by Mark Zuehlke
Although taken by surprise, the 15th Panzer Grenadiers in the convoy and manning the positions on the west side of the mountain responded rapidly. “From the ditches beside the burning trucks German drivers returned the Regiment’s machine-gun fire with rifle shots. The crews of four light anti-aircraft pieces, sited beside the road, cranked down their guns to fire point-blank at the Canadians upon the crest. Machine-gun detachments, hurriedly withdrawn from the front, scrambled up the road, flung themselves down behind stone fences and engaged the Brens in a staccato duel. With commendable, but frightening efficiency, the enemy’s batteries, which had been concentrating their fire on Second Brigade in front of Leonforte, slewed their guns around to bear upon Assoro. Within an hour after dawn the crest of the hill was almost hidden in the dust of volleying explosions.”50
About five hundred Canadians clung to Assoro’s summit, which was so rocky that digging in was virtually impossible. For the next three hours the Hasty Ps endured a fierce bombardment as the Germans hurled between two and three hundred shells down upon the small circle of ground they held. At regular intervals, the shelling would cease and Panzer Grenadiers would press up the hill, to be immediately thrown back by bursts of fire. The only ammunition the Plough Jockeys had was what they had carried up the cliff face, and they were burning through it at a terrific rate. Water was disappearing equally fast, and there were no wells on the summit. Down the slope towards the town there was a well, but when one man tried to reach it, he was driven back by a shower of German grenades. Out of the inevitable bright, blue sky, the searing sun baked down on the hard Sicilian ground, and the Hasty Ps fought a battle with their backs against a wall.51
[15]
Faces to the Foe
DOWN IN DITTAINO valley, the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment officers of the battalion’s support units had anxiously watched the summit of Assoro. They looked for a pre-arranged signal, two green flares that the rifle companies were to fire when they knew the road to the town was clear and safe for the battalion’s vehicles to ascend. In the pre-dawn light, Major C.S. Nickle and the others saw the flares, precisely as planned. Within minutes, about thirty trucks and carriers hauling supplies and the support platoons were on the move—not one of the men aboard aware that, by coincidence, the Germans “used this same signal in calling for mortar fire.”1
The Canadian convoy made its way undisturbed to where the road began winding up to Assoro before coming upon a minefield. From nearby, “spasmodic rifle fire was opened on them but it appeared to be from small isolated positions and it was decided to try and advance. Almost immediately the enemy opened up with [medium machine guns] and mortars.” The Hasty Ps jumped out of their vehicles and took up defensive positions, desperately returning the enemy fire. Yanking one of the 3-inch mortars out of a carrier, the mortar platoon managed to get it into action. Quickly enough, Nickle and his group realized they were seriously outgunned. Drivers rushed back to their vehicles and madly jockeyed them about. With its three 6-pounder guns hitched to the rear carriers, the anti-tank platoon was unable to turn around and had to abandon the weapons and vehicles. Several heavyweight trucks were also unable to turn about and were left behind. When all the vehicles that could be were pointed back the way they had come, everyone loaded up. With the Germans still bringing down a terrific rate of fire, the convoy retreated.2 Although four vehicles and the three anti-tank guns were destroyed in this debacle, only four men were wounded and none killed.3
Now 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade knew that the Hasty Ps on the summit were cut off and in serious danger, but Brigadier Howard Graham realized no attempt to push a relief force through in daylight could succeed. Summoning the 48th Highlanders of Canada commander, Lieutenant Colonel Ian Johnston, Graham told him to make an attack that night up the south and southwest flanks of the mountain to gain the town.4
Meanwhile, Major John Tweedsmuir and his men had decided the key to survival lay in taking the battle to the enemy. The German artillery fire was growing ever more accurate, the castle serving as a perfect marking point, and the gunners had switched to timed fuses so the shells exploded overhead to spray great swaths of area with shrapnel. More than twenty men had been wounded. They were crowded into a shallow cave and laid out on straw that the stretcher-bearers had gathered. “The narrow space looked and stank like a slaughterhouse. Blood was everywhere, glaring from torn, dust-whitened clothing, naked grey flesh and yellow straw.” The medical officer, Captain Krakauer, had nothing but a few first-aid kits that had been carried up the cliff and so was unable to staunch the flow of blood from the more gaping wounds.5 “They suffered terribly though we managed to keep them dosed with morphia,” Tweedsmuir later wrote.
