by Mark Zuehlke
22
FIGHT FOR THE BULGE
HAVING committed 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade to a slugging match against the 1st Parachute Division over ownership of the streets of Ortona, 1st Canadian Infantry Division commander Major General Chris Vokes now sought to speed conclusion of that battle by threatening the German defenders from the rear. During the battle for The Gully, the 48th Highlanders of Canada had inserted a narrow salient into the heart of the German defences northwest of Casa Berardi. This had enabled the Canadians to cut the road linking Cider Crossroads to Villa Grande. Since creating the salient on December 18, the Highlanders had been trying with little success to expand the depth of penetration into the German line.
In the afternoon of December 22, Vokes decided that the salient could serve as the jumping-off point for a major northeastern thrust by 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade. The ultimate goal of the attack would be to cut the roads running from Ortona to Tollo and the coast highway leading to Pescara. All supply and reinforcement of the paratroopers defending Ortona was confined to these roads. If he could break through and put blocking forces across the roads, the Germans in Ortona would be surrounded. If successful, Vokes could transform Ortona into a miniature Stalingrad.
It was common knowledge among the Allies that a similar strategy had forced the February 2, 1943, surrender of the 91,000 remaining survivors of Generalfeldmarschall Friedrich Paulus’s starving and exhausted Sixth Army to the Russians at Stalingrad. During an unparaleled, brutal six-month battle, more than 200,000 Germans had perished amidst the ruins of the city. For the last three months of the battle, the Sixth Army had found itself trapped in Stalingrad after the Russian army succeeded in surrounding the city with a two-pronged pincer-style offensive launched on November 19, 1942. Allied military analysts were declaring Stalingrad to be the turning point in the war on the Russian front. Where before the Germans had been on the offensive, they were now permanently thrown into a defensive stance, slowly and inevitably being forced to withdraw from Russia’s heartland. Paulus had been given no choice but to allow himself to be surrounded. In one of his increasingly common, irrational directives, Hitler had ordered the Sixth Army to hold Stalingrad at all costs. Paulus had done so. The cost had ultimately been the destruction of an entire army. The chance that General Richard Heidrich would allow his paratroopers to suffer the same fate was comparatively remote.
Nevertheless, once the Canadians started to threaten its lifeline, the parachute division’s options would be limited. Either stay and face destruction or flee Ortona.
Vokes issued his orders to Lieutenant Colonel Don Spry late that afternoon. The attack plan contained three phases. In the first phase, the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment, which had just completed a move from the coast to Casa Berardi, would attack through the 48th Highlanders’ front line. Its objective was a bulging ridgeline one thousand yards to the north of the Tollo road. Bordering the southern flank of the Riccio River, the ridge followed a gradually rising course north to a position overlooking the road from Ortona to Tollo. Once the Hasty P’s gained the edge of the ridge, the 48th Highlanders would kick off phase two by leapfrogging through the Hasty P’s and capturing the ridge’s highest point, which overlooked two hamlets, San Nicola and San Tomasso. Phase three would entail the Royal Canadian Regiment, which had just been bolstered by an influx of reinforcements, striking northeastward off the high ground to cut the main road north of Ortona.1
Staff at Spry’s brigade headquarters believed that even if only the first two phases of the offensive succeeded, the Germans must still surrender Ortona. Once 1 CIB was on the heights overlooking the two hamlets, all the roads north of Ortona would be subject to directed artillery fire, and would face the immediate threat of being severed by further Canadian offensive action. General Heidrich would then have two choices. He could commit his paratroopers to counterattacks against a strong defensive position in hopes of forcing the Canadians back to Casa Berardi or cut his losses by retreating from Ortona.2
The offensive would follow the well-established pattern that had enjoyed greatest success during Morning Glory. First, a massed preliminary artillery bombardment involving four field and three medium artillery regiments. Second, a combined armoured and infantry force advancing behind a creeping artillery barrage to the objective.
