Ortona

by Mark Zuehlke

  The mud formed like giant snowshoes on the soldiers’ boots. But they were in the open and could only keep going. Smith gasped for breath. Everyone was slogging forward with tortured difficulty, the mud dragging on their legs. Small-arms fire started snapping at the line. On his immediate right, a formerly unreliable soldier sped up. Smith was impressed until he realized that the man was merely pitching forward in response to a mortal wound.

  The platoon reached a row of barbed wire. Smith fought his way over it to find a slit trench immediately behind. It contained three paratroopers working an MG42. Smith brought up his rifle and emptied the clip into them. Then he threw a Type 36 grenade on top of the middle man in the position to guarantee the kill.

  From the tower of Torre Mucchia, standing only yards away, a shot rang out. Smith saw a German soldier firing from its doorway. He charged the man and shot him in the chest at point-blank range. He then threw grenades through the doorway and a nearby window. Several of his men then rushed into the tower and swept through it, finding no other Germans inside.

  Lying in a small defile running down to the Adriatic from the tower, a German cried, “Tommy, Tommy, help me. I’m wounded.” Smith’s first thought was, “We aren’t Tommies. We don’t want to be called Tommies.” He also wondered, he later said, “how the bastard who was killing us for days now had the gall to call for help.” Despite this, Smith sent a stretcher-bearer down to care for the wounded German.

  Smith set the platoon to digging in, with no time to spare. No sooner had the paratroopers retreated from Point 59 than the Germans started to pound the promontory with artillery. One of Smith’s men suddenly threw down his rifle and shouted, “I can’t take it any more. I’m leaving.” Smith walked over, shells exploding around the two men. Shrapnel sang through the air and cordite-reeking smoke rolled over the battlefield. Smith picked up the soldier’s rifle and said, “Look, Junior, you hold onto your bloody rifle, get into that slit trench, and don’t go anywhere unless I tell you to.” Worried that the man’s panic might spread and that the Germans might counterattack any moment, Smith could ill afford to lose even one more of his men.14

  Minutes later, the other platoons of ‘B’ Company captured their supporting objectives. Point 59 was secure. ‘B’ Company had taken eighteen prisoners. The Canadian walking wounded marched them back. As the last rifle fell silent at Torre Mucchia, the great Canadian battle fought from the Moro River through Ortona to the Arielli River drew to a close.

  EPILOGUE: ORTONA IN MEMORY

  DECEMBER 1998. I stand before the tombstones of the Moro River Canadian Cemetery. It is one of those crisp, clear, early winter days that CBC war correspondent Matthew Halton likened to a Cézanne painting. Sea purplish gray, sky azure, grass deep green, tombstones soft white marble. This Canadian cemetery is the largest of its kind in Italy. Of 1,613 graves, 1,375 hold Canadian soldiers. Not all died during December 1943. Some were moved here from other battlefields nearby. All too many others perished in an ill-conceived January 1944 offensive launched against the Arielli Line by the newly arrived 5th Canadian Armoured Division.

  Canadian Forces Major Michael Boire and I have come to this cemetery, as must all pilgrims drawn to Abruzzo province by the Battle of Ortona. Michael walks slowly from one tombstone to another. A name read, date of death noted, regiment identified, a moment of silent remembrance passed. He has a slight limp, the result of an airborne drop gone wrong. Michael, a keen military historian in his spare time, is stationed in Germany at Heidelberg. Once he heard I was coming to Ortona on a research trip, luring him down from Germany was easy.

  We have spent several days going methodically over the December battlefield. Michael has offered me his soldier’s eye and understanding of how ground affects a military operation. Today we measure the costs. Michael’s parent regiment is the Three Rivers — the tankers who fought in Ortona’s streets alongside the Loyal Edmonton Regiment and the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada. He carries a ring-binder version of his regiment’s unpublished history. Many names cited in its pages correspond to those etched in marble.

