by Mark Zuehlke
Vokes ended up having to search out Bernatchez’s headquarters and finally found it in a house apparently ahead of his own leading infantry regiments. He could see the ruined village of Aquino, a corner pin of the Hitler Line, just off to the north. As he was giving Bernatchez instructions, an artillery bombardment rained down around the house, forcing the two officers to cower under “the doubtful shelter provided by a six-foot folding army table. It was most unpleasant for about ten minutes. Fortunately no one was hurt or equipment damaged.”
“As soon as quiet was restored,” Vokes “gave poor Bernatchez a piece of my mind. I told him I found no fault with aggressive brigadiers siting their headquarters well forward, but to do so in full view of the enemy was not only foolhardy but errant stupidity, especially when there was concealment nearby, and he was to locate his headquarters there immediately.” Vokes thought Bernatchez would prove a first-class infantry brigadier if he could just stop feeling he had to prove his courage at every step. However, this was the man’s first major engagement as a brigadier so allowances could be made.
Given his performance in the past two days, Vokes thought Bernatchez was learning fast.
Back at his far more safely positioned headquarters, Vokes settled down in his caravan to puzzle out a plan for breaching the Hitler Line. Failing unexpected success by the morning’s probing attacks, 1 CID would have to put in a deliberate set-piece attack. This would mean inevitable delay, something that would please neither Lieutenant General Tommy Burns nor General Sir Oliver Leese. But how much time would he actually need?
Vokes envisioned 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade carrying out the attack, with 25th Royal Tank Brigade alongside. In support, he wanted every artillery gun that Eighth Army could provide to smother the fortifications under a blanket of fire. Drafting a major artillery-firing plan required at least forty-eight hours. Seventy-two hours would be better because Vokes wanted a creeping barrage, which entailed precise timing and coordination with the advancing troops. Also necessary was a day to patrol the line to determine the best ground for an attack. From the map, it appeared the right flank most suited tank operations, but this had to be confirmed by close-up reconnaissance. Vokes hoped to get that information tomorrow, meaning that the earliest he could begin issuing the orders necessary to launch a set-piece attack would be May 20. If Burns and Leese agreed to a forty-eight-hour or seventy-two-hour planning period, the actual attack would then proceed late on May 22 or early May 23. That would still mean a hasty staff work schedule and one that would exhaust everyone and might well overlook obvious complications.
On May 18, Leese believed the Canadians might not have to fight at all for the Hitler Line. Not only had the Corps Expéditionnaire Français turned the line on the left-hand flank, but XIII Corps’s British 78th Division had made remarkable progress on the right flank. By evening, the 78th was closing on the Aquino airport, just east of the village standing behind the Hitler Line’s wire. Although a hasty attack that night toward Aquino was repulsed, a renewed attack in the morning was likely to succeed. Once Aquino fell, both of the Hitler Line’s flanks would be turned. In that scenario, to continue to try to defend the line would leave the Germans facing encirclement.
First Canadian Corps’s intelligence staff was much pleased by the day’s developments. “Today has been a good day,” one officer wrote. “The paratroopers were forced to evacuate Cassino, but they almost left it too late. Many prisoners were put in the bag, and others fought to a bloody finish. The Polish flag was raised over the monastery late in the morning, and the mopping up of the area continued for the rest of the day.”10
From Royal Canadian Regiment’s rear-area headquarters, Major Strome Galloway had jubilantly watched through his binoculars as the Poles attacked Monte Cassino. From such a distance, the Polish troops had looked like hundreds of ants rushing up the steep slope, some appearing to crawl on their hands and knees over the white rocky ground. At 1020 hours, a horde of men leading the charge plunged through the holes that had been punched in the massive walls surrounding the abbey ruins. The flag appeared at the highest point amid the rubble just a few minutes later.11 The Poles paid a high price for the abbey. Lying dead on the surrounding slopes and heights were 860 men. A further 2,924 had been wounded.12
Shortly after the Poles raised their victory flag over the abbey, Leese visited General Wladyslaw Anders at his headquarters. In a letter to his wife Margaret, he wrote, “we drank sweet champagne. . . . It was terrific. The success has made up for all their casualties — and the Polish flag flies proudly on the Monastery.
