by Mark Zuehlke
Eventually he started crawling again, clawing his way across the floor with his left arm and leg. The German sniper must have dismissed Mallet as dead, for no third burst came his way. Mallett reached the stairwell and slid painfully down two flights to the ground floor. The men in his rifle section were across the street. They saw him struggling to reach the doorway.
One of the soldiers, ignoring the sniper fire, ran across. The man bent down, picked Mallett’s 190-pound body up in his arms as he would a baby, and raced back to the rest of the section. Mallett was vaguely aware of a first-aid man working on him, then of four comrades carrying him on a stretcher through the streets. Later he found himself in a jeep, lying on one of its three stretchers. By evening, he was in an operating theatre in the field dressing station in San Vito Chietino.
When he awoke from surgery, Mallett assumed he must be dead. He could hear angels singing — a heavenly choir welcoming him with Christmas carols. Then a gruff voice brought him back to earth. He stared up at the doctor, who said, “Would you like one of the bullets as a souvenir?” Mallett said yes. A bullet with a flattened tip was handed over. Mallett discovered the choir was a group of nurses and orderlies singing Christmas carols to the wounded. Outside the building, the roar of incoming mortar shells threatened to drown the sweetly singing voices.9
In the signals area of the Seaforths’ battalion headquarters, Lieutenant Wilf Gildersleeve was worried that the radio team in ‘D’ Company might have been wiped out by a German sniper or artillery shell. His repeated attempts to raise them produced no response. It was possible, he knew, that the team’s batteries had failed or that for some other reason their radio was out of commission. Gildersleeve stuffed a couple of batteries in his haversack, picked up his Thompson sub-machine gun, and headed into the Ortona streets to find out what was going on.
The tall former invoice clerk who had won a scholarship to the Pitman Business College for his boy-soprano singing at a British Columbia Music Festival competition moved warily. Eventually he came to a building near Piazza San Francesco, where ‘D’ Company’s headquarters were located. As he stepped into the doorway, a very nervous sentry shoved a Thompson into his stomach and snapped, “What’s the password?” Gildersleeve fumbled a moment, remembered, and gave it to him. The man stepped aside. The officer went upstairs to the radio room. Inside, he found the two signallers hunched over the radio. Both men were dead asleep. The set was still operating, the chatter of the various companies passing back and forth.
Gildersleeve gently shook his men awake. He supposed he should be angry. But the officer knew that the men had probably not slept for three days and had finally just surrendered to exhaustion. They were both good soldiers, one the oldest and the other the youngest member of the Seaforths’ signals section. Private Vic Warner was forty, and it had only recently been discovered that Private Howard Wiley was a mere seventeen. When this battle was over, he would be shipped back to Canada for being underage. Gildersleeve left the spare batteries with the two men and returned to battalion HQ. He then ordered a third signaller to go to each of the company radio teams. The men were to ensure they alternated sleeping schedules so nobody fell asleep again while on duty.10
Lieutenant Colonel Syd Thomson held the right wrist of his good friend, Major Tom Vance. The young officer, temporarily blinded by an exploding artillery shell in the first Seaforth attempt to cross the Moro River, had returned to duty only two days earlier. Now he lay in the Forward Aid Post with a sniper’s bullet lodged just below the collarbone in the left side of his neck. Dr. Anderson stood opposite Thomson, slowly feeding plasma into Vance’s left arm.
Vance was the son of a well-known Vancouver criminologist and had just qualified to practise law when war broke out. He and Thomson had met in Calgary in early 1940 during an officers training course. They had been fast friends ever since. In Britain, Thomson had a steady girlfriend, whom he had asked to marry him. Vance and Thomson had often gone on double dates, Vance taking out Thomson’s girlfriend’s sister. If asked to describe Vance, Thomson would have said he was an intelligent, unassuming, possibly too trusting young man with a brilliant future ahead of him in the postwar world.