  There are also names that I will come to know well as I write this book. Mitch Sterlin, the unlikely hero. Tom Vance, a gentle and trusting soul. Bob Donald, the too-often-forgotten RCHA forward observation officer, who was part of the triad of officers who made Casa Berardi’s capture possible during the gallant dash of Captain Paul Triquet’s Van Doos. Sometimes on paper their short lives and the manner of their deaths can seem remote, distant. Today, I look at the ground on which they died, then the tombstones under which they lie, and they are cast in a clearer, sorrowful light.

  Later, Michael drops me on the Moro River’s southern ridge across from Villa Rogatti. He is returning to Germany. I plan to retrace part of the physical journey of the 1st Canadian Infantry Division regiments. I will walk my own short road to Ortona.

  Fittingly, clouds have blown in from the Adriatic and drizzle is falling as I set off alone. The Canadian soldiers had only rough wool uniforms to repel the water. I wear Gore-Tex. Where they were heavily burdened by the tools of war, my pack holds featherlight 7x21 binoculars, a camera and lenses, a Swiss Army knife, a bottle of mineral water, and a thick wad of lire.

  The Moro is now spanned by a stout concrete bridge on the road to Villa Rogatti. Once across it, I veer off the road and follow the river to a point that seems roughly in line with my understanding of the route the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry took during their night assault on Villa Rogatti. Behind me the river runs high. It is narrow, barely twenty feet across. Deeper this December than it was for the Canadians. A stick shoved in sinks to thigh-depth.

  I climb through olive groves and vineyards. Moro River mud sucks at my boots, glues on, and forms the wide globular snowshoes the soldiers cursed. I add my own curses to the historic litany. But I can stop now and then to bang away some of the accumulation. Under fire, such fussiness would have been foolhardy. The vineyards offer difficult terrain. Overhanging wires force me to hunker down. It’s hard to look up the slope bent over. Everywhere I see endless terrain features that even to an unpractised eye appear perfect for defensive gun positions. The same is true in the olive groves. There I stand straight, but the mud is deeper.

  Eventually I circle up and into Villa Rogatti from the right flank, just as the PPCLI did. The town was rebuilt out of the battle’s ruins. Stone and brick walls are deeply pocked by bullets and shrapnel. From Villa Rogatti, I walk winding country lanes toward San Leonardo. Farmers work the fields. They spread nets under the olive trees and then shake the fruit down to be harvested like fish swept from the sea by seiners. They are intent on their work. I pass unnoticed.

  In San Leonardo, I pause for food at a small grocery. A woman prepares a sandwich. In my poor Italian I explain my purpose in tramping across country seldom visited by foreigners on foot. Il Guerra. As matter-of-factly as she cuts prosciutto and cheese, the woman says her parents died in the bombardment of San Leonardo. Sisters, brothers, all killed. The village ruined. She left an orphan.

  Near her store is the monument to civilian dead. Such monuments are to be found in every village and hamlet near Ortona. This one is an abstracted image of a person with arms extended toward heaven, lips open, beseechingly. A plea for mercy? A cry to the heavens for a reason for their suffering?

  Estimates of the number of civilians killed during the Battle of Ortona vary. Many Canadians question the accuracy of Italian figures. Statistics are numerous, contradictory. The most accurately detailed figure appears to be 1,314. A toll that links each numerical casualty to a name. But even this is complicated by a question of timelines. Canadians see the battle as spanning a time frame of December 5 to January 4. In the Italian mind, the battle lasted until the Allies left Ortona in the late spring of 1944. Not until the Allies were far enough north that the town and countryside were no longer subject to artillery fire or aerial bombardment did the battle end for them. Then there are the civilians killed even later by exp
loding shells and mines. Have they been counted?

  Antonio D’Intino buried several close friends and relatives in the months after the battle. He also eventually married Anna Tucci, the young woman from San Donato. They live today much as Antonio lived in 1943, on the land across the ravine from Ortona. Their house is the same as the one in which his father died of pneumonia in the spring of 1944. It is still heated by nothing more than a small wood-burning brazier in the corner of the kitchen. When I visit them one late afternoon, they are in bed to keep warm from the unexpectedly chill December weather. They rise, wrap themselves in sweaters and scarves, and put blankets over their laps, open wine, and light a small fire. We sit for hours at the kitchen table, while they tell their stories. My hands grow numb taking notes in a cold the wine and the meagre fire do little to abate.

