The Gothic Line

by Mark Zuehlke

  The two attacks by the Seaforths exacted a heavy toll. Almost one hundred men were killed or wounded in less than twenty-four hours. But still the Seaforths had to swallow the bitter pill of failure.4 And the Loyal Edmontons would have to fight for their start line.

  DOUBTING THAT THE Seaforths could possibly succeed, Loyal Edmonton Regiment commander Lieutenant Colonel Budge Bell-Irving had included a plan to take San Martino in his briefing of company commanders, delivered while the Seaforth attack was underway. Two companies, ‘A’ and ‘C’, would move in battle order towards the village. If the Seaforths held the village, they would simply relieve the other regiment. Alternatively, they would fight their way in and clear San Martino so the other two Edmonton companies could pass un-hindered on the left flank and continue to the Ausa River.5 As the O Group broke up, Bell-Irving walked over to ‘C’ Company commander Captain John Dougan. “This time I’m going to bleed you, Johnny,” he declared in his typical breezy manner.6

  The two companies learned the Seaforths had failed just as they crossed the start line at 0400 hours on September 18 with five tanks of ‘C’ Squadron, 145th Royal Armoured Corps in support. Dawn found the 140 infantrymen overlooking a small valley that lay between their position and San Martino. A typical Italian cemetery surrounded by a stone wall inset with family crypts crowded up against the long slope rising up to the village. Dougan looked over the ground with his binoculars as a stream of Seaforths staggered out of the valley to pass his position. Glancing over at them, Dougan decided they were all “shell-shocked.”7 One said the Germans had at least three self-propelled guns or tanks inside San Martino.

  Dougan and Major David Blair decided that ‘C’ Company would attack on the left with two platoons forward and two tanks in support. Blair’s ‘A’ Company would meanwhile be on the right, but without tanks because the officers wanted the remaining three to take up hull-down positions on the ridgeline and suppress the Germans in San Martino with main-gun fire. Dougan wished they had artillery or other fire support, but none had been offered.8 The captain was uneasy. “To send two companies without a reconnaissance to take an objective that the Seaforths had not been able to take when they were on the ground, and knew the lay of it, seemed a bit impossible,” he said later.9

  Near the cemetery was a line of abandoned trenches that Dougan set as a rally point before his men started the long climb up to San Martino. At 0600 hours, the two companies and two tanks descended the slope. The morning was cloudy, with a cool breeze blowing off the Adriatic.

  The Germans let them reach the slit trenches and “then opened up with a terrific fire. He had the gully absolutely covered—snipers, MGs, a tank on the right, one on the left. His 88’s were firing at almost point-blank range. One section, which almost got into the village, was withered. The remainder of the forward platoons were pinned down.”10

  Dougan’s two supporting tanks, commanded by an Anglo-Burmese lieutenant, rolled past the infantry on the left and started up the hill with guns blazing. Seconds later, both tanks were burning and the lieutenant was among the tankers killed.11

  The German fire intensified, coming “down at a really tremendous rate. The gully was enfiladed from both sides. The defensive fire covered the area to within 150 yards of his positions on the crest.” Dougan called for smoke, “which came down eventually, but the enemy’s fire was so intense that we could not advance. We stayed there from 0600 to 0930 hours, and all that time his fire never let up.”12 At 0900, Blair was killed. ‘A’ Company’s second-in-command dashed over to where Dougan sheltered in one of the trenches. When he told the captain that ‘A’ Company was very hard hit, Dougan decided to use the covering smoke to pull back and reorganize.

  One of Dougan’s platoons, however, was well to the front of the rest of his company. By radio, Lieutenant Keith McGregor told the captain his men were safer remaining in a series of deep German dugouts they had found than trying to withdraw across such a long stretch of open ground. Dougan concurred. It rankled him badly enough to withdraw and to have to do so at great risk of more casualties made the matter all the worse. The captain, who had won a Military Cross in Sicily, had never before failed to capture an objective.

