The Gothic Line
Page 40
Van Doo patrols were soon stumbling on pockets of Germans dug in well south of the river. Then divisional intelligence gave Allard a map detailing “the new German layout north of the river, and it was hardly encouraging.”10 Allard considered delaying the attack to arrange artillery support. “If I were to launch this attack,” he wrote later, “I could expect the worst. However, I had unbounded confidence in the quality of my officers and men and, in point of fact, no other choice; I therefore decided to go ahead.”11
Major Tony Poulin’s ‘D’ Company would lead the way to the river, with ‘A’ Company under Major Henri Tellier following. By dawn, the two companies were to have secured a bridgehead through which ‘C’ Company and ‘A’ Squadron of the 12th Royal Tank Regiment would pass to advance on the high ground east of San Lorenzo in Corregiano.12
Using the intelligence map, Allard had time before the attack to target forty-two likely machine-gun and mortar positions for possible counter-battery artillery fire. He told Poulin that, if his advance was contested at these points, he should radio in the coordinates and the artillery would immediately hit the Germans there. Skeptical that the silent night attack could succeed, Poulin took some heart in this news.
At 0345 hours on September 14, Poulin and his seventy-five men headed into the pitch-black night. The river lay two thousand yards away and the major hoped to reach it by following a narrow farm track. Reading his compass in the dark was impossible without the aid of a flashlight, but that would both destroy his night vision and betray the company’s presence. He could only hope the track, which snaked through a series of ravines choked with thorns that snagged clothing and cut exposed flesh, went where the map said it did.
The company had just started out when someone tripped a flare that popped gently up into the night with a soft whistle and burst whitely overhead. Everyone froze, hoping to escape detection. It didn’t help. The Germans had the coordinates of their flare traps marked on maps and responded immediately with fragmentation shells set for airbursts that exploded right above the French Canadians.13
“Shrapnel came down like razor blades,” Poulin recalled later. Men ducked to escape the deadly rain, tore through thickets, and then found themselves lost and disoriented. Corporals tried frantically to keep the five or six men in their sections together, while lieutenants had three times that number to keep under control in the platoons, and Poulin “was just going crazy trying to maintain some order” in the company.14
He yelled into the radio, “Give me the artillery!” Allard apologized. The counter-battery program had been cancelled, with the guns shifted to other priority targets. “The Poor Blood Infantry alone as usual,” Poulin muttered, but he also realized that “some sticky situation had likely come up elsewhere and the divisional commander had decided it was more important than my little sideshow. Accordingly, he had swung his artillery away from us. Should my advance and the subsequent attack be cancelled? As a lowly company commander of some seventy-five men at the time, I knew very little of what was going on within the companies of my own unit, let alone what was happening at brigade or divisional level.” This, he knew, was the true “fog of war.”15 And all a company commander could do was carry on.
By the time ‘D’ Company escaped from the killing zone, Poulin and his officers had the men back under control. Two platoons were out front, followed immediately by Poulin’s headquarters section and then the reserve platoon. They were almost at the river when a machine gun tore into the leading platoons, which immediately veered off the track to attack the position in a two-pronged assault. To Poulin, it seemed the men ahead of him just evaporated into the dense foliage. A firefight broke out somewhere in the brush, but he was unable to see muzzle flashes or use the echoing sounds of the gunfire to fix the location. Rather than blunder off into the brush with the rest of his men, Poulin trudged doggedly on down the track towards the river. It was about 0400 hours. In barely fifteen minutes, a company-scale attack had deteriorated into what Poulin considered the normal confusion of night combat.
