Ortona
Page 13
“After nearly sixty hours of fighting and ‘Standing To’ the troops are beginning to look tired, the strain and excitement has keyed them to a pitch higher than has ever been reached in any previous battle in the Italian campaign,” wrote the Patricia’s war diarist on the grey, warm morning of December 7.11 Lieutenant Colonel Ware was thankful that the Germans had let the battle for Villa Rogatti slacken. There was no repetition of the previous day’s counterattacks. Resistance was limited to light, but continuous, shelling and mortaring of the Canadian position. The PPCLI waited for the engineers to construct the bridge across the Moro below the village. It was expected that later in the day the Loyal Edmonton Regiment and a British tank squadron would cross the newly erected Bailey bridge, advance through Villa Rogatti, and jump off toward Villa Jubatti and Villa Caldari.
So Ware was astonished and dismayed to receive instructions at noon to expect relief by the British Royal West Kent Regiment in nine hours. First Canadian Infantry Division, he was told, was shortening its line west of San Leonardo by handing off Villa Rogatti to the 8th Indian Division. Ware protested to 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade commander Brigadier Bert Hoffmeister. Once again, he argued that from the stronghold of Villa Rogatti the brigade could break through to the Ortona-Orsogna lateral highway and roll the German flank up to force Ortona’s surrender. Hoffmeister agreed that Ware’s plan was sound and the one both he and divisional commander Major General Chris Vokes favoured.12 But it was a moot point because Royal Canadian Engineers commander Lieutenant Colonel Geoff Walsh claimed it was impossible to launch a Bailey bridge over the Moro below Villa Rogatti. No bridge, no offensive.
The engineers’ failure was all the more frustrating because, in anticipation of the offensive, the entire brigade had realigned itself westward during the night. At least a day would be lost moving the battalions back toward San Leonardo and developing a new attack plan. The failed assault by the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada had proven that San Leonardo was heavily fortified. Instead of being able to outflank this fortress and advance “along the grain of the country,” the Canadians would now have to attack the village head on. Such attacks always meant greater numbers of killed and wounded as the “advantages of topography lay with the defenders.”13 Reluctantly, Ware conceded defeat and told his men to prepare to withdraw from Villa Rogatti. His mood was sour as he saw the spirits of his soldiers crumble around him. Against the odds they had fought a battle and won. Where the other attacks had failed, the PPCLI had succeeded. But now it seemed to have been for nothing.
On the ridgeline across the river from Villa Rogatti, Lieutenant Jerry Richards was still unaware of the PPCLI’s orders to withdraw. Richards dodged from one three-inch mortar position to the other, checking on his men and searching the opposite ridgeline for possible enemy targets. Without fail, each time he went into the open, an enemy antitank gun hidden somewhere across the Moro snapped a shot in his direction. The shell would come in on a thrumming flat trajectory and strike with a crack that threw mud and vegetation flying. Other guns were shelling the area steadily, but it seemed this gun was deliberately sniping at the young officer.
Richards was running toward his slit trench when he heard the distinctive thump of the antitank gun firing. He dived into the trench just as the shell exploded on the hole’s edge. Tremendous pain wracked him. Lying face down in the trench, unable to move, Richards was sure he was dying. Blood poured over his face. Because he couldn’t move, Richards remembered the driver whose legs had been torn off in the jeep, when Richards had received his first wound.
