by Mark Zuehlke
Despite Vokes’s rough exterior and unsophisticated manner, Hoffmeister considered the man a competent commander. He also genuinely liked the veteran soldier whom many considered a disagreeable and coarse bully. The two had worked well together within 2 CIB, and Hoffmeister had no doubt that both he and Vokes were up to handling their new jobs.
The question of Hoffmeister’s competency was undisputed in the ranks of 1st Canadian Infantry Division. Soldiering ran in his blood. The Hoffmeister family had been military for generations. The man the soldiers of the Seaforth regiment affectionately nicknamed “Hoffy” had joined the regiment as a cadet in Vancouver when he was only eleven years old. By the time he was sixteen, Hoffmeister was cadet commander. In 1937 he became a commander in the regular regiment. In October 1942, following a staff training course, Hoffmeister had been promoted to lieutenant colonel and had assumed command of the Seaforths. In Sicily, and during the early months of the Italian campaign, Hoffmeister had proven himself to be a top-notch battalion commander and a fearless leader.9 Major Thomas de Faye, who commanded the Saskatoon Light Infantry company that provided heavy weapons support to 2 CIB, thought Hoffmeister undoubtedly the most talented battalion commander in the Canadian army. Within days of Hoffmeister’s assuming command of the brigade, de Faye thought him the army’s best brigade commander as well. “Not only a very brave soldier, but also a compassionate man,” de Faye said of him.10
The major was less impressed with Vokes, whom he had worked alongside when the red-haired brigadier had commanded 2 CIB. Adequate, de Faye commented: “A tough old bird, great boxer, tall, wide, and built like a bulldog, which also summed up his personality perfectly.” Before the war, Vokes had served as district engineer officer of Military District No. 3 at Kingston and had been in charge of building Dundurn Military Camp with relief camp labour. Faced with a hostile labour force, Vokes had gained their respect and cooperation by offering to take any of the unemployed young men out behind the barracks for a boxing match. None took him up on the offer. Merely an adequate leader Vokes might be, but de Faye respected the man’s courage and figured that guts was what it took to lead soldiers effectively during war.11
Although de Faye and some other officers in the division were not overly confident in Vokes’s command ability, he was generally well regarded by the troops. Twenty-six-year-old Private Elwyn R. Springsteel, serving in No. 18 Platoon of the Loyal Edmonton’s ‘D’ Company, was always glad when Vokes came up to visit upon the regiment one of his short, sharp speeches. Most of the time when Vokes arrived Springsteel and the other men would be paraded in full kit with packs on their backs, rifles strapped over their shoulders, helmets on their heads. Vokes would always immediately order the men to sit down and take off the tin hats. “I want to be able to really see you,” he would say as the men settled comfortably before him.12
Lieutenant Don Smith of ‘B’ Company, Carleton and York Regiment, shared de Faye’s contention that Vokes was merely competent as divisional commander, but he also found the major general’s habit of imitating Montgomery irritating, especially the way Vokes insisted on swishing around his horsetail swagger stick. When he dropped in to visit the troops, he would always tell the officers to have the men “gather round the jeep” in an affected accent that sounded much like Monty, crisp and haughty. Usually he called such sessions immediately prior to the troops’ going into battle and would end his brief address with the same words — “Go in there and kick ’em in the crotch.” It was a line the men loved.13
Regardless of their opinion of Vokes, officers and men alike were glad that he was a Canadian — even if he did affect British mannerisms. Loyal Edmonton Lieutenant John Dougan, a platoon commander in the same company as Private Springsteel, had first seen Vokes when the regiment was going into an attack in Sicily. Vokes was standing on the side of the road talking to the men as they passed, giving them encouragement. Later the twenty-two-year-old officer realized that Vokes might not be the best divisional commander ever, but he and most of the men he knew would rather have an average Canadian commander than the best commander the British could offer. Dougan was proud to serve in an all-Canadian division where all the senior officers were also Canadians, which was not the case in World War I. He thought that most of the other young line officers and the troops they commanded felt the same. Not a soldier in the division, Dougan believed, would put up with any sharp criticism of those officers’ abilities — particularly from anyone not asked to risk their lives in response to their command.14
