by Mark Zuehlke
Operation Diadem would be launched on May 11, 1944. I Canadian Corps was to play a leading role in determining the offensive’s success or failure by breaking out of the German defences and driving up the fertile Liri Valley, which formed the southern gateway to Rome. So, with the first hint of spring, the Canadians started marching west toward the Liri Valley and a new battle, the first test of their ability to fight as a corps. This is the story of that terrible test of arms.
ONE
PRELUDE TO OPERATION DIADEM
1
MILITARY SINS
The hulking, bombed-out ruin of the Benedictine Abbey of Monte Cassino glared menacingly toward International Ridge. Huddled inside the rock-walled enclosure of his sangar shelter, Sergeant Ron Hurley knew that if he could see the shattered abbey that clearly, the Germans manning observation posts inside the rubble and equipped with binoculars and spotting scopes could probably see him. Or would, if he were foolish enough to stand up or move out into the open on the rocky spine. So, like everyone else in the Westminster Regiment that had moved onto International Ridge on April 15, 1944, Hurley kept out of sight during daylight hours. When darkness cloaked the ridge, the men emerged from their slit trenches, sangars, and fortified farm buildings to eat, relieve themselves, and attempt to intercept German patrols probing the Canadian lines for weak points. It was miserable work in a godforsaken place that Hurley thought had damned all to recommend it.
If International Ridge served some essential tactical role in threatening the German Gustav Line, which stood just sixty miles short of the prize of Rome and which had foiled Allied attempts to reach the capital throughout the long, bitter winter months, nobody had bothered to tell Hurley. The ridge’s name derived from the endless parade of national units drawn from either the U.S. Fifth Army or the British Eighth Army to man the position since its capture in the winter of 1944. Fierce French Goumiers from Morocco, Free Italians, Americans, Poles, New Zealanders, British, and now Welsh Paratroopers currently serving alongside the Canadians had all done hard duty on the 9,000-yard ridgeline. Nobody even thought of advancing forward from here any more. The job was just to hang on, keep Jerry from taking it back, and hope your unit would soon be relieved so the tedious and dangerous task could be handed off to some other poor wretch wearing a different national shoulder patch.
It helped not at all, of course, that the ridge was under German observation from dominant points far closer than the five-miles-distant abbey. Right in front of the ridge stood Monte Cifalco. Separating ridge and mountain was a narrow valley, through which a tributary of the Rapido River ran. Monte Cifalco, at 3,173 feet, was 1,300 feet higher than Hurley’s position, so the German observers on its broad summit could see the Canadians on International Ridge without fear of being seen. Then there was the massive 5,000-foot-high, pyramid-shaped summit of Monte Cairo rising behind Monte Cassino that was being used by the Germans to observe the entire battle front from the eastern mountains to those in the west.
The instantaneous response to virtually any movement was a cluster of mortar bombs the Canadians called stonks, or a burst of machine-gun fire, or a couple of rounds from a sniper rifle. When the mortar rounds struck the ridge’s rocky spine, they threw a deadly ring of metal shrapnel and bits of the rock chipped by the explosion out of the ridge’s stony surface. Anyone nearby who was not well down in a slit trench or inside the sangars was likely to be badly wounded or killed. The ridge’s impenetrable rocky spine had largely resisted any attempts to dig slit trenches, so Indian and New Zealand troops had introduced the sangars to the ridge — rough, circular enclosures ringed by stoutly built rock walls.
Like those who had come before them, the Canadians spent the days with their heads down, fighting boredom more than the Germans. Once in a while, however, some officer threw a monkey wrench into this logical and established routine by demanding daylight movement. Which was the case this afternoon. Hurley’s platoon commander had called him into the command post and said, “You’re an athlete. Go back and get the major.”
Hurley was aghast. “What do you mean, go back? We’re not supposed to be moving anywhere in daylight.”