There would, however, be no future. Holding Vance’s right wrist, urging the beat of life in his veins to keep throbbing, Thomson felt the young officer’s pulse slow and then cease beating altogether. Dr. Anderson and Thomson stared sadly across the operating table at each other. Then Anderson turned, picked up two glasses, and filled each with precious Scotch whisky. He set the glasses on Vance’s chest. Doctor and battalion commander raised the glasses in a silent toast.11
Many individual soldiers Thomson had known since the beginning of the war had died or been severely wounded in Ortona, and the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada itself seemed to be perishing. Thomson wondered how the regiment would ever rebuild after such loss of experienced personnel. The stream of wounded and dying flowing through the Forward Aid Post was staggering. In the streets, the bodies of Seaforths lay scattered through the buildings and on the cobblestones. Nobody had time to gather up those who died, so they were left where they fell.12
The new men coming in as reinforcements, although they had experienced extensive training in Canada and Britain, were usually chewed up and spit out by the meat grinder of Ortona in mere hours. Thomson had seen Tom Middleton, the brother of long-time Seaforth Lieutenant Fred Middleton, arrive as a reinforcement that morning. The Middletons were both from Thomson’s hometown of Salmon Arm in the British Columbia interior. Thomson had sent Tom Middleton out to ‘A’ Company, which was badly understrength.13 Two hours later, the young man came back on a stretcher severely wounded. He started the long evacuation down a line that would end back in Canada with a medical discharge from the army.14
Captain June Thomas’s ‘A’ Company reached the edge of Piazza San Francesco in the early afternoon. The Canadians were unaware of its proper name. Previously it had just been marked on the map as an open space surrounded by some large buildings. Sprawled in the street before the San Francesco cathedral was a dead horse. Accordingly, the Seaforth commanders reported to battalion HQ that they now faced Dead Horse Square.
Thomas and his men had come up on the square by a narrow lane. Looking around the corner into the square, he could see that Germans were firing from the cathedral. Its bell tower already had a gaping hole in the southern side and other shell holes had been blown in the roof and walls of the building. The school was similarly smashed up, but there seemed to be no enemy fire coming from it. That was odd. Still, the Germans had not consistently defended every large building.
He decided to secure the school with one section of his depleted company.15 Lieutenant Stewart Lynch slipped over to the school with the six-man section and ordered the corporal in charge of the men to sweep the building and then hold it.16 The section consisted of reinforcements, mostly veteran Seaforths, who were returned from bouts of illness or who had been on other duties in North Africa until being rushed to Ortona. Among them was a twenty-six-year-old private, Gordon Currie-Smith, who had been cooling his heels in the reinforcement camp in Philippeville, Algeria, since arriving in North Africa from Canada en route to returning to the Seaforth Regiment.
Currie-Smith was a very small man, barely five feet tall and weighing hardly more than one hundred pounds. Yet he had been a professional soldier since the mid-1930s, serving first in the Irish Fusiliers and then in the Seaforths. Currie-Smith had not gone overseas in 1940 with the Seaforths, being detailed instead to the training camp in Vernon, British Columbia, to serve as a sergeant-trainer. With the Sicily invasion, Currie-Smith decided he had had enough of being out of the action and applied, as he had several times before, for a return to his regiment overseas. Called into the camp commander’s office, Currie-Smith was informed he could have his transfer, but only if he agreed to a demotion to private. Knowing in advance this was likely to be the condition, Currie-Smith had already loosened the stitches from his stripes. He yan
ked the stripes off and hurled them on the desk in front of the commander, telling him in no uncertain terms where he could put them. The officer curtly sent Currie-Smith on his way.17
Now, looking over at the schoolhouse, neither Currie-Smith nor the corporal commanding the section liked the situation. It seemed ridiculous that the Germans would just hand over a large three-storey building without exacting their normal pint of blood. The corporal and Currie-Smith had only been in Ortona for a day. But they had already heard enough about the German penchant for booby traps to think the Canadians were being deliberately lured into the building. Lynch ignored their protests and told the men to follow their orders.
