The Gothic Line

by Mark Zuehlke

  He arrived at Eighth Army Headquarters in a very satisfied mood late on September 1 to report that the Gothic Line was broken across the entirety of his sector. Leese, who had been issuing one congratulatory note after another to Canadian regiments throughout the day, was meeting with General Harold Alexander, Deputy Supreme Commander, Mediterranean. “They were highly pleased,” Burns wrote, “and, I thought, a little surprised at the speed of the Canadians’ advance.”32 After delivering his report in his usual terse, no-nonsense style, Burns took his leave. Leese called him back just as the lieutenant general was stepping into his jeep. Alexander told Burns he was personally recommending him for the Distinguished Service Order. Burns was stunned. “I considered the decoration as an honour for the corps whose bravery and sacrifice had won the victory. But I also took it as a sign that the generals had decided that I could handle my command and that confidence had replaced the doubts that had formerly existed.”33

  Leese also offered Burns the 3rd Greek Mountain Brigade and its supporting field artillery regiment, both currently serving with the 2nd New Zealand Division. The object of doing so, Leese said, would be to give the Greeks some “battle experience.” Burns took this as a further sign that Alexander and Leese, having earlier sought his dismissal from corps command, had revised their opinion of his abilities. He agreed to discuss with New Zealand commander Lieutenant General Bernard Freyberg how the brigade might best be utilized.34

  Burns left Eighth Army HQ cheerfully, but he also left lacking the very thing he most needed. Having cracked the Gothic Line wide open, I Canadian Corps desperately required reinforcement in the form of a fresh armoured division capable of shoving the disorganized Germans aside and plunging straight through to the Po Valley. The opportunity existed. The Canadians had created a gaping hole. Leese had the 1st British Armoured Division positioned to the south in readiness to carry out just such a breakout. But Leese had set his strategy in mid-August and predicated his operations on the supposition that the Germans would crumble in front of V Corps. The Eighth Army commander therefore offered Burns nothing more than the Greeks—an infantry brigade of dubious value.

  Leese’s failure to seize the initiative won by the Canadians was all the more puzzling in view of V Corps’s sluggish advance through the mountains to the west. To the immediate left of I Canadian Corps, the 46th British Infantry Division was managing to keep more or less abreast of the Canadians. But in the higher country left of this division, Lieutenant General Charles Keightley’s V Corps was bogging down and a dangerous gap had opened between the 46th Infantry Division and the 4th Indian Division on its left. This gap was so wide that Keightley had decided he must bring his reserve division—the 56th Infantry Division—up to fill the centre.

  While briefing the 56th’s Major General John Whitfield, Keightley emphasized the need for haste. Whitfield later recalled how he could “still see the way the corps commander kept putting his hand on the map and saying, ‘We mustn’t get involved in the hills. We can get along on this flat bit and the army commander reckons that we might get a race up that right-handed side.’”35 Keightley referred here to the narrow strip of ground immediately bordering the Canadian Corps’s left flank. Significantly, this was country through which no roads other than local tracks passed. It was hardly ideal tank country even by Italian standards.

  Not only was Leese still banking on breaking out through a corps beginning to founder, but he made no effort on September 1 to move 1st Armoured Division rapidly north from its holding position to where it could enter any breach that was opened. In a curious attempt to reduce traffic on the few and heavily congested roads in Eighth Army’s rear, Leese had positioned the division one hundred miles from the front. His initial instructions to its commander, Major General Richard Hull, were to be ready to start operations on September 7. These instructions went unmodified, even after Leese had approved the attempt to gatecrash the Gothic Line. Only on the night of August 31 did Leese order the division to start a ponderous approach towards the Metauro River. No haste was urged and no accelerated timetable was proposed for the division’s breakout operation.36

  Hull believed his division would not be called into battle until the Germans had been thrown all the way back to the Rimini Line and a gap created in that final defensive position before the Po Valley. Hull told his officers they would “pass through the Rimini gap… and then… go on, and on and on, day and night, until we are too exhausted to see the target.”37 An enticing vision for tankers trained to believe that an armoured division’s primary role was exploitation deep into the enemy rear.