The lieutenant laughed grimly. “I want you to go back and get the major and guide him up. He wants to see things.” Hurley knew there was no point arguing further. His platoon leader was also right in picking Hurley for the job of fetching ‘C’ Company’s commander, for it was true that he was an athlete. Indeed, he was one of the Canadian army’s top track-and-field competitors, a winner of many Allied service meets in Canada, England, and Italy. As a boy growing up in Penticton, British Columbia, Hurley had often hitchhiked up and down the Okanagan Valley from one little community to another to compete in track-and-field events that paid out first-place prizes of twenty-five cents. His family had been hard hit by the Depression and the coin prizes were almost as welcome to Hurley as the sheer joy he derived from competition. His athletic skills were immediately recognized when he enlisted and Hurley became a favourite of senior officers, who expected him to add laurels to the reputation of their regiments, brigades, and divisions while at the same time winning them sizeable betting returns. So successful was he in fulfilling both these objectives that the wiry, tough sergeant was almost held back in England when the Westminsters deployed to Italy so that he could serve the rest of the war as a poster boy of Canadian athletic prowess. But Hurley had raised a hellish stink and threatened to not compete. Finally, he was packed off to the regiment that brought him eventually to International Ridge and a race that he must run for his very life on a sunny April afternoon.
Headquarters was two and a half miles to the rear. In between lay a narrow steep-sided gully that was thickly wooded in the bottom, where a wooden footbridge crossed a small stream. The upper slopes of the gorge were nakedly exposed, with a rough mule track switching up out of the trees to either rim. Hurley hightailed out of the company position down the slope, dodging boulders, and short-cutting the switchbacks wherever possible. About halfway from the gully’s edge to the trees, Hurley heard the whistle of incoming mortar rounds and knew Jerry had him spotted. There was no cover, nothing to do but to try outrunning the stonk. With explosions going off in his wake and shrapnel whistling past, Hurley threw himself into the cover of the trees and slithered off on a radical tangent to avoid the next mortar volley.
The Germans held fire. As Hurley warily approached the tree line on the opposite side of the gully, he knew they were probably waiting for him to emerge from the woods en route to the top, but there was nothing he could do beyond running like hell once he broke cover. That seemed to work because the mortars stayed silent, he topped the ridge, ducked into the cover of some thickets of scrub brush, and made his way without further incident to the cluster of houses known as Vallerotonda, which served as the Westminster headquarters.1
Vallerotonda was also under German observation, so the staff there was as confined to the protective cover of the heavy stonewalled buildings as the line companies in their sangars. All supplies had to be brought up from the rear at night by trucks driving with headlights turned off, then unloaded at headquarters and strapped onto mules for the trip up to the front. Knowing this procedure was under way, the Germans routinely illuminated the village with flares and then mortared the exposed resupply outfits. Surprisingly, this tactic proved ineffective and the only casualties so far had been a couple of mules that had had to be destroyed after suffering severe shrapnel wounds.
Because of the daytime hazard, the headquarters staff were going a bit stir-crazy. Westminster commander Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Corbould found an accordion somewhere and spent afternoons squeezing and keying away in an enthusiastic, if untalented, attempt to master the instrument. Meanwhile, the Military Police sergeant had become seemingly obsessed with improving his marksmanship. Each lull in accordion playing was punctuated with the sharp cracks of his pistol firing. HQ staff hotly debated whether the braying of the mules at night was preferable to the daily accordio
n entertainment.2
Hurley puffed his way into HQ and was dumbfounded when Major Ian Douglas looked up at him and said, “What are you doing here?”
“You ordered me back. Don’t you remember?”
“Oh yes, you’re going to take me to the line, aren’t you?” Douglas said. Hurley replied that was what he was there for and asked permission to get something to eat while the major got ready. Digging thankfully into a pot of stew simmering on a stove, he favourably compared the fare to the bully beef and hardtack that was the standard, repetitive diet of the line companies. Ammunition and water had priority on the nightly supply runs. In between mouthfuls, Hurley explained to the major that they must cross the gully before dark, as the Germans had infiltrated a patrol in there the previous night and might repeat the stunt. Douglas decided to detail a section of HQ troops to accompany them through the gully bottom. This meant more people tagging along than Hurley would have liked. There was no way to move quickly or quietly with five or six men in tow who didn’t know the ground and were loaded down with guns and equipment that clinked and jingled noisily with every step.