The small section entered the school, swept it, and then scattered throughout the ground floor. There were so few of them that each man had to operate alone. Currie-Smith was frightened. He felt tremendously uneasy about being in this building.18
Currie-Smith’s concerns were warranted. Within an hour of the section’s occupation of the school, an enormous explosion shook the square. Thomas was down an alley and didn’t see what happened. Company Sergeant Major W.C. Smith did. The entire building simply erupted in a vast shower of masonry. When the debris stopped falling, Smith ran over to the rubble pile, hoping to find some survivors. He scrabbled his way through the debris, but it seemed all the men had been completely buried or blown apart. As he started back to the Seaforth lines, a sniper fired a shot from the church bell tower and the round creased Smith’s backside. The man ran for cover.19
At least one man was still alive. Currie-Smith was wedged tightly on all sides by concrete blocks. Rubble covered him from feet to neck. Miraculously, a small space was clear around his face and a trickle of air flowed down past the concrete block looming immediately over his head. He could not see the sky. His legs, hands, and arms were all pinned tightly. Currie-Smith was entombed inside the ruin of the school.20
German Fallschirmpionier Karl Bayerlein heard the explosion. He wrote in his diary at day’s end, “Close to us, during the day, a whole building on the enemy side exploded under a huge bang and parts of the building flew hundreds of metres away. We were able to get under cover before the debris came down on us.”21
Bayerlein thought perhaps the explosion had resulted from the water-closet trap. Many buildings had been mined this way in recent days. The amount of explosives being packed inside some of the buildings was unbelievable. They packed as many boxes of explosives in as they possibly could, using up the great surpluses of Italian mines and dynamite they had brought into Ortona. All day long, Bayerlein and his comrades alternately destroyed or mined buildings. They blew most of them down into piles of rubble to serve as tank obstacles and to clear lanes of fire for the machine guns.
The work was terribly dangerous. Bayerlein was very afraid a bullet would hit him while he carried a heavy load of mines and explosives. He was also slowed by the fact that the boots he had retrieved recently from an abandoned Italian supply depot had lost their soles. His attempts to secure the soles to the boot tops with wire had not been entirely successful.
Finally, the officer in charge told Bayerlein’s section to go back to their basement in the chemist’s shop and get some rest. To Bayerlein’s amazement, the unit had come through the day without a single casualty.22
The Seaforths spent several hours trying to root the Germans out of the cathedral in Dead Horse Square with no success. Thomas was getting fed up. A paratroop machine-gun position in the broken bell tower made any attempt to get inside the church and clear the building impossible. The gun also blocked a proper search for survivors in the ruins of the school.
Finally, however, he had the means to destroy the enemy gun. A Three Rivers tank named Agnes had finally bulled its way up one of the narrow lanes and reached the square. Thomas ran over to the tank and pointed the target out to its commander. “As much as I hate blasting the tower of that church,” Thomas said, “I want you to get him out of there.”23
The ‘A’ Squadron tank commander was Gord Turnbull. Turnbull said, “It’s Christmas Eve and that’s God’s house.”24 Thomas insisted and Turnbull knew the officer was right. Although he hated to do it, Turnbull sighted the main gun on the steeple and blasted it to oblivion with one well-placed round. The machine gun was destroyed.
Thomas’s men rushed the church and fought their way inside. The Germans retreated to the far end of the church and dug in around the pulpit. The ensuing bitter exchange of grenades and small-arms fire carried on throughout the night.25
With the machine gun in the bell tower silenced, a perfunctory search of the rubble of the school was conducted. No sign of survivors could be discovered. The Seaforths quickly withdrew from the destroyed building, as it was too exposed to German sniper fire to allow a more thorough search to be conducted.26
Back at the Seaforths’ battalion HQ, Syd Thomson had given his blessing to an extraordinary notion in the midst of the worst battlefield the regiment had so far experienced. Shortly before noon, Quartermaster Captain Bordon Cameron had suggested organizing a real Christmas dinner that could be served to the rifle companies one at a time in Santa Maria di Costantinopoli. The moment Thomson gave his enthusiastic endorsement to the plan, Quartermaster Sergeant Stan Wellburn went to work. The company cooks were brought up to the church and a field kitchen was established behind the altar. The cooks gave Wellburn a shopping list for desired food.
