by Mark Zuehlke
Galloway watched with admiration as Liddell and his men maintained perfect battle formation while pushing through tall grass and over rocky obstructions, even as mortar rounds hunted them. Then Liddell drew his men over to the right, creating a preplanned space for ‘B’ Company to come up on his left so that they would move towards the enemy side by side. Galloway lunged out ahead of his men, realizing as he did so that by carrying a walking stick and wearing a forage cap with a gleaming badge—which, he suspected, had reflected sunlight and drawn the sniper’s attention to him back where Armitage had been shot—he presented not only a romanticized figure of an officer from the Great War but also a perfect target. Yet the fusillade of small-arms fire that tore into the company missed Galloway entirely, cutting down four of his platoon section commanders instead. One took a bullet in the foot, another a round through the shoulder, and the other two went down with bullet wounds Galloway was unable to see. Private W.J. Huff also fell, a bullet having drilled directly into an eye. Although none were fatal wounds, the fact that all five men had been knocked down in seconds was shocking.
Yet the company never faltered—instead, the men charged forward. Private H.R. Dolson, who looked to Galloway to be all of fourteen despite having been overseas since 1939, “tore down the slope swearing and wrestling with his Bren gun which had suddenly had a stoppage. So fast did we sweep across the low valley, now burning as a result of the Jerry mortar bombs, that in no time we were up on ‘A’ Company’s right flank and engaging the enemy with rifle and Bren. Pte. Kamalznuck lay a burst from his Bren into a group of the enemy dispersing those who remained standing. Cuthbertson, my company-quartermaster-sergeant, got in some rapid fire with his rifle, for Company HQ dashed forward in the same assault wave as the fighting platoons. Leaping into tracked vehicles, the Germans drove off in speedy retreat. We had driven them from the field, but as our reward had only the prospect of further pursuit.”40
The RCR was now within a half-mile of the town and had gained two small knolls that provided good cover and firing positions. They started digging in, Crowe expecting to be counterattacked at any moment. During the advance, the RCR had come upon a section of men from the Hasty Ps in ‘D’ Company that had been hiding out after wandering lost for several hours. The platoon officer commanding this party reported to Crowe that the Plough Jockeys had broken into groups to withdraw to the highway. It was disappointing news, as Crowe had still expected them to come up on his flank for a two-battalion attack. Still unable to establish wireless communication with brigade, he was unable to tee up any reinforcement. Crowe decided that taking the town would have to be entirely an infantry operation and that his task was to gain control of the ground in front of the outskirts. Once this was accomplished, he would somehow establish contact with brigade headquarters to get the other battalions forward in support.
As ‘A’ and ‘B’ companies had carried out their charge, which the RCR’s war diarist dubbed “a truly amazing sight to see,”41 Major Billy Pope had spotted a section from the Hasty Ps in ‘D’ Company pinned down in a draw to the right. With Crowe forward, Pope was chafing at standing idly by in his role as battalion second-in-command—a sort of “always the bridesmaid, never the bride” problem. Here was the perfect opportunity for action. Gathering a section of men from ‘C’ Company, he led them in a scramble down a virtual cliff to the Hasty Ps’ position. Leading the rescued men back to the battalion lines, Pope spotted an enemy blockhouse about three hundred yards away on the southern outskirts of Valguarnera.