“A victory and an advance are a great tonic. I thank God very much for allowing me a victory in my first Army battle.”13
CBC Radio correspondent Peter Stursberg soon sweated his way up the steep mountainside to the abbey, passing along the way a blanket of corpses left during the many battles. The Germans still occasionally shelled the slope and the Polish officers guiding Stursberg and the other journalists advised them not to bunch together, for that might attract deliberate enemy attention. Stursberg later wrote: “It was not the sight of the dead, the swollen, glaucous faces, the stary eyes, that turned our stomachs but the stench.” He did not mention the smell in his recorded broadcast. Instead, he said: “I have never seen such a grisly sight as I saw. There were the dead that had stormed and taken this fortress. . . . And there were the dead that had tried to take it months ago. I almost stumbled over a head that had almost mummified. The horrible thing about these battlefields above Cassino was that the men who fought there lived with the dead around them.”
Stursberg climbed over the broken outer wall and entered the abbey. In a crypt, he found two gaunt monks and some ragged civilians who had hidden there throughout the months of fighting.14 Hundreds of other civilians had sought protection in the abbey and been trapped inside, having to seek shelter in its cellars and crypts. How many civilians were buried in its rubble would never be determined.
Shortly after Cassino’s fall, Canadian war artist Captain Charles Comfort drove into the town en route to corps headquarters. Although he had painted the rubble of Ortona, what he saw here was far worse. “For sheer horror and utter devastation,” he wrote, “I had not set eyes on its equal. The terraced structure of the streets might be discerned, if one searched for structure in that formless heap of calcined stone, but it resembled rather some imagined landscape on the moon. It had ceased to be terrestrial, it was like some lidless, blind eye, glaring back at the sun with empty lifeless inertia.
“The town in itself was completely silent. Swallows darted aimlessly about, their plaintive shriek the only sound other than the roll of gunfire and the clatter of armour. Unburied dead, protruding from rubble or huddled grotesquely in cellars, still made a grisly spectacle. The heavy stench of corruption hung about in dense patches near the pile of debris that was once the Hotel des Roches. In the flats, near the Rapido [Gari] River, the lands flooded by the enemy bristled with shattered tree stumps, the stagnant surface dull with a heavy brownish algae. Streets were no longer streets, simply tiresome mountains of broken masonry, in some instances reaching to second-storey levels. . . . What had been gardens were whittled to the ground, thick stumps of palm torn and gashed, vines uprooted, unidentifiable trees chopped and shattered into kindling. The ground everywhere was strewn with shell fragments, spent casings, and a litter of German equipment. In a most depressed state of mind, I set up my equipment and sketched what was left of the town.”15
Aware of the abbey’s significance as “one of the oldest seats of learning in Christendom, where the lamp had burned through the darkest ages,” Comfort wondered why “so great a monument should have been destroyed by our generation. . . . No doubt there had been very real provocation but in eliminating a military problem, western culture had lost a great monument of art, and an institution which had contributed vitally to its life for nearly fourteen hundred years.”16
Few on the sharp end mourned the destroyed historical treasure
. Since the Canadians had first set eyes on the abbey, the place had seemed a malevolent presence that monitored their every move, like a sniper staring through a scope at a target. From that great shattered white ruin, firing orders had directed deadly artillery fire their way. Thousands of Allied soldiers had been killed or wounded attempting to wrest Monte Cassino from the Germans. Ontario Tank Regiment Chaplain Waldo Smith thought the abbey seemed “invested almost with a personality. It had become a symbol. To Germans also it had become such.”17 Smith was personally disheartened. Not a young man, the chaplain had found the past week of his tank regiment’s battle at the Gari River terribly trying. He was exhausted and sometimes feverish. Smith realized that, even for chaplains, war was a young man’s game. When the Ontario Regiment had withdrawn to the east bank of the Gari for a rest and refit on May 16, Smith visited the senior Canadian chaplain, Jock Logan-Vencta, at corps headquarters. He told Logan-Vencta that regimental morale and cohesion were good and he thought it would “do no harm if I stepped out and a younger man should be able to do a better job than I had prospect of doing.” Logan-Vencta agreed to replace Smith in a week. As the regiment was expected to remain out of the line, Smith could use the week to prepare the troops for his departure, as there was no doubt how respected the chaplain was in the eyes of the tankers he had served since the Sicily invasion.