Wellburn spent several hours roaring around the countryside between Ortona and San Vito in a jeep, buying fresh vegetables from farmers who still had some crops left. He and a few other men then scrounged through ruined buildings for tablecloths, candles, silverware, and anything else that would help with place settings. Tables were made of planks and erected in the centre of the large church.
Much of the work was done under fire, as the Germans heavily mortared all of Ortona throughout Christmas Eve. At 1500 hours, Padre Roy Durnford arrived at Santa Maria di Costantinopoli and smiled when he saw the battalion staff all busy either carrying out regular duties or organizing for the dinner. “Well, at last I’ve got you all in church,” he said, and then helped out with the preparations.27
For the Germans, the day had not gone well. Despite the commitment of another full battalion to the battle, 1st Parachute Division commander General Richard Heidrich had to report to Tenth Army headquarters that “in hard house to house fighting enemy advanced to the centre of Ortona. Heavy fighting continues.”28
The 2nd Battalion of 3rd Regiment, which had been defending Ortona since December 20, had suffered too many casualties and been too overextended across the 500-yard width of the town to prevent the steady, remorseless advance of the two Canadian battalions and their tank support. Heidrich had also made a costly error. His reserve battalion, 2nd Battalion of the 4th Regiment, was located three miles north of Ortona at Torre Mucchia. When it became apparent that the reserve unit was required to bolster the German resistance in Ortona, it had taken most of the day just to get the battalion moved up from Torre Mucchia.29
With more than half the town now in Canadian hands, it was only a matter of time before the town had to be surrendered. Yet Tenth Army had received a troubling new directive from none other than Adolf Hitler. Hitler had always taken a close personal interest in battlefield developments on every German front. Ever since Stalingrad, he had also started issuing directives that routinely denied the commanders on the scene the right to make an essential tactical decision — the decision to retreat so that a unit could live to fight another day. On December 24, Hitler issued an order that Ortona should be held at all costs. Heidrich appears to have responded by simply ignoring the order. Instead, he accelerated the destruction of Ortona by engineering demolitions. It appeared he had decided that, if the paratroopers could not hold Ortona, they would leave the Canadians in final occupation of a ruin riddled with mines and booby traps. He would also continue to exact a costly toll for every yard of town surrendered.30
Brigadier Bert Hoffmeister had spen
t the day getting a good sense of the high price the Canadians were paying. He had nearly become a casualty himself on three occasions. First, when the shell hit the building that Gibson had used as a supply depot. Second, when he was moving across a street and looked down just in time to see and avoid two tiny prongs that betrayed the presence of an S-mine where his foot was about to land. And third, when he was walking across an open square to confer with a tank commander and the tanker was shot by a sniper. Had the sniper shot the infantry officer instead, he would have bagged a brigadier rather than a lieutenant, but Hoffmeister took care to look like any other soldier.
He was understandably still a bit shaken from those close calls when he paid a final evening visit to the Edmonton battalion headquarters. As he waited for Lieutenant Colonel Jim Jefferson to finish a radio conversation with one of the rifle company commanders, Hoffmeister was drawn to a line of bodies lying in one corner of the room. A blanket was draped over each body, the faces covered. For some reason he could never afterward explain, he bent down and pulled back one of the blankets. He found himself looking into the unseeing eyes of the young reinforcement officer who only that morning had appeared so bewildered by Ortona.31
26
AS MERRY AS CIRCUMSTANCES PERMIT
SURROUNDED by paratroopers of the 1st Parachute Division, the 48th Highlanders of Canada endured a “most unhappy Christmas.” The regiment’s war diarist went on to note that its soldiers were “practically unable to move in battalion area owing to enemy snipers and MGs.”1 The diarist’s summary of the battalion’s Christmas accurately reflected the experience of all the Canadians fighting on the Ortona front. There was no day off from the war for festive celebration. German and Canadian spent the day doing their best to kill each other. For many, Christmas 1943 was the last day of their lives.