by Mark Zuehlke
On the same day that Kesselring and von Vietinghoff congratulated each other on stemming the 11 CIB attack, Vokes accepted a suggestion by Allfrey that he finally take a long overdue leave. Vokes thought it a good time to go, as his division should be engaged in nothing more than patrolling operations until it was brought under I Canadian Corps control at month’s end. He left for Cairo in the last week of January, leaving the division in the capable hands of Brigadier Bert Hoffmeister. This would give the young officer, who had risen rapidly through the ranks since coming ashore at Sicily as a mere major, some valuable divisional command experience. It was rumoured that he was slated to take over 5th Canadian Armoured Division in the spring. Simonds had relinquished command of this division to Major General Eedson L.M. (Tommy) Burns on January 11 when he was posted to Britain to assume command of 2nd Canadian Corps because its commander had been returned to Canada due to ill health. Hoffmeister’s rumoured promotion rested on the probability that Burns would be given command of I Canadian Corps once Crerar was deemed to have gained enough battlefield experience in Italy to warrant command of the First Canadian Army. That hand-off would have to happen sometime in the next couple of months to allow sufficient time for Crerar to settle into his new command before the northern European invasion got under way.32
Unknown to Vokes and without notifying the Canadian corps commander, Allfrey ordered Hoffmeister to carry out a limited attack on January 30, just one day before 1 CID was to move from Allfrey’s command to that of Crerar. Again the primary purpose was stated as being to prevent the Germans from shifting Adriatic front units to the Anzio beaches or to Cassino. Hoffmeister complied without question or opposition. He handed the task to 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade commander Brigadier Dan Spry. It was decided that only one battalion should make the attack, the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel A.A. (Bert) Kennedy. Because a holding attack, as this form of offensive was called, often resulted in heavy casualties, Allfrey insisted that both Hoffmeister and Spry should keep its real purpose from the troops so as not to weaken their morale. The officers should, he said, rationalize the operation as intended to secure a forward base that would allow more aggressive patrolling to determine the strength and precise whereabouts of the German paratroops.
The attack would advance along a road running from Villa Grande north across a level plain known as the Piana di Moregine toward the village of Tollo. Supporting the Hasty P’s would be squadrons drawn from the Calgary Tanks of the 1st Canadian Armoured Brigade. At 1600 hours on January 30, the Hasty P’s advanced behind a heavy artillery barrage with the tanks slogging through the mud in support. Just as Kennedy radioed back that his men were closing on the objective, a fierce counter-barrage shattered ‘B’ Company, and ‘D’ Company was brought up abruptly by heavy machine-gun fire. Despite heavy casualties, the two companies kept trying to advance for two hours to no avail and finally were forced to withdraw to a position 300 yards back from their assigned objective. They suffered fifteen dead and thirty-three wounded.
The following day, they tried again at 1330 hours, with ‘A’ Company on the left and ‘B’ Company on the right, advancing across the open field under cover of a smokescreen. Teller antitank mines disabled two of six Calgary Tanks in support. The other four emerged out of the smoke just fifty yards from the objective and took the defending paratroopers entirely by surprise. Although the Germans rallied quickly, managing to knock out two Shermans with 75-millimetre fire from three dug-in antitank guns, the Calgary troopers won the shootout by destroying the enemy weapons. This success was nullified when heavy mortar, machine-gun, and rifle fire cut down so many of the Hasty P’s that they were reduced first from platoons to sections, and finally to just two or three men acting in independent groups. Kennedy could only order a general withdrawal. Lacking infantry support, the two remaining tanks also pulled back. The day’s butcher bill for the Hasty P’s was nine killed and thirty-four wounded.33 Lieutenant Colonel Cyril Neroutsos, commander of the Calgary Tanks, and an old Three Rivers Regiment veteran of the prewar Canadian armoured corps, was infuriated. In two days, he had lost four tanks and fifteen crewmen in an operation he had opposed from the outset as employing tanks in a completely ineffective manner.34
Vokes returned late on the evening of January 31 and immediately learned of the failed attack. He had found the peaceful atmosphere of Cairo got on his nerves and was “eager to get back to the war in Italy, even to the misery of the Italian winter.” Having come back expecting his regiments to be in good condition, perhaps even a bit rested up, Vokes was angered that Allfrey would order such an attack in his absence when he had explicitly stated that no further offensive actions were to be undertaken by 1 CID. “What grieved me most,” he later wrote, “about this second senseless attack was the loss to the Hastings of 90 all ranks, killed, wounded or missing. It was too big a price to pay for an attack staged in the impossible conditions of ground and weather which prevailed. I wondered,” he added, “when the senior Allied command in Italy would realize the futility of attacks in the mud of an Italian winter.”35
The attack by the Hasty P’s was, however, the last offensive mounted by 1 CID on the Adriatic front. On the evening of January 31, the division shifted from Allfrey’s command to Crerar’s. For the next ten to twelve weeks, the newly formed corps and its divisions endured a bleak, cold, and wet time in trenches that came increasingly to mirror in their construction those of World War I, as slit trenches were linked together and deepened.