  There was nothing dignified about the withdrawal. When the smoke arrived, everyone just ran towards the ridgeline from which they had advanced almost four hours earlier. Knowing that once men started running, their instinct would be to keep going as far as possible, Dougan sprinted to beat his men to the top. Winning the race, he spun around and started grabbing men, ordering them to assume a defensive position. Many of the soldiers coming in were bleeding from wounds, some were barely able to walk, and others were being dragged along or carried by their mates. Dougan realized then just what a mauling the two companies had suffered.13 ‘C’ Company had fourteen casualties, but ‘A’ Company had forty-four either killed or wounded.14 Including Major Blair, twenty-one men had died.15

  As he finished steadying the men, Major Jim Stone strode up. The Edmontons’ second-in-command lit into Dougan with “a real dressing-down for this disorganized withdrawal.”

  “I think that’s unfair, Sir,” Dougan responded stiffly. “I think we were very fortunate that the withdrawal was stopped here instead of a lot further back.”

  Stone relented slightly. “What happened to you?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” Dougan replied.

  “Then why are you bleeding?”16

  Dougan touched the side of his face and discovered it was covered in blood. A bullet or piece of shrapnel had gashed his forehead and blood was gushing from the wound. Stone ordered Dougan back to the Regimental Aid Post with the other wounded. “Goddamn it, no. I’m mad and I’m staying here,” Dougan snapped.17 Stone shrugged and called the medical officer up to dress Dougan’s wound. Then Stone amalgamated the two companies into one and put Dougan in command of it, with orders to remain on the ridge while a new plan was developed.18

  Bell-Irving and 2 CIB Brigadier Graeme Gibson decided that continued direct assaults on San Martino would only grind the Edmontons up like the Seaforths before them. Instead, they would try bypassing it on the left. While Dougan’s combined company pressured San Martino from the front, ‘B’ and ‘D’ companies would swing to the village’s left and follow either the Carleton and York Regiment or the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. Both of these regiments had set off shortly after dawn with the intention of driving through to the Ausa River.

  THE PPCLI HAD kicked off its attack at 0530 hours on September 18. ‘B’ Company under command of Major Colin McDougall and Major Pat Crofton’s ‘D’ Company were to hook around the end of the narrow spur codenamed Whipcord and push northward. A railroad that bordered the Ausa River’s south bank 1,500 yards away was the objective.19

  On Whipcord itself, the PPCLI’s ‘C’ Company and ‘D’ Company of the Royal 22e Regiment were surprised to find themselves alone. The Germans had withdrawn. At 0640 hours, Major Tony Poulin passed control of the knoll to the PPCLI’s ‘A’ Company and marched the twenty-two men he had left back to the Van Doos’ lines. From the base of the ridge, Poulin looked up at the “still smoking” summit that had cost so much blood to take and hold. “What the hell for?” he wondered.20

  The strategic answer was: to enable the PPCLI to perform precisely the manoeuvre it was now making. Had the two companies been exposed to German fire from Whipcord, the attack would have crumbled as surely as had those struck in the flank from San Martino. As it was, the PPCLI reached the western corner of the narrow spur unmolested. The moment the two companies turned that corner and struck northward at 0700 hours, however, they came into view of the German guns on San Martino Ridge’s reverse slope. Crofton thought it was as if “the Germans threw every shell they had left at us.”21 McDougall’s company was out front, with ‘D’ Company following. Explosions sent men flying and hissing shrapnel cut down others.

  The Shermans and Churchills of the 145th Royal Armoured Corps’s ‘B’ Squadron mired in
the thickly overgrown, rough terrain and fell far behind the infantry. McDougall and Crofton knew the best way to escape the shelling from San Martino was to get in among the Germans defending the Ausa River, so they urged their men to greater haste and let those who fell lie. At 0800 hours, the small force broke into a line of trees riddled with abandoned slit trenches and tumbled into them for cover. But the Germans had zeroed in the trenches and the shellfire directed their way only fell with more deadly accuracy.22

  Seeing that the tanks were still coming on, the company commanders ordered the men to sit tight despite the shellfire so the armour could catch up. When Crofton returned from conferring with McDougall, he found the decision had resulted in several of his men being killed in the trenches and many others wounded.23

  Any likelihood of the tanks reaching the infantry ended at 0920 hours when several well-concealed antitank guns ripped into them. The squadron commander’s tank went up in flames and he was killed. With the tanks dying behind them and the two companies having lost about fifty per cent of their strength, Crofton and McDougall decided their only course was to run for the objective while they still had some men left. The soldiers dashed through a rain of artillery fire until reaching a brick building into which everyone piled for cover. A German tank could be heard grinding back and forth somewhere nearby. Crofton flopped down on a chair next to where McDougall was braced against the wall and the two officers started discussing how to reach the railroad with enough men still alive to take the objective.