The same medical orderly who had spent the night before with him in the river bottom turned Richards over. “Are my legs all right?” the lieutenant asked anxiously. The orderly told him they were okay. Richards asked after his men and learned some were wounded. “Go look after them,” he said. “No, no, they’re not too bad,” the orderly responded, as he cut open Richards’s shirt and started bandaging the six ragged holes in the officer’s stomach. “Your left arm is fractured too, sir,” the orderly reported, before injecting him with morphine. As he drifted off to sleep, Richards was aware of being carried on a stretcher toward an ambulance that had driven up. Then he fell into a deep darkness and escaped the pain.14
Crouched in their shallow slit trenches on the ridgeline, the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment had endured a terrible night that dawned into an equally dreadful day. Through the long hours of darkness buckets of rain had poured down, transforming the ground into a slimy quagmire. German shelling and mortaring of the small beachhead on the northern shore of the Moro continued without pause. Shell craters riddled the area. Olive trees and grape vines were torn and splintered, some ripped out by the roots, others blackened by fire. A large number of dead Germans lay scattered throughout the area. In the grey morning, the soldiers looked out of their holes at a landscape resembling historical photographs of the No Man’s Lands of the Great War. The incessant noise of explosions; the foul blended odour of decaying flesh, blood, and cordite; the mud and filth covering the soldiers from head to foot, all combined to render this a place of unparallelled misery and fear. The fear grew with the sure knowledge that the Germans must try to throw the battalion back over the river. They would attack soon. To wait would only allow the Canadians more time to solidify the position.
As the day wore on, the Hasty P’s did what they could to improve their odds of holding out. Lieutenant Stan Walker’s antitank platoon, aided by men from ‘C’ Company, undertook the amazing feat of carrying two six-pounder antitank guns and ammunition across the Moro. They then dragged and pushed the wheeled weapons, which weighed about half a ton, through the deep mud to ‘A’ Company’s forward position. Two three-inch mortars were also manhandled over and set up in a gravel pit just below the ridgeline. The men struggling with these heavy loads were inspired by the strength of ‘C’ Company’s Sergeant Major George Ponsford. The bulky Ponsford carried burdens twice the weight of any of the others and always seemed to be there at the critical moment during the movement of the guns.15
While the infantrymen strengthened their defences, the battalion’s pioneers ignored continual shelling from 105-millimetre German artillery and sporadic machine-gun fire as they tried to improve the diversion at the Moro. Several times the pioneers pulled back and Sherman tanks rolled down to attempt a crossing. Each time the tanks bogged down in the riverbed and were forced to withdraw or become hopelessly mired. Major Bert Kennedy’s frustration mounted. Without tanks, the battalion was in great danger of being forced back or even overrun and destroyed.
At 1600 hours, Kennedy was called back across the Moro to attend a 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade Orders Group. Brigadier Howard Graham informed the battalion commanders that Kennedy’s small Moro River salient was to be the starting point for a major brigade assault the following day toward San Leonardo. It was more vital than ever that Kennedy’s battalion hold out. Indeed, he should attempt to get men up on the ridge itself and secure the San Donato road junction.16
As darkness fell over the battlefield, ‘A’ and ‘B’ companies each slipped a platoon onto the ridge and succeeded in extending the perimeter forward to encompass the road junction. The advancing soldiers met only light resistance that faded away at first contact.
Meanwhile, Quartermaster Sergeant Basil Smith laboured through much of the night to get rations up to the men on the other side of the river. Smith’s provisioning party of men and food-laden mules found itself in an area of muddy flats near the riverbank. The mules sank into the muck to their knees, becoming unable to move either forward or backward. It took hours for Smith’s party and some pioneers to build a rock and gravel track through the muddy section to provide secure footing for the mules. Obviously the Germans had earlier registered the mud flat as a likely bottleneck for forward movement of supplies, as it was subjected to regular mortaring. “Here however the mud proved helpful,” Smith later wrote in his diary. “The danger from mortar fire is not the explosion, which is up
and out and is confined to a very small area, at ground level. It is the fragmentation of the bomb which causes the damage and in this soft mud, they bury themselves quite deeply before meeting enough resistance to detonate the charge, which reduces fragmentation to a minimum.”17
The mortar fire weighed less heavily on Smith’s mind than the outcome of what should have proven a perfect afternoon spent foraging near battalion HQ. At loose ends while waiting for nightfall to come, Smith and two other quartermaster company personnel had gone exploring. They chanced upon Nicolo Annechini, a farmer who had spent half his life in Canada. Annechini had worked for the Canada Cement Company in Lakefield, Ontario. Having lived two years in Lakefield himself, Smith spent a pleasant hour with the farmer reminiscing about better times.
