by Mark Zuehlke
Aboard 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade’s headquarters ship Circassia, Captain Frederick Norman Pope gave the briefings. The brigade’s intelligence officer, Pope lamented that “while the fellows upstairs were sunning themselves on the decks, I was down in the bowels of the ship taking in officers and men, a group at a time, and saying this is where they would be landing, and there were photographs taken from airplanes flying in so you had a landing view of the coastline as you were coming into it. This is where you’ll be landing, this is where your first objective is, and that’s your second objective. These people will be on your left flank, and, on the right, you’ll have so and so. And I was doing this all day, every day, for it took all that time for everyone on board to go through ... They were all suntanned and I was still as white as white could be.”33
An astonishing mass of detailed documents had been prepared. The operational plan itself ran to more than two hundred pages—the last document of that size ever produced by 1st Division.34 While Pope walked people through the briefing room, other officers lectured the men on various aspects of the operation. Map-reading, signals procedures, first aid, sanitation issues, and treatment of prisoners and civilians were singled out for special emphasis. Simonds was determined that when 1st Division hit the Sicilian beaches, it would “become known not only as a fighting division but as one possessing every good military quality.” In a directive on training aboard the ship, Simonds stressed that “good fighting must be associated with smartness of turn out and keenness in all those things which go to make a good soldier.” The division, he said, would “go ashore physically fit, with everyone knowing his job and what is required of him, and with a definite urge to kill.”35
Each man was issued a handbook entitled Soldier’s Guide to Italy, which “contained a description of the geography, the history, the government, the church, [and] the principal towns and industries of Italy and told the soldier what his assignment was in the country and what his relations were to be with civilians. It also gave him information regarding various Italian customs, currency, weights and measures and a list of useful Italian words and phrases.”36
Almost all of Sicily, they learned, was “occupied by mountains and hills, which fall either directly to the sea or to restricted coastal plains or terraces ... In Central and Southern Sicily the bare treeless ridges and rolling hills composed in large part [of] clays and soft rocks form difficult country, slopes are unstable and landslides probable.”
Looming over the surrounding landscape on the island’s eastern coast was massive Mount Etna, the almost eleven-thousand-foot-high active volcano that sprawled across more than six hundred square miles and had a base circumference of about ninety-three miles. Catania, the port city that was one of Eighth Army’s major objectives, lay on the lower slopes of the volcano’s southeastern corner. Its summit often wreathed by a mixture of smoke and cloud, Etna’s last major eruption had been on June 30, 1942. It remained intensely active, spewing forth highly porous lava from a side vent on the southwest flank about two thousand feet below the summit.
Sicily’s climate in summer was hot and dry “with conditions very constant, the temperatures mounting by day and falling by night with monotonous regularity.” There existed three classes of roads, but on “nearly all routes there is a succession of ups and downs, and curves, owing to the mountainous nature of the Island.” While state roads were well constructed, the provincial and communal roads, which were largely what 1st Division would be relying on, generally followed “a narrow and torturous course.”
