by Mark Zuehlke
The entire regiment was now inside the wire and past the antitank ditch, holding a position about 300 yards wide on either side of the road and 400 yards deep. Although exposed to fire from the ridge to the north and from Pontecorvo, the position was relatively good for defence. Cover was provided by a number of scraggly oaks and poplars, and a few shallow gullies and ditches that could be used for shelters. Johnston established his forward headquarters in one of the concrete pillboxes.25 To their left, the regiment discovered a squadron of the Princess Louise Dragoon Guards reconnaissance regiment. ‘A’ Squadron had crashed boldly through the line shortly before the Highlanders’ attack. The squadron had rounded up about sixty prisoners and claimed “the distinction of being the first unit in the Eighth Army to penetrate the Hitler Line,” wrote the PLDG’s jubilant war diarist at day’s end.26 Johnston quickly incorporated this squadron into his defensive line.
As the men dug in, the Germans saturated the position with mortar, Nebelwerfer, and artillery fire. From his observation point, Major Mackenzie spotted the rapid six-at-a-time flashes that betrayed the presence of Nebelwerfers. He quickly plastered them with artillery concentrations and three launchers were destroyed. This relieved some of the pressure on the Highlanders. To the immediate north of their position, however, was a low ridge — the ridge they were to follow toward Point 106 — and German machine guns positioned there were kicking bullets up all through the area.
The tanks were still unable to get forward. To try moving up without the tanks would result in heavy casualties, but to remain in this small bridgehead for long without tank support would be equally costly. Johnston looked back anxiously toward the tanks and saw that they were hung up in a minefield on the road, which the engineers had failed to detect.
Complicating things was the wreck of a Canadian water truck blocking the centre of the road right where it crossed the antitank ditch. The truck was from the 3rd Field Regiment, Royal Canadian Artillery. It had been destroyed by a mine on the night of May 20 when its driver got lost and took the wrong road en route to the Liri River to load up with water. The front of the truck had been sheared off when the mine exploded. The driver, Gunner A. Stanyer, and his helper, Gunner Ernie Buss, had initially escaped injury. But as they tried to return to Canadian lines, Stanyer had been shot in the shoulder by a sniper. Buss had been forced to leave him in a ditch and flee for his life through a hail of bullets. He made it back safely and some hours later a patrol sent out by the PLDG had rescued Stanyer.27
In the current action, a Churchill trying to push past the wreck had struck an antitank box mine and been immobilized. This left the road completely blocked. Sappers from the tank brigade’s engineering company examined the ditch and declared that tanks could cross it safely if the heavier Churchills led and crumbled the banks to enable the Shermans to cross behind. The Churchills rolled off the road and started toward the ditch only to run afoul of a wide swath of well-concealed antitank mines. None made it through; all that tried were knocked out in a succession of explosions.28 Casualties among the tankers were high, with only two officers surviving. Major Moser, the squadron commander, was badly wounded, as was the other surviving officer.29
For ninety minutes, the Highlanders had waited in their narrow bridgehead for the tanks. Now, Johnston knew they would have to do the job alone. They certainly could not stay where they were. At about 1300 hours, he ordered Major John Clarke’s ‘A’ Company and Major Ed Rawlings’s ‘C’ Company to head north toward the ridge and Point 106. ‘D’ Company would follow behind, mopping up points of resistance bypassed by the leading companies. ‘B’ Company would hold the bridgehead until the RCR came up to occupy the position once the Highlanders reached Point 106.
As the 48th switched back to the offensive, I Canadian Corps commander Lieutenant General Tommy Burns watched the action from an observation point west of the Liri River on Monte San Maria, a mountain overlooking Pontecorvo. He had moved there in the early morning and been led to the observation point by General de Larminat of the French Corps. His vantage point was about a thousand yards from the road on which the tanks supporting the Highlanders were moving. Through binoculars, he had watched the tanks going into the attack. Occasionally, he would see one or two Highlanders ducking through the tall grass or emerging from a ditch, but was not surprised that most of the Glamour Boys, as the Toronto-raised militia unit was nicknamed, slithered toward the wire without being seen — infantry lived longer when invisible. Then the Panzerturm ripped into the tanks and Burns watched grimly as they burned.
By noon, with the tanks mired in the minefield fronting the anti-tank ditch and the infantry apparently pinned down, Burns had seen enough. An hour before Johnston attacked the northern ridge, the corps commander abandoned hope and returned to corps headquarters. Operation Chesterfield must, he decided, proceed.