Annechini also showed the soldiers a German gun emplacement destroyed by a direct hit from a Royal Air Force bomb. Smith was grimly impressed by the gruesome sight. The bomb had literally torn the gunners to bits, “morsels of bone, flesh and field-gray cloth bespattered the landscape.”18 Sightseeing over, the soldiers bought a five-gallon wicker-covered glass bottle filled with red wine from the farmer. Carrying the bottle in turns, “tenderly as a babe in arms,” they made the two-mile return through some rugged gullies to battalion HQ. Along the way, they spoke with anticipation of how fine and warming their booty would be. In front of their tents, the soldier carrying the bottle lowered it gently from his shoulder to the ground only to have the bottle inexplicably disintegrate in his hands. Smith and his comrades watched mournfully as “the beautiful, rose-tinted liquid soaked into the ground.”19
There would be no wine upon the resupply party’s return to battalion HQ. Instead, Smith’s party managed to complete the task of taking rations up to the line companies shortly before midnight, distributed the food, and then trudged back to catch a quick sleep and begin preparations for the next evening’s resupply.
No sooner had Smith’s party crossed the Moro River en route to battalion HQ than the expected German counterattack against the Hasty P’s rolled in. It started with a short, intense artillery barrage by self-propelled guns firing at close range at the two platoons that held the forward San Donato junction position. The moment the barrage lifted, a Panzer Grenadier company stormed forward, showering the fifty-man strong force with rifle fire and stick grenades. The ‘A’ Company platoon was forced to abandon its position or be overrun. Withdrawing to a point somewhat behind and to the left of the ‘B’ Company platoon, the surviving soldiers set up in a loose semi-circle and prepared to meet a new attack.20
This came in minutes, with the Germans infiltrating the gap between the two platoons. ‘B’ Company’s No. 12 Platoon, under the command of twenty-six-year-old Acting Company Sergeant Major Bill Nolan, was now effectively cut off from the rest of the battalion. But the infiltrating Panzer Grenadiers were unknowingly moving into a narrow salient between the two platoons. Nolan allowed the enemy to come within thirty yards of his position before opening up with a withering volley of fire, to which the ‘A’ Company platoon added its weight. Hit from both flanks, the German force was cut to pieces. About forty soldiers were killed and several surrendered, while the rest fled in disarray. That brought the Germans’ night counterattack to a decisive end.21
In the first glimmer of daylight, Sergeant Nolan observed that a platoon or more of Panzer Grenadiers had occupied a small farmhouse. From the building, the Germans could bring the road junction under fire and break up the planned brigade assault toward San Leonardo before it even got started. Nolan realized the Canadians would have to force the enemy out of the building.22 He had fewer than twenty men in his platoon and some of these had to remain where they were to secure the road junction. Taking only one section of ten men, Nolan launched a frontal assault on the heavily defended position. Charging through heavy machine-gun and small-arms fire, the little force broke through the defences, fought its way hand to hand into the building, and drove the German defenders out. Twenty-five soldiers and one officer surrendered to Nolan and his men. The brigade’s planned rallying point for the afternoon’s offensive was secure.23
While the battalion’s two forward platoons fought heroically to keep the road junction open, divisional headquarters staff worked through the night and into the morning to ensure that the assault against San Leonardo would not mirror the earlier failure. The urgency to move to the offensive before the Germans destroyed the tenuous bridgehead had to be tempered by the logistical complexity of organizing a major attack. Major General Chris Vokes hammered out a plan fitting to a man at home in a boxing ring — a front jab and right hook combination designed to push the Germans out of San Leonardo. It would be a 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade show.
