by Mark Zuehlke
It was poor timing for the tankers when Lieutenant Colonel Leslie Booth, who was on the wireless near where Vokes stood glowering at a map, received a wireless request from ‘C’ Squadron’s Major Pat Mills to withdraw the armoured troops. “‘Wait one,’ Booth said. ‘I have to ask ‘Grandfather.’”
“Booth left the wireless and moved the few feet to where I was busily scratching at my fleas,” Vokes wrote later. “I was already in a bad temper, vexed at the errant Patricias, choleric on account of the fleas.” Booth explained that Mills was worried he might lose some tanks in the night. Vokes demanded if any had so far been knocked out, and Booth admitted none had. “‘Then hell, no!’ [Vokes] exploded in total exasperation. ‘If the infantry can stick it up there tonight, so can Mills and his tanks. It will give the infantry confidence to have the tanks with them.’”
When Booth broke the news to Mills, Vokes heard the tanker reply, “Tell the old bastard to come up here himself and have a dose of the crap that is flying around!” Vokes “had to smile . . . I ignored the outburst. That moment was no time for ‘rabbit ears.’”10
THE SEAFORTHS RESPONDED rapidly to the change in plan. Lieutenant Colonel Bert Hoffmeister simply put into play the plan for the advance from Tiger to Grizzly, with Lion becoming the start line. ‘A’ Company, now commanded by Major Budge Bell-Irving, would be left of the road and Major Jim Blair’s ‘C’ Company on the right. The rest of the battalion would follow close behind.11
By 0330 hours on July 27, Bell-Irving and ‘A’ Company ventured out from Lion in single file and moved alongside Highway 121 without meeting any initial resistance. The moment ‘C’ Company started off the ridge, however, it came under accurate machine-gun and mortar fire that pinned the men down. In front of Leonforte, Major Bell-Irving had demonstrated little ability to keep his men together and properly oriented in a night move. Success for this outing depended on his getting both things right. Still hugging the highway, ‘A’ Company spotted a German tank only a short distance from the PPCLI positions. Its turret hatch was open and Bell-Irving realized the crew was asleep inside. When a couple of men tried tossing grenades into the hatch, both missed. As the grenades exploded, Bell-Irving and his men scampered into the darkness to get clear of what was likely to be an angry bunch of tankers. By wireless, the major provided Hoffmeister with the tank’s map-referenced location and suggested the 90th Anti-Tank Battery supporting the operation come forward and knock it out. Realizing any Germans guarding the road would have been alerted by the grenade explosions and ‘C’ Company’s ongoing fight back at the start line, Bell-Irving headed cross-country on a donkey trail winding through a wood.
As the company moved in a long extended line, the major grew “more and more worried, because I didn’t know where I was . . . It began to look as if it might be first light pretty soon. I knew I had Germans well behind me, and I was trying to figure out what to do when all of a sudden a Nebelwerfer went off right in my face.”12 One after another, the six large rounds from this multibarrelled mortar, nicknamed “Moaning Minnie” because of the shriek its firing made, blasted directly over Bell-Irving’s head from a position only yards away. Sensing the German gunners had failed to spot him, the major wheeled sharply to the right and up a hill.13
Get his men on top of the hill and wait for daylight, Bell-Irving decided. Blundering around in the dark was only going to result in ‘A’ Company walking right into an enemy position. Sure enough, just before the crest they bumped into some Panzer Grenadiers and a sharp firefight ensued. But the surprised Germans were quickly put to flight. Captain F.H. Bonnell, however, was wounded in this action. “I remember looking at the hole in him and suggesting that it was time he went back, but he didn’t seem interested in that proposition,” Bell-Irving wrote.14
Coming onto the summit, they found Highway 121 running across it and then bending southeastward towards Agira. The centre of the hilltop was a saucerlike bowl and on its opposing lip, about seventy-five yards away from Bell-Irving’s company, stood a tank. “It was light now...and there was no sign of enemy except this tank. Purely by good luck ... ‘A’ Company had arrived on the very centre of the Tiger objective.”15
So far the tankers seemed unaware they had company, so Bell-Irving told Lieutenant Jim Harling to take a PIAT team, work “around to the left below the ridge, and come up close to the tank and knock it out. Good idea, but they discovered they didn’t have any PIAT bombs. [These] had been strapped on a donkey, which had decided to go home” during the march.16