  Antonio tells me of a time in the early spring of 1944 when seven teenage boys tilled a nearby field. They moved in line, working shoulder to shoulder. One boy struck the detonating pin of a Teller antitank mine. All seven were killed. Casualties of the battle? Or victims of the larger frame that was World War II?

  Armies sweep into a landscape and fight their battles. Then they leave. The civilians are left to clean up the detritus. Between San Leonardo and The Gully to the south of Cider Crossroads, I see few signs of war’s passage. Only the occasional stone building with its roof collapsed in a manner I now know is caused by the impact of an artillery shell. Those same buildings are usually deeply pocked by the strike of small-arms fire. As I walk along, I finger a fragment of shrapnel given to me the day before by a member of the Berardi family. Michael thinks, because of the width of its curving arc, it is a piece of casing from a 105-millimetre artillery round.

  Casa Berardi still stands, little changed from when the battle raged around it. The Royal 22e Regiment erected a small memorial next to the building in honour of the heroism of Captain Paul Triquet and the other Van Doos who succeeded in capturing this objective against great odds and at the loss of many lives. There is also a plaque, installed by the Royal Canadian Regiment, on the side of Sterlin Castle, where Mitch Sterlin’s small platoon held off successive waves of Panzer Grenadiers.

  Walking through the Ortona countryside, lulled by the softly repetitive scenery of olive groves, vineyards, and farmhouses, I ponder the point of the battle. Historians and veterans alike remain conflicted. Should the battle have been fought? Michael and I worried this question at length while standing on ridges or sharing vino rosso and grappa at Ortona’s Ristorante Miramere. At one point, we stood on a promontory looking north up the coastal highway. It may or may not have been Point 59, where the battle ended. We were unsure and there was no tower in sight.

  Michael said, “Your job is to help defeat Germany by diverting divisions from northern Europe and from the Russian front. You are confined to a narrow band of ground between the Apennines and the Adriatic. There is no operational ground in the mountains. This road hugs the coast all the way to northern Italy, and from there you might get into Austria and even beyond that to Germany. There are the rivers, of course. Always another after the last one. To advance, you have to win the rivers. One at a time. Delay a month because of the weather and you achieve nothing. The Germans can move divisions freely while you sit and do nothing. So you cross the Sangro River and that brings you to the Moro River. The weather is closing in. But you have a fresh division. So you go one river farther. It would have been difficult to predict the cost.”

  Following a one-lane road passing under the massive concrete spans near the crossroads that today allow vehicles travelling on the coastal autostrada to whisk effortlessly over the width of The Gully, I decide that Michael’s soldierly explanation is the clearest. There are Canadian historians who vie to saddle 1st Canadian Infantry Division Major General Chris Vokes with the blame for an ill-considered battle. Hardly fair. Vokes marched to orders, just as each private did. Bernard Montgomery gave the orders. His “colossal crack” turned out to be a colossal conceit. Michael’s assessment regarding the coast highway and the unavoidable strategy of advancing up it to Italy’s northern border was only part of Montgomery’s reason. Pushing the commander to reckless haste was the desire to beat the Americans to Rome.

  A fool’s errand. Travelling to Ortona by train through the valley extending from Rome to Pescara was a sobering journey for me. It seemed inconceivable that Montgomery seriously thought the Eighth Army could win Rome via this route of advance in winter. Defensible positions abound. Hilltop fortress towns provide virtually impregnable bastions upon which to anchor a defensive line. The terrain in that valley is far more hostile to an attacker than any I encounter between the Moro River and The Gully.