It got worse. By the time Poulin reached the river, he had only his two-man headquarters section beside him. Then to his relief, the reserve platoon slipped out of the darkness. Fifteen minutes later, Major Tellier and his runner arrived. Tellier’s company had been advancing by platoons in a long string down the track when the shellfire that had bracketed ‘D’ Company also set several haystacks on either side of his men on fire. Knowing the light from the fires would silhouette his men as they passed, Tellier swung right of the track to use the cover of the brush there to safely bypass the haystacks. This brought ‘A’ Company in range of a German machine-gun position, which allowed the first two platoons by and then ambushed the reserve No. 7 Platoon. Two section commanders and the platoon’s sergeant had been killed, leaving only its commander and a wounded corporal in control of just ten men. The platoon went to ground and Tellier lost contact with them. He had no idea where they were and knew only that the ground through which his company was moving was lousy with Germans who were not supposed to be there.16
Tellier left Poulin to search for his lost men and returned a few minutes later with two platoons. But his reserve platoon and two of Poulin’s platoons remained missing. Between them, ‘D’ and ‘A’ Company effectively mustered the strength of one company, less, of course, the normal deficiency that habitually sent companies into battle with seventy to eighty men.17 Waiting for the missing men to show up was not an option, the two officers decided, as their position was being relentlessly mortared and sniped at from the opposite shore.
At 0610, the little force dashed through the virtually dry riverbed and pressed against the opposite bank directly below a stand of tall poplar trees just visible in the predawn light. They were two hundred yards from the initial objective of a road parallelling the river. Deciding to secure the road and hold it until the tanks and ‘C’ Company could come through, the two majors moved out, with Tellier’s two platoons forward and Poulin’s forming the reserve. While Tellier’s left-hand platoon got through, a machine-gun position blocked the one to the right. When the platoon commander charged the gun with his leading section, they were all killed. Meanwhile, the left-hand platoon was caught on the road by two German tanks and, lacking PIATs, desperately tried to find cover from the machine-gun and high-explosive fire ripping through its ranks. Tellier ordered a retreat to the riverbed.18
Poulin was delighted to find his two lost platoons back at the riverbank. But Tellier had lost about forty men killed or wounded, so the Van Doos still had fewer than one hundred men across the Marano River at 0800 hours when hell suddenly broke loose overhead in the form of an 88-millimetre gun firing right down its barrel at them.19 Each German shell exploded in a great flash of orange and red as it struck the poplar branches and trunks, spraying the men below with shards of wood and steel shrapnel. Eleven shells hammered into the trees directly over Poulin’s head and as the hard concussion from each blast crushed down upon him, the major was each time rendered momentarily senseless. The thick stench of cordite was nauseating. Poulin and the others grimly hunkered in their holes, screaming into the radios for reinforcement.20
When help arrived, in the form of Tellier’s reserve platoon and a troop from 12 RTR’s ‘A’ Squadron, on the south bank at 0900 hours, no suitable crossing for the Shermans could be found. Engineers rushed a Sherman bulldozer to the site, however, and twenty-five minutes later three tanks moved across the river. One quickly suppressed the 88-millimetre gun by shelling its approximate location. This enabled Tellier to evacuate his wounded to where jeeps waited across the river.21
Poulin, meanwhile, was able to establish radio contact with Allard via a static-garbled link and provide the lieutenant colonel with the gun’s approximate coordinates. At 0948, following some hasty work by Allard, Canadian 25-pounders laid down a heavy concentration on the locations pinpointed by Poulin—mangling the gun.
A few minutes later, the rest of ‘A’ Squadron’s operable Sh
ermans arrived, boosting tank strength to seven and prompting the Germans to try smashing them with a concentration of shells from a devastatingly powerful 15.5-centimetre artillery piece. This fire was accompanied by the shrieking screams of incoming rounds fired by two Nebelwerfers. Casualties mounted. At 1010, Poulin’s radio went off the air. Allard switched over to the tank squadron commander’s net to regain contact to the bridgehead, and sent the scout platoon to bolster the infantry. Then Tellier, whose radio had been malfunctioning, suddenly came up on the air shouting that further advance was impossible and a Panther Mark V was bearing down on his position.22
The Van Doo commander restlessly paced his headquarters, trying to find a way to improve the perilous situation. There were, he thought, two options: “fall back and try again the next day or risk everything with a very slight chance of success.” Allard fretted, trying to weigh the merit of each option, and hoped to hear soon that the West Nova Scotia Regiment had won a river crossing that would force the Germans to shift some of the pressure off his men. But the West Novas reported being badly bogged down well short of the river.23
Then Tellier’s radio kicked back on momentarily at 1144, with the officer anxiously reporting ‘A’ Company “surrounded by the enemy” and requesting immediate reinforcement.24 When Allard pressed the tank commander for details, he was told, “things are uncomfortable but can hold for awhile.”25 He decided that “the situation would be no better the next day, that I could not risk leaving ‘A’ and ‘D’ alone all night at the mercy of possible counterattacks, and that, after all, since the road was open, a breakthrough towards the northwest might still be possible. The best choice appeared to be an attack.”26
Allard’s two remaining rifle company commanders had been loitering impatiently outside his headquarters for instructions, so he called them in and ordered an attack at 1400 hours to the left of the current lodgement across the Marano River. Two tank troops and the regiment’s Bren carrier platoon would be in support and artillery would provide covering fire in the form of a mixture of smoke and high-explosive shells.