Back on the ridge, Pope grabbed a PIAT gun and several bombs. Gesturing for the ‘C’ Company section to follow, Pope headed for the blockhouse. Crawling to within one hundred feet of the position, Pope struck the blockhouse with two bombs that killed its occupants and severely damaged the structure. While Pope was attacking the blockhouse, three Mark IV tanks grinded up onto a nearby roadway and started blasting ‘A’ Company’s position with their 75-millimetre main guns and machine guns. Pope went for the tanks, dashing around some houses on the town’s southeast edge to get into firing range. He had three PIAT bombs left. Either because in his excitement he forgot to prime the bombs or because the detonators failed (quite common until the PIAT bombs were modified in early 1944), none of the bombs exploded. Out of options, Pope headed towards ‘A’ Company’s position on the knoll. As he led the section across a slightly exposed rise, one of the tanks caught him with a machine-gun burst. The thirty-year-old officer from Victoria fell dead—the RCR’s first officer fatality.42
By now it was 1400 hours. From Valguarnera came the racket of trucks and tanks on the move, and the RCR observed a long mechanized column streaming out of the town’s northern exits. It appeared the Germans might be giving the place up, but Crowe was still wary. He scribbled a note explaining that due to a lack of supporting arms, he intended to wait until nightfall before sending a patrol into Valguarnera. Crowe handed the note solemnly to Rusty Wilkes. The RCR padre had volunteered to carry it back to brigade headquarters with a request for reinforcement. Wilkes made the journey on foot, alone, almost constantly being sniped at by hidden German riflemen trying to isolate the RCR. Upon receiving the report, Brigadier Howard Graham quickly ordered his reserve battalion, the 48th Highlanders of Canada, towards Valguarnera from their holding position about two miles south of the town.43
The Highlanders had not had an entirely easy time themselves during the morning of July 18, having arrived at the hill to find it occupied by Germans. But they were fortunate to have been able to maintain wireless contact with the artillery regiments and so had the feature shelled. They then charged and took the hill, killing thirty-five Germans and wounding another twenty in the process, at a cost of four dead and six wounded. During this action, Corporal William Frederick Kay led his section of five men from ‘D’ Company’s No. 17 Platoon in a charge against a strong position containing three machine guns manned by seventeen Germans. Although shot in the arm, Kay threw two grenades into the position and then rushed it with his Thompson submachine gun blazing. When the smoke cleared, eight Germans were dead and the others severely wounded prisoners. Kay was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal.44 After nightfall, the Highlanders moved to enter Valguarnera from the right flank and found its streets and buildings abandoned.45
About the same time, Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Crowe—with tears in his eyes—was admonishing his RCR officers that Major Billy Pope’s death “should never have been; that it was an object lesson for all of us. We were not to expose ourselves needlessly. The Second-in-Command had no business stalking enemy armour and we, the company commanders, had even less business putting ourselves in positions of great danger when our men were supposed to be properly led by the sound application of our tactical training and by accepted techniques of command and control.” As he summed up Crowe’s comments, Captain Strome Galloway had to acknowledge their sense.46
It also occurred to Galloway that the regiment now had only one major, meaning two such ranking slots were open. Crowe had previously held off promoting either Galloway or Captain Slim Liddell to the third opening until he could compare their combat performance. Now there was opportunity for both men to be promoted, and the awkward competition between two friends to be put to an end. But Crowe said nothing about this, which failed to surprise Galloway. To do so immediately after Pope’s death would have been poor form. Instead, Crowe drew hard on a cigarette and told Major Pappy Powers that he was now the battalion’s second-in-command. Captain Charles “Chuck” Lithgow would take over ‘D’ company. “Stay well back,” Crowe cautioned Powers. “I can’t afford to lose you too.”47
[13]
Mountain Boys
WHILE 1ST CANADIAN Infantry Brigade had been striving to take pressure off 3rd Canadian Infantry Brigade’s Royal 22e Régiment by seizing Valguarnera in a cross-country flanking movement, Major General Guy Simonds had set in motion a major set-piece attack to break the German grip on Portella Grottacalda and the Highway 117 junction.
