Ortona

by Mark Zuehlke

  There the man stayed until December 23, when Boyd unexpectedly found him loading the six-pounder. “What are you using for brains?” Boyd demanded of Sergeant Jim de Young, who commanded the gun. The sergeant defended himself, saying that Mabley had insisted on loading. And look at the result, de Young told Boyd. “Never before or after did I see loading like it,” Boyd said later. “Eight hundred rounds went through that gun. . . . The crews would rush into the gun positions, fire fifteen to twenty rounds as quickly as possible, then rush back to safety before the counter fire started. . . . Every round through that gun was loaded by Mabley.”2 By the end of the day, Mabley was stone deaf, but he would man the gun for the rest of the battle despite the fact that his hearing would be permanently lost.

  The second gun was better concealed than the first. It was positioned through a gap in a long brick wall. Behind its protective cover, the gunners were able to prepare themselves before lunging out to snap off a blaze of rounds. As soon as the German shells started to whine their way, they scampered back behind the wall. After leaving Mabley, Boyd stepped out from behind this wall as the men rushed once again to the gun, and heard a ping. A sniper bullet zipped between his spread legs, passing just slightly below his crotch. Boyd ran behind the wall before the sniper could chamber and snap off another, more accurate round.

  The paratrooper working the sniper rifle had fired across a distance of close to a mile. Yet he had come within inches of killing or wounding Boyd. Throughout the battle for Sicily and the long march up the boot of Italy, German snipers had plagued the Allied forces. The Germans made extensive use of these soldiers. A well-placed, competent sniper could force an entire battalion to deploy in reaction to the threat posed. German strategy was for snipers to move out at night and crawl deep into positions that the Allies would have trouble finding and destroying. At first light, they would start killing. German gunpowder released virtually no smoke, and the sniper rifles emitted little muzzle flash. This made it extremely difficult to locate the sniper.

  German snipers sought victims worth killing. An infantry private was a poor target. His death would do little to destabilize an attacking platoon or company. Rather, the snipers were trained to focus on officers, non-commissioned officers, and radio signallers. After paying the price in the first days of Sicily, Canadian officers, from lieutenants to brigadiers, had ditched their holsters and pistols for rifles or Thompson submachine guns. Those who kept pistols stuck them inside their coats or shirts. Binoculars were similarly hidden. Some ripped the rank insignia off their uniforms. Every measure was taken to avoid looking like an officer, to blend with the soldiers around them. For an officer to stride about waving arms and yelling orders was to write a death warrant across his own forehead. The officers learned to give orders with a calmly spoken word or two that was passed along the line, or to exert control with a subtle movement of the hand or inclination of the head.

  Even bold officers such as Major Jim Stone and Lieutenant Colonel Bert Kennedy took measures to make themselves appear less obviously in command. They did not shrink from enemy fire, but they did not seek through flamboyant demonstration of command to draw fire upon themselves. The truth was that Captain Paul Triquet of the Van Doos had been wrong during the attack on Casa Berardi. He had said, “Don’t worry, they can’t shoot.” But the Germans shot very well. Canadian military analysts thought the German snipers were inferior to none. They were also considered immeasurably patient. It was nothing for a sniper to allow an entire company of infantry to pass by his line of fire without taking a shot at obvious targets. Instead, he would wait for the company headquarters or even the battalion headquarters to come forward, then shoot the radio signaller. Betrayed by the antenna waving above the radio on his back, so burdened he often walked bent over, and rendered deaf by the headphones, a signaller was virtually helpless to defend himself. He was also linked by the umbilical cord of the radio handset to the most desired sniping targets on the battlefield, either a company commander, an artillery forward observation officer, or, better still, a battalion commander or even a brigadier.