Precisely on the hour, Captain Côme Simard led ‘B’ Company towards the river with Major Fernand Trudeau’s ‘C’ Company behind. Simard’s men advanced in an arrowhead formation, with Trudeau’s company similarly spread out behind in order to protect the flanks and rear. The attack caught the Germans, who had shifted their strength to block ‘A’ and ‘D’ companies, off balance and the fresh Van Doo force punched out for a crossroads about a mile north of the river rather than trying to link up with the embattled two companies. Forced to pull men away from Poulin and Tellier, the Germans lost the initiative. Although antitank guns knocked out two of the tanks, the crossroads was taken at 1632 hours. Trudeau yelled into his radio that they could not “go further forward until someone else moves on to the ridge. Left flank is exposed.”27
THAT SOMEONE should have been the West Nova Scotia Regiment, tasked with clearing San Lorenzo. Until this small gathering of stone buildings clustered around a stone church was secured, the Van Doos were stuck. But, as Lieutenant Colonel Danby had predicted, things had not gone well for the West Novas. At 0300 hours, ‘A’ and ‘B’ companies had headed for the riverbank and spent the first two hours making slow progress through confusing terrain. Well short of the river, the two companies had “encountered heavy resistance, which included small-arms fire, mortars, shelling, and [self-propelled] guns” at 0500 hours.28 Positioned inside several wrecked houses, the SPGs were well protected from artillery fire.
Hoping to break the impasse, Lieutenant Colonel Ron Waterman pushed his other two rifle companies up and by daybreak—when ‘C’ Squadron of the 12th Royal Tank Regiment joined the fray—a tangled, confused firefight raged. From his tactical headquarters, Waterman could see dust and smoke rising from the battleground as both Canadian and German artillery pounded the battlefield. Leaving his intelligence officer in charge of communications, Waterman walked out into the smoke, eventually made contact with his company commanders, and, by 0900 hours, had reorganized the attack. He then ordered his tactical headquarters section to meet him at a farmhouse in the middle of the battlefield and set up shop there.
The regimental commander’s intervention had the desired effect and at 1000 hours, ‘D’ Company, under Captain W.H.P. David, entered into a house-to-house fight with bayonets, grenades, and machine guns for control of a small hamlet blocking the route of advance. Fifteen minutes later, it was in Canadian hands. But resistance remained fierce, to the point that when 3rd Canadian Infantry Brigade commander Brigadier Pat Bogert appeared at Waterman’s farmhouse he was “greeted by a hail of enemy bullets and shells,” as poignant explanation for the regiment’s slow advance.29
Then suddenly the resistance eased and the forward pace accelerated. At 1300 hours, when Captain J.H. Jones’s ‘B’ Company reached the river, the officer was stunned to see a bridge still spanning its banks. Lieutenant G.M. Hebb dashed out and tore the wires from demolition charges placed on the bridge before the Germans could react and set them off. Capturing a bridge intact was almost unheard of in Italy, but this day ‘B’ Company rushed over it by platoons and quickly dug in on the opposite bank.30
Ahead, the rising slope leading to San Lorenzo crossed recently harvested grain fields broken in small pockets by olive groves. The leaves of the trees had been stripped away by the force of shell blasts. Although the earlier fighting had cost ‘C’ Squadron many of its tanks, the British tankers did not hesitate to follow ‘D’ Company out into this barren ground for a blood-soaked climb towards the village. The infantry leaned into an ever increasing hail of small-arms fire and shrapnel thrown by exploding mortar rounds while antitank guns picked off the tanks.
