by Mark Zuehlke
The divisional attack would start without 3 CIB. To keep apprised of the situation at the immediate front, brigade commander Brigadier Graeme Gibson rode a DUKW across the Sangro on the morning of December 5. He planned to spend the night organizing the forward logistics for his brigade to settle in on the proper side of the river.17
The morning of December 5 also saw the infantry of 2 CIB preparing for a night attack across the Moro to seize the two crossings at San Leonardo and Villa Rogatti. The previous night’s patrols had determined that the crossing close to the river’s mouth, where the newer coastal road was located, was too deep and wide with floodwater for an easy crossing. The Royal Canadian Engineers were confident of building a bridge only in front of San Leonardo. Vokes decided consequently that the main attack would focus on seizing San Leonardo, while a secondary attack would be put in at Villa Rogatti. San Leonardo would be taken by the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada and the PPCLI would attack Villa Rogatti. The Loyal Edmonton Regiment would be in reserve, ready to move through the lines of whichever regiment opened the best opportunity for pushing toward the Ortona-Orsogna lateral road.
At the river mouth, 1 CIB would relieve the 38th Brigade in the morning. Despite the fact that constructing a bridge at this point was considered impossible under present conditions, Vokes planned for the Canadian brigade to launch a diversionary attack across the river as soon as the relief was completed. This way the Germans across the river would be forced to defend three positions, not knowing which was the primary target of the attacking Canadians.18
At the Loyal Edmonton headquarters, scout platoon leader Lieutenant Alon Johnson looked across the valley to Ortona in the distance. The town looked relatively nondescript to the twenty-three-year-old officer. Johnson’s eye was caught by the large dome of a Roman Catholic cathedral standing in the midst of a cluster of old buildings. The dome shone as if coated in brass.19
3
PEARL OF THE ADRIATIC
IN the summers of the 1920s and 1930s, workers and their families had come to Ortona from the factory towns of northern Italy, from Milan, Piacenza, Reggio, and Modena. To escape the torturous heat of Rome, mid-level bureaucrats had gathered up their wives and children and caught the train that ran through the wide valley stretching from Avezzano to Pescara. In Pescara they changed trains for the brief run down the blue Adriatic coast to Ortona’s station. There they disembarked and looked up to the escarpment facing the water, where the town perched. Those who minded their lire waited for the bus or made the thirty-minute climb up the flagstone steps that zigzagged up the steep face. The more affluent vacationers usually paid to be whisked, along with their luggage, in the gondola that ran between the train station and the esplanade, Corso Umberto I.
From the gondola, they were rewarded with a fine view of the old castle perched precariously on the edge of the cliff. They also looked back down upon the harbour with its two recurved moles, looking like crab claws. The moles, built of rock and earth, sheltered the harbour from storms and prevented the basin from filling with silt. To the immediate south of the harbour a white sand beach stretched clear to the ridgeline where San Vito Chietino was visible on the far side of the Moro River. Inland, lush green olive orchards and vineyards blanketed the surrounding countryside, dotted by farmhouses and the small timeless hamlets of San Donato and San Leonardo, little more than a half hour’s walk away along the dusty, narrow lanes.
Long abandoned, the castle’s thick sandstone block walls crumbled more with each passing year. Cracked by past earthquakes and undermined by two railway tunnels leading to the port, which ran under its foundations, the castle was slowly collapsing down the cliff. It was an ancient structure, dating back at least to the 1400s. Townspeople and even a few Italian historians claimed the origins of Ortona dated back to the thirteenth century BC, when escaping Trojans had landed here after the fall of Troy and founded a new city. Successive earthquakes had swept away all trace of these legendary roots, but buildings that were at least 500 years old were common along the town’s streets.