  There was a hellish crash overhead and a tank shell sliced through the roof and caromed into the wall right behind Crofton. Shrapnel flew around the room and a chunk of steel or masonry struck Crofton in the back of the head.24 When he regained consciousness a few minutes later, Crofton had such a terrific headache and was so dizzy that McDougall told him to wait in the building for evacuation. There were so few men left in either company, McDougall said, that he could easily command them all.

  At 1010 hours, McDougall led the sixty remaining combat effectives through to the railroad and a short distance past it to the cover of a ditch. From across the Ausa, Germans on the river’s opposite shore opened up with antitank guns and machine guns. Several times over the next few hours, the Germans massed around the tiny force, but McDougall scattered them with artillery fire before a counterattack could be launched.

  Meanwhile, a major effort to rescue the wounded strewn along the line of advance was underway. Under the watchful eyes and guns of the scout platoon, whose snipers were particularly vigilant, stretcher-bearers carried the wounded back to Whipcord. Here, they were loaded onto half-tracks and the regiment’s ambulances for shuttling to a Regimental Aid Post set up in the Palazzo des Vergers. Crofton was among the evacuated, but his wound proved only minor and after being bandaged up he returned to duty.

  At nightfall, the antitank and medium machine-gun platoons filtered through to shore up ‘B’ and ‘D’ companies. Several tanks arrived at 2230 hours. With the PPCLI on the Ausa River, the flank of San Martino was finally turned. Their casualties totalled seven dead and fifty-five wounded.25

  THE PPCLI WERE NOT the only Canadians to reach the Ausa River that day. About 1,500 yards to the left, the Carleton and York Regiment’s ‘A’ Company started digging in on the south bank at 0800 hours. In fact, ‘A’ and ‘C’ companies, which together had led the regiment’s attack, moved so quickly at first that they overtook the supporting fire several times and were shelled by their own artillery or bombed by Kittyhawks. Fortunately, only a few casualties resulted.26

  The artillery and aerial support provided for the Carleton and York attack was extensive—the result of their being on the boundary line between the operational areas of 1st Canadian Infantry Division and 4th British Infantry Division. The latter division was receiving massive support from Eighth Army’s gunners and the Desert Air Force to enable it to push through the rugged, highly defensible terrain of the foothill country. Some of this fire was easily slopped over to support the Canadian regiment.

  September 18 saw the culmination of a terrific gun battle between Eighth Army and the Germans defending the Rimini Line. The gunfor-gun ratio between the Germans and Allies here during the past five days had been virtually equal—an unusual situation because normally Tenth Army was greatly outgunned. But Kesselring had shifted every available artillery piece to the Adriatic, along with sufficient ammunition to keep them firing. The Germans routinely fired in excess of eleven thousand rounds each of these five days, a weight of fire just slightly lower than that of Eighth Army.

  Tenth Army could not, however, match the Allies in air superiority or even challenge the Desert Air Force during the daytime. Allied flyers launched hundreds of strikes against San Fortunato Ridge and other parts of the German line. On September 18, the attacks on San Fortunato rose to a crescendo of 486 strikes by 24 light bombers, 228 medium bombers, and 234 fighter-bombers. Fighter-bombers alone dumped 128 tons of ordnance on the ridge. Tenth Army Chief of Staff Generalmajor Friedrich Wentzell reported that the massive Allied bombing of the ridge made it impossible for the German gunners to man their weapons. “And when the artillery is silenced fighting becomes a murderous mess,” he complained.27

  Despite the intensity of the fire that had backed up the two Carleton and York companies, they still found it impossible to cross the river because the Germans were holding in strength on the other side from fortified gun pits. With four of their six 12th Royal Tank Regiment tanks lost en route to mechanical breakdowns, one of the survivors was knocked out by an antitank gun just as it reached the riverbank. Crossing the river without help from an engineering unit was going to be impossible for any tanks because the wide streambed was cut down the centre by a steeply banked channel that formed a perfect tank obstacle.

