interlocking defence. So while some regiments, like the Van Doos, faced fierce resistance from a determined and well-positioned defender, others, like the Seaforths, encountered only slight, easily eliminate
d pockets of resistance.

  On the extreme left flank at Monte Marrone, the Germans seemed to have no infantry to throw against the Cape Breton Highlanders and ‘B’ Squadron of the 8th Princess Louise New Brunswick Hussars. Instead, they resorted to constant artillery fire and probing the hilltop position with several tanks and self-propelled guns.

  Private Bill Metcalfe and his buddy had dug a slit trench during the night and covered it with a crude straw roof to create some shade. The two men were still sound asleep just after dawn when an SPG started raking the ground around them with machine-gun fire. Gazing out from under the improvised roof, a startled Metcalfe realized they had dug the trench slightly downhill on a slope directly facing the German lines. Blinded by the sun, the private couldn’t see the SPG. But there was no mistaking the tracers striking the ground just forty feet away and slowly, methodically, creeping his way. Then a tracer plowed into the ground in front of their trench and ricocheted up through the overhead straw. There was a sizzling sound and flames started engulfing the roof over their heads. Metcalfe and his friend rolled out of the trench and hugged the ground nearby, hoping to hell the straw would burn up quickly so they could reclaim their trench.32

  Close by, two Shermans in Lieutenant Bill Spencer’s No. 3 Troop burst into flames after the SPG hit each in rapid succession with armour-piercing rounds. Two of the tankers, unable to bail out, burned to death. The tank squadron’s strength was reduced to just nine tanks. An armour-piercing round struck the main gun on Captain Bob McLeod’s Sherman, bounced off the side of the turret with a mighty clang, but failed to penetrate. As blinded by the rising sun as Metcalfe had been, the Hussars were unable to bring the SPG into their sights. They fired into the general area, frantically hoping for a lucky hit.33

  Suddenly at 0930 hours, the sun rose a little higher and the SPG was brought into plain view. The Hussars opened fire, quickly reducing it to a smoking wreck. A Panther Mark V was also exposed and knocked out by a storm of armour-piercing shot fired almost simultaneously by several Shermans.34

  ‘B’ Squadron commander, Major Howard Keirstead, could now see Tomba di Pesaro off to the northeast of Monte Marrone. Thought to be the last key Gothic Line fortification in 5th Canadian Armoured Division’s way, this was the objective that other Hussar squadrons and the 11th Canadian Infantry Brigade infantry were scheduled to soon attack. Hoping to soften up the German defence there, Keirstead ordered McLeod to take command of No. 2 Troop and lead it out 1,000 to 1,500 yards to a ridge that would enable the Shermans to range in on the village.35

  McLeod set off at 1000 hours in his tank Byng, with Sergeant “Tug” Wilson and Corporal H. Sheppard in tow. The tankers took no chances. They raked every passing bush and clump of trees with machine guns and blasted any houses or haystacks with high explosive. When a high-explosive round in McLeod’s gun stuck in the bore, he realized the German round that had earlier hit the gun must have damaged the barrel. It took his gunner five minutes to finally remove the shell. Then McLeod’s radio ceased functioning just as Sheppard spotted a 75-millimetre antitank gun to the left and rear of his captain’s tank. The corporal smashed the gun with a high-explosive round before its crew could fire.

  Momentarily halting the column, McLeod ran over to Sheppard and ordered the corporal to switch tanks with him so he could restore a radio link to the squadron. The day was another scorcher. McLeod gulped water so quickly that he immediately vomited most of it back up. When they reached the ridge at 1100 hours, the Shermans lit into Tomba di Pesaro with their 75-millimetre guns.

  After about an hour of blazing away, McLeod advised Keirstead he was running low on ammunition. The troop was going to stop shooting so there would be some ordnance left for their return trip to Monte Marrone. Keirstead sent another No. 1 Troop under Lieutenant Wally Manley to take over the shelling operation.

  While the captain awaited his relief, he decided to check a farmhouse on the opposite side of the crest. When McLeod raked the building with the co-axial machine gun from the rise, a flurry of white sheets appeared in various windows. With McLeod covering him, Sheppard rolled his Sherman down the slope to investigate. The house proved full of Italian civilians, none of whom had been hurt by the machine-gun fire.

  Manley arrived at 1330 hours and McLeod briefed him in the shade of some overhanging grapevines. As No. 2 Troop rolled back towards the squadron along the southwest edge of the ridge, McLeod spotted some German infantry off to his right. Simultaneously, Manley called up on the radio to report that one of his men, Trooper F.A. MacDonald, had crushed his hand in the breech of his 75-millimetre gun and required immediate evacuation. McLeod dispatched Sheppard to fetch the injured soldier. While he and Sergeant Wilson waited on Sheppard’s return, three German infantrymen blundered out of the nearby brush and immediately surrendered when McLeod fired his pistol at them. One carried a sniper’s rifle. McLeod searched the Germans and relieved them of a Luger pistol, a cigarette lighter, and a pen and pencil set.