In the southern part, more modern houses, some warehouses, and a couple of larger apartment buildings now stood; but in the older, larger quarters of Terravechia in the north and Terranova in the west, traditional brownstone buildings faced each other across cobblestone streets barely wider than an ox cart. The old buildings were primarily two or three storeys high, the lowest storey often possessing only a solid wooden door that provided entry to one large windowless room — traditionally a shop for a craftsman, grocer, or other shopkeeper. In the late 1930s, with a global depression, a war in Abyssinia, and so many dead from Il Duce’s intervention in Spain, many of these dark caverns were transformed into homes for the poorest Ortona residents. About 10,000 people were crowded into the town and for many the living conditions were crude. Generally, even the residential quarters above the caverns were quite basic: a few stark rooms with front windows brightened by painted shutters and an iron rail balcony.
The tourists noticed little of Ortona’s increasing poverty. They gathered each morning on the beach to the south of the town to worship sun and sea. The beach and Ortona’s prospect over it were the reasons the town was known in many corners of Italy as the Pearl of the Adriatic. Swarms of children played in the gentle surf, while the fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins, sweethearts, and friends gathered under their umbrellas — the younger ones in bathing suits, the older in ever darker and heavier-weight clothes — spaced tightly together in the manner favoured by Italians who sought not privacy but community on a beach. In the afternoon, after taking the main meal in Ortona’s trattorias and ristorantes , they returned to the hotels and pensiones for the siesta. With the setting of the sun they rose to join the locals in the ritual promenade up Corso Vittorio Emanuele. The broad main street of Ortona was fronted to the north in Piazza Municipali by the two-storey municipal building, with its distinctive clock mounted just below the roofline. Before the bars and trattorias on the corso, cloth-covered tables were set out and waiters wearing starched white shirts and precisely pressed black pants fetched carafes of the rich red montepulciano, cappuccinos, grappa, and sweet cake. Later, when the evening darkness had settled in, the vacationers again filled tables in the ristorantes for their second main meal. They savoured the pasta smothered in black mussels or the lightly fried mullet, either of which had been drawn that very day from the sea before the town. Others preferred the grilled lamb brought to Ortona in the morning by the farmer from the highlands near Guardiagrele. When the meals were done and if the weather was still fine, as it usually was in the summer months, musicians played on Corso Umberto I. Dancing and much festivity would continue into the small hours.1
On Sundays, vacationers and townspeople alike gathered in the various churches of Ortona to take Mass. The main cathedral was San Tomasso, with its great frescoed dome and an adjacent watchtower that rose up almost as high as the upper reaches of the brass-roofed cupola. Cattedrale San Tomasso was so named because it purportedly housed a tomb containing the sanctified remains of the Christian apostle Saint Thomas, often referred to as Doubting Thomas because he initially questioned the truth of Christ’s resurrection. When Thomas demanded physical proof of the resurrection, Christ appeared before him and asked him to touch his wounds. Stunned with the truth of the resurrection, Thomas said: “My Lord and my God,” thereby explicitly acknowledging Christ’s divinity. Legend held that pilgrims to Rome who viewed Saint Thomas’s remains in Ortona would enjoy a safe journey to the Vatican City.
Cattedrale San Tomasso may have been the grandest of Ortona’s churches, but the oldest was Santa Maria di Costantinopoli, believed to have been originally constructed in the fourth or fifth century AD, although it was heavily overlain with medieval construction and by the 1930s only the base foundation was authentic. According to local lore, this church was founded by Saint Mary Magdalene herself, prior even to the erection of the Byzantine-era structure — so that the ground upon which th
e church stood was among the most consecrated in Italy. This church was of narrow construction with a simple stone exterior and, by Italian standards, a relatively plain interior. It stood on the southern outskirts of Ortona, its back close to a steep embankment that fell away to the intersection where the coastal road and railroad met the Ortona-Orsogna lateral road.