Shortly after Crerar assumed command, he toured the front lines to get a better appreciation of the conditions in which his men lived and operated. Captain Don Smith of the Carleton and York Regiment was sitting on the edge of his slit trench eating lunch out of his mess tin when he saw a small, older officer standing a few feet away. The man wore the typical Tommy piss-pot–shaped steel helmet of British and Commonwealth troops and a leather jerkin that covered his badges of rank. Standing behind him was the regiment’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Dick Danby. Smith put down his mess tin, slowly stood up, and saluted the two men. In a soft, friendly way, Crerar chatted with Smith for a few moments about conditions and the state of his men. He congratulated Smith, who had been awarded the Military Cross for his bravery during the January 4 battle for Point 59, just north of Ortona.
When the older officer and Danby walked off, Smith wondered who he was and why he and the commander were wandering the lines with nobody else in their company. Soon after the two departed, his company commander, Major Burt Kennedy, walked over and asked if Smith had seen Lieutenant General Crerar and the colonel. Smith said, “I guess I did. Who is General Crerar?” Kennedy told him Crerar was the new General Officer in Command of I Canadian Corps. Smith was impressed and thought Crerar, unlike some of the officers, such as Vokes, was very Canadian in his mannerisms rather than mimicking the Eighth Army British brass in both their speech and dress.36
The same day, Crerar showed up at the Royal Canadian Regiment’s battalion headquarters. Galloway walked out with him onto the frozen mud to look toward the front lines. Behind the two men stood the shattered house in which the RCR headquarters was located; ahead lay the trenches in which the men were hunkered. The surrounding olive grove trees and vineyards were splintered and ripped asunder by weeks of artillery fire, shell craters were full of half-frozen water, a bitter grey sky hung overhead. Leaning on his walking stick, Crerar shifted his gaze over the scene. “Why, it’s just like Passchendaele,” he muttered. “Just like Passchendaele.” Galloway had never heard about Passchendaele, but he listened politely as Crerar spoke with a faraway look in his eyes of “the mud of Flanders, the rainfall in the Ypres Salient, the misery of trench warfare.” Then Crerar left, returning in Galloway’s mind “to his comfy caravan ten miles behind the line, well out of even long distance artillery fire, and left us to the mud of Italy, the rainfall in the Ortona Salient and the misery of position warfare as we knew it.”37
4
FRUSTRATED AMBITIONS
Since arriving in the Mediterranean theatre, I Canadian Corps commander Lieutenant General Harry Crerar had single-mindedly laboured to bring all Canadian soldiers serving in Italy under a common corps banner. This purpose, advanced and defended at every turn with his usual tactless manner, had brought Crerar into conflict with the former Eighth Army commander, General Bernard Montgomery, its current commander General Sir Oliver Leese, and General Harold Alexander, Deputy Supreme Commander Mediterranean.
