by Mark Zuehlke
From ahead, they were continuously harassed by three machinegun and two mortar positions. Galloway decided something needed to be done about them and told Lieutenant Harry Keene to wipe them out. As Keene warily led his platoon forward, he heard the sounds of tracked vehicles hurriedly withdrawing. They found the Germans gone.9 Encouraged, Keene pressed on and actually pushed into the outskirts of Agira, capturing the Italian district commandant’s driver.10
Damn the communications. The three captains were within a short, one-mile charge of Agira. But they had no orders, no link to battalion. Their men had no food. As always, water was desperately short. They were exhausted by the hard marches under the searing Sicilian sun and the ensuing fighting. You can only ask so much of even the best soldiers. Galloway, Hodson, and Liddell decided they must stay put until CSM Stillwell returned. There would be no bold dash for Agira.
THE FOG OF war had completely descended upon 1st Canadian Infantry Division. At both divisional headquarters in Valguarnera and 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade headquarters on the western outskirts of Assoro, all contact with the Royal Canadian Regiment had been lost since late afternoon. This prompted Major General Simonds to signal Brigadier Howard Graham at 1540 hours on July 24 that he should “consider using [Hasting and Prince Edward Regiment] on final attack on town if RCR used up.”11
In an attempt to clarify the RCR’s situation, Graham commandeered a Three Rivers tank to take him into Nissoria. There he met with Major Thomas “Pappy” Powers, who had just come forward from the RCR’s rear headquarters to assume command after Crowe’s death. Powers told him he had one decimated company in the town with his battalion headquarters and three others lost somewhere between Nissoria and Agira. Effectively, Powers had no control over the RCR. Powers pointed out the known German positions on the two hills covering Highway 121 east of Nissoria. The brigadier decided that because of the clear German strength, he should delay any further attacks until morning and then hit the hills with concentrated artillery fire.12
Back at his headquarters, Graham called divisional headquarters and spoke to Lieutenant Colonel George Kitching. Not wanting to awaken Simonds, who had already gone to bed for the night, Kitching instructed Graham to proceed with the original plan. With the RCR obviously “used up,” the Hasty Ps should go forward immediately and put in a night attack. “Perhaps the enemy would retire,” Kitching offered weakly.13
Major John Tweedsmuir had just been going to bed when a message from Graham said he would meet the Hasty Ps’ acting commander at a specific location on Highway 121. “It was about midnight and very dark,” Tweedsmuir wrote. “My Jeep driver took a great deal of waking.” They found Graham standing in the road. “Trouble was in the air and the [brigadier] didn’t waste time in preliminaries. The RCR were scattered . . . and it was our job to try and reach Agira . . . and capture it. The only thing was to get as far as possible in darkness and hope for the best.”
The major quickly sent orders to his second-in-command, Major Bert Kennedy, to get the battalion marching. He and Graham then went into Nissoria to talk with Powers. “We went into a stable to study the map by torchlight.”14 What information Powers could offer seemed pretty slight.
Kennedy, meanwhile, had rousted up the Hasty Ps at 0030 hours on July 25 with news they were going into an immediate attack. Thirty minutes later, the men marched towards Nissoria.15 When the battalion reached the village, Tweedsmuir stepped forward to greet Kennedy. An RCR platoon guided the Hasty Ps to a hill that part of Captain Charles Lithgow’s ‘D’ Company was holding. This would serve as the battalion’s start line. “We formed our familiar single file with the leading company patrolling ahead and made our way across country. We moved thus for about a mile when we met the enemy. They were emerging from a bivouac and had we been certain that they were Germans we could have wiped them out, but they had no helmets on and could possibly have been the missing companies of the RCR. The leading company set out to encircle them. The Germans moved over to what we later learned was their alternative positions and began to dig. They were silhouetted against the pale light of the coming dawn. The leading company could have surprised them completely had not an unfortunate accident occurred. Two men who had got left behind, and were hurrying to catch up their company, missed their way and blundered into the Huns. Next moment streams of golden tracer bullets were flying at random, and the fight was on. We were on the highest point of an undulating ridge, sparsely covered with trees and surrounded by a low stone wall.”