Dougan and every other officer in 1st Canadian Infantry Division knew Vokes now faced his most difficult command challenge to date. Becoming divisional commander had come as something of a shock to Vokes, who was only second senior officer at the time. Brigadier Howard Penhale, commander of the 3rd Canadian Infantry Brigade, was senior to him. By tradition, when Simonds was relieved, divisional command should have fallen upon Penhale. Overweight, and a veteran of World War I, Penhale lacked Vokes’s inarguable command presence, but that seemed insufficient reason for Vokes to be promoted over him. Vokes never learned why command fell his way. But shortly after his appointment to major general was confirmed as a permanent promotion in November, Vokes quietly shuffled Penhale out of the division. He gave Penhale’s command to Brigadier Graeme Gibson, just transferred from England to Italy. He told the new brigadier it was his job to turn around what he considered the worstrun brigade in the division.15
Vokes’s first major challenge was to quickly move the whole division about fifty miles from the Campobasso area to a rallying point at Termoli, and then another twenty miles up the coast to the south of the Sangro River’s mouth. Given the dreadful condition of the roads in the region, it was a daunting task. During the first four days of December, 1st Canadian Infantry Division was to complete the move in its entirety. This included pulling the 3rd Canadian Infantry Brigade out of front-line positions in the upper Sangro River region near the base of the Apennines. Approximately 15,000 soldiers travelling in hundreds of vehicles started the difficult process at 0700 hours when 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade climbed into their vehicles and set off under a clear cold sky to pass through Campobasso and descend to the coast.
By early afternoon, 2 CIB had begun jockeying to crossroads and finding the snaking road that led from the mountains to Termoli plugged with 1 CIB and its supporting artillery vehicles. Formed up in a column in the twisted streets of the village of Busso, the PPCLI stared out at a seemingly endless line of vehicles rumbling past on the main road. At 1500 hours the road was still clogged with a solid traffic jam and the regiment’s officers started muttering among themselves, wondering how in hell they would be able to cross the assigned start point as scheduled at 1530 hours. To their amazement, precisely as the minute hands of their watches ticked to the appointed moment of departure, the roads suddenly cleared and “the unit rolled on to the road dead on time.”16 So it went for all the battalions of the two brigades moving out of the Campobasso region that day.
Although the descent from the mountains to the coast proceeded in orderly fashion, this proved not to be the case once the division exited the mountain road at Termoli and entered Highway 16 — the coastal highway that provided virtually the sole supply and transportation route for the entire Eighth Army. Here they joined the long, winding column of vehicles from various divisions all advancing toward the Sangro River at about the pace of an ox cart. Quartermaster Sergeant Basil Smith of the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment of 1 CIB had been happily enjoying the views as the column approached the coastal highway. No sooner had they managed to slip into the northward-moving stream of traffic, however, than a gale whipped up off the Adriatic and lashed the column with freezing rain. Smith scribbled in his diary: “The roads are damnably slippery, bridges are washed out up ahead and there is mile upon mile of transport, going both ways, lined up bumper to tailgate, this convoy is a driver’s nightmare. Spent most of the night on the road, tried to grab a few winks of shut-eye but eve
ry time either Breakenridge (my driver) or myself dozed off, a limey red-cap would waken us, to proceed another fifty yards, or less. These red-caps certainly took a volume of abuse tonight, poor devils. We were at least in the cab of a truck, but they were out in the weather, trying to do a job. Finally pulled up into a field, about ten miles south of Vasto at 0200 hours of the 2nd and flopped in the seat until dawn.”17
2
WAITING, WAITING, ALWAYS BLOODY WAITING