  It took most of the march up the Italian boot for the Eighth Army and 1st Canadian Infantry Division to start meeting German snipers with their own. The British and Commonwealth command had no experience to draw upon. They responded to the slaughter of officers and radio signallers with hesitant, fretful steps. First, they issued six sniper rifles to each battalion with the idea that an equivalent number of soldiers would be transformed into deadly snipers. Designated the Lee Enfield No. 4 Sniper’s Rifle, these rifles were just Mark 1 Lee Enfields mounted with a tangent rear sight and fitted for a telescopic sight. A thin cheek rest was also attached to the top of the rifle butt to allow the sniper to have some comfort during the long process of selecting targets, and to provide better gun stabilization against the effect of recoil.

  German sniper rifles were equally crude. The standard German rifle was the Mauser Kar 98k, first constructed in 1935. It was little more than a shortened version of the rifle that the Germans had used in World War I. Rifles lacked the flair in weaponry that obsessed Adolf Hitler and the German high command. Their attention went to automatic weapons, tanks, jet-propelled aircraft, and self-propelled missiles, such as the V-1 and V-2 guided-missile bombs that would soon terrorize Great Britain. Because of this obsession with the sexier forms of weaponry, most German infantrymen carried a crude, inferior rifle into battle.

  But the German snipers learned to use the rifle with masterly skill. They formed an elite of their own. They operated outside the confines of platoon, company, and battalion structures, normally reporting to regimental or battalion command. German snipers were as well trained in reconnaissance, observation, and unit identification as they were in shooting to kill. Every German division had a large number of snipers. First Parachute Division had more than most. In Ortona, the German snipers exacted a terrible price. And the designated snipers were supplemented by swarms of other parachutists who also took up sniping positions and were relatively capable marksmen.

  Dug into heavily fortified positions, the German snipers and machine-gunners controlled movement on the streets of Ortona. To stay on the streets was to invite a bullet. To counter this threat, the Loyal Edmontons and Seaforths responded by deploying overwhelming superiority in firepower from the antitank guns and the Three Rivers tanks.

  They had only a poor semblance of snipers themselves to deploy — six to a battalion. And these men were seldom left free to work independently from company-level operations. In Russia, Communist snipers had learned to counter German snipers through the development of patiently maintained hiding positions. They were also backed by a spotter equipped with binoculars or a spotting telescope. A Russian sniper and assistant would lie in a pile of rubble or in a basement, peering toward an area from which a German sniper was known to be firing. Sometimes the vigil took hours, other times days, even weeks. At last the German sniper would betray himself and the Russian would deliver a killing shot. Some of the best and most patient Russian snipers were women. Commonwealth troops seldom had such patience. They sniped as opportunity arose and only occasionally took the hours and days to counter the German snipers with stealth of their own. Most Canadian snipers were as likely to be drafted into working as riflemen as to be allowed to remain solely snipers. Seldom were they properly deployed. So the balance remained tipped in the favour of the German snipers.3

  In Ortona on the morning of December 23, the Germans seemed to retain the initiative no matter what actions the Canadians took. Paratroopers dominated the roofs with sniper fire. Machine guns controlled the streets. Mines made tank movement nearly impossible. Everything found inside a building was likely to be booby-trapped. At night, the paratroopers infiltrated back into positions from which they had been cleared during the day. The town seemed like some kind of evil maze, Germans sprouting up behind, beside, and in front of the Seaforths and Edmontons. Sheer endurance and dogged determination were about all the Can
adians could offer up. They were still learning the ropes in the bloody world of street fighting. The parachutists were veterans. They had fought in Leningrad. Some had served in the streets of Stalingrad before the Sixth Army had been surrounded there. They had learned in the harshest training schools on earth. The veterans of the urban battles on the Russian front had passed their experience and knowledge to the newer recruits. In Ortona, they demonstrated their skill with deadly efficiency.

