by Mark Zuehlke
The SLI commander, Major Thomas de Faye, figured the men assigned to the Oerlikons could take the adjustment in stride, one fast-firing heavy gun not being that dissimilar from another. But for the two platoons each equipped with four mortars, which were mounted in fifteen-hundredweight trucks, there was a steep learning curve. Few had any previous mortar training. The officers and NCOs attended a rush course and then turned to training their men. There was nothing precise about the heavy mortar. With a range of 4,500 yards, its 19.5-pound bomb, de Faye quickly realized, was never going to be deliberately dropped “into somebody’s back pocket. They were strictly an area weapon, but a very dangerous, very effective weapon for catching infantry in the open.” With time short, de Faye knew his men would be “barely trained on these new equipments by the time we went into action with them.”24
A welcome addition to the Canadian inventory were 100 DUKWS reportedly en route directly from the United States. But when the delivery date passed with no sign of the vehicles, it was feared they would not arrive before the invasion force departed. With only two of the amphibious trucks that had so impressed General Harold Alexander available in Britain, the driver-mechanics tasked with operating this missing fleet had to queue for days to clock even a few minutes of operational and maintenance time. Finally, in early June, the trucks appeared.25
Captain Howard Mitchell and his SLI mortar platoon managed one trial DUKW landing before a general order was issued for all the vehicles to be loaded on transport ships. Instead of being directed to a dockyard, Mitchell’s group found itself driving onto a stretch of sand where an embarkation officer was busily issuing orders to an array of soldiers boarding either DUKWs or small landing craft. “See that ship out there?” the officer said to Mitchell. “Well, that is your ship. Good luck.”
To Mitchell’s untrained eye the vessel appeared to be standing at anchor about two miles offshore. “Actually,” he soon realized, “it was about six miles out. And our DUKW’s only carried enough gasoline for about 8 to 10 miles of sea travel. There was an odd wave but then land lubbers expected to see waves on the ocean. We struck out to our ship. The further out we got the rougher the waters seemed to get. We bobbed about like corks. Finally we reached our ship. The captain was furious. What kind of God Damned fools were we? Didn’t we know that the water was too rough for him to pick us up with the davits? He had to pick us up. We didn’t have gas enough to get us ashore again.
“Finally he agreed to take us aboard. I never realized what a tricky business it was. We got close and scrambled up rope ladders. With both the ship and the DUKW bobbing up and down, even getting started up that ladder was something. Getting the DUKW’s hooked on was terrible. When they were finally aboard most of the davits had suffered and one was bent horribly. The skipper held me personally responsible for the damage to his fine ship.”
It didn’t help the naval captain’s mood to realize the DUKWs he had loaded were actually on the manifest of a different ship, one tasked to carry SLI troops supporting the 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade. He had been expecting troops from 3rd Canadian Infantry Brigade. With the damaged davits, nothing could be done to sort out the mess, so Mitchell and his men would travel to Sicily as part of 3 CIB.26
MISTAKES LIKE THE one that put Mitchell’s DUKWS on the wrong ship proved remarkably rare as the complex loading proceeded through early June. The planners at Norfolk House had been meticulous. Major Robert Kingstone worked closely with a British combined operations officer, who was an expert in amphibious landings, to devise the loading plan for 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade’s troops and equipment. “The landing tables alone were several hundred pages because you had both the assault convoys and the follow-up convoys to deal with and you had the sizes of vehicles and the capacity of ship holds to take various heights ... It was a fascinating time actually.”27
It was a near-Herculean task. To transport a total strength of 1,851 officers and 24,835 other ranks, complete with all their equipment and 30,000 tons of supplies, a distance of more than 2,000 miles would require 125 transport and escort vessels. Throughout the first three weeks of June, “long motor convoys began to arrive at ports up and down the west coast of Great Britain—in the Bristol Channel, on the Mersey, and along Clydeside—bringing heavily laden unit transport from the training areas. At the docks a vast assortment of stores gathered from ordnance depots all over the country found its way into the holds of waiting ships. Loading was done tactically...in such a way that vehicles and cargoes could be discharged in order of priority governed by the demands of the tactical plan and by the facilities for unloading that would be available on the beaches. Since it was essential that the vehicles, stores, supplies and ammunition necessary to maintain the assault should be landed as quickly as possible from the waiting convoys, the ships carrying the motor transport and the general cargo vessels had to be so grouped that their arrival at the ‘Release Position’ would immediately follow upon the landing of the assaulting waves. As the vessels in the English ports completed loading their respective quotas of vehicles and stores, they sailed up the west coast into the Clyde and anchored in their convoy assembly areas.”28
What long after the invasion seemed so orderly to the Canadian Army’s official historian in fact often bordered on the calamitous, and there was more on-the-spot innovation than the planners ever knew. In a number of cases, the cabs of trucks proved too high to fit inside low-ceilinged holds. Removing the cab, slicing a few inches off it with a torch, and then fitting it back together solved the problem and nobody cared if that meant its driver had to hunker down for lack of headroom.
