by Mark Zuehlke
Although there were about 75,000 Canadians in the Italian theatre, fewer than 20,000 served on the sharp end of the infantry and tank regiments. Behind them was a giant wedge of manpower necessary to keep those front-line troops in the field. The generally accepted wisdom was that it took three to four men in the rear to keep one man engaged directly in combat. While the men in the rear were normally less exposed to enemy fire, they were not immune from casualties. Truck drivers had to move supplies up to the front and their vehicles drew German artillery and mortar fire. Drivers were routinely killed or wounded as a result. The artillery gunners were regularly targeted by German fire. Ambulance drivers and stretcher-bearers shared the hazards with front-line troops, often suffering a proportionately higher casualty rate as they exposed themselves to fire in order to rescue wounded from the battlefield.
German action was not the only cause of casualties. In an environment where men constantly carried firearms, handled ammunition, travelled in vehicles on bad roads, and worked in harsh conditions, accidents were common and injuries often no less severe than combat wounds. Men died or were permanently maimed by such accidents. Poor hygiene, diet, and living in perpetually harsh outdoor conditions increased the rates of illness and disease. The cumulative result of all these perils was that the normal strength of all units was seldom maintained. Every unit was short of manpower.
In the front-line units, the situation had been severe since the Canadians landed in Sicily. Within days of the first battles, it was common for infantry companies that were supposed to number about 125 men to go into action only 75 to 80 strong.32 When companies were broken down into their platoon strengths and the platoons into section strengths, the picture appeared even darker to the individual soldier. Private Dan Nikiforuk of the Westminster Regiment drove an armoured car that was supposed to hold twelve men, but he seldom had more than four or five riding in the vehicle. It did nothing to boost his morale to know that, instead of having the mutual fire support that a dozen men could lay down, his section would be lucky to fight with half that number.33
Burns knew that the best way he could keep enough men in the front was to reduce losses to avoidable causes, particularly disease. To underscore the importance of preventing manpower losses, he prepared a special briefing of his brigadiers that focused on the reinforcement issue. After describing the problem, he outlined how the corps might have to strip down or eliminate some services that were less important to operations than combat units, such as “postal sorting, kit disposal.” Losses due to illness, he wrote, “are a direct indication of the efficiency of the unit and its command in these matters.” Medical Officers would do their part in prevention, but “nothing they can say or do will be effective unless the CO takes proper disciplinary measures to enforce the hygienic regulations, and sees that his officers all follow out his directions.”
An equally critical cause of loss, Burns wrote, was battle exhaustion. “It has often been observed that the incidence of this type of disability varies directly with the state of discipline, training and man-management in the unit. Basically, the cause is the inability of the man to control his fear, and while most men are afraid, they overcome it by the example of others and by the feeling that they are safer, better off and happier while enjoying the respect of their fellows in their section, platoon or regiment. Esprit de corps can only be high where discipline, training and man-management are good.”34
Once men were diagnosed with battle exhaustion, however, they seldom proved able to be returned to front-line combat units. The men and officers there generally didn’t trust such men. All too often they quickly relapsed and had to be evacuated. To retain these men in some semblance of a worthwhile role, I Canadian Corps had created a Pioneer Company where “personnel who, by reason of nervous instability, are temporarily unfit to take their place in the line” were “employed on strenuous manual labour.” The purpose of this unit, strikingly akin to an ongoing field punishment detail, Burns said, was to prevent exhausted men being able to “escape to the Base, much less to the UK.” The Pioneer Company service, he hoped, would “recondition them physically and mentally so that they will be able to return to fighting units, though it is realized this may not be possible in many cases.”
Burns had little sympathy for battle-exhaustion cases. “I personally feel that men who fail to do their duty in the way these men have, should be under certain disabilities in relation to the man who continues to risk his life in the front line, or do his duty wherever he may be placed. For one thing, I think it must be made clear to these ‘psychiatrics’ that they may not expect to leave the theatre here during hostilities, and that those remaining in the unit at the close of hostilities will be the last (except prisoners) to return to CANADA.”