About 3.9 million Sicilians called the island home, and because the countryside was pestilent with malarial mosquitoes, the residents concentrated in towns. The guidebook described the people as “temperamental and hot headed, but lacking single-heartedness and constancy for a cause. The large mass of the population is politically apathetic partly owing to poverty. Life is harsh; the great majority of the population is engaged in agriculture, and except in a few favoured spots, their life is a constant struggle for existence. Big estates, absentee landlords, malaria and the great shortage of water in a country where there is no rain from May to October have kept the standard of living very low. The standard of education and literacy is also very low, some 40 per cent of the population being unable to read or write ... The Sicilian peasant commonly lives in a small town perched on a hill and often approached by a track so steep and rough that even the Sicilian carts cannot mount it. This isolation has helped the survival of many old customs and habits of thought.” Soldiers were advised that such was the state of apathy that the civilian population would take no active part in military operations, but would “greet the invading forces with sullen indifference, whether they are British, Canadian or American.”37
Aboard the converted Dutch ship Marnix van St. Aldegonde, Captain Strome Galloway and several other Royal Canadian Regiment officers gathered around the model of the landing beaches. “The first thing that struck us all...was that the practice landings we had recently done on the Ayrshire coast had been on a section of beach and hinterland that was remarkably similar to where the Sicilian landing was to take place. The road exits from the beach were almost identical. The distances to the exercise objectives the same as to the actual objectives—an airfield and a coastal battery in Sicily. In fact, in our Scottish exercise those exact objectives had been simulated. The beaches were sandy as well. The only real differences, it seemed, were that tall vineyards had to be crossed in Sicily once we cleared the beach, and that our enemies would be real, waiting for us behind minefields, barbed wire and blazing weapons.”38
Their sandy beach was code-named “Bark West.” Measuring 8,300 yards long by 86 to 145 feet deep, the beach had a gentle grade running from the water to where it butted up against a steep limestone ridge varying in height from ten to fifteen feet and fronted by a system of low dunes. Behind the ridge lay several salt marshes and ponds that might or might not have dried up under the summer sun. The ground free of the marshes and ponds was taken up by an assortment of vineyards, closely planted citrus orchards, and grazing pastures. Several dried-up streambeds cut sharp paths down the gentle slope to gain the sea.
At first glance the beach appeared ideal for amphibious landings, until closer examination of the models revealed that standing out to sea from the “real” beach were several “false beaches or sandbars.” Between the sandbars and Bark West the water was believed to be as deep as five feet, but nobody knew for sure. All that was known was “that if landing craft were going to ground on the sandbars then it was essential that the water inside the bars be not too deep for wading or driving motor vehicles.”
These sandbars had been the subject of much discussion and concern at Norfolk House. On May 12, the Canadian staff officers there had concluded that the depth of water behind the sandbars would restrict the initial landings to just infantry “and that the casualties would ... be very high.” No intelligence gathered since had changed their thinking.
The fact was, if Bark West was fiercely defended, the Canadians were heading into a slaughter. Stretched along Bark West were fifteen known pillboxes and twenty machine-gun positions, with more such defensive works extending three miles inland to Pachino airfield. This airfield, northeast of the beach, was the first day’s main objective. Pachino, population about 22,000, lay next to the airfield. Roughly midway between Bark West and Pachino, a coastal defence battery had been erected next to the hamlet of Maucini. The battery’s four medium guns, set on a height of ground about one hundred feet above sea level, enjoyed an all-round field of fire and could range freely on every inch of Bark West. This battery was hidden in an orchard alongside a farmhouse and was surrounded by wire. Covering the approach to the airfield and also capable of ranging on the beach was another field-gun battery positioned immediately north of Pachino.
Predictions were that as the landing craft approached the beaches, they could come under fire from between eight and twelve artillery pieces and far more machine gun
s. The planners had postulated a grim scenario of what would happen if “the enemy put everything into their defence” and the infantry had to be dumped into the water to wade slowly ashore from landing craft stuck on the sandbars. Even on “reaching the beaches there would be wire entanglements and perhaps mines and booby traps to clear while under fire from enemy M.G. [machine gun] posts and pillboxes.”39
In the end, all hopes had been pinned on the premise that the defences would prove lightly manned by inferior troops. xxx Corps commander Lieutenant General Oliver Leese had assured Simonds that he believed the beaches would be held only by Italians. And he had little regard for the Italian troops. “Once we have closed with him, he gives up,” Leese said. “The great point about the Italian is that he does not hang on and fight, once the leading troops have by-passed him.”40
Even if everything did go sour, the division should be able to win the sand and carry its objectives through sheer force of numbers. Two of the three brigades would be in the leading wave, and as long as a brigade managed to get the equivalent strength of even one of its battalions ashore, it would strike out for the inland objectives. If, however, “a whole Brigade were destroyed, the action of the Brigade which had been lost would be carried out by the Reserve Brigade.”41
Nobody aboard the ships, except the officers who had been involved in preparing the operational plan at Norfolk House, was made privy to the full extent of their worries. But the dangers were clear to see. Hoffmeister understood that the Germans would stiffen the Italian backbone by sifting a number of their men in among the troops defending the beaches. “We were prepared for, maybe not a heavily opposed landing, but an opposed landing. We expected that we would have to fight our way across the beaches.”42
On June 30, matters became even more complicated when a message from xxx Corps reported that a reconnaissance team had been slipped ashore at Bark West on the night of June 25-26. This commando team of scuba divers confirmed the existence of a sandbar that was about twenty yards wide and submerged under eighteen inches of water on the southern flank of Bark West. Although about six hundred yards of the bar lay outside the Canadian landing zone, eighty yards of its length protruded into the right flank of the beach—the portion of Bark West where 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade was slated to land. While the sandbar’s existence was little surprise, the commandos had been taken aback to discover that on the shoreward side it fell away sharply to a depth of nine feet. Working their way north, the team had confirmed the existence of another sandbar off the section of the road where 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade would land to the left of 1 CIB. Lying under about thirty inches of water and falling away shoreward to a depth of only five feet, this bar presented less of an obstacle.