On the evening of January 31, 1944, Crerar’s ambition appeared realized as I Canadian Corps became operational in the field for the first time. Within four days, a series of orders shifted most of the approximately 75,000 Canadians in Italy to his command. On February 9, however, Crerar realized an entirely dedicated Canadian corps would not come into being when Leese advised him that the 3,700 tankers of 1st Canadian Armoured Brigade would not be assigned to the Canadian corps after all. Instead, 1 CAB was attached to the British XIII Corps.1
Since the invasion of Sicily, 1st Canadian Infantry Division and 1 CAB had mutually supported each other during countless operations. Eighth Army, however, tended to treat armoured brigades as quasi-independent entities that operated outside normal corps organizational structures. The reason for this was that there were fewer armoured brigades in the Eighth Army than infantry divisions, so the tankers served as fire brigades, shifting rapidly from one infantry support role to another as the combat situation dictated. That the British wanted to maintain this flexibility, despite Crerar’s all-Canadian plan, was apparent. It was one of the reasons Montgomery had argued against the formation of an additional corps organized on national lines. Coincidentally, however, acrimony between two senior Canadian commanders provided an alternative justification for Leese’s decision that deflected blame away from the British, while ensuring that Eighth Army retained armoured brigade flexibility.
The culprit who somewhat unwittingly scuttled Crerar’s all-Canadian corps was Major General Chris Vokes. Throughout the December and January fighting on the Ortona front, Vokes had been critical of 1 CAB’s commander Brigadier Bob Wyman. In late January, Vokes made it known to anyone of equivalent rank or higher that he would welcome the opportunity to never work with Wyman and his brigade again. Wyman, he said, was “a bull-headed guy, a little lord unto himself.”2
He was not alone in his complaints about the performance of Wyman’s three armoured regiments. Brigadier George Kitching, commander of 11th Canadian Infantry Brigade, had been sharply critical of Wyman’s handling of the Three Rivers Regiment during the disastrous January 17 attack. Kitching picked up a rumour after the battle that Wyman had orally ordered Lieutenant Colonel Leslie Booth to keep his tanks far enough back from the front-line action to ensure they did not become engaged in a “dog fight” with German armour or antitank guns. Kitching thought this order undoubtedly explained why the tanks had not come down into the Riccio valley but instead had lurked on the southern rim doing little more than acting as close support artillery. Apparently, he reasoned, Wyman considered infantry expendable, but not tanks. Had he known this to be the case, Kitching would have “never agreed to put in the attack.”3
Both Kitching and Vokes directed their attacks toward Wyman personally. Neither had any disrespect for the ability of the 1 CAB tankers, who had proved themselves in many battles. The tankers had fought hard and well in the horrific mud, tangled vineyards, and debris-strewn town streets that had so hampered tank operations during the December fighting. Vokes, however, was convinced that as long as Wyman led the armoured brigade, it would fail to march to orders that he issued, despite the fact that he was the senior officer.
Just over two weeks after 1 CAB had been sent into the wilderness, Vokes came to regret his denunciations of the Canadian tank brigade. On February 27, Wyman left Italy to assume command of the 2nd Canadian Armoured Brigade. Command of 1 CAB went to Brigadier Bill Murphy, who, Vokes knew, was a “first class” officer.4 Murphy was a likeable, easy-going Irishman who quickly proved himself popular to the tankers under his command. Vokes wished he could take back his earlier statements, but the damage was irreparable and the Canadian armoured brigade would seldom fight alongside Canadian infantry during the rest of the Italian campaign.
Throughout February, Vokes had little time to dwell on the impact of his actions with regard to 1 CAB. For Crerar was determined to make the corps — the first Canadian corps under a Canadian commander to be in contact with the Germans — operate by the book. Vokes was buried under a continuous deluge of written instructions setting out training and administrative details that would previously have warranted only a quick telephone call. Vokes thought the obsession with paper “verged on the stupid.” But he also knew there was no alternative but to comply with Crerar’s demands and “hope that time and battle experience would produce a saner and more practical outlook.”
