by Mark Zuehlke
The Canadians had four objectives for July 10—to secure Bark West, protect the left flank of xxx Corps, capture Pachino airfield and make it operational for Allied aircraft, and begin advancing towards a road that cut along a sharp southwest-to-northeast axis from the coastal village of Pozzallo inland to Rosolini. This would enable them to conform to, and continue protecting, the western flank of 51st Highland Division as it pushed inland.
Phase One, seizing Bark West, would be kicked off by the commandos landing ahead of the Canadians. To their right, 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade would land on a stretch of beach code-named “Sugar,” while 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade would set down on “Roger,” farther to the right yet. Each Canadian brigade would have two battalions forward and one in reserve. The Seaforth Highlanders would be on the left of 2 CIB’s front and the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry on the right, with 1 CIB’s Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment on that brigade’s left and the Royal Canadian Regiment on the right. Each battalion would have two companies leading and two landing close behind as reserve. The Loyal Edmonton Regiment would be in brigade reserve for 2 CIB, and the 48th Highlanders of Canada would do identical duty for 1 CIB. The 3rd Canadian Infantry Brigade’s Royal 22e Régiment (Van Doos), Carleton and York Regiment, and West Nova Scotia Regiment would wait offshore in reserve until the beach was secure.
After Bark West was secured, 2 CIB’s immediate task was to strike westward to destroy enemy beach defences and link up with the commandos. Securing Pachino airfield would be 1 CIB’s major objective, but they were also to eliminate the gun battery at Maucini to the south of the airfield. As the two lead brigades pushed towards their respective objectives, the rest of the division would be landing according to a phased schedule and establishing supporting operations. Included in these landings would be gun batteries from the 1st Canadian Field Regiment (Royal Canadian Horse Artillery) and the Shermans of the Three Rivers Tank Regiment from 1st Canadian Army Tank Brigade.13
Much attention had been paid in Kitching’s orders to the problem of recognition signals and passwords because the initial part of the operation was expected to be carried out in darkness. So worried were Eighth Army planners of the prospect of friendly fire incidents that a single password sequence had been established for all troops. During the convoy the Canadians had gleefully practised the sequence until it was second nature. The challenge: “Desert Rats.” Answer: “Kill Italians.”14
IT WAS THE kind of challenge that tickled RCR second-in-command Major John Henry William “Billy” Pope’s sense of humour. On Marnix van St. Aldegonde, he and a group of old friends had eaten during the late night of July 9 “off snowy white linen what many of us thought might be our last meal.” There were five others: Lieutenant John Praysner and Captains Ron “Slim” Liddell, Strome Galloway, Ian Hodson, and Sam Lerner. As usual, Pope dominated the conversation. Not that the others minded—everyone liked Billy “of the close-cropped head, round as a cannon ball, with china-white teeth under a Zorro moustache.” Throughout the voyage, Pope had repeatedly taken aside one or another of the battalion’s lieutenants. “Have you seen much of death in the sun—in the morning?” he would ask. Before the apprehensive young man could reply, Pope flashed a grin, twitching the scar that curved down his cheek, and said, “Well, you will.” Pope’s explanation of the scar’s origin typified the man. A sabre cut suffered in a student duel at university, he told strangers. Galloway and his friends knew the truth—the result of a motorcycle accident.15
Over coffee, Pope suddenly turned serious and broke the news that the assault companies would use DUKWS. Liddell was just explaining how this meant junking all his plans for loading ‘A’ Company, when Pope produced some fresh aerial reconnaissance overlays that made matters worse. Visible directly behind ‘A’ Company’s stretch of sand were more machine-gun positions than had been earlier identified. Liddell scowled when a fellow captain quipped that the added guns improved his odds of winning a Distinguished Service Order or Military Cross.