The newly minted battalion commander was under no illusions. If the artillery fire “wasn’t stopped soon we were plainly going to take serious casualties.”6 That was when someone remembered there had been an artillery spotter’s telescope in the observation post the assault company had overrun. A soldier dashed across open ground flayed by shrapnel from the airbursts, retrieved the telescope, and delivered it into the hands of the battalion’s second-in-command, Major Bert Kennedy. 7 It was a beautifully precise, 20-power, scissor-type instrument.
Before the war, Kennedy had trained with a militia artillery regiment in his hometown of Owen Sound. The battalion had but a single wireless set—but it was perfect for the job. Having seen the poor performance of the battalion No. 18 and company No. 38 models in the mountain country of Sicily’s interior, Tweedsmuir had insisted on having a signaller from the Royal Corps of Signals accompany the battalion. This lance corporal had lugged a 24-pound No. 46 wireless set up the cliff. He now “netted his set to the artillery frequency, and within minutes,” Kennedy was able to go to work.8
Through the glasses, Kennedy “caught the wink of one of the guns as it fired and sent an urgent call on the radio for artillery support. It was not long in coming, and on the third correction our shells lit squarely on it. We ordered three rounds ‘gunfire’ and the shelling ceased. It was none too soon.”9
For an hour Kennedy “gave the distant Canadian artillery a series of dream targets. As each German gun fired up at Assoro, its position was radioed to the rear and within minutes salvos of Canadian shells fell upon it. There was no escape, for every movement of the German gunners could be seen. Methodically, carefully, [Kennedy] directed the counter-battery fire, until by noon well over half the enemy’s artillery was out of action, and the rest was hurriedly withdrawing to safer sites.”10
The Hasty Ps’ long siege of July 21 ground on. Worried they were going to run out of ammunition before any relief reached them, Captain W.K. “Bill” Stockloser and RSM Angus Duffy volunteered to climb down the cliff to organize a party to come back up with rations and ammunition. It was a journey, at several points under enemy fire, that took six hours. Arriving at the battalion headquarters of the Royal Canadian Regiment, the two men reported to Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Crowe. Brigadier Graham was with Crowe. The RCR battalion commander immediately offered to organize a company to carry supplies up the cliff to the Hasty Ps.11
Back on the embattled summit, things were looking up at 1700 hours as the “enemy fire had become spasmodic and ineffective.”12 The Hasty Ps were exhausted; men kept nodding off to sleep despite the incoming fire and risk of snipers that kept picking away at them from hides within the town. Suddenly, at 2000 hours, the Germans opened up with heavy mortars, and two Panzer Grenadier companies came out of the town directly towards where the summit group was holding. The men there were down to counting rounds, but they opened up with carefully aimed fire that started knocking down the Germans climbing up the slope.