Having never previously served under Crerar, Vokes was unimpressed by the man’s attitude toward his subordinates. The infantry division commander found he could get along well enough with Crerar only so long as he offered no arguments. “No amount of argument could budge him from a pre-conceived idea, even though it had been found unworkable or unreasonable in contemporary practice. His whole outlook on tactics was influenced by his experience as a junior officer of artillery in the Great War. He believed the tactical methods of attack employed in Italy were wrong and should be brought in line with those used in France and Flanders in World War I.”5
Crerar’s apparent obsession with the muddy stalemate north of Ortona, which the older general kept comparing to the Western Front, alarmed Vokes. When he tried telling Crerar that neither the Germans nor the Allies considered this anything more than a temporary stalemate caused by the weather, which in the spring would again allow a campaign of movement, Crerar was dubious. During a February 11 study period held in Lanciano, some nine miles south of Ortona, Crerar delivered to Leese, his staff, and the other British corps commanders a long lecture entitled “The Principles of Effective Fire Support in the ‘Break-in’ Battle.” He told them that “in this theatre conditions and circumstances have faced us once more with the tactical problems and conditions which typified the last Great War.” Crerar emphasized how the same combined artillery and infantry tactics that had been used on the Western Front, particularly at Vimy Ridge, could, despite the winter morass that currently engulfed them, be employed to break through the German defences and restore the campaign of movement.6 His comments, Vokes noticed, “were heard in stony silence by that battle-experienced galaxy.” Vokes came away thinking that Crerar had done himself no good with Leese by treating him like some inexperienced junior officer who had never seen previous combat.7
To prove his point, however, Crerar hammered out a plan whereby 1 CID would capture the village of Tollo through the application of the tactical techniques he had described at Lanciano. Vokes was relieved when this scheme came to naught because V British Corps replaced I Canadian Corps in the line on March 7. The Canadians withdrew to the village of Larino, forty-five miles southeast of Ortona. Two days later, Crerar received orders to proceed immediately to Britain for promotion to the command of First Canadian Army. Royal Canadian Regiment second-in-command Major Strome Galloway thought the presence of Crerar during the winter of 1944 was somehow fitting. It seemed, he later wrote, “as though Flanders Fields had come to Italy bringing the same old mud, the same old boredom, the same old wounds and death by day and night, the same old rum ration, and as an extra, an elderly general whose mind went back to Passchendaele.” With the spring, it was equally fitting that this general should fade quietly away, leaving behind little trace of his having passed.8
Soon after Crerar’s departure, many officers and other ranks were transferred to Britain. Distributed through all layers of First Canadian Army, from its headquarters down to individual rifle platoons, these combat veterans were expected to stiffen the backbone of this untried army when it received
its baptism of fire during the northern European invasion. Acting Lieutenant General Guy Simonds had, of course, already returned to Britain to command 2nd Canadian Army Corps. He personally asked for Brigadier Kitching, who left his command of 11 CIB and returned to Britain on March 1. Promoted to acting major general, Kitching assumed command of 4th Canadian Armoured Division. Only thirty-four, he became the youngest Canadian general officer.9 First CID’s artillery commander, Brigadier Bill Matthews, and its engineering commander, Lieutenant Colonel Geoff Walsh, left. Two battalion commanders, Three Rivers Regiment’s Lieutenant Colonel Leslie Booth and Loyal Edmonton Regiment’s Lieutenant Colonel Jim Jefferson, headed off to brigade commands in Britain. Major Herschell A. Smith of the Ontario Tank Regiment and Major Ned Amy from the Calgary Tank Regiment also departed.
As had been rumoured, Tommy Burns was promoted to Acting Lieutenant General and given command of I Canadian Corps. Fifth Canadian Armoured Division went to Bert Hoffmeister, promoted from brigadier to acting major general. At thirty-seven this made him, after Kitching, the second youngest Canadian divisional commander.10 Crerar told Hoffmeister of his promotion shortly before departing Italy. A radio signal from Crerar had asked Hoffmeister to meet him at a particular map reference within a couple of hours. The map reference turned out to be the centre of a bridge and, as Hoffmeister pulled up at one side, Crerar drove up to the other end. Both men walked from their Jeeps to the centre of the bridge. Hoffmeister saluted and then shook Crerar’s proffered hand. The two officers perched side by side on the bridge railing and Crerar asked, “How would you like to take over command of the 5th Canadian Armoured Division?”