Just after dawn on July 18, 3 CIB’s Brigadier Howard Penhale ordered Lieutenant Colonel Paul Bernatchez to hold his Van Doos at the entrance to Portella Grottacalda so the Germans would continue concentrating on blocking their advance. Penhale hoped this would distract attention away from the Carleton and York Regiment, which he had Lieutenant Colonel Dodd Tweedie send over the hills right of the pass to cut the road running to Valguarnera, just north of its junction with Highway 117.1 Given the German ferocity to this point and reports that 1 CIB was meeting stiff resistance north of his brigade, Penhale’s plan seemed unlikely to succeed. But as the action had been unfolding, Penhale demonstrated growing uncertainty over what to do, and his orders became less articulate. Without guidance from above, Penhale was floundering.2
On the move shortly after 0700 hours, the Carletons reported that Germans were right of their line of advance, and about twenty-five minutes later, that they could hear tank engines nearby.3 The advance slowed, before stalling entirely at 0900 due to “fierce enemy fire.”4
Almost precisely to the minute that Tweedie was reporting to Penhale that his troops were blocked, Simonds and Brigadier Bruce Matthews, the division’s artillery commander, walked into 3 CIB headquarters. After Penhale briefed them, Simonds improved on his plan. Rather then keep any battalion in reserve as per conventional tactical wisdom, Simonds ordered the West Nova Scotia Regiment moved out from its position on the road behind the Van Doos in a wide left hook around the western flank of Monte della Forma to cut Highway 117 behind the Germans. With 1 CIB driving towards Valguarnera, Simonds hoped to trap the enemy defending Portella Grottacalda by preventing their retreat either to the north or west to Enna.5
While Penhale set the West Novas in motion, Simonds and Matthews worked up an artillery program to support 3 CIB’s assault with every divisional gun other than those of the Royal Devon Yeomanry, whose self-propelled guns were standing by to support 1 CIB if and when communication with its two advancing battalions was restored. By 0930 hours, Matthews had two fire plans, with the first to begin at 1200 hours and the second at 1305.6 The fire plans would saturate four selected targets around the pass with concentrated fire from four artillery regiments—the 1st Canadian Field Regiment (Royal Canadian Horse Artillery), 2nd Canadian Field Regiment, 3rd Canadian Field Regiment, and 7th Medium Regiment, Royal Artillery—at sixty-eight rounds per gun.7 Three field regiments having a total of seventy-two 25-pound guns and the medium regiment ’s sixteen 5.5-inch guns meant the Canadian gunners would throw 5,984 shells out in the largest gunnery operation they had ever fired.
While Simonds and Matthews returned to divisional headquarters to ready the artillery, the West Novas started out with a one-and-a-half-mile withdrawal back along the road. From here, at 1030 hours, they advanced cross-country due west, heading for about two miles to where a small riverbed followed a northerly course between two high hills and then crossed Highway 117. Although the streambed was dry, the descent into it was too steep for the carriers to negotiate.8 Dismounting, Lieutenant Reginald Warren Bullock had his 3-inch mortar section break the heavy, bulky tubes down and follow the rifle companies on foot.9 Although the carriers were unable to negotiate the streambed, a troop of Shermans from Three Rivers Regiment’s ‘B’ Squadron managed to keep pace.10 The West Novas’ commander, Lieutenant Colonel Pat Bogert, expected any moment to bump a German defensive line. But the only opposition met, as one hour ground into the next, was the blazing sun that transformed the hard-baked clay of the valley into a veritable oven. The men also had to hack their way through thick stands of bamboo.11 At noon, the West Novas looked eastward as the Canadian guns thundered and shells began exploding on the imposing height of Monte della Forma.
Manning one of the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery guns was twenty-three-year-old Gunner Henry Worrell. Stripped to the waist like all the other gunners, he wore only shorts and boots. Each time the 25-pounder roared, it kicked up a blinding, suffocating cloud of dust. The gun shook violently with each shot because the searing heat interfered with the recoil mechanism. He worried that the gun was going to shake itself to pieces if they kept firing at such a rapid rate.12
A short way behind the Van Doos, Canadian Press war correspondent Ross Munro had been watching as the gunners fired occasional shots to range in on the concentration points selected for the bombardment. Then, suddenly, “they hit out furiously ... [Monte della Forma] to the west of the fork was plastered with shell bursts . . . I see a grey forest of trees growing suddenly and magically before my eyes. As a shell hits the brown earth, the grey smoke billows up like a full-blown tree sprouting from the soil. There were half a dozen at first, well scattered, and then twenty, fifty, one hundred or more, crowding each other for space. The hillside was covered with the grey forest and then the smoke drifted and merged into a dirty, grey curtain over the brown hillside.
“You heard the grumble of the guns miles behind and the swish and whine of the shells overhead like a long train going through a tunnel. There wasn’t much commotion on the hill-side target. Twenty-five-pounder shells dig only a shallow crater, usually just a scoop in the ground about five inches deep, with the blast spreading for fifty yards or more around.