Kennedy was instantly on the wireless, knowing they had to stop this counterattack in its tracks. He called for an immediate bombardment of the town. “The first salvo hit the castle and we gave the correction of 300 yards west. The next was dead on the edge of the town, on the slope below: as the shells shrieked into the tightly packe
d houses it occurred to me to wonder whether this was the origin of the phrase, ‘to paint the town red,’” Tweedsmuir wrote. “Our guns pounded the town intermittently and a long night began.” The counterattack melted away, the slope leading up from the town littered with German dead.13
At midnight, the RCR’s ‘D’ Company, under Captain Charles Lithgow, prepared to carry a full day’s ration and ammunition supply sufficient for a battalion up to the Hasty Ps. They put the supplies “in their small packs, which they had emptied of all their personal possessions, in some Everest packs and in bandoliers around their necks,” and headed for the eastern cliff face. Stockloser and Duffy served as guides.14
To make the trip there and back before daybreak required taking a shorter route than the two Hasty P sergeants had followed on their way back from the mountain. The supply party found itself literally creeping “under the nose of... enemy positions” to gain the cliff. Then it was a long, back-breaking slog up the hill to reach the summit and hand over the supplies. Few words were exchanged. The RCR troops thankfully dropped their burdens and set off back down the mountain. They reached battalion headquarters at 0600 hours on July 22, having suffered no casualties.15 Tweedsmuir was elated. “We were now well fed and well enough armed to deal with anything.”16
THE HASTY PS on Assoro posed a grave threat to the overall defensive front that 15th Panzer Grenadier Division had established to block the Canadians’ northward advance. Assoro to the east and Leonforte to the west were like bookends to the defensive line that stretched along the ridge linking these two summits. Generalmajor Eberhard Rodt’s dilemma was simple. His division must hold both summits and the ridge or abandon the front in its entirety, because losing any part of it exposed the troops holding the rest to the danger of being outflanked and cut off from their line of retreat eastward to Messina. With the Hasty Ps solid on the summit by the night of July 21-22, the Panzer Grenadiers could only hope to keep them penned in while trying to stave off Canadian efforts to both break through to Assoro with a relief force and gain ground elsewhere along the ridge and at Leonforte.17
During the course of the day on July 21, the RCR had sent a platoon from ‘B’ Company “to probe the high ground between Leonforte and Assoro, and determine if the enemy was holding it in any strength.” With 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade beginning a push towards Leonforte and the Hasty Ps atop Assoro, Major General Guy Simonds had wanted to know whether “the intermediate ground might, or might not, be held. The only way to find out was to go in and ‘trouble shoot.’” Captain Strome Galloway selected Lieutenant Harry Keene to lead the patrol, which consisted of a volunteer composite platoon drawn from the entire company. Although Keene would command, Galloway was not going to be left out of the excitement and went along as an observer.
As the ground in front of the ridge was open and flat, no amount of fieldcraft could prevent the Germans from spotting the patrol. The patrol tried to keep hidden by following shallow gullies that led towards the ridge or tucking in close to the smoke from the persistent grass fires smouldering throughout the valley. By noon, Galloway and his men were working their way up the slope towards the ridgeline—sweating, gasping from the exertion, and feeling on the edge of exhaustion—when a shot rang out.18 Private Alvin Cameron, the company’s lead scout, who was well ahead of the rest of the platoon, slumped to the ground and lay still. Three other men were shot and wounded moments later. Bren gunner Private D.H. Robinson was struck in the arm by one slug, while a second punched through his water bottle with such force it spun him around and knocked him down. For a terrifying moment the man thought the wetness on one side of his body was blood gushing from a mortal wound, but then he saw the hole through the water bottle.
The patrol dodged back to the cover of a gully. Flames from the grass fires licked across the open ground they had just vacated, and Galloway realized that Cameron was still out there somewhere. If he was alive, the man would be burned to death. Lieutenant Harry Keene and stretcher-bearer Private J.A. Bancroft volunteered to go with Galloway to rescue Cameron. The three men crept out, ducking around the edge of the fire, until they found the scout. Confirming the man was dead, they started back but immediately came under dangerously close sniper fire. As the three sprinted for the gully, Corporal Joseph Ernest Norton got up on the slope to provide covering fire and was shot in the stomach. Bancroft rushed to Norton, grabbed an arm and slung it over his shoulder, and dragged him to the cover of a large boulder. Although the stretcher-bearer was able to bandage the wound and staunch the bleeding, it was obvious that Norton was in bad shape. “I’m finished, sir,” Norton responded when Galloway said they would quickly get him back to the Regimental Aid Post. Norton succumbed to his wound five days later.
Galloway considered the patrol a “disaster.” But it had confirmed that the ridge was held in strength. During the five hours that the patrol was out, Galloway had been able to spot several German positions on the ridge. He told Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Crowe that none of these could be attacked frontally in daylight.19 The only way to effectively break the German defensive wall between Assoro and Leonforte would be to secure both summits and the towns set upon them. Doing so would give the Canadians control of the roads behind the ridge, which the enemy required for their eventual withdrawal.