On May 18, Smith spent the day catching up on next-of-kin letters and was just finishing up when a warning order came down from regimental headquarters that the Ontario Tanks would move again toward the sound of the guns that night. The 78th British Infantry Division needed tank support and 1st Canadian Armoured Brigade had drawn the duty; the Ontario and Calgary regiments would move back across the river and support the division’s drive toward Aquino the next morning. Smith knew the tanks needed repairs, particularly work on the radios, and also that his men were worn out. He saw one man, standing next to a tank, letting forth a long stream of expletives. Smith walked over and put his hands on the man’s shoulders. “Don’t let it get you down, chum! We know how you feel,” he said. The man’s worried, angry expression softened into a tired grin. They both laughed off his distress.18
Rushing ahead of the Calgary Tank Regiment in a Jeep, Lieutenant Jim Quinn of ‘A’ Squadron mired in a morass of traffic all trying to go west from the Gari River into the heart of the Liri Valley. He was looking for 11th British Infantry Brigade, the unit the Calgary tankers were assigned to support. Harried provost officers trying to sort out the tangle of trucks, tanks, Jeeps, towed guns, and other vehicles all jockeying for position repeatedly directed his Jeep onto muddy, twisting cart tracks. It took hours for him to find the infantry brigade’s headquarters to the east of Aquino Airport. Inside, confusion reigned. Rumours abounded that the Germans had abandoned Aquino and were fleeing back to Rome. Plans were drafted and scrapped. New plans were cobbled together and then sent to the shredder to be replaced by another vague scheme. Quinn finally found out where the regiment was to set up its forward tank assembly area. The advance party, of which he was a member, did what they could to smooth the way for the regiment’s arrival. At 0500 hours, the Shermans rolled into the assembly area.19
The nighttime journey was the worst Chaplain Smith had ever witnessed. “Our tanks led off across country along what may well have been a suitable track for them, but what heavy tanks do to a track through the fields does not always make easy driving for a Jeep. Barbed wire was everywhere. The dust raised by the tanks added to the obscurity of the night and we soon ceased to recognize any shape as part of our regiment.” When British 26th Armoured Brigade tanks bullied into the column and a section of self-propelled guns also squeezed into the line, Smith feared the little Jeep would get crushed under somebody’s tracks. Finding another lane in use only by trucks, Smith’s driver took that route. This track proved so crowded and cut up with ruts, however, that the chaplain finally decided to pull over and proceed in daylight.20
The confusion inherent in a night move almost left behind twenty-one-year-old Lieutenant C. Malcolm Sullivan, who was commanding No. 3 Troop of the Ontarios’ ‘A’ Squadron. Earlier, his tank had been manoeuvring through an olive grove to reach its position in the regimental line. Unseen branches had started scraping the turret. Sullivan ducked into the turret, while steadying himself with one hand gripping the hatch’s outer rim. A branch caught his exposed right index finger, painfully twisted it 180 degrees, and broke the skin at the knuckle. One of his crewmen snapped the finger somewhat straight and Sullivan walked back to the Medical Dressing Station. Here, a Medical Officer reset and fixed the finger rigidly into place by taping it between two metal splints. Fearing the column would leave without him, Sullivan ran back to his tank. “Like so many volunteers,” he later wrote, “it never occurred to me that I could escape danger if I didn’t hurry back. There is an indefinable urge to rejoin your regimental and troop family.” Sullivan got back just in time. Although his finger proved awkward and painful, he was able to handle the microphone and that meant he could do his squadron commander’s job. After a torturous drive through the night, made worse every time he bumped his finger, the Ontario tankers “harboured in a softwood copse just south of the small Aeroporto D’Aquino.”21
Ontario commander Lieutenant Colonel Bob Purves received his orders at an Orders Group held at the headquarters of the Royal East Kent Regiment (nicknamed the 5th Buffs). The whole plan sounded terribly rushed. “The gist of the plan was that the 26th Armoured Brigade would plunge through Aquino, and exploit the gain with a wide armoured sweep behind the German lines. In the event that exploitation was not very successful, the Ontarios were to support the 36th British Infantry Brigade in securing the bridgehead through the gap that the armoured brigade created. The two phases of the attack were to be prosecuted at the same time so that all of the attacking forces might take advantage of the barrage. It was stipulated, however, that the 26th Brigade tanks were to pass forward first.”22
