by Mark Zuehlke
Precisely at midnight, ‘B’ Company set off. Accompanying it was Captain T. Lem Carter, a forward observation officer for the Royal Canadian Artillery’s 2nd Field Regiment. His presence meant that ‘B’ Company had the use of two #18 field radio sets, the British mancarried standard radio for company-sized units. The other companies each had one of these radios. Within minutes of ‘B’ Company’s departure, ‘C’ Company set off down the slope. Both companies were following narrow paths located in the afternoon by the scout platoon, which appeared to lead down to the river. Thirty minutes later, ‘A’ Company set off on another track. At the head of ‘A’ Company was scout platoon trooper Private A.K. Harris.
Harris’s job was to get the company across the river. Once finished that task, he was free to return to battalion headquarters. Heavy clouds obscured the moon as Harris led the company along the ridgeline to the path they would use for the descent to the valley floor. In contrast to the men following noisily behind him, Harris wore rope-soled shoes and carried nothing metal other than his helmet and a pistol. Ahead, German shells started striking the ridge. Harris led the company off on a wide detour away from the ridgeline to avoid the artillery concentrations. He was moving slowly, carefully, the way a scout who wants to stay alive does. This was too slow, however, for Vance, who passed word along to Harris to pick up the pace. Reluctantly Harris did so and soon reached the path leading into the valley. Vance, Lieutenant J.W. Baldwin of the lead platoon, and Company Sergeant Major Angus Blaker joined Harris at the trailhead. Vance insisted Harris take a section of Baldwin’s platoon with him to serve as a bodyguard. Harris initially protested, but finally realized he was caught in the age-old dilemma soldiers face when presented with questionable orders from an officer. With his unwanted bodyguard in tow, Harris started the descent. “The noise of the men with me seems more dangerous than their protection is worth,” he later wrote.
Harris proceeded to “drop them off as guides at each turn in the trail. The brush was head high. Every few minutes a flare blossomed in the sky and sparkled brilliantly for a minute or so.17 Each time a flare popped, Harris froze and surveyed the bleached landscape before him. There was no sign of German positions or that enemy soldiers had been using the trail. Safely at the river, which he considered little more than a stream, Harris waded across and up the steep bank on the other side. In a few minutes he was joined by Lieutenant Baldwin and his platoon. Harris’s job was done, but he was unable to decide what to do next. His orders were to return to battalion HQ, but HQ itself was expected to cross the river during the night. If he returned, Harris would only face another river crossing. When the Germans started shelling the trail over which the company had just come, Harris decided to stay with ‘A’ Company until HQ came forward.
Baldwin’s platoon led off, Harris now preceding it as the point man. Soon word came up that the rear platoon was missing, apparently having lost track of the rest of the column in the dark. By this time, Harris was in near panic about the noise coming from the men behind him. “Clinking equipment, boots squelching in the mud, and the odd muttered curse” carried clearly above the sound of distant battle. It seemed impossible that the Germans could fail to hear the company’s approach. Harris later wrote that when he was about ten feet in front of the lead platoon, crossing a small gully, “a stream of fire flies arch . . . through the blackness. They grope for the muffled sounds of ‘A’ Company. The quiet is shattered by the rip of Spandaus. There are shouted commands behind and then the pop-pop-pop of the Brens.” Harris, officially a guest at this battle, decided to “lay doggo.”18
While Harris, armed with only a pistol, went to ground, ‘A’ Company strung out behind him was pinned down by a hail of fire from what seemed to be at least a dozen machine guns. In the first seconds of the fight, Major Vance was blinded by the brilliant flash from a high-explosive shell exploding right in front of him, Company Sergeant Major Angus Blaker was killed, and Lieutenant Baldwin wounded. Soldiers all along the line were down, some wounded, others dead or dying. Despite being injured, Baldwin tried to work small parties of his platoon forward but the enemy fire was too intense. His radio having broken down during the river crossing, the wounded Vance was unable to reach Forin to either request reinforcement or to seek permission to break off contact with the enemy and withdraw. After the battle raged on for some time and his unit absorbed still more casualties, Vance ordered a withdrawal back across the Moro.19
To Harris, hunkered in cover on the other side of the gully, it seemed the Canadians were engaged in a “much noisier night battle than the Germans. . . . There seemed to be much shouting back and forth from our side. In the short periods of silence it was possible to hear the quiet disciplined voices of the German machine gunners through the darkness. One got the unfair impression that they were the better soldiers.” He realized, however, that the reality was that a unit caught in an ambush was more likely to break noise discipline. Had the tables been turned, Harris figured that the Germans would have appeared just as panicked as the Canadians.20
At 0200 hours, about one hour after ‘A’ Company broke contact with the enemy, one of its runners reported to Forin that the remains of two platoons were across the river and returning to battalion HQ with casualties.21 No. 7 Platoon of ‘A’ Company, separated from the other two platoons shortly after the river crossing, was apparently still on the other side of the river.