The 48th Highlanders of Canada would provide the hard jab against the defences of the 361st Regiment in front of San Leonardo, while the Royal Canadian Regiment struck against the Germans’ right. Success hinged on the RCR’s right hook through the bridgehead held by the Hasty P’s. From the road junction just south of San Donato’s little chapel, the RCR would storm up a small, muddy, unnamed lane for one and a half miles to San Leonardo. The road followed a relatively level plain thickly overgrown by dense vineyards and olive groves. This vegetation provided ideal defensive cover for enemy positions, while the level terrain also offered good routes for German armoured counterattacks against the advancing battalion’s open flank. The latter threat posed a grave risk to the regiment because it was apparent that the RCR would have to attack unsupported by 1st Canadian Armoured Brigade — still unable to get tanks over the river and unlikely to do so before the early afternoon attack got underway.24
Vokes’s concern about German tanks was strengthened by intelligence reports on enemy strength. A summary written up by Major N.L.C. Mathers of divisional General Staff estimated that the Panzer Grenadiers could immediately deploy two squadrons of Panzer Mark IVs and probably bring up another squadron with twenty-four hours’ notice. The report further concluded that the Canadians probably faced five infantry battalions, with the whereabouts of two other battalions unknown. (Unlike the Canadian divisional structure where regiment and battalion were synonymous, German organization was broken down in ever decreasing unit size from division, to regiment, to battalion, to company, to platoon, to section.) Second Battalion of the 361st Regiment and 3rd Battalion of the 200th Regiment were believed to be in positions to the rear of the German front line and available to counterattack the RCR assault. Equally worrisome was the fact the Germans had an unprecedented availability of artillery support. Mathers estimated the enemy had a full divisional artillery regiment of forty-eight guns ranging from 75-millimetre to 150-millimetre, about ten 75-millimetre infantry regiment guns, and two or three of the massive 17,520-kilogram, 170-millimetre guns that fired a shell weighing sixty-eight kilograms. The Germans were also known to have many Nebelwerfer six-barrelled mortars in the area. These mortars, which fired six shells apiece at two-second intervals, were known to Allied troops as “Moaning Minnies.” The name derived from the ear-piercing shriek the shells made as they descended on a target like a clutch of explosive eggs. Already “Moaning Minnie” casualties were mounting throughout the divisional area.
Mathers wrapped up his report with the optimistic prediction that “the enemy will fight his forces until it is clear that we have succeeded in seizing a bridgehead which allows the full deployment of all our arms and have support routes which wipe out the river as a tactical feature. When he judges that point has been reached he will begin withdrawal to a new line. It appears that the enemy does not think that point has as yet been reached.”25
Given the known German strength that could be brought to bear against the RCR and 48th Highlander dual assault, and the lack of tank support, it was obvious the Canadians needed some major artillery and air power in their corner. This they were promised. In addition to the Canadian artillery formations of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Field regiments of the Royal Canadian Artillery, the British 57th Field, 4th and 70th M
edium regiments of the Royal Artillery, the British 98th Army Field Regiment of 105-millimetre self-propelled guns, and the 8th Indian Division’s artillery would participate in what was to be the war’s heaviest barrage fired to date by a western Allied force. Three hundred and fifty guns would lay on a sixty-minute barrage. Additional firepower would be provided by 108 fighter bomber and 72 light bomber sorties. Even a couple of Royal Navy battle cruisers would be on hand to throw their guns into the pot. During the barrage’s last thirty minutes, the Saskatoon Light Infantry would bring the full weight of its 4.2-inch mortars and Vickers medium machine guns to bear against the German forward positions across the river.26
It was hoped that the German Panzer Grenadier regiments defending the Moro would suffer devastating casualties. Those defenders lucky enough to survive the barrage were expected to be dazed and disoriented by the mass of explosives going off around them. Before the confused troops could emerge from their holes to organize a defence, the Canadian infantry should be rolling over their positions. The bombardment was scheduled to begin at 1530 hours on December 8. The infantry battalions would begin their assault precisely at 1630 hours, going “over the top” in what everyone involved recognized as dramatically similar to a World War I attack plan. Lacking immediate tank support, however, Vokes had no alternative. Stealth had already failed. The steel and explosive of artillery and the flesh of infantry must win the day.