  Whatever the individual verdict about the larger issue of the battle’s purpose, there is another question historians and veterans push around when the subject of Ortona comes up. Was the battle well fought? Nobody questions the accomplishment of the regiments or of individual soldiers. They did their duty and did it well, absorbing casualties that might well have sent many armies fleeing the field. But there is the lingering question of whether Vokes mishandled the battle’s execution.

  Most veterans who offer an opinion seem to agree that he did. First, there was the opportunity frittered away at Villa Rogatti. An exploitation from there would have bypassed both The Gully and Ortona. But, of course, Vokes was presented with the “impossible bridge.” So perhaps he is not entirely to fault on that miscalculation.

  Then there is the issue of whether he should have taken the battle into the streets of Ortona. Certainly this ran against standard military doctrine of the day. Generally, you were to avoid fighting in built-up areas. Of course, nobody in either Vokes’s or Eighth Army’s intelligence sections expected the Germans to make a stand in Ortona. The same military doctrine argued that they would withdraw the moment the Canadians broke into the outer edge of the town. Once the Canadians and Germans started fighting in the streets of Ortona, it would be impractical for the Canadians to break off the action.

  And then, as Albert Kesselring noted, the world press transformed the battle into a matter of Allied versus German prestige. More important to their respective commands, Canadian versus German prestige. It is significant that when the battle was finished, Allied public relations officers were cautioned about their dealings with reporters: “DON’T before Rome is captured claim it as a great military objective. Show that Rome as a town has no military significance.” I think it is armchair hindsight that leads us to fault Vokes for getting drawn into the Ortona street battle.

  Where Vokes was in error, where he came close to destroying the division he commanded, was in his overall execution. Specifically, his insistence on feeding the regiments into individual battles against well-defended objectives. It seems Vokes could not think on a divisional scale or implement a divisional-level offensive. He committed his regiments piecemeal, allowing each to be chewed up before withdrawing it and sending another into the fray. Several opportunities to achieve a breakthrough, particularly at The Gully, were thrown away through this approach simply because there was no regiment in reserve that remained capable of capitalizing on an advantage gained. Had he outflanked The Gully early on, rather than waiting until several regiments had been mauled in head-on attacks, the battle undoubtedly would have been decided sooner. It is also possible that he then would have seen the wisdom of abandoning the direct drive up the Ortona-Orsogna lateral into Ortona in favour of the hook he eventually had 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade and the 3rd brigade’s Royal 22e Regiment and Carleton and York Regiment throw toward Torre Mucchia.

  Standing on the southern edge of The Gully, it is unthinkable to me that Vokes failed to see the folly of frontal assaults. I wonder if he ever came up to the actual front to see where his regiments were dying? There is no record that he did. The Gully is a daunting land feature, readymade for defence. Too many Canadians died there needlessly. I am less convinced they died for no purpose in Ortona itself.

 
; Generals, of course, make plans; soldiers pay the price of execution. It is their voices that murmur in my ear as I join the Ortona-Orsogna lateral road and walk along its verge through the industrial park that stands now on the ground across which the Loyal Edmonton Regiment made its assault on December 20. For every veteran’s voice I can hear, there are many more who remain silent. Five out of six declined to be interviewed. Ortona has left its imprint on the hearts and minds of many soldiers in a way other battles perhaps did not. How often I heard, “It’s not something to talk about. It should just be forgotten.” These veterans were not talking of the war itself, or of their overall experience. They were speaking of December 1943.

  Yet the veterans who were there seem unable themselves to forget. Many who declined an interview remarked that they had gone back to Ortona once, twice, sometimes repeatedly. In December 1998, a few days after I left Ortona for Canada, a group of about fifty veterans arrived. Their visit was a significant affair, but one organized and paid for by a private Canadian benefactor rather than the Canadian government. For the first time, Canadian veterans and German veterans sat down together in the church of Santa Maria di Costantinopoli for a Christmas dinner reminiscent of the one taken by the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada on Christmas Day, 1943. A group of Ortona citizens provided the meal. The dinner was accompanied once again by organ music played by Wilf Gildersleeve. Former enemies emerged as somewhat wary comrades. Many spoke of a healing being achieved.