That was the plan, but even on the evening of December 22 doubts about its prospects of success were being expressed. Once again, rain was wreaking havoc on the Canadian tactical plans. Preliminary reconnaissance by 48th Highlander patrols that afternoon had revealed that the ground over which the tanks were expected to travel was extremely muddy. During the night the rain intensified, and by morning the ground was a boggy soup. This boded ill for the armour’s ability not only to keep up with the advancing infantry but to reach the objective at all.3
Dismissing this gloomy prognosis, Spry ordered Hastings and Prince Edward commander Bert Kennedy, who had been promoted to lieutenant colonel on December 11, to proceed with the attack. Kennedy had only just returned to the battalion after being evacuated on December 15 with jaundice. He was weak, but as feisty as ever.
The Hasty P’s had seen little significant fighting since December 15. Along with the 48th Highlanders, they were one of only two battalions in the division fielding close to normal strength in the rifle companies. They had also been able to get a little more rest than most of the other battalions. Still, even after the fighting on their front had cooled down, the Hasty P’s had continued to lose men during patrol actions, and German artillery fire had inflicted an almost daily toll in casualties. The worst casualties the battalion had suffered during their quiet duty had come on December 16. A platoon from each rifle company was withdrawn from the front lines and sent into San Vito Chietino by truck.4 Among the platoons was No. 12 from ‘B’ Company. Once the men had bathed, changed, and picked up their Christmas parcels, they started reloading into the trucks. Suddenly a large shell struck near the No. 12 platoon’s truck. One man was killed, several others wounded. The survivors got out of the truck, carrying the wounded toward the village square. Another shell caught the unlucky platoon.5 When the smoke cleared, four more men were dead, another twenty-three wounded.6 Only four men in No. 12 platoon were left unscathed.7 Hasty P’s Quartermaster Sergeant Basil Smith was horrified to see so many of the men he thought of as “his” injured in what was supposed to be a safe rear area. “This is a damned tough break,” he wrote in his diary that night, “to come through the toughest battle which has been fought in Italy and then to get it here. It would seem there is no ‘SAFE’ area in this corner of God’s footstool.”8
On the morning of December 22, just how dangerous the entire area could be had again been impressed on the Hasty P’s. The battalion had started mounting up in trucks for the move from San Leonardo to Casa Berardi. By 0830 hours, most of the men were on board. Some of the battalion headquarters staff, Smith wrote, were “just standing around awaiting the order. Without even a warning whistle, a shell landed fairly in the midst of the group clustered around our RAP [Regimental Aid Post] truck. . . . One moment they were chatting in a casual, carefree manner and one split second later, all three were gone.”9 Dead were Medical Officer Dr. Charlie Krakauer, medical sergeant Charlie Reid, and medical orderly Clayton Young. The three men were torn into unidentifiable fragments.10 Grimly the survivors gathered up the body parts, buried them in one grave, and drove toward their next battle.
The Hasty P’s moved into the attack at 0930 hours on December 23. ‘A’ Company led, with ‘C’ Company following close behind. In support was ‘A’ Squadron of the 11th Canadian Armoured Regiment (Ontario Tanks). Because of the mud, the tanks were confined to a narrow track running at a right angle from the road from Cider Crossroads to Villa Grande, toward the infantry battalion’s objective. Sappers from the Royal Canadian Engineers, working with metal detection equipment, walked ahead of the tanks to clear the track of Teller antitank mines.
