by Mark Zuehlke
Back at divisional headquarters, Vokes received a call from Burns. The corps commander ordered a morning meeting to discuss the divisional commander’s plan. Burns promised that Brigadier E.C. (Johnny) Plow, the corps’s senior gunnery officer, would help Vokes’s staff develop an artillery fire plan. Leese, Burns reported, wanted the attack launched no later than May 22 and had guaranteed that the Canadians would be able to call on all the artillery at Eighth Army’s disposal.
Vokes and his staff had a plan sketched out by midnight. If Burns approved it in the morning, Vokes could issue the necessary orders immediately and believed everything would be ready to go sometime between 1000 hours on May 22 and 1000 hours on May 23. Thinking a night attack inadvisable and wanting to start before noon in hopes the battle would be concluded before nightfall, Vokes would request a start time of 0600 hours on May 23.
Vokes still hoped that the set-piece attack might prove unnecessary. There was a good chance that the French on the left flank might get far enough west to so threaten the Germans in the Liri Valley with encirclement that they would withdraw. He also intended to keep 1 CIB probing hard against Pontecorvo’s defences in hopes that a breach might be made. If this happened, Vokes would immediately shove the fresh 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade through, “instead of employing it in what promised to be a costly frontal assault.”27
As darkness fell, Captain Pierre Potvin struggled painfully to start walking toward the Canadian lines. Every movement was sheer agony and he could barely turn onto his side, let alone stand. It was difficult to keep focused on the task at hand. Visions of his parents passed through his mind. He thought of all the friends and family he would never see again. Death would come to him here alone. He would bleed to death, dying slowly without food or water. The more he dwelt on his family, the stronger Potvin felt. After a short prayer, he summoned every ounce of courage and resolve that he had left and pulled himself to his feet in the chest-high grain. About a hundred yards away, he saw a German soldier standing next to a motorcycle propped against a scrub oak. Beyond the German, a self-propelled gun was moving slowly forward, its commander shouting orders loudly to the crew as if he had no fear of being overheard. Potvin wondered why Garceau would allow the Germans to set up so close to his company perimeter without fighting back. Realizing he was exposed, Potvin cautiously lay down again and waited another hour for things to settle down.
While he was waiting, the captain heard rustling nearby in the grain. Someone was coming toward him. Drawing his heavy Colt .45 pistol, Potvin could barely hold the weapon in both hands. Pain shooting out from his broken right wrist made him grind his teeth. Whenever he moved the fingers of his left hand to improve his grip on the gun, blood gushed from the wounds in that arm. Would he even be able to pull the trigger?
Peering hard into the gathering darkness, Potvin saw a man crawling through the grain about ten feet away and with a wave of relief realized he wore khaki and a Van Doos shoulder patch. The other man was Private Réné Casavant from ‘B’ Company. His leg was broken, but he could move more quickly than Potvin by dragging himself along on his arms. Potvin could only crawl very slowly, in almost snakelike fashion, and so forced himself to stand. Finding he could walk, if only at a shuffle, Potvin set off at what he figured was about the pace of a turtle. Yet it was faster than Casavant could crawl. Knowing the two would inevitably become separated in the dark, Potvin told the private that if he kept going on the cart track it would lead to ‘D’ Company’s perimeter. The captain then set off at his own pace. He promised to send a stretcher-bearer once he reached the company lines.
Potvin’s clothes were in tatters. The left sleeve of his tunic had been cut up to bandage his wounds and the remnants flapped loose, threatening to snag on branches. Because of the bandages he had wrapped around his right wrist, he was unable to grip the flapping pieces strongly enough to tear them away. His suspenders had been cut when his men were treating the exit wound in his back, so Potvin was in constant peril of his pants falling around his ankles to trip him. When he tried to take the pants off, he was unable to remove his puttees, into which the cuffs were stuck. So he returned to shuffling along, clinging to the waist of his pants with one hand.