Early on July 21, the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada were established on a ridgeline facing Leonforte from the south. A deep ravine lay between their position and the town, which ascended the western slope of a mountain in a series of terraced rows stretching up to the top. At the bottom of the ravine was a dry streambed. Highway 121 crossed this obstacle by a bridge, which the Germans had blown, and then it climbed through Leonforte via a long central thoroughfare.20 From their position on the ridgeline, the Seaforths were unable at first to determine whether Leonforte was occupied by the enemy. To find out, Lieutenant Colonel Bert Hoffmeister had Major Budge Bell-Irving take a patrol of about thirty men down into the ravine directly in front of the town. In command of the leading section, Corporal Johnnie Cromb was well down the slope when the patrol came under machine-gun fire from positions all along the escarpment in front of Leonforte. Cromb and his section dived into a nearby ditch and started throwing out covering fire to give the rest of the patrol time to find shelter or withdraw. In those first chaotic seconds, however, all cohesion had been lost.21
Bell-Irving, accompanied only by Lance Corporal Gordie Tupper, “ran all the way down the hill into the river and into the dead ground under the town.” Realizing the rest of the platoon had failed to follow this charge, Bell-Irving and the man with him had little choice but to start working their way back up the hill by following a series of gullies that concealed them from the Germans.22
One section, meanwhile, had retreated up the ridge, while the other had deployed in the ditch immediately to the left of Cromb’s men. The men here were in a poor position, badly exposed to German fire from positions in among houses that looked down upon the ditch. Several machine guns were firing on them and soon a couple of mortars joined in. To Cromb, the Germans seemed to be everywhere. “They were shooting from windows, from doors, from streets and there was on our right an armoured car ... [It] would make its appearance, fire a few shots and then back away.” Some of the Germans in the buildings were so close they were within range of the Thompson submachine gun Cromb was carrying. He ripped off one burst after another that shattered glass in windows and punched holes in doors.
Casualties mounted alarmingly as men were hit by bullets and shrapnel. As Cromb looked at the carnage around him, a stanza from William Edmondstoune Aytoun’s Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers played repeatedly through his mind: “One by one they fell around it, / As the archers laid them low, / Grimly dying, still unconquered, With their faces to the foe.” Struck in the thigh by two bullets, Cromb was using a rifle for a crutch. He was dimly aware that his twenty-four-year-old brother, Charles Alexander Cromb, lay dead in the ditch. The patrol’s dwindling ranks were pinned down. Cromb kn
ew that going up the slope would be suicide, but staying where they were also meant dying. Their situation seemed hopeless.23
At the Seaforths’ battalion headquarters, the whereabouts and dire predicament of the patrol were unknown. Hoffmeister and his staff had only a tentative grasp of what was going on with their rifle companies, some of which were attempting to carry Leonforte with a direct attack in broad daylight and with no artillery support. At a hurried ‘O’s Group, the battalion’s second-in-command, Major Douglas Forin, had, on his own initiative, ordered ‘C’ Company’s Major Jim Blair and his two platoon commanders to push two platoons into Leonforte. This attack quickly faltered. With casualties mounting, the company drifted westward in the face of drenching German machine-gun fire and finally ended up atop a hill overlooking the town. Here ‘C’ Company would remain until nightfall enabled it to slip back to the battalion lines.24
Captain E.W. “June” Thomas’s ‘D’ Company, meanwhile, had been directed by Hoffmeister to work around by what appeared to be a route screened from German observation and gain the high ground north of Leonforte. If successful, this action would cut off the Germans holding the town. With ‘A’ and ‘B’ companies providing covering fire from the southern ridge, the company headed into the ravine and came under immediate heavy fire just as Lieutenant Arthur Vernon French’s lead platoon reached the streambed. French’s men were pinned down in the bottom of the gully, while Thomas’s headquarters section and another platoon were similarly trapped on the slope above. Several wounded men were stranded in such exposed positions that it was impossible for anyone to go to their aid until nightfall. Among these was the thirty-three-year-old French, who would succumb to his wounds on July 28. By noon, the battalion’s heavy mortars and an anti-tank gun were able to provide sufficient covering fire to enable most of ‘D’ Company to escape up the ridge. But Thomas and a number of other men remained trapped on the slope.25