Purves returned to the assembly area and called a “rather dismal orders group in the back room of a farmhouse.” The squadron commanders were all red-eyed and worn-looking, as was Purves. Everyone “squinted painfully at their maps in the dim candlelight, while the raw damp of a foggy night seeped coldly through the room.” ‘B’ Squadron’s Major D.H. McIndoe was to support the 5th Buffs’ drive directly into Aquino, while Major Harry Millen’s ‘A’ Squadron moved to the north end of the airport and protected the right flank. Along with the 6th Royal West Kent Regiment, ‘C’ Squadron would be in reserve. The 8th Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders would protect the left flank.23
Throughout the night, there had been periods of drizzle. At 0500 hours on May 19, the tanks rolled toward battle through a thick fog that cloaked the valley. Ahead, the flash of the barrage’s exploding shells could be seen through the murk. The Ontario Tanks moved west along an axis paralleling the road and running past the airport toward Aquino. ‘B’ Squadron and the 5th Buffs advanced warily up the road’s left-hand side. Across the road, ‘A’ Squadron headed for the northern end of the airport. The fog soon proved so thick that the lead platoons were unable to distinguish landmarks, let alone detect signs of the enemy. A halt was called until 0700 hours to allow the sun time to burn off some of the fog, despite the fact that this largely nullified the effect of the barrage.24
At 0700 hours, ‘A’ Squadron’s Shermans rolled out of a line of trees into the airport’s open grounds. Sullivan felt nakedly exposed, resigned to the forthcoming danger, and mostly “too busy to be afraid.” But it was not just fear for themselves that haunted young officers. More threatening, sometimes even paralyzing, was the fear of failure; the fear that a bad order would cause the death of men or misunderstanding an order from the squadron commander would lead to a terrible defeat. With experience, something Sullivan had, this fear lessened, but it never disappeared. Today, ‘A’ Squadron’s immediate task was to give the Buffs covering fire and take on any targets detected in the vicinity of the railroad and Highwa
y 6. These two major transportation links running from Naples to Rome paralleled each other immediately north of the airport, with the railroad being closest and the highway little more than a hundred yards beyond. The tanks advanced to the dubious cover offered by two hangars previously bombed into nothing more than metal frameworks. The tanks spread out to watch for signs of enemy positions.25
One troop of ‘B’ Squadron followed the Buffs toward the cemetery, situated between the village and the airport. Undoubtedly, this would be strongly defended with positions dug in around and inside of the tombs, crypts, and graves. At 0745 hours, a concealed antitank gun knocked out one Sherman. The infantry, engaged by numerous machine guns, were pinned down on the edge of the cemetery.26
Meanwhile, another troop of ‘B’ Squadron, commanded by Lieutenant Keith D. McCord, followed a company of Buffs through the cover of vineyards toward the village’s outskirts. About 300 yards from Aquino’s edge, an antitank gun opened fire from the left. The tanks quickly spun their turrets and blasted the gun apart. Suddenly, all three tanks were struck one after the other by a camouflaged .88-millimetre antitank gun firing at point-blank range from inside a concrete and steel pillbox positioned in the vines directly ahead of them.27 Although each tank was holed at least twice by the deadly accurate fire, the crews stuck to their guns, exchanging shot for shot until fires started breaking out inside. The men bailed out, all escaping except for Jack Phillips, who was never seen again. He was believed to have either perished in the tank or to have been taken prisoner.28
Seeing ‘B’ Squadron’s trouble, Major Millen sent a troop of ‘A’ Squadron across the railway to Highway 6 with orders to enter the town from the northwest. He hoped this might allow the troop to cut off German outposts there and loosen things up so that the infantry could enter Aquino. The troop commander drove his tank up the bank to get astride the railroad and came under immediate antitank fire. He hastily withdrew. Another ‘A’ Squadron troop tried to get over the railroad further east, but the commander’s tank was hit and knocked out. ‘C’ Squadron, meanwhile, moved up behind ‘A’ Squadron to provide covering fire and to protect the forward squadron’s right flank.29