Adjourning to the ship’s lounge, the officers listened as a soldier drafted for the occasion pounded away on the piano until Padre Rusty Wilkes arrived to lead the Protestant officers in a divine service. In a smaller venue, Billy Pope acted as lay priest for the Catholic officers. After the services, the officers shook each other’s hands. “See you in Sicily, old boy,” several told Galloway. Before going to his cabin, Galloway checked into ‘B’ Company’s mess deck. The men “were in fine fettle. In the dim lights the air was smoky and close. Corporal [Joseph Ernest] Norton was slitting his web belt and stuffing the slits with .303 ammunition in cowboy style. Burgoone, a Bren gunner, was trying out a can of self-heating soup—a gadget with a tiny spirit stove built in. A fuel pellet is lit and the soup in the upper section is heated in a few minutes.”16
By the time Galloway reached the cabin he shared with Captain Liddell, the latter officer was already getting ready and the space was too cramped for two men to move about. Galloway reclined on a bunk. Throughout the voyage, their friendship had been strained by a competition that Lieutenant Colonel Crowe had imposed. The RCR had only two majors on strength—Billy Pope and ‘D’ Company’s commander, Major Tom “Pappy” Powers—while each battalion was allowed three. It was a close call, Crowe had allowed, whether Galloway or Liddell should be awarded major’s crowns. On one hand, Galloway was senior in service time and had three months’ battle experience under his belt. But Liddell was a Permanent Force officer who was older and married. If Liddell died a captain, his wife would receive less of a pension. Galloway was unmarried. Unable to decide, Crowe promoted neither. The rank instead would go to whomever he felt performed better in the forthcoming battle. Both Liddell and Galloway disliked this idea, but Crowe was adamant. Trusting the odds lay with him, Galloway had secreted two sets of brass crowns in his battle pack to have at hand when he won the promotion.17
Stripped to the waist, Liddell lit a match to his copy of Crowe’s battalion operation order, “then crushed the blackened paper in the wash basin and made a filthy paste out of it. Scooping this mess up, he smeared his face until it was as black as any end-man in a Dixie show! Slim maintained that this personal camouflage would conceal him from observation. He had ordered all his men to black their faces too.” Galloway refused to follow suit. Liddell shrugged, pulled on his heavily laden web gear, picked up a Thompson submachine gun, and headed for his company’s mess deck.
There was no rush, so Galloway checked on one of Liddell’s lieutenants in the cabin next door. As instructed, Len Carline was just finishing blacking his face. “Then he draped himself with his webbing, moaning loudly about its weight. With Tommy-gun, eight loaded magazines, grenades, entrenching tool, 48-hour ration and personal kit piled on him he could hardly stand up. Len is a slight fellow. He said that to his dying day he’d always pity a pack mule!
“Harry Keene, one of my own subalterns, was in the next cabin. In there his batman, an 18-year-old youngster whom we call ‘the innocent child,’ was almost at the point of exasperation as he struggled manfully to shove Harry into the unyielding web equipment. While young Horton stuffed and tugged to gird his officer for battle, Harry amused himself by discussing his fat belly and munching a biscuit. We were issued with so much hardtack we had nowhere to carry it, so Harry was solving his problem by eating some of it then and there.”
Soon kitted up, Galloway joined his company. Not one of the two assault companies, ‘B’ Company had been divided into serials that were each assigned to a specific LCA. The “men filed out from between their mess tables, a long khaki serpent of infantrymen, each grasping the bayonet scabbard of the man ahead to keep the line intact. We moved at a snail’s pace along the corridors and up the companionways to the boat decks. As we ascended the stairs, the bright lights of below-decks receded and dim, blue lights became our only guide.”
Stepping onto the outer deck, Galloway passed Lieutenant Gray of the War Graves Commission. “His face looked pale and eerie i
n the dim blue light. ‘I’ll be seen’ you,’ he remarked, with all good intentions.”
“Not me, I hope,” Galloway whispered back.18
“Attention, please. Attention, please,” the public address systems on each infantry transport sounded. Then the number of a serial would be called to proceed to its boat position. Aboard Circassia, the Seaforth Highlanders waited their turns in mess decks that had been plunged into total darkness to prevent any light escaping through the doors opening to the boat deck. When their turn came, the men proceeded “very slowly in . . . one single line . . . and up the gangways they would go, along the dim corridors, up again to decks still higher till finally they reached the promenade or boat deck. Stumbling over the high sills of the ship’s door-ways they would issue out into the open air and the moonlight. Out of the oppressively hot atmosphere of their close confinement below where little if any ventilation seemed to exist and into the cool night air. Silently—for the whole ship was bound in silence—they would creep forward till the leader had found his boat station and then, one by one, each man would file past him into the Landing Craft as it swung from its davits at the side of the ship. Here they would kneel on one knee with their rifles vertical in their hands until the craft had its full complement aboard in three rows—the officer being the last to enter as he was to be the first out on landing. There was always a slight hesitancy about taking the step from the ship into the swinging Landing Craft for the gap between revealed a long, long drop into the watery depths below.