Even without the mud
, the terrain over which the Hasty P’s attacked was hopeless tank country. It was almost exclusively vineyards, which formed ideal antitank obstacles. In this area, the wire used to train the vines was strung between thin concrete posts rather than the lighter wooden stakes that the Canadians had encountered closer to the Moro River. When a tank pushed through the rows of vines, the wire rolled into tangles held taut by the concrete posts. Tank tracks fouled or were even torn loose by the wire. Meanwhile, the paratroopers enjoyed ideal cover in which to set up gun positions and ambush the tanks with remotely triggered mines. The mud was increased by the centuries-old cultivating practice of deeply tilling the soil between the vine rows. In soil of such loose consistency, the slightest bit of rain rendered the land a quagmire. By following the tracks, the tankers hoped to work their way to a position where they could then bushwhack just a short distance through the vineyards to reach the infantry positions.11
Despite these problems, tanks and infantry made good progress from the start line toward the objective one thousand yards away. Moving closely behind the creeping artillery barrage, the infantry suffered very light casualties, coming up on the base of the low hill at 1030 hours. At this point, the artillery had to lift to allow the Canadians to seize the high ground without being caught in their own artillery bombardment.
It became immediately clear how the tactics of 1st Parachute Division differed from those of the 90th Panzer Grenadiers. The paratroopers had made no attempt to stop the Canadian advance to the base of the hill. Instead, all their strength was concentrated in a network of fortifications dug into the side of the hill and along the ridgeline itself. The 3rd Battalion of the 3rd Regiment now tore into the Hasty P’s with heavy machine guns, mortars, and light artillery. ‘A’ and ‘C’ companies were brought to an abrupt halt by the German fire within one hundred yards of the ridgeline.12
Never one to steer clear of a fight, Lieutenant Colonel Kennedy collared his assistant, Lieutenant Farley Mowat, marshalled up ‘B’ Company, which had been following behind the battalion HQ unit, and rushed forward to rally the faltering attackers. Mowat was impressed by Kennedy’s refusal to surrender to the natural instinct to hunch one’s shoulders when enemy bullets and shells whizzed close overhead. The commander strolled across the battlefield, issuing orders in an icily calm voice. By setting such a courageous example, Kennedy stiffened the determination of his regiment. The riflemen advanced again into the face of the enemy fire.13
While Kennedy was rallying his men, the tanks had ground up a gravel track to a point a few hundred yards to one side of the infantry. From here, the only route was through the vineyards. Lieutenant A.W. Hawkins led off with his Sherman to test the ground north of the track. Slogging through the mud, he soon found himself confronted by a shallow gully not indicated on his map. The sappers sweeping ahead of him for mines started descending into the gully, but were immediately forced back by machine-gun fire covering its entire length. Hawkins decided to proceed on his own. The tank rolled over the edge, and minutes later was disabled when an anti-tank mine tore off a track. It was 1100 hours. The tanks could go no farther toward the Hasty P’s until darkness allowed the engineers to find a path for them through the heavily mined vineyards.14
Despite losing the tank support, Kennedy was able to keep his men advancing. By midday, the Hasty P’s had fought through to the objective on the ridge. Kennedy then brought up ‘D’ Company and positioned it off to the battalion’s right. Casualties during the day had been heavy, with thirteen men killed and at least twice that many wounded. But the paratroopers had also suffered heavily. Kennedy walked through the ranks, unmindful that he was presenting himself as a target for German snipers. “Take it easy, lads,” he told his men. “No matter what happens we will look after you.”15 For their part, the soldiers had started calling the ridgeline over which they fought “the bulge,” an accurate description of what their position inside the German lines looked like on a map. Officers soon picked up the term and the battalion’s after-action reports each day referred to the ridgeline fight as the Battle of the Bulge.
Infantry and tanks remained separated and susceptible to being overrun by counterattack. Links to the Canadian main front line were fragile and could easily be severed by determined German action. In light of the situation, phase two was postponed until Kennedy’s men could work their way forward from the regiment’s main objective to a position that would serve as the 48th Highlanders’ start line. Advancing ‘B’ Company forward the necessary 400 yards took several hours. Once this objective was taken, word was sent back to the Highlanders to come up to the extended perimeter.16
The Hasty P’s were 1,000 yards ahead of the main Canadian lines and linked to the main line by an L-shaped thread running back to the Ortona-Orsogna lateral. This was an extremely tenuous position from which to continue an offensive, but Spry believed the risk had to be taken. He ordered the Highlanders to go forward at 1400 hours.