After midnight, Potvin reached what he believed was ‘D’ Company’s sector. Ahead lay nothing but devastation, visible in the light cast by several smouldering Sherman tanks. Bodies hung from the turrets and others lay stiffly beside the scorched vehicles. All were terribly burned. Infantry weapons and equipment were strewn about and Potvin saw several R22eR insignias on some of the equipment. He could not believe Garceau’s company would have left, so kept casting about for some sign of troopers hiding in slit trenches. Finally, he was within paces of the house where he had talked to Garceau during the advance. “Where are you going like that, Little Pot?” Garceau had asked. “Where have you gone, my friend?” Potvin wondered.
After waiting fruitlessly for Casavant to arrive, Potvin decided to continue along the track. But a tree knocked over by artillery soon blocked his path. Its thick foliage and heavy branches were impossible to climb over in his condition. Off in the darkness, an Italian Breda machine gun chattered, a sign that Germans were about. Dizzy and increasingly delirious, Potvin thought of returning to the little house and looking for some food and water there. He staggered back and pawed around in the cupboards, drawers, and among the equipment scattered on the floor. Finding some old nuts, he bit into them, but they crumbled between his teeth into dust. Dust to dust, nothing but dust, all was dust. Exhausted, he crawled into a corner under some collapsed ceiling beams and plunged into unconsciousness.28
14
OPERATION CHESTERFIELD
At 0900 hours on May 20, Lieutenant General Tommy Burns attended a conference at Eighth Army General Sir Oliver Leese’s headquarters to discuss the set-piece plan for attacking the Hitler Line. Leese confirmed that the Canadians would make the breakthrough, while XIII Corps maintained pressure in the Aquino area. To avoid diluting the supporting arms, Lieutenant General Sir Sydney Kirkman’s corps would seek only to tie down the 1st Parachute Division elements at Aquino. The Canadians would have priority call on all air force and artillery assets available to the Eighth Army, the latter numbering between 500 and 600 guns.1 Air support would be provided primarily by 239 (Fighter-Bomber) Wing, Desert Air Force.2
Controlling traffic on the extremely limited number of roads in the Liri Valley remained a serious problem. There was particular competition between the Canadians and XIII Corps over Highway 6, which provided “the only practicable route” for reaching both 1st Canadian Infantry Division’s right flank and XIII Corps’s left-flank division. Despite the fact that the Canadians were to carry out the offensive, Leese designated Highway 6 the sole preserve of XIII Corps. This left the Canadians with only secondary, mostly unpaved, roads or local farm tracks to link the rear area to the front lines. Burns offered no protest.3
Burns called Major General Chris Vokes and told him to report immediately for a briefing at corps headquarters, two miles east of the Gari River.4 Seething, Vokes and his driver drove through bumper-to-bumper traffic on the heavily congested roads. For days, the weather had been dry, making dust a continual problem, but the previous night had brought rain and a steady drizzle persisted. The moment Italian soil met water, slippery, mushy mud resulted. With the roof up on the Jeep and the wipers ineffectually scraping away at the muddy spray, Vokes faced the same poor visibility plaguing the many Royal Canadian Army Service Corps drivers on the tracks and dirt roads linking 1 CID to the rear. When his driver pulled out on Highway 6 to make better time, the Jeep was caught in a two-way traffic jam. Vokes noticed that most of these were XIII Corps’s vehicles. The ten-mile trip took three hours.
When Vokes stormed into Burns’s office, he was met by an equally angry lieutenant general who demanded to know what had taken him so long. Burns said he and his staff had been waiting for hours to begin the meeting. Vokes shot back that he wanted to know whether �
�any son of a bitch on his staff was aware the only road forward was jammed by trucks nose to arse.” Had Burns granted XIII Corps authority to monopolize the route with no form of control? Whatever the case, Vokes said, “someone’s ears should be burned off.”