Tweedsmuir could see German machine-gun positions firing from a ridge north of their position. In fact, there seemed to be fire coming at the battalion “from a confusing number of points.” He formed the battalion into a “rough square on the hilltop.” When the sun came up, the Hasty Ps were presented with many targets to shoot at because there were so many Germans dashing about on the slopes around their position. But it was equally clear that the battalion was badly outnumbered and virtually pinned down, as mortars added their weight of fire to that of the machine guns. The mortars, Tweedsmuir realized, were working “to fill in the gaps in the geometrical patterns made by the machine-gun fire and with extraordinary accuracy they did it.”16 Also kicking into the fray were three Mark III tanks that the Germans had “dug in on commanding points.”17
The number of dead and wounded on the hill was mounting alarmingly. Captain Alex Campbell was with ‘A’ Company dug in behind a stone wall on the left-hand side of the hill. He “had a bullet through his tin hat and a bullet graze on his cheek. Beside him a wounded man was repeating over and over again, ‘Give ’em hell, Tweedsmuir, give ’em hell,’ as we called the artillery on the radio. We could not pick good targets or get a good position to observe from, which was a terrible handicap. The steady rate of fire we were maintaining was telling on the ammunition supply.
“I was just moving to the right hand company when four mortar bombs fell beside me. I passed command to Captain [Bill] Stockloser and came-to twenty minutes later, some hundred yards further back, with my head pillowed on a steel helmet in ‘D’ Company’s position.”18 Tweedsmuir had suffered a bad leg wound. Before a couple of men carried him to the rear, he ordered the battalion to withdraw.
There was little choice. No amount of bravery could reverse the fact that the Hasty Ps would die if they stayed on the hill. Among those who had already died trying to save the situation was Lance Sergeant Ernest Johnson. The twenty-three-year-old had single-handedly charged an anti-tank gun and killed its crew with grenades before being shot down.
Corporal Freddy Punchard, “a rangy, taciturn lad, was caught completely out in the open. Punchard ordered his men to break away while he gave them cover, and they crawled through the appalling weight of machine-gun and mortar fire, most of them to reach safety in the end. The Germans moved in on Punchard and called on him to surrender, but there were still two wounded men of his section in danger and Punchard cried out, ‘Not bloody likely!’ and fired the last of his Bren magazines. When that was done he picked up a [Thompson] and waited for the ultimate attack. It came in a few moments. Punchard did not die alone, for when the position was cleared several days later, his body was found with those of seven grenadiers to bear him company.”
As the battalion pulled back, Private Alfred Keith Long—who had been the first man to gain the mountaintop at Assoro—was badly wounded by a mortar round. A couple of men moved to drag him along with them during the retreat, but he warned them off. They last saw the thirty-year-old from Port Hope, Ontario, “sitting with his body braced against the shattered remnant of an olive tree, sucking on an empty pipe, and leafing through a pocket edition of Macbeth.”19
By early morning, the Hasty Ps had fallen back to a position just west of Nissoria and were sorting themselves out. They discovered that one platoon section from ‘B’ Company was missing. Corporal F.R. Bullier and his men had been forty yards from a strong German position when the order to withdraw came. Going to ground in some brush, they hid until night fell
to conceal their withdrawal.