Captain Jim Stone had reluctantly drawn duty as a ship’s storage officer. Having enlisted in the Loyal Edmonton Regiment as a private in 1939, Stone had had pre-war experience in the British militia before emigrating to Canada. This put him on a promotional fast track to the rank of company sergeant major and, after two years’ service in the ranks, on to officer training. By the spring of 1943, he was a Loyal Edmonton captain, hoping to lead one of the battalion’s rifle companies into combat. Instead, he was sent on several transportation management courses to learn how to organize the movement of stores and equipment on an invasion beach, shuttle supplies and men about on trains, and finally stow things aboard ships according to a tactical plan. Upon learning he was to be detailed to precisely that last task instead of being given a rifle company, Stone railed at Lieutenant Colonel Jim Jefferson: “I’m going to take my Edmonton flashes off.” Jefferson shook his head. “Don’t. You’ll be back.” Stone groused, “I don’t know. You get caught up in these staff things and you never know what will happen.”
So it was that in early June, Stone stood aboard the freighter Orestes Iv in a Birkenhead dock near Liverpool. The Orestes was to join the slow convoy, its holds to be filled with vehicles. Stone had been warned that the merchantmen would want to mess with the tactical loading plan and his job was to stand fast. Reporting to the ship’s captain, Stone was directed to work out the loading details with the first mate. “I have the stowage plan here, Mr. Kay,” Stone told the first mate. “This is the way the ship must be stowed.”
Kay studied the plan for two long minutes. “That is the way the ship will not be stowed,” he said.
“It’s got to be stowed that way.”
“It can’t be stowed that way,” an exasperated Kay replied. “We’ve got no heavy lifting gear forward, you see. So those heavy vehicles are going to have to go aft ... the people who set the stowage plan in London had a complete plan of the decks of the ship but no knowledge of the lifting equipment on deck. It’s not like going into the dock where you can pick things up from the dock. All the equipment has to be lifted out of the holds and put over the side. And so it’s only what the lifting gear on the ship can manage.”
Stone thought this over and realized “it was just nonsense to argue with people who knew what they were doing.” So he said, “Look, I’ve got to get these vehicles off in this order.”