Venting his frustrations to the fullest, Vokes kept rolling. He told Burns that “it was customary for corps commanders to go forward to the HQ of divisional commanders whose troops were in contact with the enemy, and not to call them to the rear.” By the time Vokes gave his presentation and spent another three hours returning to the front, he said, the better part of the day would be shot before he issued even one order necessary to get the attack plan under way. When Vokes finished his tirade, Burns merely scowled hard at him and strode in silence toward the briefing room. Vokes was sure that the rapport he had tried to build with his grim-faced superior was now completely broken, but he was unapologetic. He had “served under too many experienced British corps commanders to put up with an incompetent and inexperienced one, even though he was a Canadian.”5
In the meeting room, Vokes found not only Burns’s staff and 5th Canadian Armoured Division’s Major General Bert Hoffmeister present, but also Eighth Army Chief of Staff Major General George Walsh and other Eighth Army luminaries. In a one-hour oral presentation, Vokes described his plan. Second Canadian Infantry Brigade, supported by two 25th Royal Tank Brigade regiments, would carry out the attack. It would be a two-phase operation. In Phase One, two regiments of infantry supported by tanks would assault on a 2,000-yard front and sever the Aquino-Pontecorvo road. This would constitute the penetration of the Hitler Line main defences. In Phase Two, the left forward regiment and the reserve regiment, supported by all surviving tanks, would advance further west and capture the ridge lying between the Aquino-Pontecorvo road and the road running from Pontecorvo to Highway 6. A two-mile-deep, 2,000-yard-wide penetration of the German line would have been achieved by day’s end.
During each phase, the infantry and tanks would advance behind a rolling barrage provided by all Eighth Army 25-pounders with the fire lifting 100 yards every five minutes. As soon as possible, Vokes wanted all available medium and heavy artillery regiments to start hammering designated targets. This harassment would continue until the attack was launched.
Vokes said he needed between forty-eight and seventy-two hours to prepare, mostly because of the complex artillery plan and the need to bring sufficient ammunition up to the gun positions. Putting the knife into Burns a little, Vokes said that he could not possibly get back to his headquarters until 1600 hours to start issuing the necessary oral orders, so an attack beginning at 0600 hours on May 23 was hurried but feasible.
Although confident of his plan, Vokes was concerned about XIII Corps’s undertaking no significant operations at Aquino. The 2 CIB regiment on the attack’s right flank, Vokes pointed out, would be dangerously exposed to fire from the town and the defences anchored around it. These positions overlooked the proposed route of his attack, so their fire could rip into his flank. The only apparent solutions Vokes saw were to widen the artillery plan to constantly suppress the Aquino-area positions, or for the 78th Division to attack Aquino with sufficient determination to keep the Germans occupied throughout the Canadian breakthrough. Walsh and Burns assured him that XIII Corps would have the 78th do its part. Burns then approved Vokes’s plan.
As predicted, Vokes was not back at his headquarters until 1600 hours. He glared around his desk at the stacks of papers, most emanating from corps headquarters, and issued his first order. Divisional war diarist Captain S.P. Lachance wrote: “The GOC [General Officer Commanding] has laid down that in future all miscellaneous paper for his attention will be retained in ‘G’ Branch on a file. Any important information will be passed to him by word of mouth. Other information will be passed to him in quiet spells by the duty officer taking the file down to him, telling him what the contents are, and letting him see anything he is interested in. The reason for this is of course that the GOC is more than a little busy these days, and the amount of paper . . . is fantastic.”6
Having tried to minimize the impact of Burns’s continual paper barrage, Vokes set to work on what was now designated Operation Chesterfield. Just as he did so, however, Burns phoned to say that Leese wanted changes. Generally, Burns said in a follow-up written memo, Leese “thinks the scheme is sound, but from his experience of breaching the sort of defended line that you are tackling, feels we are not using enough infantry, and the front is not quite wide enough. He feels very strongly that you should use two brigades up — either three or four battalions in the line as you see fit.” The front should be expanded to 2,500 yards with the barrage extending 500 yards further on either side. Another tank regiment would be provided.
