The Gothic Line

by Mark Zuehlke

  “When last seen alive he was standing erect only a few yards from the final objective [of the church] throwing the grenades in the face of point-blank fire. Hit in the head by a German stick grenade he fell mortally wounded. So effective was the personal leadership and personal valour of this officer that his shattered company advanced steadily, inflicting many casualties, and he was instrumental in destroying many of the enemy by his own hand. The efforts of ‘A’ Company so employed the enemy that the remainder of the assaulting troops were saved from complete annihilation and were able to reorganize as fighting components.”24

  No amount of valour could save the attack, though, which crumbled. Thirty survivors of ‘A’ Company, however, were so far ahead they were unable to extricate themselves.25 The highest surviving ranker among these was Sergeant C.R. Sweeney. Rushing and scattering a cluster of Germans, Sweeney threw a grenade after them but then, in his haste to catch the fleeing paratroopers, overran the explosive. The grenade exploded, killing him.26 When night fell, eight of the isolated pocket succeeded in crawling back to the Canadian lines. The rest were believed taken prisoner. Only eighteen men from ‘A’ Company were present and accounted for when Company Sergeant Major I.A. MacDonald, now in command, formed them up that night.27

  Left of the RCR, the 48th Highlanders of Canada had attacked the ridge overlooking Marano Ridge, where they had suffered heavy casualties the day before. ‘A’ and ‘B’ companies walked into a hail of fire at 1630 hours. The half-strength ‘A’ Company was too weak to make headway. ‘B’ Company did a little better, managing to close on the ridgeline before bogging down. Major D.B. Deeks radioed for ‘C’ Company to come up, but as its men rose to leave their slit trenches a heavy, unrelenting barrage of mortar fire poured down and they could only dive back into their holes for protection.

  Lieutenant Colonel Don Mackenzie ordered Deeks to withdraw. Arrangements were made for the 3rd Canadian Infantry Brigade to relieve 1 CIB. In two days of fighting, the 48th Highlanders had lost four men killed and twenty-two wounded.28 The RCR had been mangled, with two officers and twenty-six men dead, one officer and sixteen others missing, and five officers and ninety-one other ranks wounded.29

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  Five Minutes To Twelve

  ON SEPTEMBER 7, Eighth Army commander General Oliver Leese relented. He summoned the Canadian corps commander Lieutenant General Tommy Burns, V Corps’s Lieutenant General Charles Keightley, and Eighth Army Chief-of-Staff Major General George Walsh and informed them that the 4th British Infantry Division and 25th British Tank Brigade, less one regiment, were herewith under Burns’s command. This was in addition to the 3rd Greek Mountain Brigade, which Burns had yet to utilize. The bulked-up Canadian corps was to cross the Marano and exploit onward to the Marecchia River and Rimini to realize Eighth Army’s breakthrough to the Po Valley. With V Corps mired in a bloody fight to pry the Germans off Gemmano Ridge and out of the hilltop village of Croce, Leese knew he must switch the respective roles of his two corps or fail. So V Corps would now support a Canadian breakout directed up the Adriatic coastline. But before this could take place, Coriano Ridge must be cleared to secure the Canadian Corps’s left flank.1

  Leese developed a three-phase battle plan. In the first phase, V Corps’s 46th Infantry Division, later supported by 4th Indian Division, would continue hammering away at Gemmano Ridge and Croce. Once these key objectives were won, 1st British Armoured Division and 5th Canadian Armoured Division would cooperatively clear Coriano Ridge. The 56th British Infantry Division would simultaneously pass through Croce to form alongside the British armoured division’s left flank.

  In phase two, 4th British Infantry Division would pass through 5 CAD to cross the Marano River with 1st British Armoured Division keeping pace to the left. On the right flank, 1 CID would march up the coastal highway.