Lying on a stretcher, Tweedsmuir reported the battalion’s failure to Graham and then passed out. He woke again in a Casualty Clearing Station in Valguarnera that had been a nunnery. All around him lay men from the Hasty Ps. “A statue of the Virgin and Child looked down on the several rows of stretchers, and the men, dirty, torn khaki blotched with rust-coloured stains of blood. No one complained. The badly wounded men smoked stoically, others talked or slept. We were all so dog tired that few can have felt pain. There were about fifty of us and in a few days time we were evacuated and scattered to Malta and all over North Africa.”20
The Hasty Ps lost five officers, and seventy-five other ranks were dead, wounded, or missing. This would be the highest casualty count that a Canadian battalion suffered during a single day of the Sicily campaign.21
DURING THE NIGHT, while the Hasty Ps had been fighting to retain their hold on the hilltop south of the highway, Company Sergeant Major Danny Stillwell of the Royal Canadian Regiment carried out a dangerous cross-country trek back to Nissoria from the three lost companies’ position near Agira. The danger came mostly from friendly artillery fire being called down by Major Tweedsmuir—who miraculously had been able to maintain a wireless link back to brigade. Stillwell reached the RCR battalion headquarters shortly before dawn and, based on his directions, the carrier platoon commander set off with a small patrol to bring the companies in. At about 0900 hours on July 25, a sentry looking out over a gully to the west of where the lost companies were holding spotted a carrier with a man standing on it waving semaphore flags. “D-I-L-L-O-N,” the flags signalled. The signal was quickly answered, and thirty minutes later Captain Dick Dillon rolled into the RCR perimeter aboard the carrier.
Captains Ian Hodson, Strome Galloway, and Slim Liddell had been expecting instructions to push on to Agira. Instead, Dillon told them they were ordered back to Nissoria. They learned also that Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Crowe had been killed, the wireless sets lost, and that this was the reason the three companies had been unable to communicate with battalion headquarters. Because the Germans were in control of the two hills dominating Highway 121 east of Nissoria, the troops followed “a devious route” back to avoid being detected. For about a mile this entailed following “a low, stone stairway, surely a relic of Roman days. The steps were about four feet square and with a rise of six inches. They looked worn with the traffic of the centuries.”
By 1100 hours, the RCR had regrouped west of the village. The men from the lost companies broke open crates of compo rations—each containing enough tinned and packaged food, tea, cigarettes and other sundries to meet the daily needs of a platoon section—and filled their bottles with water. Galloway “ate a tin of cold Irish stew with a skewer made from a twig, my first food for thirty hours!”22 The RCR’s casualties, in addition to the death of Crowe, totalled three officers and forty-three men with sixteen of the other rank losses being fatal.23
During the late morning of July 25, Simonds directed Graham to try again to take the heights between Nissoria and Agira. Graham worried that doing so would simply expose his remaining battalion—the 48th Highlanders of Canada—to the same kind of mauling the other two had suffered. But the orders were firm.24 There was also a report floating around divisional and brigade headquarters that a small patrol sent out by the Princess Louise Dragoon Guards reconnaissance squadron had gained a ridge that ran from a summit identified as Monte di Nissoria, about 750 yards north of Highway 121, to the red house on the hill—without contacting any enemy troops.25 The report was erroneous. In fact, the PLDG’s ‘A’ Squadron had spent the day moving into a forming-up position well west of Nissoria. From there it was to bound ahead on its carriers, as soon as 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade seized Agira, and make contact with the 231st (Malta) Brigade.26 This brigade’s 1st Hampshire Regiment had managed to advance from the south to cut Highway 121 east of Agira on the night of July 24-25, but was soon forced back by German fire from the heights around the town.27
However, on the basis of this faulty intelligence report, Graham decided that the 48th Highlanders should try to get around the hill with the red house—which had by now been nicknamed “the Schoolhouse” because it resembled the small country schools so commonly painted red back in Canada—by seizing Monte di Nissoria and advancing across the ridge immediately below it. Wary of the whole scheme, 48th Highlanders commander Lieutenant Colonel Ian Johnston decided to send a couple of patrols to first test the situation.
‘C’ Company’s Captain Ian Wallace led one ten-man patrol forward with Lieutenant George Fraser commanding a second patrol of the same strength. Fraser and his men headed for the Schoolhouse. When the patrol got close to it, the lieutenant sent four men towards a low knoll north of the building while he took up position on the roof of a small shed to watch its advance. As Corporal Joe Lapp led the men up onto the knoll, he spotted a dug-in Mark IV tank on the ridge to the north slowly depressing its gun barrel to bring his men under fire. Fraser also saw the tank and yelled at Lapp to get out of there. As Lapp and his group fled the knoll, the tank slammed them with a high-explosive shell. Dodging around a boulder, Lapp suddenly found himself in the middle of a group of Panzer Grenadiers. They were all lying on the ground, either sleeping or sunbathing. The corporal ducked back behind the boulder and with the other three men ran to safety before the surprised Germans could grab their weapons and bring them to bear.