  Feldwebel Fritz Illi and his platoon were constantly on the move. They believed themselves to be outnumbered and outgunned. Illi was exhausted — he had never seen such awful fighting. There seemed so few of them to hold an entire town against what he thought was an entire division of the Eighth Army. Since the British had burst into the town, the fighting had been continuous. (Illi had no idea the enemy were Canadians. To him they were just Tommies. British, Canadians, New Zealanders, and other Commonwealth troops all wore the same khaki uniforms, the same helmets, and carried the same weapons. So he thought he fought the British.) His platoon, slowly chipped away by casualties, moved every few hours from one position to another. Most of the positions were either firing pits dug into the rubble piles or small fortifications inside houses. To his veteran’s eyes, Illi’s men were substandard. He spent most of his time directing their fire, warning them about the hazards that could kill them. For the past three days, he and his men had slept hardly at all. They had not washed. From a distance, the Canadians seemed so clean, so well dressed, so strong and robust, and so very well armed.4

  Company Sergeant Major Jock Gibson and a small section of men from the Seaforths’ ‘D’ Company worked their way up a narrow street leading toward a large square on Via Cavour. They kept to one side, pressed close to the walls of the buildings. One man would dash forward and duck into a doorway, then the next would leapfrog past him to the shelter of an alley. It was a frightening task, as they were very exposed to enemy ambush. Gibson was weary. His uniform was covered in what seemed to be several weeks’ worth of mud, the blood of fallen comrades, the grime of gunpowder and sweat. He needed a shave and would have given just about anything for a bath.

  Coming up on an intersection, he saw an officer and two Seaforth privates approaching the door to a nearby building. The officer raised his rifle, obviously intending to bash the door open with its butt. Gibson had a premonition. “Watch out!” he yelled. “Don’t touch that door.” The words had just left his mouth when the officer banged the door with the rifle butt, knocking it open. An explosion threw the man into the street. Forgetting about the danger of snipers, Gibson ran to him. The officer’s ankle was hanging loose, connected to his leg by only a small scrap of flesh and muscle. Gibson strapped the ankle back to the rest of the leg as best he could with a bandage, and helped drag the man to the battalion HQ at Santa Maria di Costantinopoli. Then he returned to the never-ending battle.5

  Whether the Canadians used the streets or tried to advance by jumping from house to house by the second- or third-storey balconies, they were invariably exposed to fire. Trying to gain access to buildings through windows or doors made it easy for the paratroopers to ambush them with booby traps. A new strategy was needed. In the afternoon, Loyal Edmonton Captain Bill Longhurst thought he had the solution. He had set out to capture a stretch of rowhouses, but the street was totally enfiladed by machine-gun fire. Moving in the street would be suicide. Longhurst summoned two of the battalion’s pioneers and got them to make a demolition charge with plastic explosives that could be moulded to whatever shape was required. This kind of charge was called a beehive, created by tying together whatever amount of plastic explosive was judged necessary to achieve the desired destructive effect. Sometimes the beehive would be wrapped around the end of a pole so that the charge could be put in place from a distance by extending the pole from a covered position to its destination.

  Longhurst had the pioneers take the charge up to the top floor of the rowhouse his unit held. Germans were positioned in the building next door. Longhurst later wrote, “To get the right height they placed the ‘Beehive’ on a chair and leaned it against the wall. While the ‘Beehive’ was being set I gathered all my men on the ground floor. With the fuses set the pioneers tumbled down the stairs, and as they reached the ground floor, there was a loud explosion. We all tore up the stairs in order to get through the mouse-hole before the dust subsided, but there was no hole. What we thought was one wall was actually two walls. Again we set a ‘Beehive,’ went through the same routine as before, and this time found ourselves in the next house.

  “The leading section into this house was the follow up section. It immediately cleared the floor and manned all windows covering the house on the opposite side of the street. The first section then came through, cleared the next floor up, then moved down and cleared the bottom floor.”6 The process of clearing floors was dangerous and bloody business. When a hole had been breached in the wall, the first section hurled a few grenades through. After these exploded, one or two men would jump into the smoke- and dust-filled room and rake it with Thompson submachine-gun fire. If there were paratroopers in the room, they usually died before they could react. The next section would move out. An upstairs floor would be cleared by spraying the stairwell with an automatic weapon and then charging up before the Germans could respond. Downstairs floors were subjected to showers of grenades thrown down the stairwell and then a mad rush by troops firing submachine guns and Bren guns.