  During phase three, I Canadian Corps would seize San Fortunato Ridge and advance to the Marecchia River. Once a crossing was won, the army’s reserve division, 2nd New Zealand Division, would drive into the heart of the Po Valley and liberate Bologna and Ferrara. If possible, 5 CAD would join the New Zealanders in this triumphal march.2

  Leese told Burns to work up a plan using these resources and then meet with him again the following day, conceding that his plan would likely see 2nd New Zealand Division placed under Burns’s command for the third phase. Burns “was impressed with the additional responsibility with which he proposed to entrust me, recalling that after the Liri Valley offensive one of the reasons for withdrawing the corps from the pursuit was his doubts as to our ability to handle divisions other than the Canadians. I felt that our success during the past twelve days had given him confidence in our competence. I was also glad that with the additional divisions it would be possible to withdraw the Canadian formations for rest and reorganization without halting the offensive.”3

  There would be no attack on Coriano Ridge until V Corps captured Gemmano Ridge. Repeated assaults had so far won only the barest of footholds on the ridge and inevitably each gain was met by fierce counterattacks that often succeeded in repelling the British units. Ground was taken, lost, retaken, and then lost again. Each passing day saw further deterioration in the weather as heavy rains transformed the hill country’s formerly dusty ground into slimy mud and filled previously dry streambeds with thickly silted water.4

  While this battle raged to the west, the regiments holding I Canadian Corps’s front lines dug ever deeper shelters for protection from the incessant shelling. The Irish Regiment of Canada clung to Besanigo Ridge until being relieved by the West Nova Scotia Regiment on September 10. Lieutenant Colonel Bobby Clark was still headquartered in the shell-battered San Andrea church perched on its hilltop. The German gunners on Coriano Ridge enjoyed an excellent prospect over the Irish positions. In the four days that Clark and his headquarters were based in the little white church, the building took forty direct hits. Clark’s intelligence officer, Major Gordon Wood, believed that perhaps “never before [had] a Tactical HQ remained so long in front of the remainder of the battalion.”5 The Irish paid the price in casualties. Wood later remembered “seeing the medical carriers dashing night and day, amid a thick hail of shells, picking up wounded men from the Church and from their trenches.”6

  When relieved, the Irish Regiment marched back to San Giovanni with the knowledge that they were to quickly reorganize, have only a brief rest, and then return to drive the Germans and their guns off Coriano Ridge. Even as his men trudged southward, Clark was at 11th Canadian Infantry Brigade headquarters with the brigade’s other regimental commanders being briefed on the details of the forthcoming attack. The Irish, Perth Regiment, and Cape Breton Highlanders were to go forward on the night of September 12–13.

  On September 10, Leese decided he could wait no longer for V Corps to clear Gemmano Ridge. The deteriorating weather served as a constant reminder that the autumn rains were drawing closer. As if only just noted, Leese declared that “the ground rose gradually inland from the sea, and thus there was always some higher feature on the left flank which interfered with the forward movement of the troops in the coastal sector. I decided,” he later wrote, “to offset this advantage, which the enemy possessed by his occupation of the higher ground, by forcing him to dissipate his fire all along the front.”7 This decision made seizing Gemmano Ridge before attacking Coriano Ridge no longer imperative. It was enough for “V Corps… to keep up the momentum necessary to maintain as many German divisions as possible throughout the battle on their front.”8

  Meanwhile, the Germans on Coriano Ridge were not restricting themselves to merely shelling and mortaring the Canadians placed so clearly on view below them. They took advantage of the lull to bolster their defensive positions. Numerous engineering battalions were withdrawn from sections of the Gothic Line to the west and, along with German and Italian construction battalions, put “under command of [LXXVI] Panzer Corps for the construction of positions in the rear adjoining the main battlefield and for keepin
g the supply lines open. Each day’s delay in the enemy offensive represented a gain of several times that period for the defence. The hard-hit formations could rest and reorganize somewhat; fresh reserves flowed up, and the new positions became stronger.”9

  Burns figured as much. And he was going to deal with the strengthened positions in the time-tested Eighth Army manner by subjecting them to a terrific preponderance of artillery. Every gun in the corps was brought to bear and on September 8 the gunners opened up with concentrations on targets ranging from the Adriatic shore to the ridge. Some were pounded for hours, others only minutes. The intention was to confuse the Germans as to where the inevitable Eighth Army set-piece attack would occur.10 In addition to the corps artillery, Burns had at his disposal four artillery field regiments of the 2nd New Zealand Division and an equal number of regiments from 4th British Infantry Division—all told, seven hundred guns.11