  That such a dramatic strategic development was improbable on V Corps’s front was obvious. And, although the Canadians had opened such a gap, it was equally evident that Leese had no intention of taking full advantage of this opportunity. So Hull continued to await developments on V Corps’s front while moving northward at an unhurried pace. Hence, even as the Canadian Corps won its finest victory in Italy, the decisive opportunity this success offered Eighth Army was beginning to slip away.

  [ 19 ]

  A Long Chance

  ON AUGUST 31, 104 Canadians had been killed and 271 wounded, followed by another 97 dead and 202 wounded the next day. Hardest hit was the Canadian 5th Armoured Division. During the height of the battle, staff from hospitals farther back had to reinforce its No. 24 Field Ambulance at Monteccicardo.1 In the Corps’s field dressing stations and surgeries, doctors and medical orderlies worked nonstop. Chaplain Waldo Smith, formerly the Ontario Regiment’s padre, had joined No. 16 Field Dressing Station just five days before the battle began because he thought himself too old for the hard duty demanded of regimental chaplains serving in fighting units.

  Among the casualties that passed before him on August 31 was Captain Kenelm Eaton, the young Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry chaplain who had knelt on a mine while tending a wounded soldier. “Now I can get home,” the chaplain told Smith while orderlies prepared to take him into the surgery. The chaplain had lost much blood and was in shock. Citing a passage from the 23rd Psalm, Smith told his friend: “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.”

  “And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever,” Eaton responded wearily. Five hours later, an orderly summoned Smith. “I think the padre is dying,” he said. Smith hurried to the man’s side, but he was already gone.2

  On September 1, the surgical teams started operations at 0700 hours and worked twenty-four hours straight with only brief pauses for meals. By 1900 hours, despite their efforts, a twelve-hour backlog had developed between the time a wounded man arrived and when he entered the surgery. The doctor in command ordered further admissions stopped until the backlog was shortened, with the wounded who were turned away transported by ambulance to medical facilities farther from the front lines.

  Smith helped nurses to bathe post-operation patients and get them into beds. As the anaesthetic wore off, some of the wounded regaining consciousness would thrash about wildly as if still in combat. To keep the men from tearing intravenous or transfusion needles from their arms or clawing their bandages off, Smith had to hold “down restless arms and fix a glittering eye upon semi-conscious lads.”3

  In the resuscitation room where blood transfusions were given, Smith watched many soldiers bleed to death as the blood pumped out of wounds faster than it could be transfused. He came “to know by the amount of blood on the floor under the stretcher whether the soldier was to die.”4

  The resuscitation doctor’s job was a thankless one, Smith thought. The man had to monitor blood pressures and then decide which wounded should be operated on and in what order of priority. “Here was a man so badly wounded that there seemed no chance that he should live. Was he to be left lying there while others who came in after him whose wounds appeared less severe were taken in and dealt with? It was a medical decision and I had no word to say. All one could do was try to keep up men’s faith in their God and trust in His care. One trie
d to assure them all that the doctors were very anxious about them and were working as hard as they could, taking first those whose need was greatest.”5

  THE FLOW OF WOUNDED was unlikely to abate any time soon, for the battle still raged with I Canadian Corps renewing its drive northward in the early morning hours of September 2. Expectations ran high throughout the corps that the Canadians would manage to break-through to the Po Valley in just a few more days, vindicating all the bloodshed by winning a decisive victory.6

  The 21st British Tank Brigade’s Brigadier D. Dawnay, who commanded 1st Canadian Infantry Division’s flying column, ordered the Royal Canadian Dragoons and one company of Royal 22e Regiment to cut the coastal highway and railway southeast of Cattolica. From there, he hoped to send an armoured car squadron north to seize a bridge crossing the Conca River. Meanwhile, another company of Van Doos would advance with a 48th Royal Tank Regiment squadron in support to capture Pieve. Both columns were to strike out from a position parallel to Monte Luro. En route to this forming-up position, the rugged, confused country through which only ox-cart trails passed proved impossible to navigate quickly in the early morning darkness. It was soon obvious that the attacking units could not reach their forming-up positions before dawn, but attempts to relay this information by radio to Dawnay failed.7

