by Mark Zuehlke
Stone, Dougan, and Bowen held a huddled conference. It was starting to drizzle lightly, but they were so used to the cold, wet weather that they paid no mind to their rapidly dampening clothes. Stone explained ‘D’ Company’s task. He wanted one platoon to take the point. If it got through, the others would follow. The three men drew lots. Dougan, who considered himself little blessed with gambler’s luck, predictably lost. “Can you lay down some smoke to cover us?” he asked Stone.5 The major told Private Elwyn Springsteel, the company’s two-inch mortarman, and his helper to lay on the smoke bombs.6 Springsteel could see the German machine-gun positions on the edge of the town, so putting smoke where it was needed posed no problem.
Dougan considered his options. For six men to try striding across the machine gun–swept open ground was simple suicide. There was, however, a small ditch running directly from the Edmontons’ forming-up position to where a large house stood on Ortona’s edge. The building looked to be a pensione, or small apartment house. The ditch was narrow, and about three feet deep. It occurred to Dougan that if they hunched over and ran up the ditch in a single-file line, they might remain unnoticed by the German machine-gunners. Of course, a wise German officer would have set a machine gun right smack at the end of the ditch to prevent precisely this kind of infiltration.
In fighting the Germans, Dougan had previously found that often the tactic that seemed most unexpected because of its hazard was the one to take. The Germans tended to dismiss the possibility of their enemy taking bold, aggressive action. The proper way to mount an attack was to advance by sections over the open ground on a wide front. This was what the Canadians had already done. This was precisely what the Germans would again be expecting. Bunching up in a ditch was madness. “Hell, we’re all going to die anyway,” Dougan thought, “might as well give it a go.”7
With Springsteel firing off smoke as quickly as his loader could drop bombs into the firing tube, Dougan and his men bolted down the ditch. As they neared the end, Dougan expected to hear the horrible ripping sound of a German MG42 machine gun. He kept expecting to die. But not a shot was fired. The ditch was unguarded. Dougan and his men piled out of it and up against the cover offered by the wall of the pensione.8 He turned to look back, planning to wave Stone and the rest of the company over. They were already through. Stone came out of the ditch first, grinning fiercely. “Nobody but a bunch of madmen would have attempted that dash,” Stone said.9
Behind them, still manning their slit trench positions in front of the pensione and other buildings, the paratroopers awaited the next Canadian attack. They appeared to have no inkling that the remaining fragment of ‘D’ Company was now to their rear. Dougan opened the door to the pensione and the men quickly secured the house. Stone led Dougan and several infantrymen up the stairs to the top storey. They found the rooms there empty. From the upstairs windows, they looked right down into the German slit trenches. Rifles, Bren guns, and Thompson submachine guns poked out of the windows and opened fire as one. The Germans died in place.10
With the paratroopers now alerted to the Edmontons’ presence, the battle was on. Stone led his section out of the pensione and they proceeded to clear the buildings standing between it and ‘B’ Company’s position to the right. Some prisoners were taken and held at the pensione, which Stone turned into his company headquarters. Shortly after the two companies linked up, Lieutenant Alon Johnson, the commander of the scout platoon, met Stone at the building. Johnson had been sent by Jefferson to confirm the precise location of Stone’s company.
Stone told Johnson to take the prisoners back with him to battalion headquarters. As Johnson left with the prisoners, he heard Stone radio Jefferson. “Johnson’s House is now in our hands,” Stone said. “Johnson headed your way. He’ll explain.” When Johnson reported to Jefferson, he was able to point out the large building on Ortona’s edge. For the rest of the day’s fierce battle, the building was referred to by everyone in the Edmonton Regiment as Johnson’s House.11
The fighting was chaotic. Germans and Canadians exchanged grenades by the dozens. ‘C’ Squadron of the Three Rivers Tanks rolled its Shermans up close to the edge of town and hammered German positions with the 75-millimetre main guns. No. 5 Troop of ‘C’ Squadron pushed 200 yards into the town itself, firing up numerous enemy positions as it advanced, but was unable to move up Corso Vittorio Emanuele due to lack of infantry cover. With ‘D’ Company too reduced by casualties to do more than widen its holdings of houses immediately around the pensione, the Edmontons’ ‘B’ Company spearheaded the Canadian advance.12 The tankers engaged two antitank guns, driving off their crews and capturing the guns.13
Forward movement of the tanks was seriously hampered by the many mines buried in the few streets paralleling Corso Vittorio Emanuele that were wide enough for the tanks. These streets were also choked with large piles of rubble the Germans had created by systematically blowing up buildings so their walls collapsed into the street. The tanks found it impossible to get over these mine-laden rubble piles. Even the infantry found moving in the streets difficult and dangerous. The paratroopers had snipers covering virtually every open space. ‘B’ Company took heavy casualties, but pressed on.