“The smoky hill flickered with bursts of shells, but the bursts did not seem large. They just sparked and were followed by more sparks.”13 From his vantage, Munro could see the Carletons going up a shell-blasted hill towards the Germans—the battalion’s ‘B’ and ‘C’ companies advancing side by side.14 The riflemen had bayonets fixed, while those men with Thompson submachine guns or Bren guns snapped off bursts from the hip. Then the entire battalion disappeared into the smoke and dust thrown up by the artillery. He lay alongside the road listening to the sheet-ripping sound of the German MG 42 machine guns and the slower, harder thump of the Bren guns’ return fire. It seemed to go on interminably, hours dragging by. Late in the afternoon, Munro recognized Canadians closing on German positions, “little clusters of men in khaki moving cautiously forward and then running and falling flat as they took cover. Some men were hit and fell and didn’t move.
“The others couldn’t stop, and kept going, firing, dodging, creeping, sweating forward. Stretcher-bearers, with their Red Cross arm-bands standing out clearly, reached the falling men and bound them up or left them dead on the brown, scorched earth.”15 One of the men charging up the hill was Private Maurice Brisson of ‘D’ Company. With two other Carletons, he stormed a machine gun. When the other two were killed by a long burst of fire, Brisson worked around the position to attack it from the rear. Shooting two of the gun crew dead, he battered the life from the third with his rifle butt. Brisson was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal.16
As he gained the crest of the hill, twenty-five-year-old Lieutenant Joseph Beverley Starr of Wolfville, Nova Scotia, was killed while throwing a grenade at a German position. Nearby, Captain Thomas Southall raised binoculars to his eyes only to have a bullet split them in two and penetrate his forehead. The twenty-nine-year-old Ottawa native fell dead.17
By 1600 hours it was over. The West Novas, having encountered en route only a single machine-gun position, which was easily eliminated, ensconced themselves on a hilltop dominating Highway 117 west of Portella Grottacalda and the junction. In their drive north of the pass, the Carletons had cut the road to Valguarnera and won a hill to the west. As the Carletons closed in on the road, the Panzer Grenadiers flooded up it to escape the closing trap. The battalion suffered forty-six casualties in the sharp battle, with two officers and nine other ranks killed.18
After fourteen hours of continuous action, the Van Doos were surprised when the enemy broke off the engagement. They moved through the pass unobstructed and reported the junction in hand at 1700 hours. During the artillery barrage, some rounds had fallen short, but only two or three men had been wounded. In the protracted fight, however, they had suffered thirty-one casualties, seven of which were fatal.19
The battles waged around Valguarnera and Portella Grottacalda between the
night of July 17-18 and the following evening had largely involved battalions fighting individually with little or no artillery or tank support. Yet the Canadians had prevailed and inflicted heavy losses on the Germans, who fought from well-camouflaged and strong defensive positions. While the two battalions of 104th Panzer Grenadier Regiment had managed to hold up two Canadian brigades for twenty-four hours, they did so at the cost of about five hundred officers and men either taken prisoner or killed. Total Canadian casualties were set at 145, of which forty were fatal.20
“At Valguarnera I succeeded in enveloping and cutting off their rearguard,” Simonds boasted to First Canadian Army’s commander Lieutenant General Andrew McNaughton on July 30. “The slaughter was terrific and only remnants got away.”21 While overstating results, Simonds could draw satisfaction from his division’s performance.
In his daily report to Berlin, Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring wrote on July 20: “Near Valguarnera troops trained for fighting in the mountains have been mentioned. They are called ‘Mountain Boys’ [by the Panzer Grenadiers] and probably belong to the 1st Canadian Division.”22 It was high praise for the Canadians, whose only real mountain warfare training had consisted of about eight days climbing cliffs at Sussex by the Sea.
MAJOR GENERAL GUY Simonds knew his Canadians were now entering Sicily’s mountainous heart. General Harold Alexander had once again adjusted Eighth Army’s boundary with that of the U.S. Seventh Army. “It was now clear,” he wrote, “that Eighth Army would not have the strength to encircle Etna on both sides against the stout resistance of the Germans. The Canadians were therefore ordered to advance on Leonforte and then turn east to Adrano.”23 This meant the division was to immediately dogleg north at the Highway 117 junction onto the road leading to Valguarnera and abandon the drive towards Enna, despite his earlier July 13 decision to shift the capture of this town from the Americans to the Canadians.24 Although intending that responsibility for securing Enna was now being returned to the Americans, these instructions reached neither General George Patton nor General Omar Bradley. This may well have been an oversight on Alexander’s part, or some nefarious sleight of hand on the part of Patton’s chief of staff, Brigadier Hobart R. Gay.