“Thus they would kneel or half squat in tightly packed lines until . . . every section had found similar positions. In this way these boys would soon be lowered with other Landing Craft swinging below them from the Promenade deck into the sea and away to a hostile shore. The intense silence and darkness gave the whole procedure a weird and ghostly atmosphere.”19 Padre Durnford had walked with the men and watched them load into the LCAS. He wondered what “intensity of prayer existed among these lads who were about to face the ugly realities of war.”20
While darkness cloaked the Canadian ships, Sicily burned. Ninety minutes before the convoy had reached the release point, flights of medium bombers had started raining bombs on the defences immediately inland. Pachino, Maucini, and Ispica all were badly bombed. Pachino airfield and its defensive works were struck. “A dull red glow suffused the sky to the north of us and we knew the small town of Pachino was ablaze,” Durnford wrote.21
Aboard an LCA, Seaforth Sergeant Jock Gibson could scarcely believe that the invasion was on. The waves were tossing the flat-bottomed LCAs about like corks. The vessel’s crew was throwing up over the sides; every soldier—except Gibson—was puking on the deck. Having spent years on West Coast tugboats, he possessed an iron stomach. “The sea didn’t bother me a bit,” he said later. But how the hell the men around him were going to fight when they got ashore, Gibson had no idea.22
Things were equally bad aboard the LCA carrying PPCLI’s Corporal Felix Carriere. A lot of men were seasick, but Carriere was too keyed up to be affected. He and the others who felt okay whispered back and forth over the thumping roar of the two diesel engines that drove the LCAS. They had been told to stay quiet, that they were trying to surprise the enemy guarding the beaches.23 Ahead, bombs were exploding. The Italians were madly lighting up the sky with flares, and anti-aircraft tracers stabbed towards the bombers. As the first wave of 2 CIB’s LCAS cast off and wallowed towards the beach, HMS Roberts—a British monitor ship hovering nearby—belched fire from her heavy 15-inch guns, and shells screamed towards Pachino airfield’s defences.24 Aboard his lurching and bucking LCA, Lieutenant Farley Mowat of the Hastings and Prince Edward’s ‘A’ Company watched in awe as four “incandescent spheres burst from her suddenly revealed grey bulk—four suns...that seemed to ignite the whole arc of the southern horizon in flickering red and yellow lightning.” Other naval vessels weighed in and “cataclysmic thunder overwhelmed our world.”25
IT WAS ABOUT 0130 hours when the first flight of 2 CIB’s two assault battalions headed for shore. Twenty-four minutes earlier, the first troops from Nos. 40 and 41 commando units of the British Special Service Brigade had cast off.26 The commandos headed towards the westerly outer curve of the bay to destroy the two coastal defence batteries that could bear on the main Canadian invasion force.27 Leading the Seaforth’s assault was ‘A’ Company under Captain Sydney Thomson on the right flank and Major J.W. “Jim” Blair’s ‘C’ Company on the left. The LCAS were in a box formation. Aboard one of the craft, a man unaffected by the rolling seas sang “Heading for the Last Roundup” at the top of his lungs.28 Right of the Seaforths, the PPCLI was also running for shore with Captain Don Brain’s ‘B’ Company and Major A.E.T. Paquet’s ‘D’ Company leading.29 The reserve companies were not far behind, and aboard one of ‘C’ Company’s LCAS Lieutenant Colin McDougall noted the men in his platoon “were weighted down with extra loads of grenades, mortar bombs, SAA [small-arms ammunition] bandoliers, Bren magazines. During the past hour they had helped each other dress, like athletes or actors backstage. They carried more on their bodies than could have been expended in the most desperate firefight, but they did not know this yet because they did not know the actuality of war.”30