In ‘D’ Company’s sector, Dougan was realizing that the German paratroopers were “tough babies.”14 He was in a street near the pensione when his section got tangled in a short grenade exchange with some of the enemy. The Canadians drove off the Germans. Dougan saw a wounded sergeant lying in clear view on the cobblestones. He shouted at the man to surrender. Slowly, calmly, the German raised his rifle and fired at Dougan. Dougan’s men cut him down.15
On the Edmontons’ right flank, ‘C’ Company of the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada had pushed off at daybreak toward Santa Maria di Costantinopoli. They met with little resistance and soon had occupied the church. Things went so well on his front that Captain Don Harley initially figured the town would be cleared of German troops by nightfall.16 ‘C’ Company started advancing up Via Costantinopoli, which arced from the eastern part of Ortona toward the southernmost square on Corso Vittorio Emanuele. Via Costantinopoli was bordered along much of its length by low stone walls protecting small gardens and olive groves. Interspersed among the gardens, and growing more numerous as the road advanced deeper into Ortona, were interlinked rows of two- and three-storey houses.
Harley’s company got only a short distance up the street before meeting stiff German resistance. Several Three Rivers tanks followed a lane running off the Ortona-Orsogna lateral road east to the Seaforth front and provided suppressing fire against German strong points. One tank from ‘C’ Squadron, named Cobourg II, parked square in the middle of the street and fired shell after shell down its length to knock out a number of targets. Soon spent brass cartridges lay in a ragged pile behind the tank, as the loader threw the empty shells out of a hatch.17 With the tanks in support, Harley’s men pressed on, making good progress until they reached the more densely built-up area.
It was soon clear that the paratroopers were not going to give Ortona up easily. It was impossible to flank enemy strong points by moving around them on the side streets. Every time Harley sent men off to check the flanking streets, they found them dangerously narrow and blocked by large piles of rubble from demolished buildings. Some of the piles were fifteen feet high, impossible to climb over without being completely exposed to sniper fire.
At 1100 hours, hearing matching reports from the two Edmonton companies in Ortona and from Harley’s Seaforths, 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade commander Brigadier Bert Hoffmeister decided that Ortona was going to be a tough nut to crack. He realized the entire brigade would have to be committed. Accordingly, he ordered all companies of the Seaforth and Loyal Edmonton battalions into the battle. The Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry would remain in close reserve.18
By evening, the Seaforths were all in Ortona. ‘D’ Company was given the task of relieving the remnants of Stone’s Edmonton company and protecting the Edmontons’ left flank. Th
is would allow the Edmontons, much reduced by casualties, to concentrate their strength on advancing up Corso Vittorio Emanuele.19 The remaining Seaforth companies secured the area around Santa Maria di Costantinopoli. Lieutenant Colonel Syd Thomson moved his battalion HQ into the church.
The Seaforth war diarist noted that battalion HQ staff were shocked by the evidence of the stiff fight Harley’s men had faced. He wrote that ‘C’ Company was “busy burying their own and enemy dead. The company’s casualties being seven killed and many wounded. . . . Battalion strength . . . at that time 524, all ranks.”20
Knowing the Seaforths were protecting their flanks, the Edmontons pressed up the Corso on a two-company front. One company took each side of the main street. Buildings in this sector before the first square were scattered in closely packed little knots, with vegetable gardens between. Three Rivers’ ‘C’ Squadron was able to provide good support against the paratroopers’ sniper and machine-gun positions, which were usually located in second- and third-storey windows. The presence of Teller antitank mines, however, meant that minesweeping teams from the Royal Canadian Engineers often had to precede the tanks. It was a dangerous job, especially as the sniper fire was extremely accurate.