Harris had listened to the soldiers withdraw, knowing it was impossible for him to safely join their retreat. Even after the company had gone, the Germans continued to rake the area with machine-gun fire. Finally, when the guns fell quiet, Harris crawled over to a haystack he had spotted earlier and wormed into its heart. Once inside he was able to stand and poke his head out for a good look around. He could see precious little, including any of the machine-gun positions that had fired on ‘A’ Company. Just as it started to turn light, Harris left the stack and retraced his steps to the south bank of the Moro.22
While two platoons of ‘A’ Company were being cut up in an ambush on the right flank of the Seaforth attack, ‘B’ Company slipped through to its objective to the west of San Leonardo without a shot being fired. Buchanan set up his positions and waited for the dawn. Despite Forin’s orders to report back, battalion HQ heard nothing from Buchanan. As far as Forin knew, ‘B’ Company had simply vanished on the other side of the river.23
As for ‘C’ Company, it advanced only one hundred yards beyond the river’s edge before being struck by machine-gun fire from the facing high ground at 0100 hours. The guns appeared to be firing on pre-fixed lines with excellent overlap, so there was no chance of any platoon pressing an attack without being cut to pieces. The company went to ground, conserving ammunition and offering only token return fire against the German gunners.24
Throughout the rest of the confused night of fighting, Forin’s radio stayed completely quiet. He could raise nobody. Lacking any idea of ‘B’ Company’s whereabouts, able to see the volume of enemy fire raking ‘C’ Company, and with ‘A’ Company staggering back across the Moro in disarray, Forin saw little point in advancing ‘D’ Company into the fray. Meanwhile, the alerted Germans had started heavily shelling the area of the blown bridge. The RCE unit decided that work on throwing the bridge over the river could not continue and the engineers retreated to safety. It was clear to Forin that if anything tangible could be rescued from the night’s attack it would have to wait until daylight. Perhaps then he would be able to bring supporting artillery and mortar fire in to break up the enemy resistance and enable the battalion to advance.25
6
NO GOOD, JOHNNY
OF the three regiments attacking across the Moro River on the night of December 5 and in the early morning hours of December 6, the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry had conducted the most thorough reconnaissance and planning. Early patrols had discovered a ford slightly downstream of Villa Rogatti. Thirty-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Cameron Bethel Ware, a permanent force offic
er before the war, decided to send his entire three-company attack force up this route. ‘B’ Company would lead at midnight, with ‘A’ Company following in thirty minutes, and ‘C’ Company crossing fifty minutes after the first company jumped off. ‘D’ Company would remain in reserve, scheduled to join the battle in the morning. Rather than spread his companies out and assault the village from differing flanks, Ware planned to attack on a one-company wide front, hitting Villa Rogatti from the southeast. The two following companies would then move through ‘B’ Company to exploit success or provide immediate reinforcement.
Ware had also managed to develop some concrete plans for the battalion’s reinforcement in the morning by tanks of the British 44th Royal Tank Regiment. Under cover of first darkness, PPCLI patrols, accompanied by some 44th tankers, had determined that tanks could negotiate a rough road that led down from the southern ridge to a destroyed bridge directly below Villa Rogatti. The river here was found to be fordable by tanks and unguarded by German sentries. Once across the river, the tanks could follow a circuitous route up to the ridgeline by driving along the valley floor to a point about a mile downstream, and winding up another narrow track to the ridge. From there, a road led back to the village. It would be a difficult task for the tankers to get through the mud of the river and follow the extremely rough and slippery tracks, but all concerned thought the plan should work.