While 2 CIB was away, its LCAS cutting through the darkness, 1 CIB’s assault battalions anxiously awaited arrival of the LCTS bearing the DUKWS that three of the four companies were to board. These ships were lost, blindly groping through the blacked-out convoy in search of the ships bearing the Hasty Ps and RCR. Lowered on schedule aboard LCAS, the Hasty Ps in ‘A’ and ‘C’ companies were tossed about in the heaving hell of the storm. ‘C’ Company was to assault the beach to the west of ‘B’ Company—which was to land in DUKWS—while ‘A’ Company would stand off as a floating reserve until needed or the way was clear for the rest of the battalion to land.31 The crews manning each LCA had cast away from Glengyle for fear of being thrown against her steel hulk and crushed. “The sea . . . played with the landing craft as if they were chips caught in a spring spate,” the regimental historian later wrote. Nausea gripped almost the entire company, even the tall, broad-shouldered Captain Alex Campbell. The thirty-three-year-old company commander “was a fire-eating hulk of a man who had lost his father in one war with the Germans, and who had lost his brother in this one. Now in an interval between retchings he turned and voiced the battle slogan of his company. ‘Nil carborundum illegitimo’—‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down!’”32
The RCR had already lowered the second flight of troops in their LCAS on schedule so these craft would be clear of the transport ship when the LCTS arrived. As the LCA bearing Captain Galloway and a section of ‘B’ Company had been lowered, “it bumped against the side of the ship and pitched forwards and backwards as the davits dropped us. Halfway down we banged up against a bilge outlet and we all got drenched with the foul water, a lot of it getting into our mouths. Choking and spluttering, we eventually hit the sea and swung back and forth until we were cast loose.”
For the next two hours the LCAS that 1 CIB had set loose motored around, trying to maintain their company formations in the inky darkness. The pilot of Galloway’s craft seemed to be blundering blind, the LCA continuously banging into other craft. Galloway and the other men aboard hardly cared, as they “were hanging over the sides of the craft, puking into mare nostrum.”33
Two and a half hours late, the LCTS finally appeared. Their lateness hardly surprised 1 CIB’s Brigadier Howard Graham and his naval counterpart, Captain Andrew Gray, on Glengyle. They had predicted the LCTS would be “slow, very slow, to find us in the darkness and the great concourse of some two thousand ships. Once found, the problem was to tie up to us with great heaving seas bashing about and, once tied up, to get the men down scrambling nets with all their gear and into the bucking LCTS.” He and Gray were in an “utter fury” of frustration, trying to implement a plan they opposed. It little helped their moods when at 0315 Hilary’s signal lamp flashed a message from
Rear Admiral Vian. “Will your assault ever start?” the admiral demanded.34
That was the last straw for Graham. A minute later, he ordered the Hasty Ps in ‘B’ and ‘A’ companies to immediately head their LCAS for the sand. Thirty minutes later the rest of the brigade was still struggling aboard the LCTS when the division’s assistant adjutant and quartermaster general, Lieutenant Colonel Preston Gilbride, came alongside in Vian’s personal barge and delivered a terse signal from Simonds. “You must get your assaults away either in L.C.T.s or L.C.A.s,” it read. By this time, of course, Graham had done all he could. The RCR assault companies and the Hasty Ps in ‘B’ Company were finally aboard the LCTS and crammed into the seven DUKWS tied down on their respective vessel’s deck. The LCTS cast off at 0400 hours and started towards shore.
BY THE TIME 1 CIB was finally under way, 2 CIB’s assault companies were already on the sand. Since they had entered the bay at about 0230 hours, the seas had moderated. Overhead, bombers still droned in to bomb Pachino. The fires burning in the town were supposed to act like beacons to help the LCA pilots steer to the assigned landing points, but the shoreline was so blacked out that many became disoriented. 35 Groping through the dark, anxiously consulting the compasses in the binnacles by their sides, the pilots aboard the Seaforth’s LCAS blundered in a collective flotilla behind those bearing the PPCLI and ended up on that battalion’s right flank, rather than, as planned, to the left.36 The PPCLI fared better, the majority of the two companies staying on course and only a few LCAS straying off to land elsewhere.37
PPCLI captain Don Brain, leading ‘B’ Company, had his eyes fixed forward as the LCAS neared shore. “Flares could be seen being put up by an enemy even more uncertain than ourselves as to what to expect. Machine-gun tracer made very attractive patterns against the sky in the distance while on the shore every once in a while would appear a bright flash followed by a loud report as though someone were tossing grenades about.”38