When ‘D’ Company reached the village at 1500 hours, not a single tank remained and Captain David knew his company would be destroyed if it ventured on alone. He withdrew eight hundred yards to a fold and started digging in while Waterman requested another tank squadron to renew the attack.31 Back at brigade headquarters, Bogert had no idea that Waterman had requested and subsequently believed he was going to receive more tank support, for no tanks were available.32
After a four-hour wait and no appearance by the phantom tanks, Waterman sent ‘B’ Company up on ‘D’ Company’s left for a direct assault on San Lorenzo. Although the infantry got right up to the village, the attack stalled at 1940 hours. Waterman radioed Bogert with the puzzling report that his men were “rallying around” San Lorenzo.33 Twenty minutes later, he informed Bogert that the entire regiment was retiring to concentrate near the river and that the village “was strongly held and that to capture it a carefully coordinated plan would be necessary.”34
Just before midnight, Waterman advised an increasingly baffled Bogert that the attack could not possibly be renewed before 0500 hours on September 15. With Vokes urging him to get the advance moving, Bogert ordered Waterman to kick off the attack no later than 0200 hours. After a bit of dickering, this was finally pushed back to 0330 hours.35 By the time this conversation concluded, the West Novas’ support company had arrived among the infantry companies with trucks and half-tracks bearing the mortar and antitank platoons, ammunition, and, most welcome of all, the cookhouse. The cooks whipped up a hot meal.
“All ranks are now very tired,” one West Nova after-action report recorded, “and, as a result of the fierce fighting, casualties were numerous and the fighting strength of the companies is dangerously low. However, we were told that as soon as the tanks arrive we will push on to our original objectives.”36
HAVING WAITED in vain for the West Novas to eliminate the threat to his left flank, Allard arrayed the depleted Van Doos to hold the ground won. He brought Tellier’s ‘A’ Company up from the river to provide security for his tactical headquarters, which he set up in a battered shack immediately behind ‘B’ and ‘C’ companies, and left ‘D’ Company holding the river crossing. Tellier sent a tank-hunting patrol out armed with PIATs to knock out some tanks lurking o
n the flanks, but it soon returned empty-handed. Everyone settled down in their slit trenches and broke out their hard rations. Allard planned to renew the attack at 0430 hours, with the next objective being Palazzo des Vergers, a massive seven-hundred-room palace with a high roofline that commanded the surrounding country.37
Both Allard and Royal Canadian Horse Artillery Forward Observation Officer Major George “Duff” Mitchell were too on edge to sleep, so they kept refining the regiment’s dispositions to use the reduced ranks to maximum advantage. This led to Allard ordering Poulin to pull his company off the riverbank just before midnight and to bring it up to the tactical headquarters. Poulin was still being sniped and machine-gunned from his flanks and worried that his leaving would leave these German forces free to retake the river crossing. “If they don’t have anyone to fight, they’ll have to pull out,” Allard argued.38
Although doubtful, Poulin did as ordered and was surprised when the Germans withdrew rather than seizing the crossing. Meanwhile, an equally worried Bogert sought and received permission from 1 CIB headquarters to draw a company from its nearby Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment supported by a squadron of the 48th Royal Tank Regiment to cover the crossing. Even though this improved the situation, Allard remained sleepless. So, too, did Bogert, who soon asked Allard if the Van Doos might assist the West Novas’ morning attack on San Lorenzo. Allard replied that his position was “so precarious” he could not “take risks in that direction.”39 Looking up from where he had been restlessly trying to nap, Mitchell offered to direct artillery fire against the village. Except for that, Allard said, “the West Nova Scotias [will] have to take care of themselves.”40 When Bogert reminded Allard that he was to take the Palazzo and then the village of San Martino beyond, Allard declared he had insufficient strength for the latter phase because the supporting ‘A’ Squadron of the 12 RTR was too badly chewed up.41 Bogert promised that he would be reinforced at dawn by a mixed force of Shermans and Churchills from the 48 RTR’s ‘A’ Squadron.42