At the same time as the patrols investigating tank routes went into the Moro valley, a ‘B’ Company patrol commanded by Lieutenant J.L. McCullough set off on a hazardous reconnaissance up the opposing ridgeline and into the rear of Villa Rogatti. McCullough’s task was to assess the validity of Canadian intelligence reports on the defences at the village. The lieutenant and his small patrol managed to slip through the German defensive net, conducted a limited observation, and returned without a shot being fired. McCullough reported to Ware that Villa Rogatti was anything but an isolated German outpost. While the patrol had been on the other side of the valley, they had seen and heard almost constant movement of enemy troops passing in and out of the village. Further, McCullough said it was evident that German armour would be able to easily reach Villa Rogatti from rear positions.
The report confirmed Ware’s suspicions. Assuming his infantry companies could seize Villa Rogatti during the night, he absolutely must receive early morning support from the British tanks to hold on when the Germans inevitably launched a strong counterattack supported by Panzer tanks. Success would hinge almost entirely on the tankers getting over the river and into the village before the enemy could organize and deploy a strong reaction force.1
First, however, Villa Rogatti had to be taken. Intelligence reports, relying largely on aerial reconnaissance photos, showed that the Panzer Grenadiers had heavily fortified the village. Gun pits had been dug in the surrounding orchards and vineyards; houses had been transformed into bunkers. The village itself presented a difficult obstacle, set on a point where the ridgeline was shaped roughly like a horseshoe with the two spurs facing the river. Villa Rogatti’s small stone houses circled the edge of the horseshoe and were backed by a mixture of terraced vineyards and orchards interspersed with small, deep gullies. There was very little depth to the village, as most of the buildings bordered the edge of the ridge. The whole place was little more than two streets wide.
To disorganize and suppress the German defenders, an artillery barrage had originally been scheduled for just prior to the lead company’s jump-off time of 2359 hours. Ware received no indication from either divisional or brigade headquarters of Vokes’s decision that all the attacks that night would be made silently, without artillery support. At 2350 hours he was still anxiously awaiting the beginning of the barrage, thinking that if the barrage were delayed for some reason the shells would catch ‘B’ Company as it entered the valley on schedule. It was a hellish moment for the PPCLI commander as he had to decide whether to wait for a barrage which might or might not come, or plunge ahead with the attack. Ware gave his orders and at 2359 hours ‘B’ Company descended into the valley.2
Without an artillery barrage, the only way for the PPCLI to capture Villa Rogatti would be to get as close as possible before the Germans realized they were being attacked. Captain R.F.S. Robertson led ‘B’ Company down the steep, slippery slope on a narrow donkey trail that cut through the olive groves to the river. The company waded across and moved downstream along the northern bank to a junction in the valley-bottom trail, from which two trails ascended to either spur of the village. Robertson’s lead platoon set off on the trail heading up to the southeastern portion of Villa Rogatti. When the advancing soldiers entered a narrow defile leading to the village, a German machine gun started to fire from the high ground to their left. This was followed by a shower of stick grenades and another machine gun opening up on the right. ‘B’ Company faced an arc of enemy positions, well concealed in the dense foliage of the vineyards and olive groves.
Despite the intensity of the resistance, Robertson’s unit immediately went on the offensive. Bren guns and the company’s two-inch mortars were put into action, the latter firing at almost the minimum extent of their range on a virtually flat trajectory. Lieutenant J.G. Clarke was hit in the throat by a bullet, but ‘B’ Company succeeded in closing with the enemy positions and destroying them with bursts of small-arms fire and grenades. Some of the defenders abandoned their positions and retreated toward the village, others surrendered on the spot. Pressing forward, the company moved past the houses on the outskirts and found it had breached the Germans’ primary defensive line. ‘B’ Company was now in the midst of the Germans, most of whom were staggering half-dressed and bleary-eyed out of their billets in the village’s houses to become prisoners.