From their position on Lion, however, a ‘C’ Squadron tanker spotted the German tank and opened fire. This prompted the German crew commander to stand up in his turret, exposing his head and chest. Bell-Irving raised his rifle and shot the man. As the tank started backing off, a round from the Three Rivers’ tank blew a track off. The tank managed to keep moving into some cover that Harling reported concealed a second tank. The Shermans on Lion started indiscriminately shelling the hill. As the Seaforths hugged the ground, Lieutenant Marriott Wilson was killed and several other men were wounded.17
Back on Lion, dawn had kicked the battle into full gear. Lieutenant Jack Wallace poked his head out of Commodore’s turret and saw “an awful flash, then another and about two hundred yards away something burst into flame. It was Ted Smith’s tank which was doing all the shooting. He had spotted a German tank through the haze and let loose before the Boche could get his own gun trained on Ted. Ted told us after that he was never so surprised in all his life ... That bit of shooting started the fireworks, for machine guns all around opened up.”18
In the morning light of July 27, even while ducking incoming German fire, the men from the two PPCLI companies and the Seaforth’s ‘C’ Company that were on Lion were able to see signs “of the terrific battle which had been fought in the past three days” for control of the ridge. “German anti-tank guns and tanks dotted the area together with Sherman tanks. Some had their turrets blown right off, a few had careened into ditches and one or two had been ‘flamers.’ German equipment—rifles, unopened rations, ammunition, etc.—was scattered about, and so too were the dead.” And from cleverly concealed positions in the vineyards and olive groves between Lion and Tiger, Panzer Grenadiers were throwing out a fierce rate of fire.19
Just before dawn, Lieutenant Colonel Lindsay had finally found his lost companies. Now that it was light, he put ‘A’ Company on the left-hand side of the road and ‘B’ on the right and told their commanders “to take objective ‘Tiger’ at all cost.”20 The Seaforth’s ‘C’ Company was advancing with the battalion’s anti-tank platoon, led by Captain Gordon Money, pushing their guns along behind the riflemen to bring fire on any tanks or anti-tank guns encountered. Several Shermans crawled forward, guns banging out rounds. Within ninety minutes, this loosely organized force gained the summit of Tiger and found Bell-Irving’s men waiting.21 The major had watched in frustration as a “large number of [Germans were] retiring, going past where we had come up” towards Agira. When the tanks arrived, he pointed to the retreating enemy “and they had a great shoot from on top of this hill.”22
Atop Lion, Wallace could see “all the ground for miles around.” He opened fire on a German convoy of trucks “about four miles off. We scatter them and put three out of action. We shoot up numerous haystacks in the valley below us in hope that there may be a Boche tank hidden in one of them. No such luck. We get an awful pasting from some Jerry mortars for about half an hour. They caught me outside of my tank and for a few moments my life was not worth a plugged nickel. During this time the Seaforths were moving into position for the attack on the ridge immediately in front of Agira. The shelling didn’t bother them for they just walked straight through it.” A wireless signal from Major Pat Mills instructed Wallace’s troop to support the Seaforth advance.23
Lieutenant Colonel Bert Hoffmeister wanted to keep going for Grizzly, but a signal from division instructed the battalion to hold in place because the town was scheduled for a noon a
erial bombardment. In frustration, Hoffmeister called ‘C’ Company, which was already on the move, at 0730 hours and told them to hold up. Taking a couple of artillery FOOs and the battalion’s mortar platoon commander along, Hoffmeister hurried to Tiger to examine the highway’s route into Agira and begin shelling any German positions they could spot.24
ABOUT THREE MILES northwest of Tiger, the men in a Loyal Edmonton Regiment platoon from ‘D’ Company were also examining the ground before them that morning. During the night, twenty-year-old Lieutenant John Alpine Dougan and his platoon had set out from Nissoria to carry out a raid behind enemy lines. Only a couple of days earlier, Dougan and his friend Lieutenant John Earl Christie had come up from the battalion’s reinforcement pool near Pachino to fill slots created when their predecessors had been either killed or wounded at Leonforte. Dougan and Christie were two of four Canadian Officers Training Corps cadets from the University of Alberta, who had all enlisted on March 25, 1942, after being exempted from taking their final exams leading to undergraduate degrees. The other two young officers, Lieutenants Alon Johnson and Keith McGregor, had also been posted to the Edmontons but remained in the reinforcement pool.