Meanwhile, Hasty P’s Quartermaster Sergeant Basil Smith set to work getting rations up to the rifle companies. During the night, he led a ration party forward. The men in his party strapped food-laden dixie cans on their backs and carried the rations to the front-line soldiers. Several times along the way, Smith’s party nearly blundered into the German lines. Once the food had been delivered, Smith volunteered the party as stretcher-bearers to bring out the half-dozen wounded men urgently requiring evacuation. He carried out a soldier named Jack Telford, who had enlisted on October 3, 1939, at the same time and place that Smith had joined up. Telford had been hit in the spine, thigh, and head by mortar fragments. Back at the RAP, Smith waited around until he learned of Telford’s prognosis. The new medical officer, Dr. Homer Eshoo, told Smith that Telford would live and probably regain most of his health, but that his soldiering days were done.17
In the forward position, the rifle companies spent the night fending off small, determined infiltration parties. The paratroopers were employing another of their favoured tactics — slipping about ten men at a time through the extended Canadian formations to strike at them from the rear. Heavily armed with machine guns and Schmeisser submachine guns, these teams caused the battalion a largely sleepless, nerve-wracked night.18
23
THE UNMUFFLED DRUMS OF HELL
WHILE the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment fought its way along the ridgeline toward the Tollo road, the fighting inside Ortona continued unabated. The Seaforth Highlanders of Canada had, as planned, moved behind the Loyal Edmonton Regiment’s rear during the night of December 22. In the morning, the Seaforths undertook a slow, costly advance through the narrow streets of the western part of the town’s old quarter. The Edmontons, meanwhile, slogged their way through Piazza Municipali and started a crawling advance up Corso Umberto I, a wide esplanade along which summertime tourists had strolled in the prewar days. Progress for both battalions was measured in a house or two gained every hour.
With the tanks finding street movement hampered by mine-laden rubble piles, the Canadians manhandled the battalion six-pounder antitank guns into the town. They turned the guns into house-busting weapons, and also used them to blast gaps in the rubble piles. Two seventeen-pounders of the division’s 90th Anti-Tank Battalion were deployed on the coast road just outside the town and started bombarding the old castle and other large buildings inside Ortona. It was discovered that the armour-piercing shells of the six-pounders, designed to penetrate a tank, would also punch good-sized holes in the walls of the old stone or brick buildings. Once a hole was opened, they switched to high-explosive shot and gutted the structure with shell after shell until the Germans inside were either killed or forced to retreat.1 Sometimes the antitank gunners continued punching a building with armour-piercing and high-explosive shells until its outside walls or the roof collapsed. A slow, bloody task that exposed the antitank gunners to machine-gun and sniper fire, this house-clearing technique offered little hope of driving the paratroopers out of Ortona before the end of the year.
These gunners were completely exposed to the enemy. As soon as they started firing, the Germans retaliated with a counter-barrage of mortar and light artillery. Antitank platoon commander Captain Ed Boyd was shocked to see that the loader manning the first gun on the mole was none other than Private Howard Mabley. Back in England, the thirty-year-old farmer from the Peace River District of Alberta had frustrated Boyd’s determined efforts to turn him into a soldier. His campaign of sullen passive resistance against learning the art of war had ended in the man being shuffled off to work in the kitchens. This was despite the fact that Boyd had spent an entire week personally forcing Mabley to repeatedly go through the basics of gun drill. “Load. Aim. Fire. Load. Aim. Fire,” he had yelled as Mabley fumbled with the gun. It had been hopeless. The farmer was never openly insolent or disrespectful. There was nothing he did to provide an officer with an excuse to bring him up on charges of disobedience. He simply would not, or could not, do the job well, no matter how long he was made to practise. Finally, Boyd gave up. Mabley went back to the kitchens.