&n
bsp; Kay rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Okay, you sit down and tell me right now what you consider is a priority.” The two men assigned each vehicle a number that indicated priority in line. There were about forty heavier vehicles that had to be reassigned to the bottom of the list because they were to be stowed in the lowest hold, but otherwise Stone got everything the way he wanted it. Knowing there would be a flap if he reported varying the sacred loading plan, Stone said nothing.29
There were a lot of things not talked about for security reasons. Lavish amounts of special equipment to enable the Canadians to operate in a subtropical, mountainous environment were secreted away in ship holds for distribution once the convoy was at sea or even after the invasion was ashore. Khaki tropical uniforms that included shorts and puttees, rope-soled shoes, and tinted eye shields and glasses were to be broken out after sailing. Special camouflage paint would be used to repaint all the vehicles in desert colours. Other gear included: 100 sets of pack saddlery in case mules were pressed into service for off-road mountain transport, hundreds of Yukon and Everest packs to enable soldiers to carry large amounts of supplies if the mules were lacking, and many crates of fly swatters. Insects caused the planners great concern, particularly malaria-carrying mosquitoes. To ward them off, 45,000 mosquito nets and a similar number of bush nets were packed alongside vast stores of anti-malarial drugs, both as a preventive and for treatment after infection.30
Once the convoy sailed, the Canadians would take daily doses of the anti-malarial drug mepacrine, a synthetic substitute for quinine—the natural alkaloid extracted from the bark of the cinchona tree. Although the cinchona tree was native to South America, Dutch entrepreneurs had transplanted it to Java in the mid-nineteenth century and it came to dominate the world supply of quinine. With Java’s invasion by the Japanese Imperial Army on February 28, 1942, and surrender nine days later, the Allies had lost access to quinine and so had turned to synthetic drugs that duplicated its effects. Mepacrine had several side effects—it turned skin jaundicelike yellow and similarly coloured urine. The latter prompted an official slogan intended to promote mepacrine use: “If you pee a golden stream it means you’ve taken your mepacrine.” But rumours also abounded that the drug caused sterility, so attempts to avoid taking it were widespread.31
By the time the last supply container had been lowered into the holds of the transport ships, officers at the War Office in London boasted with satisfaction to Simonds that his was “to be the best found expedition which ever left the United Kingdom.”32 The ships were not yet quite ready to sail. Although the fast convoy was gathered in the Clyde, and although the men, having been granted and returned from a five-day embarkation leave, were now confined aboard, there remained one final training exercise to run. Designed as a dress rehearsal for Husky, Operation Stymie was to be a large-scale combined operation, with the infantry brigades landing on a section of Ayrshire coast that bore close physical resemblance to the Sicilian beaches for which they were bound. For security purposes, however, the soldiers were told the coastline actually resembled a part of German-occupied France. On June 17, twelve transports carrying 1st and 2nd brigades sailed out of the Clyde and, in the early hours of the following day, began lowering them, despite a heaving sea, into landing craft. Shortly after the small vessels cast away from the transports, rising winds and worsening wave action led to the landing force’s hurried recovery. Four days later the bad weather had not abated, and Operation Stymie, true to its namesake, was cancelled.33
The cancellation came on June 21. Two days earlier, elements of the slow convoy, bearing the equipment and soldiers not designated to the initial assault force, had slipped their lines and left the Clyde. Over the next few days more ships departed, often at night, under a shroud of secrecy. On June 28, the Fast Assault Convoy steamed out of Greenoch and disappeared into the gathering darkness. The infantry battalions had been crowded aboard eight merchantmen recently converted into Landing Ship, Infantry (Large) vessels. One of these—the Circassia—served as 2 CIB’s headquarters ship and also carried the entire battalion complement of more than eight hundred Seaforth Highlanders. Quarters were terribly cramped, and the first night at sea the Seaforths grumbled as they struggled to learn the difficult task of slinging the hammocks that would serve each night as their beds.34
Aboard the divisional command ship Hilary, the division’s recently and reluctantly appointed historical officer, Captain A.T. “Gus” Sesia, realized at 0243 hours that the ship had slipped its cable and was under way only because the buoy to which the telephone cable providing a link to shore was drifting away. “For most of the first hour and a half of sailing,” Sesia wrote in his diary, “I surveyed Greenock [Greenoch] and Gourock through our binoculars and watched bathers, lovers, passers-by, soldiers, sailors, airmen and civilians going about their devious ways. It was hard to realize that the day had come when we were actually on the way to participate in battle.”35
[3]
Everyone Knowing His Job
CAPTAIN GUS SESIA was one of the few soldiers aboard the Canadian convoys apprised of their true destination. Although the rumour mill worked overtime, most everyone remained in the dark. When the tropical kit was broken out, speculation turned to Burma, but that just seemed too distant. Lieutenant Colonel Bert Hoffmeister and some other Seaforth Highlander officers “had Greece as one thought in mind, Crete, and we figured we were going into the Mediterranean. We didn’t know where else we’d be going wearing clothes like that.”1
One doggedly persistent rumour held that the tropical gear was an elaborate ruse to deceive German spies that might be aboard. In reality, the Canadians were bound to invade or raid Norway.2 When the ships rounded the northern coast of Ireland and steamed south through the Atlantic in order to give the U-boat and E-boat infested Bay of Biscay a wide berth, proponents of the Norwegian caper reluctantly conceded its improbability.