Dougan commanded ‘D’ Company’s No. 17 Platoon, while Christie had drawn its No. 15 Platoon. Shortly before midnight, company commander Major Bill Bury had ordered Dougan to take the lead in a cross-country move of about two miles to come astride the road running from Agira to Nicosia.25
Dougan was eager to prove himself. Orienting himself by compass and map-reading, he set off at a good pace. His platoon had been on the move only a few minutes when the man at the rear sent word forward that the rest of the company had disappeared. Calling a halt, Dougan waited until it was obvious that Bury and the other platoons had gone astray somehow. Assuming they would make for the spot on the road that had been set as the rally point, Dougan started moving again. “Sicily is a terrible place to manoeuvre,” he later commented. “We were never quite sure where we were, as the ground was terribly rough and badly broken. It’s very desolate, rocky, dry and mountainous. Water was always a problem. You would be terribly thirsty. Had to be careful of the water you did find. Not that it was poisoned, but because of whether it was drinkable or not. Had to be careful of mosquitoes, which was hard to do when you were on the move in the darkness and wearing shorts and short sleeves. There was a lot of malaria, jaundice, and dysentery.”
Despite the difficulties, when dawn broke on July 27, No. 17 Platoon was looking up at the road winding along the side of a steep mountain. Dougan and his men scrambled up the slope and into the Agira-Nicosia road’s intersection with a rough track that snaked back to Nissoria. This was the spot Bury had selected for the company to set up a roadblock. Dougan saw no sign of the rest of the company, but just as they came up on the road, “three or four German trucks came in from the north. There was a firefight. When they fired the first burst of fire, I thought it was some type of insect because I hadn’t heard bullets before. Heard this crackle around my ears and thought it might be a bee and then suddenly realized what the hell it was.” On foot, the Edmontons had the advantage and were able to rip into the Germans before most could bring their guns to bear. No. 17 Platoon kept firing until there was no more sign of movement from around the trucks.
As their guns fell silent, Dougan spotted another long convoy approaching from Agira. He was thinking “we should carry out some redeployment, but before we were able to do that a German tank came around the corner. There was some infantry on it. He saw us and, I suppose, the range wasn’t more than twenty-five yards and the PIAT man fired and missed. This was pretty awkward, because we had nowhere to go. And that damned big gun was swinging around and the PIAT man reloaded and fired standing—an act of tremendous fortitude—and he hit the tank just at the turret ring and jammed the gun. The blast dispensed with the infantry riding on the tank. And then we tried to drop grenades in the open hatch but our aim wasn’t too good and the tank pulled back and just went around the corner and blew up.”
So far the platoon had suffered not a single casualty while wreaking significant havoc, but Dougan figured he was pushing luck. “We were several miles behind the line and the whole countryside was swarming with, as far as I could see, uniforms of the wrong shade.” Having carried several “Hawkins” grenades—small anti-tank mines that weighed 2.25 pounds each and could either be shallowly buried or thrown at a vehicle—Dougan and his men planted these in the gravel on either side of the road “and carried out a tactical withdrawal to a little better position.”
Even moving cross-country, the platoon kept coming within about one hundred yards or less of long formations of German infantry marching away from Agira. “But they thought we were Germans, too, and we didn’t do anything to dispel that thought. We ran into some people and couldn’t avoid them, so we took them prisoner.” One group they captured had three Canadian prisoners with them—an artillery captain, a gunnery sergeant, and a wireless signaller—who were immediately liberated and added to the strength of the little band. The platoon had withdrawn about a quarter mile when it was intercepted by a runner sent from the battalion. The platoon, he said, was “to hold the road at all costs, if I was on the road.” The message added that the rest of the company had failed to get through, but ‘C’ Company was being sent to reinforce the position.