They made it to the gully edge without incident, however, and the approaching dusk probably hid them from most of the German observation points. But about a hundred yards away on the overlooking slope of Monte Cifalco was a shell-pounded house suspected of being an enemy observation post. Hurley pointed the structure out to Douglas and suggested they crawl across the open ground to the tree line. He set off with Douglas immediately behind and the others following in a line. When Hurley was nearly to the trees, a burst of machine-gun fire zipped past his ear from directly behind. “Goddamn it,” Douglas said. “I slipped.” Looking around, Hurley saw that the major had dropped his Thompson submachine gun and the weapon had loosed off a burst. Douglas shrugged apologetically, then said, “Okay, that’s enough of that. Go down the hill.” With all need for stealth scuttled by the major’s inadvertent fire, Hurley scrambled down through the trees, reaching the footbridge in the rapidly descending darkness. Finding no Germans about, Douglas released the headquarters section and the two men prepared to continue the trip alone.
Hurley urged haste. He wanted to get out of the gully and across the open ground of International Ridge before the moon started lighting things up. They clambered slowly up the steep slope with Hurley moderating his pace to accommodate the major, whom Hurley respected and was genuinely fond of, despite this crazy mission he had been dragooned into. He knew the man was older than he and not in such good condition. Although Douglas had served in the New Westminster militia before the war, he had also been a school principal rather than a young athlete like Hurley. Finally, a hand tapped his shoulder. “Sergeant Hurley, we got to rest for a moment.”
Despite the heaviness with which Douglas was puffing, Hurley demurred. “We can’t stay here for too long, sir.”
Douglas slumped onto a rock. “Just sit down here for a minute.”
Hurley wasn’t going to sit down; he was getting nervous. “We got to keep going.” The major looked up and asked Hurley’s age. Twenty, the sergeant responded. “You’re twenty, I’m thirty-nine. What the hell am I doing here? You should be in charge of this company and I should be back home smoking my goddamned pipe,” Douglas said with a weary chuckle. Then he heaved himself up. The two men climbed the slope and soon reached the forward positions, where they spent an uneventful night.3
In addition to the Westminsters, the three regiments of 11th Canadian Infantry Brigade were rotating duty, so the four regiments served with two on the ridge and two nearby in reserve. Every night, the regiments in the line sent patrols into the no man’s land between their lines and those of the alpine warfare–trained German 5th Mountain Division troops. The purpose of these patrols was always the same — to capture enemy prisoners for intelligence purposes and to intercept enemy patrols trying to penetrate Canadian lines. Having left Britain for Italy on November 8, 1943, as part of 5th Canadian Armoured Division, the regiments on International Ridge were still wet behind the ears.
Many of the young Canadians not only lacked combat experience, but were also new to mountain environments. Although the Westminsters were a Vancouver-based militia regiment, a good proportion of its men came not from British Columbia, where some experience of rugged terrain might be expected, but from the prairies, particularly Saskatchewan. The Perth Regiment had been raised in the gently rolling Ontario farm country of southern Ontario, the Irish Regiment of Canada hailed from the streets of Toronto, and most Cape Breton Highlanders had seldom seen, let alone hiked, steep mountains.
Perth Regiment Private Stan Scislowski, a twenty-year-old from Windsor, Ontario, saw himself and his fellow Perths as “a bunch of young, still inexperienced infantrymen, almost all of whom had never seen or climbed anything higher than the hills around Collingwood.” Still, he believed these “flatland dwelling Perths” were as up to the job of duty on International Ridge as any Allied regiment before them. Although the Germans were far more aggressive in their patrolling and even launched infrequent assaults against sections of the Canadian line, they were always driven off relatively easily by heavy rifle and machine-gun fire backed up by a hail of Type 36 grenades.4 Generally known as the “pineapple” because the metal case was ribbed into eighty sections that exploded into individual shrapnel chunks, the Type 36 had proved itself one of the war’s most deadly grenades. The Canadians on International Ridge used it enthusiastically at night because the position of the thrower remained unrevealed, whereas the muzzle flash from a rifle or machine gun immediately betrayed the shooter’s location.