From the time of his birth in 1930, Americo Casanova lived near the old church. He was a happy child, but at just two years old one rather large shadow was cast over his life. His father left Ortona to seek a better income for the family by emigrating to the United States. Thereafter, Americo’s only contact with his father was through letters and the presents sent regularly from Hershey, New Jersey, where his father worked in the famous chocolate factory. Before he left for the United States, Americo’s father built a small four-unit apartment building for his wife Angela and the three children. The family lived in one apartment and drew income from the other three. Between the rental income and the money sent from America, Angela Casanova was able to provide well for her three children: Mario, the oldest; Maria, two years younger; and little Americo, who was six years younger yet. The apartment was in the town’s new section to the immediate south of the old part of the town and close to Santa Maria di Costantinopoli.
Having an absent father did not make Americo unique in Ortona. Many of the men of the community were away. Ortona, being a port town, drew men to the sea — most as fishermen, but also many who left to crew the ocean freighters. There was little for a man to do for a living in Ortona in the 1930s if he did not fish the sea or till the surrounding soil. Unemployment was high and so the men left, some going north to the factories, others being pressed by the military into service, and a few, such as Americo’s father, travelling overseas to America with the hope of eventually returning with enough money to set up a business or, sometimes, of bringing the family over to join them in a new land.
The fishermen and their families clustered in the oldest section of Ortona, the warren of narrow streets and passages adjacent to San Tomasso and set back from the esplanade. In the morning, the men descended the stairs from Ortona to the harbour where their boats were docked alongside the long northern mole. Here their nets were hung on large racks close to the shoreline. Sometimes Americo would look out at the water to where the small boats dotted the horizon, nets out, and wish his father were out there, soon to come home. But then he would look at all the fine things that decorated their home, the furnishings from America, and remember that this was made possible only by a father who worked in a chocolate factory in the United States.
As Americo grew older, tensions in Ortona also grew. Il Duce, Benito Mussolini, was calling ever more men to the services and then the war started. This one was bigger than the one fought in Abyssinia or the undeclared incursion of the army divisions into Spain to assist General Francisco Franco in crushing the godless Republic. As the war spread and finally the Americans joined against Italy, the flow of money and presents from America slowed and then ceased altogether. But there was still the apartment rental and the family lived comfortably enough, even with the growing food shortages that plagued all of Italy as the nation’s fortunes worsened with each passing month.2
Antonio Di Cesare, a couple of years older than Americo Casanova, was not so lucky. In 1942, his father had been one of the thousands of conscripted soldiers who surrendered in Africa to the British Eighth Army when Tunisia fell. Antonio’s father was sent to a prison camp in South Africa, his meagre soldier’s pay stopped coming as Italy fell into chaos, and Antonio’s mother and the boy became entirely dependent on assistance provided to the families of prisoners by the International Red Cross. They lived in a little house 400 yards from the southern outskirts of Ortona in a community marked on no map but known locally as Porta Caldari. Able to grow some vegetables, the small family eked out a difficult life that might have bordered on starvation had it not been for the generosity of their extended family and neighbours. This was particularly true after the Italian government surrendered and the German army moved immediately to occupy most of Italy.3
On July 25, 1943, King Vittorio Emanuele III had accepted the resignation of the head of the government, his Excellency Cavalier Benito Mussolini, after an extraordinary ten-hour session of the Grand Fascist Council demanded that the dictator step aside so that Italy could sue the Allies for peace. Immediately after the king accepted Mussolini’s resignation, Il Duce was taken into protective custody. The king then called upon seventy-one-year-old Marshal Pietro Badoglio to form a government, which promptly dissolved the Fascist Party. Until Mussolini’s resignation, the German army presence in Italy was concentrated in Sicily, where the Axis forces were attempting to throw back the Allied invasion. On July 30, with the Italian government obviously poised for a surrender to the Allies, Hitler ordered the nation occupied by German infantry and armoured formations.