Following close on ‘B’ Company’s heels was ‘A’ Company under the command of Major W. “Bucko” Watson. He swung his company to the right, heading for the most northerly reaches of the village. As the lead section rushed across a road leading into Villa Rogatti, a German motorcyclist roared out of the darkness toward the village yelling, “Achtung! Achtung!” at the men he obviously thought were Germans. Several of the Canadians raised their rifles and a volley of fire tore the soldier off his BMW motorcycle. The motorcycle barrelled into the ditch and the body rolled in next to it. The company pushed on, leapfrogging platoons as they swept through the buildings. More prisoners were taken and more Germans killed or sent fleeing into the darkness beyond Villa Rogatti. The village was essentially in Canadian hands. In some of the houses where Germans had been billeted, the Canadians discovered half-eaten meals abandoned on kitchen tables.3
Although two companies of the PPCLI were now inside Villa Rogatti, the Germans still had numerous fortified positions on all sides of the village. ‘C’ Company was heading up a trail directly in front of Villa Rogatti, with Lieutenant George Garbutt’s platoon leading. The path broadened slightly, and just as the first soldiers entered this ground a grenade exploded about fifteen feet to one side. The Calgary-born officer heard no prior challenge issued by the German sentries. Seconds later, another grenade went off ten feet away, followed almost immediately by a slight plopping sound directly behind Garbutt. He hunched over, waiting, and then the grenade detonated only three feet behind him. Shrapnel whizzed between his legs, one small piece biting into his calf. Realizing the trail was a preset killing zone, Garbutt plunged to the left, pushing up a slight rise through some bordering bushes, and found himself on open ground. Meanwhile, his men backed around a corner in the path. So far there had been only one man in the platoon significantly wounded. Corporal Ralph Andros had a small piece of shrapnel sticking from his boot that had penetrated about half an inch into his foot.
A machine gun positioned seventy to eighty yards ahead of the platoon started firing down the path. Pulling the pin on his one grenade, Garbutt threw it straight up the hill toward the gun, hoping to cause them some worry. He was sure the grenade failed to explode anywhere near the gun because of the throwing range. Still, the
gun stopped firing and the platoon was able to use the lull to get off the path to safer ground.
Silence fell over the battlefield, the Germans practising excellent noise discipline so that Garbutt was unable to fix their position. He lay on the ground, searching up the hill for any silhouettes against the light from the village, but could see nothing. He thought that the grenade throwers were probably to his right, roughly in a position directly above the ambush point. Garbutt raised his Thompson submachine gun, intending to put a burst of fire where he guessed the Germans were. The gun snapped out one shot and then jammed. Garbutt cursed himself for carelessly loading the magazine and started scrabbling in his front-leg pockets, which were hard to reach lying prone as he was, for another magazine. Then he fumbled the jammed clip clear and replaced it with the fresh one. It seemed an eternity had passed since the gun jammed; he was damned scared, knowing the shot and resulting muzzle flash had betrayed his position.
Just as he was ready to open fire again, Garbutt heard a soft rustling on the path below him and then a quiet “Sir? followed by “Mr. Garbutt?” Recognizing the voice as that of his young runner, who had been cut off from him when the ambush started, Garbutt realized the man had crept back to the spot where he and the platoon had parted company in hopes of finding his commander. The officer slipped down to his runner and whispered to him to go back to the platoon and bring up some grenades. When the man returned with a satchel of grenades, Garbutt sent him back to the platoon.
Alone again, Garbutt started tossing grenades into the position from which he thought the Germans had sprung their ambush. When the grenades were used up, he crawled back to his men, who had now been joined by the rest of ‘C’ Company. A medical orderly quickly put a bandage on Garbutt’s calf and then he led off again, taking his platoon about fifty yards to the left in hopes of getting up to Villa Rogatti by a different route. After going only a short distance, he heard a soft challenge issued in German, followed almost immediately by another grenade exploding harmlessly some twenty feet away. The platoon backed off, reported to ‘C’ Company commander Captain M. Cousins, and the entire company hunkered down to await first light.4