  At 0200 hours, the British brigadier was still anxiously awaiting the arrival of the two columns and more fearful with each passing minute that the opportunity to block the escape of the 1st Parachute Division units withdrawing from Pesaro was trickling through his fingers. Looking for an alternative plan, Dawnay noted that the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry was well out on the corps’s right flank at Point 119 with ‘B’ Squadron, 48 RTR, in support. He immediately ordered ‘A’ and ‘D’ companies to board the tanks and proceed by the fastest route possible to cut the railroad line where a bridge crossed a deep ditch at San Stefano, two thousand yards southeast of Gradara. Progress was swift, and by 0400 hours the small force was digging in astride the steel tracks to form a defensive right-flank position for 1 CID and to secure the bridge for use by Allied armour.8 Only a single self-propelled gun had offered any resistance, firing one round at a Sherman conducting a dawn reconnaissance on the north side of the bridge. Although the shell glanced harmlessly off the hull of the tank, the concussion somehow caused a fire to break out inside the turret. PPCLI Major E.W. Cutbill, who was riding inside, suffered serious burns.9

  Even as the bridge crossing was secured, the Van Doos aboard a squadron of 48 RTR tanks finally jumped off towards Pieve. Dawnay ordered the Loyal Edmonton Regiment holding Monte Luro to get ready to leapfrog through that village the moment it was captured. The flying column was on Pieve’s outskirts before an antitank gun and several snipers inside the village offered the first German resistance. The infantry quickly broke into the small village and swept it clear.

  Developing his strategy on the fly, Dawnay tried to sustain the rapid pace of advance. He ordered the Van Doos to sit tight in Pieve to prevent the Germans filtering back into the buildings while the 48 RTR squadron raced by road towards Gradara.10 Meanwhile, the Loyal Edmontons were ready to proceed with their leapfrog operation but were left waiting on the arrival of the 12th Royal Tank Regiment, upon whose armoured hides they were to ride forward. This regiment was slogging along the same ox-cart tracks that had delayed the flying columns and did not marry up with the infantry until 1100 hours. The force set off immediately towards Fanano, slightly less than two miles north of Pieve.11

  After a grinding, slow trip cross-country, the tanks reached a position looking up towards Fanano at about 1300 hours. While trying to scan the village from a nearby hilltop, 12 RTR’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel H.H. van Straubenzee, came under mortar fire and was knocked unconscious when a chunk of shrapnel struck him in the head.12 Assuming command, Lieutenant Colonel Budge Bell-Irving ordered Captain John Dougan’s ‘C’ Company to attack the town the moment a scheduled artillery bombardment lifted. Dougan looked at the six hundred yards of open ground that ran up a steep slope to the hilltop town and called for the artillery to lay down smoke screens on his flanks at the same time as it shelled the village.

  When the smoke shells and high-explosive rounds screamed in, Dougan immediately led his men out into the open ground with No. 13 and No. 14 platoons out front and No. 15 Platoon close behind. Running as hard as they could, the company got in among the houses just as the barrage started to lift and caught the Germans emerging from sheltered positions before they could reenter their fighting positions. Surprise was complete and after the Edmontons killed several Germans in a fusillade of gunfire, the nineteen survivors surrendered. Captured intact was a self-propelled gun whose crew had been unable to get from the shelter of a building to man it before being overrun by the Canadians.

  Dougan told his radio signallers to set up a company headquarters in a nearby house while he organized the platoons in defensive positions. When the unarmed signallers walked into the building, they found themselves face to face with seven heavily armed paratroopers. The Germans, Dougan recalled, “gave themselves up like sheep.”13 Bell-Irving moved the rest of the regiment up and by 1830 hours reported Fanano secure.14 The village soon proved itself a surprisingly pleasant billet. Everywhere the men looked there seemed to be chickens and other domestic fowl scuttling about. Soon every squad had a pot of water boiling and several plucked birds ready for cooking.15