The suspense was palpable during those first days at sea, just as it had been when they were embarked and awaiting the order to sail. During the time they had waited for the ships to cast their lines, many a senior officer had looked at the sealed collection of top-secret envelopes and boxes containing his briefing materials and considered taking an illicit peek. But the orders were firm: nothing to be opened until they were at sea and Major General Guy Simonds granted permission. The temptation remained, however, and Lieutenant Colonel Leslie Booth, commander of the Three Rivers Tank Regiment, succumbed to it. Breaking open the covering envelope, he gleaned from its contents that they were to invade Sicily. Unfortunately for the thirty-seven-year-old officer, it was precisely at that moment that Simonds happened to board the Landing Ship, Tank (LST)—one of six carrying the tankers and their Shermans—to personally wish Booth “good fortune and to see if there were any problems arising from our enforced confinement to the ships.” Catching Booth red-handed, Simonds was rendered almost speechless with anger. He curtly ordered the officer to report to him aboard Hilary in two hours and stormed off the boat. Simonds fumed to his general staff officer, Lieutenant Colonel George Kitching, that he intended not only to severely reprimand Booth but to return him to Canada. Booth’s second-in-command would take over the tank regiment. Considering the notion of replacing a regimental commander this late in the game ill conceived, Kitching countered that if Booth were fired, he would end up wandering around either Britain or Canada with the invasion secrets in his head for twelve days before the landings occurred. Better to keep him aboard.
Kitching had never met Booth and was struck when he came up the gangway by the fact that the tanker was barely five feet tall. He was also “shaking like a leaf.” Kitching escorted Booth into Simonds’s office and took up position behind the tanker. “I had never seen Guy Simonds in a cold rage before. Everything was ice. For five minutes he told Booth exactly what he thought of his conduct.” Kitching worried that he “would have to support him physically as he wilted from the blast.” When Simonds finally released Booth, Kitching helped him into th
e small motor launch that would take him back to the LST. Booth allowed that “his five minutes with Simonds ... made him all the more determined that he and his regiment would do well.”3
The intense secrecy cloaking 1st Canadian Infantry Division’s destination reflected a grave concern that the landings would be thrown back into the sea if the Germans and Italians discovered that Sicily was the invasion target. Currently, Sicily was not heavily defended, but if reinforced in strength—particularly by German divisions—the island could be rendered impenetrable. “Anybody but a bloody fool would know it is Sicily,” Prime Minister Winston Churchill snorted even as he approved an arcane deception plan intended to throw the Germans off the scent.4 Operation Mincemeat entailed dressing a corpse in a Royal Marine officer’s uniform and planting on it papers that identified the body as Major William Martin, currently serving at Combined Operations Headquarters in London, but lost at sea in a fictitious air crash off Gibraltar. British intelligence ensured that the body washed up on a Spanish beach, where the contents of a dispatch case chained to his waist were discovered by local authorities and quickly turned over to the German consulate. The briefcase contained documents that hinted at where the Allies would strike after the campaign in Tunisia concluded. On one hand, the papers told German intelligence analysts that the Allies planned to invade Sicily, but only after first capturing Sardinia. Considered from a different angle, however, the documents suggested an invasion of Greece and sowed the seeds of suspicion that perhaps the Allies wanted the Germans to think Sicily was the target, which then logically meant it “can’t be the real target.”
Operation Mincemeat succeeded beyond all possible expectation. On May 11, German naval staff concluded it was impossible to judge the authenticity of the papers found on Martin’s body. The same day, Adolf Hitler and Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz agreed that Sardinia’s garrison should be kept at current strength and that an invasion of Sicily seemed unlikely. Two days later, the naval staff declared the documents authentic and a mock attack on Sicily would precede an invasion of Sardinia.5