Captain Wallace’s patrol managed to gain the summit of the ridge and was soon looking down on another Mark IV Panzer. Its crew and some other soldiers were sitting beside it playing cards. Wallace’s ten-man force opened fire on the Germans. Within seconds four of the Germans were dead and several were wounded. Having thrown the larger enemy force into confusion, Wallace and his men beat a hasty retreat back to Nissoria.28
Johnston had his answer when the patrols returned at about 1300 hours. The ridge was held in strength by Panzer Grenadiers supported by tanks and undoubtedly the ubiquitous 88-millimetre guns. Because of the earlier faulty intelligence, only a modest artillery support plan had been arranged and the lieutenant colonel realized it “was too late at this time to lay on” something more elaborate and powerful. As both the RCR and Hasty Ps had reported that the Germans were using caves on the face of the ridge for shelters, Johnston had the medium machine guns of the Saskatoon Light Infantry positioned so they could spray the ridge with fire as his battalion went forward.
Graham had ordered Johnston to take a cautious approach to ensure the 48th Highlanders were not shredded like his other two battalions. Just one company would advance on Monte di Nissoria. If it attained success, the other three companies would be fed into the attack and, one after the other, strike positions on the ridge that were progressively farther to the south. In this way, should the Germans counterattack at any point in the operation, at least one company would still be on the start line and able to provide a firm base that the others could fall back on. That such a careful approach might be seen as ensuring the attack’s failure was something Graham was willing to accept.
A defile that cut around the base of the mountain’s northern flank appeared to offer a good route forward. At 1800 hours, ‘D’ Company’s Major D.W. Banton led his men up the defile, while the SLI slashed the ridge with machine-gun fire and some 25-pounder guns also provided supporting fire onto the rocky hillside. All seemed to go well at first and in short order Banton came up on the wireless to tell Johnston that his men were on the objective, having made the climb in rapid order. ‘B’ Company was sent forward, climbing up the ridge by surmounting a series of the now-familiar terraces covered in vineyards, olive groves, and brush.
Suddenly ‘D’ Company reported it was being subjected to enfilading fire from mortars positioned on a ridge that fingered out to the left of Monte di Nissoria. Banton also realized that the crest his men had gained was in fact a false summit and Monte di Nissoria still loomed ahead. The true summit bristled with German machine-gun positions
that now opened up on the company. All along the ridge running over to the Schoolhouse, Germans were springing into action. Rather than being positioned in caves on the front of the ridge, as the Highlanders had been led to expect, the Panzer Grenadiers in fact had shelters on the reverse slope, which completely protected them from the Canadian support fire.29
Both companies were driven to ground, forced to take cover “on the narrow ledges below the German positions.” Back at battalion headquarters, Johnston was attempting to tee up artillery against the positions on the reverse slope, but the reduction of transmission distances caused by intervening hills suddenly put him out of communication with the artillery regiment supporting the Highlanders. The sets ‘D’ and ‘B’ companies were carrying also stopped being able to reach Johnston.
‘D’ Company was fighting on, but every attempt to push towards the summit was quickly beaten down. When Lieutenant Robert Free “Bob” Osler moved into the open to set up a new Bren gun position, he was shot in the head and killed. Four men managed to gain the crest in a wild dash, but twenty-year-old Private Daniel James Murray was killed “on the lip of the first slit trench.” Lying dead just three feet away was also Private Ronald Macgregor Warrener. The other two men fell back down the slope.30
The situation facing the two companies was clearly hopeless, and both began pulling back towards the start line.31 Between them the companies had about thirty-six wounded men to evacuate across rough terrain. Except for a few soldiers serving as rear guard, almost every fit man was required for the job—some stronger men carrying the lighter wounded men on their backs, while other injured were bundled into blankets with a man holding each corner. The companies had gone into the attack understrength, and ‘D’ Company had only forty-two men who were not wounded. ‘B’ Company was little better off.