  The Loyal Edmontons were not the only 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade regiment to leapfrog through Pieve that day. So too had the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada aboard tanks of the 145th Regiment, Royal Armoured Corps. Their objective was Monte Albano, which lay just south of the Conca and was about three and a half miles distant. The trip passed with only a few minor skirmishes, although one self-propelled gun managed to knock out four Shermans before being destroyed by other tankers. Because there were no roads to follow, the journey was relatively slow, however, and it was early evening before Lieutenant Colonel Syd Thomson set up his headquarters inside a church in the heart of the hilltop village. Dawnay ordered him to spread his companies out along the road leading towards the Conca so it was kept open for a squadron of Royal Canadian Dragoons to use as a route leading to an intersection with the coastal highway and a bridge crossing over the Conca there.16 Thomson immediately did as instructed, but it was an unnecessary action, for the Dragoons had already come and gone.

  DAWNAY HAD ORDERED the Royal Canadian Dragoons to split up into two prongs and push out from the division’s flanks to deepen the break won by his combined tank and infantry columns. The main rcd prong passed through the PPCLI position at San Stefano and headed towards the coastal highway with instructions to drive to Cattolica. Dawnay’s secondary prong was intended to provide both protection for the Seaforths’ exposed left flank and to find a route past San Giovanni by which the armoured cars could cut to the northeast through Monte Albano and secure the coastal highway bridge crossing the Conca.17

  At first light on September 2, the RCD’s ‘A’ Squadron, accompanied by a company of the Royal 22nd Regiment and a squadron of 48th Royal Tank Regiment, had departed San Stefano and driven up a bush-covered track that proved hard going for the British Shermans. Their numbers rapidly diminished as tanks bogged down or threw tracks. Then German self-propelled guns and mortars firing from inside the stoutly walled Gradara castle brought the column under heavy fire, which came as a surprise because the castle was to have been taken earlier by another squadron of 48 RTR that had been assigned that task by Dawnay. That squadron, however, had been unable to enter the narrow, winding streets of the ancient town without covering infantry and so could only cut the road leading up to Gradara and then subject the Germans inside the castle to harassing fire.18

  Seeing that the British tanks were incapable of keeping up, the Dragoons transferred the Van Doos who had been riding on the Shermans over to their armoured cars and raced ahead. All went well until the large Staghound armoured cars were unab
le to get around a crater blocking the track. The leading edge of the column cut itself even finer as the smaller, nimbler Canadian-made Lynx ii Scout Cars—called Dingoes—continued alone with a few of the infantry clinging to their hulls. Intended more for speed than combat prowess, the eleven-thousand-pound Dingo had a two-man crew—the driver and the car commander. A fifty-mile-per-hour top speed was made possible by a combination of power provided by its eight-cylinder Ford engine and light weight-reducing armour that was only thirty millimetres thick in front and in some points dropped to a mere twelve millimetres. Its only armament was a Bren gun operated by the commander. The Dingo’s five-foot, eight-inch height gave it a low profile, while its relatively narrow six-foot width provided agility and manoeuvrability normally lacking in armoured vehicles.19

  By comparison, the U.S.-built Staghound was more tanklike in design, weighing 26,600 pounds and measuring seven feet nine inches high by eight feet ten inches wide. It had a top speed of fiftyfive miles per hour provided by two six-cylinder Chevrolet engines, a maximum armour thickness of 4.4 centimetres and a minimum thickness of 63.5 millimetres. The five-man crew was armed with a 37-millimetre M6 main gun in the turret, a .30 calibre co-axial machine gun, and a .30 calibre bow-mounted machine gun.20

  As the RCD war diarist noted: “Nothing whatsoever was known of the situation, either enemy or our own troops, but advance on Cattolica was ordered and advance on Cattolica was made.”21 Leading the Dingoes was Corporal W.J. Swan of Lieutenant J.C.R. Waddell’s troop. Just as his car entered a road running from Gradara to the coastal highway at a point where the railroad line crossed it, Swan came face to face with a motorcycle with a sidecar attached “bowling briskly along” with three Germans aboard. The motorcycle skidded to a halt; Swan aimed his Bren and ordered the Germans to surrender. A feldwebel went for his gun, but Swan put a burst into him and the other two men quickly threw their hands up.22