Throughout August, the Allies and the new Italian government undertook complex and secret negotiations to secure a peace accord that would not only remove Italy with honour from the war but also ensure the Germans did not arrest and remove Badoglio’s government from power, replacing it with a puppet administration of its own choosing. Plans were hammered out for a strong Italian army force supported by the American 82nd Airborne Division, which would be parachuted near Rome, to protect the government on the day it was scheduled to announce Italy’s surrender.
The date of September 1 was initially agreed upon for the armistice announcement, but it took two more days of secret haggling before the armistice was formally signed. Even then it had yet to be made public because the Italian government was not safe from German reprisal. On September 8, the 82nd Airborne was scheduled to land near Rome, dropping on airports supposed to be secured by Italian troops. But at the last minute, Badoglio radioed the Allies to cancel the operation, claiming that a public announcement of the armistice was impossible, as was the airborne operation, because of the presence of German divisions in and around Rome. Stunned at first by this reversal in plans, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander Mediterranean, finally responded at 6:30 p.m. by proceeding with a planned broadcast announcing that the Italians had signed an armistice agreement. The Italian government was caught entirely by surprise. When Badoglio’s foreign minister burst into his office and told him the news, Badoglio said, “We’re fucked.”4
Within a couple of hours of the broadcast, German divisions near Rome began encircling the city. Badoglio, his family, and the Royal Family locked themselves into the main Ministry of War building, while scattered skirmishes broke out between German and Italian troops at the gates of Rome. In the early morning hours of September 9, a convoy of five vehicles fled through Rome’s eastern gate onto the highway from the city via Avezzano to Pescara. Having slipped through the tightening German net, Badoglio, King Emanuele, and their families and immediate aides spent a tense day hiding in the small mountain town of Guardiagrele before entering Ortona on the evening of September 10. That night they were taken aboard the Italian corvette Baionetta and whisked by sea to Brindisi, which had already been captured by Allied forces. The first the people of Ortona learned of the passage of their king through the community was the discovery the following morning of the vehicles abandoned by the northern mole.5
Only days after the surrender, the International Red Cross aid to the Di Cesare family stopped, as the Germans’ tightened occupation of Italy disrupted the operations of the international aid organization. The Di Cesares’ situation worsened, but so did that of most of the people of Ortona and all of Italy. As the Germans appropriated the transportation network for their military operations, and Allied aerial bombing began causing extensive damage to communication and transportation systems, normal movement of food and goods became virtually impossible. Each community was forced to draw in upon itself and look to its own limited resources of food and fuel to ensure the survival of its population. But making life more difficult was the absence of young me
n to work the fields and crew the fishing boats. Most were away, serving in the army, navy, and air force.
The chaos that descended on Italy in the immediate wake of the surrender swept up twenty-eight-year-old Antonio D’Intino. In 1940 he had been called back to duty by the Italian navy, in which he had served from 1933 to 1935. D’Intino, a small, slight man, wanted only to stay on his family’s land to the immediate west of Ortona and tend the olives and grapes, to find a good woman, to marry and establish a family. But the war cared little for his dreams, so he reported for duty. Initially he served aboard a destroyer, but by early 1943 Allied blockades had locked the majority of Italian ships in the two major naval harbours at La Spezia and Taranto, so he was set to work transporting naval shells from La Spezia to reinforced underground bunkers in the inland hills.
On September 11, his commander called D’Intino and the rest of the unit together and told them the war was over for the Italian military. “You’re on your own now,” the officer said. “If you stay here the Germans will probably imprison you or send you north to work in their factories.”6 He left quickly, without looking back, seeking his own safety. D’Intino and four other men, all from the Adriatic coastal regions of Abruzzo and Molise, decided to try to make their way home. La Spezia was south of Genoa, on the wrong coast, and several hundred miles from Ortona. The better part of two German armies stood between the two places. The men realized the journey would be hard, if not impossible. But they could see no alternative. If they could reach their homes, they might be able to pick up the threads of their lives and avoid capture and forced labour.