“I am sorry not to have raised this point before,” Burns wrote, “as your planning and preparations may have gone ahead on the other idea. But on thinking it over and hearing the Army Commander’s reason (and he has great experience in this type of battle), I am sure he is right. . . . The Army Commander emphasized that in this kind of battle things seldom go as well as one expects, and unless you have considerable depth, there is danger of the breakthrough failing.”7
Vokes altered his plan to accord with Leese’s recommendations. Even as he did so, however, Vokes continued to press 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade commander Brigadier Dan Spry to break through in the Pontecorvo area. If by 1200 hours on May 22, the brigade looked likely to succeed, Vokes would drive 2 CIB through 1 CIB. This, he was certain, would be the best way to crack the Hitler Line, encircle the German defenders, and minimize his own casualties.
To retain enough flexibility to permit a quick shift of 2 CIB, Vokes held it back from the front lines. He ordered 3 CIB to hold its current positions across the entire front, which included the ground through which 2 CIB was to attack. Although Vokes’s orders meant that both brigades would be realigning and moving battalions forward less than eighteen hours before launching a complex offensive, neither brigade commander objected.8 The chance that Spry might succeed at Pontecorvo and spare the division the price of a frontal offensive tantalized them all.
The Canadians faced a daunting task. Although the Hitler Line did not benefit from a natural obstacle, such as the Gari River had given the Gustav Line, the Todt labour units had compensated by constructing an interlocking web of manmade fortifications and obstacles. The line was formally designated a Sicherungs-hauptkampflinie (Main Defensive Battle Line) by German high command.9 Only three such lines existed in Italy: the Gustav Line, now severed; the Hitler Line; and the Gothic Line running from Pisa to Rimini. Once the Hitler Line was broken, there would be little chance the Germans could halt the Allied advance short of the Gothic Line.
Construction work had proceeded for five months under the watchful eye of Allied aerial reconnaissance. Thousands of photographs had been taken and scrutinized by intelligence specialists. Appreciations were drafted and redrafted as new information developed. By May 20, Eighth Army intelligence staff had a fair picture of the extent of fortifications and the strength of the German forces manning them.
While the Hitler Line was not fixed on a natural obstacle, it did use natural terrain to advantage. On the northern flank, it anchored into the mountains adjacent to Aquino. From Aquino, the line followed a slight rise in the ground running south to Pontecorvo, where the Liri River ran west to east and served to anchor that end of the line. It was believed that Aquino and Pontecorvo were heavily fortified, but that shortages of materials might have delayed full completion of this work.10 Between the Liri River and the point where the Forme d’Aquino passed through the Hitler Line just south of Aquino, the fortifications had an average depth of 900 yards. In front of the line, the ground was generally level for a distance of 1,000 yards. Lacking sufficient time to clear the scrub oak from this area, there were many pockets of natural cover that approached the barbed-wire line. The tall grain that had sprouted up provided natural cover for attacking forces and limited Germ
an fields of fire.11
The woods and tall grain were, of course, also obstacles to the offence, providing ample camouflage for the placing of snipers, machine-gunners, and antitank guns out front of the line — a tactic used to good effect against the Royal 22e Regiment’s assault. That attack had also run into a carefully prepared U-shaped killing ground that used the smallest advantage of height to bring fire against an attacker from three sides. Such positions were difficult to detect by aerial reconnaissance and the deliberately deceptive lack of obstacles offered in front of the horseshoe’s mouth served to suck attackers into a narrow area that could be saturated with small-arms and presighted artillery and mortar fire.
Fronting the entire line was a nineteen-foot-wide apron of barbed wire into which a mixture of German and Italian mines had been laced. The ground inside the wire was overgrown with tall grass that made spotting mines difficult. More mines were scattered in front of the wire and immediately behind. Intelligence staff believed that mine-laying operations had not begun until May 11, when it became apparent that the Gustav Line might be breached. Done in haste, many mines — particularly the larger antitank varieties — were visible to the naked eye. All too many, however, were properly concealed. The mines numbered in the thousands and dense fields of them crisscrossed any obvious tank approach.12 Because of the high grass and grain fields, aerial reconnaissance could not spot major minefields so that these could be avoided in the attack plan.13 As well, every night more mines were being sown. On the nights of May 18–19 and 19–20 alone, 3,000 fresh Teller and Italian antitank mines had been added to the deadly mix.14