FIRST Canadian Infantry Brigade dropped out of the column south of the Sangro in the early morning hours of December 2, while 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade continued to lurch forward in the midst of the endless flow to a position close to the river. Here, the infantry climbed down from the back of their trucks, shouldered field packs and weapons, and marched to footbridges slung by the engineering crews across the Sangro. With the vehicles all jammed before the single pontoon bridge the British had got over the river, the infantry would make better time on foot and the battalions of the British 78th Division were up ahead waiting to be relieved. With few complaints, the men accepted the march forward in the rain with a stoicism born of months of forced marches up and down the rugged terrain of southern Italy. Vokes described the march of his soldiers as “a shuffle and the only resemblance to marching was that they shuffled along in step. It ate up the miles with the least expenditure of energy. It was almost as if each soldier were praying: ‘Lord, you pick ’em up and I’ll lay ’em down.’ Soldiers on campaign are always tired.”1
The infantry would have said none were more tired than themselves. While the gunners of the artillery regiments, the tankers of the armoured regiments, the engineers, and the many soldiers who constituted the Royal Canadian Army Service corps moved forward with an array of motorized transport, the infantry line units walked as often as they rode. They walked the sharp end at the front of this long, winding column, and they carried the weapons that an infantry company required to fight the enemy up close. The commanders might define war in terms of corps, divisional, brigade, and battalion manoeuvres, but for the infantryman, survival rested on his mates in the platoon and, above that, in the company. On paper, thirty-five men and one officer to a platoon. The reality since Sicily was that most platoons numbered barely twenty due to losses caused by illness, and the killed and wounded who had not yet been replaced. Reinforcements arrived in a continuous trickle that was never sufficient to bring the ranks to full strength.
The infantryman’s primary weapon differed little from that his father might have carried in the trenches at Ypres, on the Somme, before Vimy, or during the slaughter of Passchendaele: Lee Enfield Rifle, No. 4, Mark 1. The fastest-operating bolt-action rifle in the world, which, in the hands of a trained soldier, could pump out ten rounds of .303 ammunition a minute loaded into the gun in box magazines. Weighing 9.06 pounds empty, the rifle was simply a slightly updated version of the same weapon that had been standard equipment for British and Commonwealth troops since its introduction on November 11, 1895.2
Unlike his father, a Canadian soldier in 1943 might also carry a Thompson submachine gun or a Bren light machine gun. Every platoon had at least one two-man crew armed with a Bren. With an empty weight of 22.38 pounds, this air-cooled, gas-operated gun was considered one of the most reliable and finest light machine guns made during the war, far superior to the American Browning M1919A6 (commonly known as the BAR) and a match for those carried by the Germans. The normal rate of fire from the Bren’s thirty-round distinctively curved magazine was five bursts of four or five rounds a minute. It was generally fired from a prone position with the barrel resting on a bipod, the gun tucked into the firing man’s shoulder, the assistant crouching nearby to provide fresh clips as the one in use emptied. A good firing team could put out 150 rounds a minute in measured bursts or 500 on full automatic.3
Officers and troops alike were fond of the Thompson submachine gun, especially for close-up fighting where its short firing range was irrelevant. The troops of the Eighth Army considered the Thompson about the only weapon the Americans designed and manufactured that was worth the money paid. Its only drawbacks were that it was a heavy clunker, weighing 10.62 pounds empty, and that it fired .45-calibre ammunition, whereas the Lee Enfield and Bren both conveniently shared the same ammunition. Because its ammunition was, however, heavier than just about any other used on the battlefield, the Thompson proved devastating when its bullets hit a target. An enemy soldier struck by a .45 slug from a Thompson usually went down and stayed down, either dead, dying, or badly wounded.4
When the Canadians had been preparing to deploy to Sicily, they had been provided with some 9-millimetre Sten submachine guns, a British-designed weapon that was stamped out like metal cookies from a cutter. Inexpensive to make and popular with the commandos and European underground, the gun was held in disdain by the Canadians and generally ditched as quickly as possible. All too often its primitive safety switch came off and the gun accidentally discharged, causing friendly casualties. By the time the Canadians reached the Sangro River, hardly any Stens were in use by front-line units.