If men are to be treated this way, he warned, so too must be the officers who succumbed to battle exhaustion. “At present, a certain number of officers are dealt with by adverse report, generally to the effect that the officer is unfit to lead men in a fighting unit. I presume that this procedure is only resorted to when it has been found impossible to make the officer do his duty after repeated and vigorous admonition and reproof. It must be made thoroughly clear to all officers that to be sent back in this way is a great disgrace. It might be more just if any officer so found unfit were stripped of his command and obliged to serve in the ranks in this theatre. If standards are strict for men, they must be more than strict for officers. But present regulations do not permit this. The trouble is that it is not fair to the men under him that an inefficient officer should continue to serve as such, and at the moment I do not see any entirely satisfactory answer to this problem.”
Burns ended his briefing paper with a veiled threat to the brigadiers. “If any unit shows a high rate of wastage from these avoidable causes, it means that it will eventually be under strength and there will be no more reinforcements for it, and it will represent from all points of view, a weakness in the formation concerned. The remedy in such cases is obvious.”35
A growing intolerance for diagnosing men with battle exhaustion and then according them appropriate psychiatric care developed within the corps’s medical service. The corps’s medical director, Brigadier Emmet McCusker, issued orders directing that any battle-exhaustion cases appearing in a medical unit were to be held “until personally examined by the commander of a Field Ambulance.” Psychiatrists were prohibited from intervening in such cases and the service’s neuropsychiatric unit was removed from the forward Field Ambulance, where it could quickly offer psychiatric treatment, and assigned to the corps maintenance area.
Unit psychiatrist Major Arthur Manning Doyle thought McCusker “appeared to believe that [exhaustion casualties] could all be prevented by discipline; that they were due partly to bad leadership on the part of officers and partly to laxity” by Medical Officers.36 Despite Doyle’s objections, the Canadian medical approach to treating battle-exhaustion cases in the forthcoming battle would provide only token and belated psychiatric care, an approach that differed from the one Doyle had developed and implemented during his time as the 1st Canadian Infantry Division’s psychiatric officer. He thought the new, more intolerant approach unlikely to succeed in returning affected men back to their regiments.
Believing he had done everything possible to address the reinforcement crisis, Burns began planning his offensive operation. He and Vokes visited the corps observation post on Monte Trocchio and it served to remind both officers of the difficult obstacles the Canadians must overcome. Because of the greater height of Monte Cassino and Monte Cairo, Vokes felt he could almost reach out and touch the features, even though they stood more than three miles away. “Their overwhelming dominance of the scene gave me an uneasy feeling that enemy eyes could see through my concealment,” he later wrote. “At any moment, I expected to become a target for enemy fire.”
The floor of the Liri Valley appeared undulating and was, in the Gari River region directly below him, overgrown by the usual vineyards a
nd olive groves that typified the terrain through which the Canadians had fought since the Sicily invasion. Near the Liri River on the left-hand flank of the valley, farms were interspersed with scrub forest. Monte Cassino and Monte Cairo bordered the right-hand side. Highway 6 and the Naples-Rome mainline railroad skirted along the foot of the right-hand mountain range and disappeared into the distant haze that obscured the towns of Aquino and Pontecorvo, which were Vokes’s marking points for the Hitler Line. The highway passed directly through the rubble of Cassino and, running out of the town, the Gari River followed a winding course to its confluence with the Liri River, where the river was renamed the Garigliano. Along the Gari’s course, two piles of rubble marked the remains of San Angelo and Panaccioni. The former stood directly astride the Gustav Line and overlooked the Gari River from a low-lying ridge. Panaccioni held another height of land several hundred feet back from the river. Although he carefully studied the heavy brush bordering the German side of the Gari River, Vokes saw no enemy movement. It was hard to believe they were actually down there in strength, waiting for the inevitable attack.