  Once Leese declared his final intentions on September 10, Burns issued his corps plan to his divisional and brigade commanders. Ever one for details, the elaborate plan consisted of eight separate phases. Burns said that his “reasons for this detailed schedule were that our experience after the breakthrough of the Gothic Line showed that we should probably have to fight our way forward against continued and effective enemy opposition. Without careful coordination of the moves of the two divisions [4th British Infantry Division and 1st Canadian Infantry Division] and clear orders as to the objectives they would have to take, control of the operations and momentum could be lost.”12

  Burns was too cold a realist to think the plan would proceed as smoothly as developed on paper. He had carefully studied the maps of the terrain ahead and flown over them, making detailed notes regarding the high ground and key villages that likely served as enemy strongpoints. There was no shortage of possible positions and each must be taken in sequence or the kind of flanking fire that Coriano Ridge made possible would disrupt the advance’s timing. That was why he insisted on such meticulous planning.

  For one who always held his emotions and thoughts close to the chest, Burns made a surprise move by giving an off-the-record briefing to a clutch of newspaper correspondents. To do so, he acknowledged, was to stick his neck out. If the attack failed to go as planned—as likely to occur as not—he might be ridiculed and give Leese and Alexander precisely the ammunition they needed to fire him. Although developments had forced Leese to place British divisions under his control, the two men were never to be friends or even to trust each other. Perhaps due to this briefing of correspondents, Burns’s operational instructions reverberated with the rhetoric favoured by Leese and his predecessor, Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery. Upon capturing Coriano, then forcing a crossing of the Marano River before Ospedaletto village, and then advancing north through San Martino, Burns wrote, the Canadians would “debouch into the Po Valley.”13

  When Major Strome Galloway, the ever skeptical Royal Canadian Regiment second-in-command, read this instruction, he said scornfully: “Debouch into the Po Valley. Crawl more likely.”14

  Over the course of September 11 and 12, Burns spent hours working through the divisional commanders’ battle plans. He also confirmed details with Leese and Keightley in order to ensure everyone agreed on what was to happen the night of September 12–13. Burns was particularly pleased with Major General Bert Hoffmeister, whose plan was “simple and complete.” Presenting his plan on September 11, Hoffmeister confided to Burns that he still wanted the majority of the next day to complete the details and asked for final approval to be withheld until then. Not wanting “another failure or partial success before Coriano,” Burns agreed.15

  Hoffmeister did not doubt that if he attacked with infantry during the night behind the weight of the promised artillery his division would gain a foothold on Coriano Ridge. The problem would come in the morning when the Canadians would face counterattacks supported by armour. To keep from being thrown off the ridge, Hoffmeister must get tanks up on it in time to meet the counterattacks. But Besanigo River’s deep bed, in which Major Howard Keirstead’s tank had been trapped, stood in the way. The Germans had blown all crossings, so 5 CAD’s engineers would have to build a fresh one. And there was no question that the crossing point the engineers had selected as feasible was also so noted by the Germans and would be registered by the German artillery and mortars on the ridge. Bridging Besanigo, Hoffmeister knew, would present the greatest challenge in the fight for the ridge.16

  Otherwise his divisional plan was straightforward. As the British attacked the ridge’s southern end from San Clemente, 11 CIB would cross the Besanigo, push westward up the narrow valley created by the stream, and then mount the slopes of Coriano Ridge. The Cape Breton Highlanders would go for the ridge’s north end on the right, with the Perths five hundred yards to the left. Once both regiments were secure on the ridge, the Irish Regiment would pass through and mop up the village of Coriano. A squadron of 8th Princess Louise New Brunswick Hussars would support each regiment. Waiting in reserve would be the Westminster Regiment with a squadron of the Lord Strathcona’s Horse. This regiment’s other squadrons would be positioned in such a manner that they could serve as mobile, close-range artillery batteries capable of providing continuous fire.17