The Edmontons pushed on, reaching the first square, Piazza Vittoria, just before nightfall. Three Rivers’ No. 5 Troop, which had been supporting the advance through the day, withdrew at 1400 hours and was replaced by No. 1 Troop. The new tank troop, commanded by Lieutenant F. Simard, had advanced to within one hundred yards of the square when Simard’s tank lost its left track to a Teller mine. Working under fire, Simard and his crew managed to rig up a tow chain and hook it to the rear of another Sherman. The other tank then dragged Simard’s machine out of the immediate battle zone where it could be safely repaired.21
When night fell on Ortona, the tanks withdrew to the town’s outskirts. In the narrow streets, they were too vulnerable to being destroyed by paratrooper raiding parties. The lines between friend and foe were hopelessly blurred. Germans and Canadians sometimes were directly opposite each other or even shared the same house. In the darkness, movement was dangerous, the guards on both sides jumpy and firing at any sound.
The Seaforths’ ‘D’ Company started taking over the area held through the day by Major Jim Stone’s Loyal Edmonton company. As Captain Alan W. Mercer had been wounded the day before, the Seaforth company was now commanded by Lieutenant John McLean. Company strength was only forty-two men of all ranks. Both Canadian and German artillery and mortars were at work. The town rocked with explosions and the racket of collapsing walls and roofs. McLean’s men hived off in small groups to replace the equally scattered Edmontons. Whispered passwords proved to Edmonton and Seaforth alike that they met Canadians. McLean left four men here, five men there, two men in another shattered building. ‘D’ Company was soon scattered in a thin semi-circle facing northwest toward the town’s heart.22
Company Sergeant Major Jock Gibson and McLean spent the night circulating from section to section, ensuring the men were alert, and generally boosting morale. In the sections, the soldiers tried sleeping in shifts. The din of the shelling, however, made sleep nearly impossible. So, too, did the knowledge that mere feet away the Germans were also clustered inside houses. When the shelling eased, they could hear guttural voices talking in soft whispers. Sometimes the voices grew loud and boisterous, as if the paratroopers were in a beer hall back in Germany enjoying a fine evening of camaraderie.23
Obergefreiter Karl Bayerlein was exhausted. The last two days had passed in a frenzied blur of demolition and mine-laying tasks. The twelve engineers in his section had sown innumerable Teller antitank mines into the forward rubble piles. If a tank tried bulling its way over the rubble, almost certainly one of its tracks would trip at least one mine’s pressure detonator and be immobilized.
There were three detonators built into a Teller mine, one on top, one on the side, and another on the bottom. The paratroopers could position a mine against a building or inside a room, hook a length of wire to the side detonator, and reel it off to a secure position many yards away. When Canadian infantry came near the mine, a paratrooper would give the wire a yank and out popped the detonator pin. Seven and a half seconds later the mine would explode with an enormous blast. By attaching the third detonator to a stake buried underneath the mine, Bayerlein and the other engineers were able to create a deadly booby trap. Once the mine was discovered, the Canadians would think it could be safely picked up and disarmed. But when they lifted the mine, the detonating pin hooked to the stake would pull free, setting off the mine.
German mines were all steel-cased and vulnerable to detection by Canadian engineers using metal detectors. To heighten confusion and make every obstacle even more difficult to surmount, Bayerlein’s team laced Italian wooden-box mines in among the Tellers and anti-personnel S-mines.