“So we turned and trudged back, taking more prisoners on the road. Got to the intersection and...there was another tank knocked out, the track had been blown. A couple halftracks and a truck were also knocked out. One halftrack was loaded with cherry brandy and plum jam. So we helped ourselves to that and also took quite a few prisoners. By this stage, we were getting so damned many prisoners they were becoming a real problem.” Dougan positioned the platoon on the side of the mountain above the road and they dug in. Sporadic groups of Germans kept sallying towards their position in what Dougan considered less attacks than confused attempts to determine “who we were and where we were and what we were. A few rounds of Bren-gun fire and they seemed to scatter a bit.”26
Late in the afternoon, ‘C’ Company arrived and Major W.T. Cromb’s men dug in alongside the platoon. By this time, all attempts to push traffic up the road had ceased, and the Germans were only occasionally probing the Edmonton position with section-sized units. These were easily chased off, and the men enjoyed a relatively quiet night. On the morning of July 28, the Germans launched a series of weak counterattacks that came in alternately from the north and south. These were easily repelled.27 Late that afternoon, the battalion’s carrier platoon trundled brashly up the road and its commander told Dougan he had come to take them home.
This sustained action of more than thirty-six hours had been Dougan’s battle christening. Later, when he understood better the nature of combat, Dougan would regret not putting the PIAT man up for a medal. “At the time, I thought that kind of bravery was just normal. I didn’t know any better. I thought this was just a normal operation. It wasn’t normal at all. It was quite admirable.” The Edmontons suffered not a casualty. “We were just so lucky. We took all sorts of booty and prisoners and had tanks knocked out. The Company commander [Bury] got the DSO for the operation, although he wasn’t within miles of it.”28
Bury’s citation, which was submitted by the Edmontons’ Lieutenant Colonel Jim Jefferson, claimed that by “map and compass, on this dark and moonless night, this officer unerringly led his men, cross country over the six mile stretch of rugged precipitous rock. Reaching the post at dawn Major Bury personally led the bayonet charge which captured the post, then the company dug in.”29 This was possibly one of the most blatant examples of the relatively common practice of senior officers falsifying reports in order to secure a fellow officer a coveted medal of valour. After the war, when an army historical officer interviewed Major Cromb about the patrol, he “expressed surprise” that the DSO citation “gave the work of the Edmonton platoon as the basis for his award.”30 Confronted on the matter, Jefferson defended his cit
ation report on the basis that Bury had “organized” the feat.31
DURING THE MORNING of July 27, meanwhile, the Seaforth Highlanders had been gearing up on Tiger to attack Grizzly, the last defensible ground that barred the western approach to Agira. Lieutenant Colonel Bert Hoffmeister carefully studied the complex obstacle that Grizzly presented. It consisted really of two features. South of Highway 121 stood Monte Fronte, a square-topped hill, while on the road’s opposite flank a wooded ridge extended a short distance to the north and tied in with the heights of Monte Crapuzza. On the southern end of the ridge, a cemetery sat on ground slightly higher than the rest. The Canadians dubbed this high point “Cemetery Hill.” Together, these heights on either side of the road composed Grizzly. Behind them, Agira hugged the western slope of “a still higher cone-shaped hill lying astride the highway.”
At noon, as scheduled, all these features were subjected to a heavy battering by Allied medium bombers and strafing fire from fighter bombers. The Seaforths could “observe the bursts of the big bombs as they fell in the northern and western sections of the town.” At 1400 hours, ‘A’ and ‘D’ companies went forward on either side of the road behind a heavy divisional-scale artillery barrage with each also supported by a troop of ‘C’ Squadron tanks. In both cases, the Shermans—unable to keep pace with the infantry in such rough ground—were left far behind and played no role in the forthcoming fight.32 Also on the move was the Seaforth’s ‘C’ Company, which was driving south from Tiger in an attempt to outflank Grizzly. If the direct attack failed, Captain Jim Blair’s company might manage to get behind the feature and loosen the German defences there.