Vokes was “over-awed by the task which faced the Eighth Army in breaking into the Liri Valley. From his observation posts sited on Monte Cassino and Monte Cairo the enemy could see any attempt by assaulting troops to cross the Gari River, and thus bring down a murderous artillery fire on them. The same applied to any movement in the valley. His possession of that ground gave him a tremendous tactical advantage.” The divisional commander experienced a “feeling of relief” that the “1st Division was not taking part in the initial assault. It was bound to be a difficult and bloody operation.37
TWO
THE GUSTAV LINE
6
A JUST AND RIGHTEOUS CAUSE
The picture that Eighth Army’s intelligence officers were developing of the Gustav Line confirmed that the planned breakthrough would prove costly. Since November 1943, the Germans had been feverishly constructing strong fortifications immediately behind the Gari River. The fast-flowing river drained from the northerly mountains through Cassino. In its upper reaches, it was known as the Rapido River, but became the Gari from south of Cassino to the river’s confluence with the Liri River.
The Gari averaged a width of forty to sixty feet and a depth of six to eight feet. Its combined depth, width, and swiftness rendered the river a natural antitank trench that would be difficult to bridge. On either side, but particularly on the eastern bank from which the Allies would attack, the approach was flat with open grain fields stretching back from it for several hundred yards. Because the fighting had overrun the Cassino area in late fall 1943, many of the fields remained unplanted, but had been deeply ploughed, leaving the soil broken and soft. The river was running high, and the ground close to its shores was soggy from seepage. A couple of hundred yards from the western bank, a low ridge covered in thick scrub provided the Germans with complete domination of the ground on either side of the river. The banks rising up from the water were also steeply cut.
The Germans had dug in “well-prepared infantry, antitank and field gun positions sited in depth up to about 4,000 yards or approximately as far back as Pignataro.” These fortifications were numerous along the western ridge, particularly in the vicinity of the village of San Angelo. The emphasis, however, was on machine-gun and mortar positions in the forward areas, with field and medium artillery pits located further back. There were few antitank positions. The Germans had put little effort into countering a tank attack because their engineers were confident that the river posed a sufficient obstacle to bar Allied tanks from crossing. As the defences had already withstood two major offensives launched by the U.S. Fifth Army, intercepted German reports expressed confidence that the line would again hold.1
In November 1943, Adolf Hitler, taking a personal interest in the construction of the Gustav Line, had accelerated the flow of materials necessary to strengthen its defences. He also authorized construction of a series of fallback or switch positions behind the main line, of which the Hitler Line was of primary importance.2 With the Anzio landings in January, Hitler had decided it was inappropriate for this main switch line to continue bearing the official name Führer Riegel (Führer Switch Line). On January 23, Tenth Army headquarters was notified that its name was now Senger Riegel.3
While the switch lines were vital components of the German defence in depth, primary construction focused on strengthening the Gustav Line. Here, 100 steel shelters were buried in the ground — effectively providing a steel inner lining for large dugouts. These positions were virtually impervious to artillery fire and could each protect about a dozen men. Seventy-six armoured pillboxes, weighing three tons apiece, were also dug into the ground.4 Steel cylindrical cells, the pillboxes were seven feet deep and six feet in diameter. Only the top thirty inches, constructed of five-inch-thick armour, protruded out of the ground with a gun slit cut into the side facing the line of the enemy advance. Known by the Germans as “armoured crabs” because of their appearance when being towed into position on a set of removable wheels, the pillboxes sheltered a two-man heavy-machine-gun crew.5 Nothing short of a direct artillery hit could harm this fortification.
All along the line, a vast system of concrete pillboxes was constructed. Many contained sleeping quarters for twenty to thirty men, while others were only big enough to protect a single soldier manning a light machine gun. The large pillboxes were interconnected by underground tunnels and linked directly to an open system of firing trenches, which the infantry would be able to man once the Allied artillery ceased firing. Existing buildings were tied into the defensive line. Many farmhouses and buildings in villages had inner shelters built at ground level to provide protection from artillery fire. These shelters had walls and roofs constructed of heavy logs that were reinforced with thick layers of crushed stone.