As they fell back in front of the Canadian attack, Bayerlein and his men packed Italian box mines or boxes of blasting powder into outside stairwells and behind doors. Tripwires were strung across the stairs or hooked to the doors. If a soldier tripped the wire by going up the stairs or by opening a door, the detonator immediately ignited and the explosive charge blew up. In the dark gloominess of hallways and stairwells, it was almost impossible for anyone to spot the tripwires. At times the booby traps were set with a macabre sense of humour. Quite a number of the homes in Ortona had been updated by the installation of water closets. Bayerlein and his men attached a bomb to the flush handle. When a soldier took advantage of the comfort of indoor plumbing and flushed, “boom.”24
As the day wore on, Bayerlein and his team finished their mining work and took to the roofs of some of the higher buildings behind Piazza Vittoria. They lay just back from the edge of the roofline and sniped at the advancing Canadian infantry with rifles. Bayerlein wrote in his diary that evening: “As soon as we were spotted the enemy brought in tanks. These fired shells until the buildings fell. The only possibility of escape was to jump on the other roofs of adjacent buildings. The enemy artillery is constant and falls everywhere in the city. The visibility was limited because of the dust of the explosions and houses collapsing. . . . In the evening we move closer to the front line. Our quarters are in the basement of a chemist shop near one of the main crossroads.”25
The paratroopers in Ortona ended the day pleased by the defence they had offered. Casualties had fallen within acceptable limits and they had made the Canadians pay in blood for every bit of ground given up. The channelling effect achieved by the creation of rubble piles on the narrow side streets served its purpose. The Canadians were forced to follow the path of least resistance up the main Corso, bringing them into one pre-selected killing ground after another. Generously equipped with Schmeisser submachine guns, light machine guns, and medium machine guns, the paratroopers were able to lay down vicious curtains of close-quarters gunfire that rendered the streets almost impossible for the Canadians to use. Scattering snipers throughout the buildings added to the hazard of any attempt to move along the street.26
While General Richard Heidrich’s paratroopers were confident that they could hold out as long as required, the view at Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring’s headquarters was gloomier. His chief of staff, General der Kavallerie Siegfried Westphal, telephoned the Tenth Army chief of staff, Generalmajor Fritz Wentzell, in the early evening of December 21. Kesselring and Westphal had misinterpreted signals from the battlefront and believed that Ortona had fallen. These messages had also reached Berlin. “High Command called me on the phone,” Westphal said. “Everybody was very sad about Ortona.”
A puzzled Wentzell replied, “Why? Ortona is still in our hands.” As far as Wentzell could see, the paratroopers were exacting such high casualties from the Eighth Army attackers that there was no reason to give up Ortona until the 1st Parachute Division’s flank was turned and the soldiers in the town faced being surrounded.27
21
THEY ALWAYS MESS THINGS UP
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bsp; A bold dash. Another madman’s gamble. Major Jim Stone believed he knew how to smash through 1st Parachute Division’s defences along Corso Vittorio Emanuele. If the German intent was to funnel the Canadians down its length through one killing zone after another, and there was no way for the Loyal Edmonton Regiment to outflank these zones, then the solution was to do the unexpected. Running like wildmen up the ditch had allowed his mangled company to win entry to Ortona. So why not do the same thing on a grander, more daring scale? Was not the Corso itself rather like a ditch?
After the first day’s dreadful fighting in the Ortona streets, Stone knew that the Germans would expect the Canadians to advance cautiously in the morning. But moving into the face of the enemy could only result in a prolonged and bloody house-to-house fight. Yesterday had proven how costly such an approach would be. Stone sought a way to prevent the regiment being decimated by the heavy casualties that a protracted battle in a town must entail. It was entirely likely that the paratroopers were not holding the town in great depth. They probably had a strong, well-manned defensive line. Behind that, there was unlikely to be any significant number of defenders. The paratroopers would be planning on withdrawing in staged steps from one prepared defensive position to another, bleeding the Canadians every step of the way. Stone was certain that the parachute division was implementing in Ortona a small-scale version of the strategy which Tenth Army had implemented so effectively to slow the Eighth Army’s advance all the way up the boot of Italy.
If he could pierce the line and get behind the Germans, they would be unable to re-establish a blocking line in front of his advance. The paratroopers would have to abandon Ortona or be isolated inside the town and face destruction. Boldness was the key. What Stone needed was to hit the paratroopers with a miniature “colossal crack” that would send them reeling right out of Ortona.