After mulling over this information, Simonds ordered 1 CIB’s Brigadier Howard Graham to change his landing plan. No longer would the brigade’s assault battalions use the small Landing Craft, Assaults to gain the beach. Instead, they would go in on three larger Landing Craft, Tanks to the sandbar. From here they would launch aboard DUKW amphibious trucks, which would roll over the obstacle and carry them through to the beach. The fact that 1st Division had too few DUKWs to make this plan feasible was quickly remedied by xxx Corps headquarters rushing twenty-four extra DUKWS aboard three LCTS and sending them to join the convoy.43
The presence of the sandbars was common knowledge throughout the division and added to the general belief that just gaining the beach was going to be daunting. Corporal Felix Carriere, a Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry runner, expected “we would be savaged reaching the beach.” Yet he remained in good spirits, as did the men around him. “Morale was high,” he said later. The twenty-two-year-old from a farm south of Winnipeg had, after more than three years of hard training in Britain, been honed into a “muscular 129-pound” soldier who “could run up and down ropes like crazy” and do anything else required of him with skill and daring.
Carriere spent little time thinking about the fighting ahead. What intrigued him about the Soldier’s Guide was the information on the Italian people and their customs. His thoughts were those of a tourist bound for an exotic foreign country. “Come si chiama? Questo?” he repeated over and over again. “What is it called? This?” And Carriere would point at some object on the ship, practising for the day ahead when he got to make such a query to a real live Sicilian.44
On board Circassia, Lieutenant Robert L. McDougall sat on the deck writing a letter home to his mother and “enjoying the sunlight on this incredibly beautiful and peaceful evening. Here on the port side, except for a watchful ship of war guarding our flank, I can see only one limitless expanse of blue sea. Fine weather for a cruise—and what an extraordinary cruise this is. I find it all still a bit unreal... My pad is resting on a large map board which I have propped against my knees. On this map board are the maps of this enemy land which we are to invade and the whole operation I have marked out on the talc. As I say, it’s all rather unreal. I look at that map-board in a detached sort of way and I study it and memorize names and roads and such-like, following the unfolding of the plan phase by phase; but I have gone through precisely the same motions on the large number of schemes we have done in the past few months and it is difficult to bring home a realization that this is the real thing . . . There is amazingly little feeling of tension amongst us—perhaps it’s because even up to this late date we have had virtually nothing in the way of opposition. What human hands can do has been done; the rest is with God.”45
[4]
Going to Be Some Party
EVERY DAY, MAJOR General Guy Simonds and Lieutenant Colonel George Kitching performed the same macabre ritual. Kitching would take a hat filled with equal-sized chits of paper on which the names of every ship bearing Canadian personnel and equipment was written and hold it out to the divisional commander. Simonds drew three chits and those ships were declared lost, victims of torpedoes from a German U-boat—the scenario at times being that about one thousand men aboard the fast convoy had drowned and burned in oil-drenched seas, or hundreds of trucks, tanks, guns, radios, and other equipment in the slow convoy had plummeted to the bottom of the Mediterranean. All lost, gone. Kitching and his staff would then sit down and coldly “examine the effect the loss of these three ships would have on our projected plans.”