  WHILE HOFFMEISTER was teeing up the forthcoming attack, his counterpart at 1st Canadian Infantry Division was able to pull his brigades out of the front line for a brief rest on the night of September 8–9, courtesy of the 3rd Greek Mountain Brigade. Although the relief itself proceeded smoothly despite the inevitable language difficulties, the Germans across the Melo River twigged to the fact that a changeover was being undertaken. Probing attacks ensued that resulted in the Greeks suffering an immediate battlefield blooding that left three men dead and sixteen wounded, followed the next night by two killed and ten wounded. Realizing that the Greeks, like the Poles, had no ready source of reinforcements and no significant reserves, Vokes had to cancel the Carleton and York Regiment’s rest period on the night of September 9–10 to shorten the Greek line. At Hoffmeister’s request, he also moved the West Nova Scotia Regiment into the line that night to free 11 CIB’s Irish Regiment from front-line duties in order to allow it to regroup for the forthcoming operation against Coriano Ridge.18

  These regiments aside, the rest of the division did the best they could to enjoy a brief hiatus from front-line duty. The RCR bivouacked around Gradara, and from the castle parapets Galloway enjoyed a view over “the most beautiful stretch of Adriatic coast” he had ever seen.19 The regiments of 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade were set up in Cattolica and despite the occasional German air raid experienced a grand time.

  “Cattolica,” wrote the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada war diarist, “was proving, perhaps, the best rest area the battalion had ever enjoyed.” Lieutenant Colonel Syd Thomson’s headquarters was in a seaside villa, ‘B’ Company was in a somewhat less grand, but pleasant building fifty yards to the north, while the other three companies had set up in the large naval barracks. Although the beach had been heavily mined, engineers had cleared paths through the German defensive barriers and lifted the mines in places so that the soldiers could swim and laze on the soft sand. “It was,” the war diarist enthused, “an ideal place for swimming and this became our main pastime during the ensuing few days.”20

  “Adriatic is beautiful. Sand’s lovely. Whole district evacuated by German orders. Every man gets his own villa to live in. Luxury for a day!” Seaforth Padre Roy Durnford recorded in his personal diary. “Yesterday killing and being killed, dodging from hole to hole, crawling in darkness and danger—today lolling on sands, swimming, lounging!!!”21

  Among those in Cattolica who took advantage of the many abandoned buildings to establish unofficial billets was radio signaller Corporal Jack Haley. He and two others lived briefly in a seaside hotel. They found sheets in cupboards to put on mattresses that were in rooms looking out on the Adriatic. Days were spent swimming or sleeping, an activity always treasured by eternally tired fron
t-line troops.22 Wine was abundant, there were ample food stocks about with which to supplement the normal rations, and, as increasing numbers of civilians returned to reclaim their homes, a little money would get uniforms washed and mended.

  Not all units were blessed with such luxurious quarters as the Seaforths, however. The Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment was assigned to several farms a couple of miles south of Cattolica, where Sergeant Basil Smith of the quartermaster’s section, was billeted in “this damned shed… alive with fleas or chicken lice.” His team spent as much time outside as possible. One day, he oversaw distribution of “an entire half bottle of beer per man.” Smith ruefully noted later that “the officers had a big party tonight on the other half bottle and the rum which the men should have had. In my five years of soldiering this appears to be about the rawest deal yet, fortunately it isn’t public knowledge.”23

  The men were allowed to visit Cattolica’s beaches regularly. “It sure was nice,” Smith wrote after one such visit. “The Adriatic was just the right temperature, the sand was hot, with a lovely fresh breeze blowing in from the sea. It is so peaceful and relaxing that this has really been a treat. A few destroyers blazing away at Rimini, from about ten miles out, some fighters on the roof and a bit of rusted wire along the beach, apart from that you’d never know there was a war on.”24

  But there was a war and it manifested itself almost nightly in the form of Luftwaffe raids on Cattolica. The September 9 raid was particularly fierce. Plaster from the ceilings in the Seaforths’ headquarters villa showered down to cover everything, windows broke, and nearby houses were set alight by incendiary bombs. Durnford found the abrupt disruption of each peaceful day by the “hell of noise and shattering of the night” hard to take. He tried to buoy the men’s spirits by holding nightly singsongs and quizzes with prizes awarded. Then he would spend the time before bed playing dominoes and drinking tea with his friend Lieutenant Wilf Gildersleeve, who was one of the signalling section officers and a man Durnford considered a true Christian.25