  Things were starting to get dicey, McLeod realized, as a lot more German infantry were moving around the vicinity of his position. Things came to a head just as Sheppard’s tank returned and a concealed antitank gun suddenly opened fire on McLeod’s Sherman. The first round struck just to the left, the second to the right, and the third ricocheted off the turret. McLeod ordered the three prisoners to jump on the back of his tank and told his driver to get moving. The tank sped along a trail that had a steep bank on the left side. When the trail suddenly narrowed, one of the Sherman’s tracks climbed steeply up the embankment and nearly upset the tank.

  Safely back with the squadron, a shaken McLeod told Keirstead: “After two hits on my tank it looks like I was born to be hanged, not shot.” As the adrenaline generated by combat rapidly burned away, the captain felt suddenly dead on his feet. Somebody passed him a mug of coffee and a bowl of soup. The food helped somewhat. But McLeod realized he had been going full-tilt for more than forty-eight hours. Everyone in the squadron was exhausted. When Keirstead had McLeod radio regimental headquarters and request relief, however, Lieutenant Colonel George Robinson “wasn’t complimentary.”36 The entire regiment, Robinson said, was in similar straits and ‘B’ Squadron would just have to soldier on.

  [ 18 ]

  Absolute Bedlam

  THE BATTLE’s relentless pace was wreaking havoc on 5th Canadian Armoured Division, particularly 11th Canadian Infantry Brigade. The Cape Breton Highlanders were so beaten up, Major General Bert Hoffmeister decided to leave them on Monte Marrone to rest up while still serving to anchor his left flank. That meant giving the Irish Regiment of Canada the job of assaulting Tomba di Pesaro.

  Hoffmeister’s original plan had also assigned the Perth Regiment, supported by the Lord Strathcona’s Horse Regiment, to capturing Monte Peloso (Point 253 on military maps). Repelling the counterattack on Point 204 had, however, left its commander wounded and the surviving infantrymen exhausted. The general had no option but to commit some of 12th Canadian Infantry Brigade’s regiments—so far kept out of battle to keep them fresh for the anticipated rapid breakout from the Gothic Line—to complete breaching that line. All hopes of winning a breakout now hung in the balance. Accordingly, Hoffmeister ordered Lieutenant Colonel Bill Darling to march the 4th Princess Louise Dragoon Guards to Point 204 and attack Point 253 from there.1

  At 0900 hours on September 1, Darling arrived at Point 204 by jeep to conduct a preliminary reconnaissance while the regiment followed on foot. The PLDG was going into battle for the first time since being reduced from an armoured car unit to infantry. Most of its men still resented being subjected to what they viewed as a demotion in regimental status. In a quiet act of defiance, the regiment had retained armoured designations, so its men served in squadrons broken down into troops rather than companies comprised of platoons.

  Darling found the situation on Point 204 vague and confused. Lieutenant Colonel Jim McAvity, the Lord Strathcona’s Horse commander, had no intelligence on how many Germans de
fended the PLDG objective. When his troops arrived, Darling held them on Point 204’s reverse side and called the officers up to an observation post on the hilltop that afforded a good view of the ground over which they would attack. After a quick briefing, the officers headed back to their companies, but had taken only a few steps when an artillery salvo caught them in the open. ‘B’ Squadron’s Major J.B. Lawson was killed. A combination of losses due to sickness and artillery-inflicted shrapnel wounds had so diminished this company’s officer ranks that a junior platoon commander, Lieutenant P.M. Moore, was left as the only fit officer. He took over the squadron’s command.2

  At noon, Darling warned the attack would start in just forty minutes. But as he started to brief the surviving officers on the details, the entire regiment was caught in a devastating artillery bombardment. “Absolute bedlam reigned,” Darling wrote afterwards, “while we were subjected to an extremely heavy concentration of shelling and mortaring which kept up continuously for half an hour. I should think five hundred heavy shells landed within our immediate area. Three tanks and numerous vehicles were destroyed and burning. Grass fires were raging and the men had scattered to find cover as best they could. All this somewhat interrupted the O Group but worse still, three officers and about thirty [other ranks] were hit, about a hundred more were ‘off their rockers’ from the merciless pounding, and there was a considerable amount of confusion.” Darling had to delay the attack by thirty minutes.3 At 1310 hours, ‘A’ Squadron, which was to have led off on the left flank with ‘D’ Squadron on its right, was still sorting itself out from the shelling. Darling swapped it for ‘C’ Squadron. The Strathcona’s ‘C’ Squadron, under command of Major Jack Smith, followed in waves behind the two advancing infantry squadrons.