On July 3, Simonds pulled from the hat chits for three ships travelling in the Slow Assault Convoy—City of Venice, St. Essylt, and Devis. The coincidence was chilling, for it was aboard these vessels that equal portions of the divisional headquarters equipment—including all the trucks, Jeeps, radio sets, and a panoply of other gear that kept a division functioning—had been distributed. Were one or even, God forbid, two of these ships sunk, the headquarters could function almost as normal. But lose the three and the division was crippled. Kitching considered the “chance of all three ships being sunk was a million to one.” Deciding there was no point in studying the implications of such a wildly remote possibility, he asked Simonds to draw another three names from the hat, which the general did.1
As Simonds and Kitching were drawing lots, the slow convoy had passed the Straits of Gibraltar and started making its way along the North African coast between Oran and Algiers at a leisurely eight knots. Aboard St. Essylt, a dispirited and frustrated Major Cameron Ware brooded about the fate that put him on this ship rather than with the rest of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, sailing in the fast convoy aboard Llangibby Castle. The twenty-nine-year-old major could hardly believe his bad luck—declared Left Out of Battle and hence barred from being with the battalion during its combat debut. Left Out of Battle, a perfectly sensible precautionary measure, required every battalion to hold back a small number of officers and men to provide an experienced core around which to rebuild should the unit be decimated in the forthcoming assault. Soldiering was Ware’s lifeblood. He had joined the militia as a boy soldier in 1927, entered Royal Military College in 1931, and been posted as a lieutenant to the Permanent Force
PPCLI upon graduation. Nobody was a more faithful servant to the regiment and army than Ware—it had even been his boyhood dream that one day this regiment would be his to command. And now he was repaid by being bloody LOB when the PPCLI needed him most.
Ware should have seen it coming when he was made the battalion’s second-in-command, but he had simply forgotten about the practice, which had been introduced during the Great War. The rules were clear. If the battalion commander was leading his men into a fight, the second-in-command became LOB. Same with the individual rifle companies and on down the chain, sometimes as far as individual sections within platoons. Perhaps Ware could have accepted it all more gracefully if he had been with the battalion on Llangibby Castle, but no, it was decided that he needed to be on a different ship in case the one with his commander, Lieutenant Colonel R.A. “Bob” Lindsay, was sunk. No good having the LOB men go down with the same ship as the rest of the battalion.2
So the PPCLI soldiers designated LOB were on this freighter, which was filled to bursting with 320 troops from a variety of units. In the lower holds were about one hundred vehicles and large quantities of ammunition that taken together amounted to a gross weight of nine hundred tons of matériel.3 Ware was the senior army officer aboard so technically commanded the soldiers and was responsible for the stores. But there had been precious little to do except sit in the ever warmer sunshine until the order to break open the operational instruction bags had been received on July 1. For the past four days, he had been walking the men aboard through the instructions and now considered “everybody briefed and puffed up about what they were going to be doing” when they finally landed in Sicily days behind the assault battalions.
After dinner on the evening of July 4, Ware went up on deck wearing only his khaki shorts because of the heat and stood chatting with the ship’s captain, Master Stephen Diggins. The two men leaned casually against one of the stacks, reviewing an earlier incident that had seemed to the soldier to be a great display of Royal Navy efficiency. There had been a U-boat alert, and the nine naval ships protecting the convoy had responded immediately. The single destroyer and one of the six corvettes raced with black flags raised—to alert the convoy ships to the U-boat danger—and unloaded dozens of depth charges on its suspected location. Whether the ships sank the German submarine or not, Ware was glad they were so vigilant and said so to the ship’s captain.