  Longhurst dubbed the wall-breaching technique mouse-holing, and word of its effectiveness spread like lightning through the two Canadian battalions. Although, as far as the Loyal Edmontons were concerned, Longhurst had invented a new method of street fighting, this was not exactly the case. British tactical doctrine for “Fighting in Built Up Areas” included a strategy known as the “vertical tactic.” In 1941, a British Army training film showed troops employing a method of breaking into a house by cutting a hole in the roof, either with an axe or explosive charge. They then followed up by bursting through behind a screen of grenades.7

  Commonwealth forces had had little expectation of actually having to fight in towns, so no attempt had been made to train either officers or common soldiers in the vertical technique, or even to make them aware of its existence. Loyal Edmonton Major Jim Stone had been to the British battle-drill schools, where the technique was supposed to be taught, and he had never been introduced to it. When Longhurst reported his success to Stone, the officer thought the tactic ingenious. “It was utterly new to me,” he later said.8

  Longhurst blew his way through one wall after another, managing to clear the entire block in a long afternoon of mayhem. To his surprise, each time his men occupied a house on one side of the street, the Germans withdrew from the house immediately opposite. This meant his men needed only to clear one side of the street to move the Canadian front forward.

  The Seaforths added their own distinctive stamp to the mouse-holing method, and many of their pioneers denied that mouse-holing was an innovation they learned from the Edmontons. Sergeant Harry Rankin of the Seaforths’ Pioneer Company argued that it was simply the logical thing to do, once the hazard of moving in the street was realized. Rankin’s platoon was recovering hordes of Teller antitank mines, which were perfect for the task of mouse-holing. He would jam a bayonet in the wall, hang a Teller on it, slip a short time fuse to the built-in detonator, light it, and run like hell. Usually the result would be a nice hole in the wall through which the infantry could move. Sometimes the charge would fail to open a hole; other times it would bring the entire house crashing down. “We aren’t exactly practising scientific demolitions here,” Rankin would say, when an officer complained that the house he was planning to capture had instead been demolished.

  Rankin never gave a thought to the destruction he was wreaking on Ortona with his explosives. There was a job to do, so he did it. If a tank was having trouble getting around a corner because the street was too narrow, he would set some plastic explosive charges
and blow the obstructing walls out of the way. Destruction on demand, with nothing sophisticated about the methods. All a Seaforth had to do was send the word back, and Rankin and his team would appear to work their explosive magic.9

  In this manner, the Canadians slowly bludgeoned their way through the streets of Ortona. Germans and Canadians alike laid waste to the town. The air was choked with smoke and dust. Fires burned in the wreckage of buildings. Hour after remorseless hour witnessed the constant din of explosions, machine guns rattling, rifles cracking, and masonry collapsing.

  Even from a distance, the savagery of the battle for Ortona was apparent. About two miles south of Ortona, war artist Captain Charles Comfort was based in a rear-area camp among the trees of a pretty orange grove located about a mile north of San Vito Chietino. “The very smell of death and destruction,” he wrote in his diary, “reached us. . . . A holocaust of red glowed in the sky, revealing a ragged skyline as tongues of flames leapt into the night. We peered through the trembling darkness . . . overlooking the awesome scene. Downwind from the action the frightful intimate sounds of battle were all too clear, bursts of automatic fire, the Bren and the Schmeisser answering one another, each with its own distinctive accent. A dozen concurrent dialogues penetrated the blunter, duller, but more profound thunder of the gunning. From the intervening vineyards rose a ghostly vapour, like a shroud winding itself around the town. The most boisterous and profane among us became silent in face of what we witnessed. The morbid fascination of destruction held us in its grip as life and its monuments dissolved before our eyes. Over all, the deafening voice of guns beat a massive dirge like all the unmuffled drums of hell.”10