The other weapon the infantry carried was the Type 36 grenade. Its segmented metal exterior was thought by the soldiers to resemble a pineapple, so it became known as the pineapple grenade or simply a pineapple. Filled with high explosive that, upon exploding, turned the metal exterior casing into about eighty pieces of deadly shrapnel, the 36 was effective to the range a man could pitch it in an overhand throw. Once the fuse was activated, however, there was no deactivating it and the weapon was dangerous to thrower and immediate comrades alike if improperly used. Some soldiers hated and avoided grenades. Others, such as Seaforth Highlander Private Harry Rankin, loved them. Rankin loaded up all the grenades he could carry, used them whenever possible, and even kept notes in his pay book setting out the safe times that a grenade with each fuse length could be held and still be thrown out a safe distance.5
In addition to these weapons and their ammunition, each rifleman carried a bayonet, water canteen, some emergency rations, perhaps some extra socks, and a few personal effects, as well as a bandage for dressing a wound. It was not uncommon for a soldier’s canvas pack to hold one hundred pounds of gear. In a haversack across his shoulder was also an anti-gas respirator that he hoped never to use. Two pouches attached to combat webbing held numerous five-round clips for the rifle, extra loose .303 cartridges, and normally a couple of thirty-round .303 magazines for the Bren gun. Secured on the webbing and stuffed into pouches would be a varying number of grenades based as much on personal preference as any standard requirement.
An infantry division’s fighting strength depended on the number of riflemen fit for duty in the rifle companies. Seldom did this strength exceed what the army called light scale. Light scale dictated a company strength of 110, battalion strength of 440, and a total strength of 3,960 in a division’s nine infantry battalions. These were the troops who went head to head against the enemy infantry. Bren carrier, mortar, and antitank platoons were left out of these calculations because they were seldom in the immediate front line. To keep each rifleman properly equipped, supplied, and medically cared for required almost a three-to-one-ratio of divisional support personnel for every front-line soldier.
Increasing the firepower of the infantry were support companies with various types of mortars; the artillery regiments with their twenty-five-pounder guns; the antitank units equipped with six-pound and seventeen-pound antitank guns; the reconnaissance regiment with its armoured cars; and the armoured regiments with their Sherman M-4 tanks. But always it was the infantry that had to go forward and root the enemy out of their holes, clear the buildings, sweep the dense stands of trees. The infantry led, and it was the infantry who most often bled and died.
As the infantry trudged once more on foot toward new positions immediately behind the 78th Division, their transport and support vehicles continued to jockey across the Sangro. It took six hours of waiting and lurching yard by yard for the PPCLI’s tran
sport to finally get over the bridge. The trucks linked up with the infantry near the small hamlet of Fossacesia. And there, as was so often the case in the army, the soldiers were told to wait. Soon they learned that the fighting south of the Moro River was not yet concluded. The 78th was still trying to shove the Germans out of San Vito Chietino, a town just south of the Moro valley. Word came back that the 78th would not hand over the front to the Canadians until it had bloody well thrown the last German over the other side of the river. Few complaints about this turn of events were heard among the ranks. Nobody was that anxious to start mixing it up with Tedeschi, the Italian word for German, which the Eighth Army had quickly adopted as its favoured slang for the enemy.
Everywhere the Canadians looked they found innumerable signs of how bitter the battle for the Sangro had been. Loyal Edmonton Regiment platoon scout commander Lieutenant Alon Johnson, waiting his turn to cross the bridge, sat in his jeep and surveyed the detritus of war about him. Utility poles were down or tilted erratically and trailed wires, burned-out hulks of German tanks and antitank guns stood in the fields, shell craters were everywhere, dead horses and mules lay swelling on the roadsides. A British officer from one of the line units that were starting to trickle past stopped to chat with Johnson. “You must have had quite a battle here,” Johnson said. The officer paused, looked reflective for a moment. “Yes, a bit of a do,” he replied drolly and proceeded on to the rear.6
Dawn found many Canadian units still trying to get over the Sangro bridge. And with the dawn came sporadic German artillery shelling of the bridgehead. Shells thumped down on either side of the bridge, sending up geysers of water, and erupted on and around the road. As shrapnel sang through the air, men piled out of helplessly jammed trucks, Bren carriers, and jeeps to scramble into the dubious shelter of the ditch. When a barrage lifted, any vehicles damaged too badly to continue moving were pushed into the ditch to allow the rest of the column to advance.