  Considering the Carleton and York Regiment safely on their objective, 1 Canadian Corps headquarters staff redirected the artillery and aerial cover back to 4th British Infantry Division. The German spotters on San Fortunato and San Martino crawled out of their holes, the gunners returned to their guns, and soon mortar and artillery fire began to rain down on the New Brunswick regiment. The resulting casualties were relatively light—six men killed and twenty wounded. At 1110 hours, the company commanders reported there were at least six tanks and many machine-gun positions ready to oppose any crossing. Major Jack Ensor estimated that the other riverbank “could not be cleared without 75 per cent casualties.”28

  But such a crossing was necessary, 3 CIB commander Lieutenant Colonel Pat Bogert told Ensor, in order to open the way for the assault on San Fortunato Ridge. Ensor replied that a daylight attack would “be suicidal alike for the infantry and for the sappers who would have to prepare the crossing.”29 Accepting Ensor’s evaluation, Bogert ordered an attack just after nightfall and the construction of suitable tank crossings completed before dawn. Bogert promised heavy preparatory artillery fire to suppress the Germans holding the other riverbank.30

  DESPITE THE CARLETON and York and PPCLI regiments reaching the Ausa on September 18, on the coastal plain between Rimini airfield and San Martino the 48th Highlanders of Canada and the Royal Canadian Regiment won only the slightest of advances. The Highlanders came face to face with a Panzerturm hidden in a farmhouse just three hundred yards from their front lines and no amount of artillery or mortar fire could silence the long-barrelled 75-millimetre Panther gun. The Highlanders hugged the ground out front of the gun and waited for nightfall.31

  In the RCR sector, heavy casualties and the growing exhaustion of the men combined to hamper offensive operations. ‘C’ Company commander Major Rick Forgrave was so worn out, Lieutenant Colonel Jim Ritchie ordered him to take a forty-eight-hour rest. The officer walked back to regimental headquarters to spend the evening and get cleaned up before leaving for the rear the next morning.32 Combining what was left of ‘C’ Company with his own ‘A’ Company, commander Captain J. Milton Gregg still had fewer men than would normally form a single company.

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p; But Gregg detected a certain loosening ahead, and soon after a platoon under Lieutenant A.D. Egan captured a stone house the Germans had previously held with ferocious determination. Although the paratroopers counterattacked and wounded several of Egan’s men, the platoon clung on until Gregg was able to reinforce them with the rest of his men.33

  Meanwhile, Lieutenant Jimmy Quayle and his surviving scouts prowled the front, attempting to cause mayhem by sniping at the German positions. Quayle was creeping along the edge of Rimini airfield when a mortar bomb went off nearby. Metal fragments embedded his left leg and cut his forehead. “Apart from a slight limp, and some dramatic dried blood on my forehead,” he later wrote, “I had no problems.” Quayle refused evacuation not so much out of devotion to duty as out of fear of losing his special belongings, “particularly souvenirs like excellent German binoculars, a Luger pistol, a P-38 pistol and an Iron Cross. Theoretically your kit followed you back to hospital, but in practice it usually disappeared.”34

  As evening approached, RCR adjutant Captain Ted Shuter assumed temporary command of the regiment so that both the exhausted Ritchie and his second-in-command Major Strome Galloway could get some rest during what was anticipated to be an uneventful night. Radio traffic, which for many days and nights had been virtually constant and full of reports of desperate battle, suddenly hushed.35 Wondering if the lack of activity might indicate that the paratroops were withdrawing, Shuter radioed Gregg at 2300 hours and asked that he send out a patrol. Gregg reported back at 0300 hours that the patrol had gone well forward without finding any enemy.36

  Excited now, Shuter told Gregg to go as far forward with his entire company as possible before dawn. He then woke Ritchie and reported his actions. The lieutenant colonel grunted a couple of times by way of response and Shuter took this to mean his orders were endorsed.37