This combination of intensive fire and increasing combat experience bore particular fruit on the nights of April 27 and 28. Just before midnight on April 27, a German patrol probed the section of line held by ‘D’ Company of the Cape Breton Highlanders. The wily company commander let the small patrol move unmolested past his hidden men rather than wipe them out. This led the Germans to believe the line was only lightly defended. The following evening, ‘D’ Company’s perimeter was pounded by a heavy mortar bombardment that lightly wounded three men. From their sangars, the thirty men of No. 18 Platoon, watched a German officer meticulously position two platoons in line abreast for an attack. When he finished, the officer shouted, “Surrender, Canada, we have you completely surrounded!” The Canadians responded with a string of shouted profanities and a shower of about thirty grenades, followed immediately by every man opening fire with his Lee Enfield rifle, Thompson submachine gun, or Bren light machine gun. The Germans fled screaming with fear, abandoning their dead and wounded on the slope. In the morning, German stretcher-bearers came forward under the protection of Red Cross flags and were allowed to evacuate their dead and wounded.5
On May 5, regiments of the 12th South African (Motor) Brigade replaced the Canadian regiments on International Ridge. They marched out under the cover of darkness to rendezvous with trucks that transported them to positions about thirty miles north of Naples and well to the rear of the front lines. Total casualties suffered by 11 CIB on International Ridge numbered about 125 men.
No sooner had 11 CIB’s regiments reached their rest positions than the men realized a major operation was teeing up. The entire rear area was choked with supplies and a multitude of infantry, armoured, and artillery units. Included in their number were all the divisions and brigades of I Canadian Corps, brought over from the Adriatic coast. On May 7, 5th Canadian Armoured Division’s commander, Major General Bert Hoffmeister, inspected the Westminsters’ company lines. He paid scrupulous attention to the state of the men’s equipment and the effectiveness of their concealment of the Bren carriers and White scout cars that gave the regiment its motorized mobility. The following day, British Eighth Army commander General Sir Oliver Leese himself visited, impressing many of the men with his casually informal style and manner of dress. And every day, the Westminsters spent many hours engaged in intensive training. The battalion’s war diarist, anticipating a major attack
to break through the German Gustav Line, wrote, “The days of static warfare are over and in a short time we should be operating in our normal role of a Motor Battalion.”6
Since the failure of the major offensive of November and December 1943, the U.S. Fifth Army and the Eighth Army on their respective coasts had deadlocked before the virtually impregnable, well-entrenched, and heavily defended German lines. Rome remained as far out of reach as ever and the entire offensive Allied plan for Italy was reduced to tatters as the two armies stagnated amid battlefield conditions that increasingly mirrored those of the Western Front trenches of World War I.
In the west, Fifth Army, under General Mark Clark, had faltered early in its attempts to crack the German Winter Line — an advance section of the Gustav Line defensive network — in November. Horrendous casualties had been suffered just to force the Germans back a few miles to the Gustav Line proper, against which the offensive quickly crumbled. Hoping to relieve pressure on the divisions trying to crack the Gustav Line, VI U.S. Corps, a combined American-British amphibious force of almost 50,000 men, landed at Anzio on January 22, 1944, sixty miles to the rear of the Gustav Line and less than thirty miles southwest of Rome. With half his total force of 100,000 men ashore and facing virtually no opposition, U.S. General John P. Lucas dithered on the beaches rather than pushing inland.
General Harold Alexander, Deputy Supreme Commander Mediterranean, had intended that the Anzio force push boldly toward the Alban Hills and cut the German Tenth Army’s lines of communication back to Rome. This would force Tenth Army to withdraw from the Gustav Line, give up Rome, and fall back to the defensive line running across Italy from Pisa to Rimini, code-named the Gothic Line. Lucas, however, never intended to carry out this ambitious scheme. Instead, he had been instructed by his direct superior, General Mark Clark, to “seize and secure a beachhead” and advance slowly toward the Alban Hills. Clark further cautioned that he should move out from the beachhead only if German resistance remained weak. The Fifth Army commander fully expected that divisions drawn from the enemy at the Gustav Line would quickly counterattack the beachhead. The more Germans were diverted in this way, the better his chances of breaking through the Gustav Line and driving north to Rome while at the same time relieving the Anzio beachhead.