On the eastern side of the river and on the western bank running right up to the German main defensive lines, thousands of mines were buried. At least 24,000 had been planted immediately in front of the Gustav Line. Most common was the Schümine, a small, pressure-triggered device with sufficient charge to sever or mangle the foot of the person engaging it. S-mines were equally common. These mines were released when someone stepped on a trigger plate or inadvertently pulled a tripwire that engaged the trigger, causing a small charge to be thrown up to waist height where it exploded. Loaded with steel pellets, an S-mine usually caused massive multiple injuries to the groin and stomach area. Often these antipersonnel mines were constructed with a wooden casing that rendered them virtually impossible to locate with mine-detection equipment. Teller antitank mines powerful enough to blow the track off a tank or destroy a Jeep or truck were scattered through the minefields, particularly on roads or pathways that would tempt vehicle traffic. Thick fields of barbed wire were strung across the minefields and immediately behind them. And just back of the wire were the first rows of machine-gun positions, sited so they could provide a curtain of interlocking fire across the entire width of the front.
While the defences on the Gustav Line were impressive, German tactical doctrine never relied solely on a statically manned defensive line. The German divisions, particularly the Panzer Grenadier divisions, were trained to counterattack constantly to keep the Allies off balance and deny them the ability to consolidate gains won. No sooner would an Allied company seize a position from the Germans than it would face a series of determined counterattacks, often heavily supported by mortar and artillery fire. The German infantryman’s task “is above all to send out reconnaissance parties and patrols to ensure the safety of the heavy weapons, to take part in close-quarters fighting, and to conduct counter-attacks,” read one German divisional report.6
The XIII Corps infantry divisions and the supporting tank brigades were well briefed on the fortifications they faced and the German tactics doctrine. On May 11, the Three Rivers Tank Regiment war diarist cited a report detailing the forward Gustav Line defences and summarizing the locations a
nd defensive works of each of the two switch lines that lay between the Gustav Line and the Hitler Line. Of particular note were intelligence estimates that the Germans had placed immediately behind the second switch line 120 field guns, 48 medium artillery pieces, and nine to twelve heavy 17-centimetre guns. It was also estimated that a battalion of tanks and an assault gun battalion were concentrated here, so either or both could quickly intercept any armoured breakthrough.7
Three Rivers’ Intelligence Officer and consequently the regiment’s war diarist, Lieutenant Horace Dugald Beach, was so enthusiastic about the quality of information that the Allies had on the German defences that he thought the attack plan far too conservative. Instead, he argued in the regiment’s official diary that an armoured-infantry flying column could explode out of the shattered Gustav Line and be “manning the ADOLF HITLER Line behind the Boche, in a minimum of 2 hours from zero hour of the push-off.” However, he concluded sadly, “that possible method has not entered into the planning notes or Ops Orders.”
“Nevertheless,” he added, “a more carefully considered or assiduously prepared plan has seldom been worked out. Perhaps only a Second Front would have more bumph. For almost a month all units and formations down to [battalions] have been planning, holding numerous information and discussion groups, making extensive recces of the ground east of the Gari and training for his own special task. Practically every officer knows all [roads] and [tracks] leading up to and possible crossings of the Gari, all such knowledge gleaned at night.”8
With virtually uncontested air superiority over the battleground, Allied aerial reconnaissance had taken thousands of photographs of the countryside. Beach sorted through more than a thousand photos pertaining to the regiment’s assigned area of operation. One series of photos was overlain with definitions of how well the ground would serve for tank movement. Roads were classified as to their quality and even the narrowest track was subjected to categorization. As the day of the attack approached, more photos were passed to Beach, showing overprints of the enemy positions and their believed strengths. A colour map was produced that graded soil conditions from the Gari River up the Liri Valley to Ceprano. This enabled Beach to brief the tankers on how the terrain would respond to tank traffic and how particular ground would respond to rain. Never had the Eighth Army been so well prepared and briefed for an attack and the spirits of the tankers in the Three Rivers Regiment ran high as a result.9