From the outset, Burns had been lukewarm toward Vokes’s Pontecorvo-area attack. He felt it would mean “that attention would be distracted from the preparations for the three-battalion attack on the front running south from the Forme d’Aquino.” The best it would achieve was a limited breakthrough that would end up with 1 CIB being sucked into a street fight for Pontecorvo. Burns noted that “fighting to clear a town that was resolutely defended could be a long and hard business — as many examples from World War I and the experience of Ortona more recently had shown.”30 Reaching corps headquarters by afternoon, Burns phoned Vokes. Shift everything to the three-battalion attack against the north end of the Hitler Line, he said.
Vokes waffled. Things on the 1 CIB front were not as bad as the events Burns had witnessed. Since Burns had left his observation post, the Highlanders had made progress. Now, Burns hesitated. The clock was running. The 2nd and 3rd brigades were still not moving to their starting points for Operation Chesterfield. Could the Highlanders succeed or not? Burns thought not, but about the time he might have closed Vokes down General Leese phoned to say that the 1 CIB operation should continue. “It would be valuable in any case, whether the enemy was intending to evacuate the line or to stay,” Leese said. However, even as he told Burns to let Vokes continue, Leese “cautioned against getting too involved in this subsidiary operation in prejudice of the main Chesterfield Operation.”31
According to the original ad hoc plan developed as an alternative to Operation Chesterfield, if 1 CIB had not achieved a major breakthrough by noon on May 22, the other divisional brigades would move to their Operation Chesterfield assembly points. Once that process started, any success achieved by 1 CIB would be moot, as the other brigades could not realign in time to exploit the situation. Vokes, Burns, and Leese were all pausing, hoping for a miracle that only one regiment could win — the 48th Highlanders of Canada.
The moment the Highlanders left their position opposite the antitank ditch, they entered a perfectly flat wheat field overlooked from two sides by the fifty- to seventy-foot-high ridge. Crouching, Major Clarke and Major Rawlings led their companies forward at a run. The men were hunched as low as they could manage and still run, praying the tall grain would conceal them. From the crest of the ridge, German machine-gunners sprayed the field with bullets and brought heavy direct fire to bear on any flash of khaki.
It took only a few minutes for the German gunners to hit ‘C’ Company with such weight of fire that the men could only throw themselves down and hug the ground. Rawlings, hoping to reach the antitank ditch and use it to advance safely on the ridge, ordered them to crawl to the east. That plan was quickly abandoned when the first men entering the ditch drew fire from two steel-and-concrete two-man pillboxes positioned so the machine-gunners could fire down the ditch’s length. Sergeant Edsell Allen, who had been in the lead, was killed by a burst of fire.
With no choice but to stay in the open, Rawlings spread his men out across a wide front of the field and led them forward. They tried to advance, but it was soon obvious that the German gunners would wipe out the company long before it reached the ridge’s forward slope. Reali
zing the attack was futile, Rawlings signalled for his men to go to ground and dig in where they were.
On the left flank, ‘A’ Company met heavy fire coming from the ridge and from three houses bordering a narrow track that led to the ridge. Several MG42s and many rifles fired from the windows and doors of the houses. Major John Clarke and the leading platoons hit the ground. “It’s sheer murder to raise our heads,” Clarke yelled into his radio.
The tall young officer also knew there was no alternative but to raise their heads. They were too exposed to stay where they were. By platoons, the company tried jumping ahead. Each platoon moved only a few feet at a time before the German fire started to become too accurate. While that platoon burrowed into the ground, the one opposite set off to play the deadly game. Clarke realized the forward platoons could not do this for very long before the Germans would anticipate their next moves. They were not going to reach either the houses or a low spur off the ridge that he had been aiming for. Looking behind, he saw that the reserve platoon was taking little fire. Because of earlier casualties, a mere corporal, Richard A. Riley, commanded it. Clarke ordered Riley to conduct a left-flank rush on the houses.
With barely twenty men, Riley led a wild charge toward the houses. They closed on the buildings so quickly that the Germans inside had no time to react and shift their fire to meet the threat. The Highlanders poured grenades and bullets through the windows and doors, then burst inside and quickly killed, captured, or drove off the defending Germans.
From the houses, Riley and his platoon attacked the spur leading to the top of the ridge. Free of the fire coming from the houses, the other platoons joined the advance. The machine guns and mortars on the ridge, however, soon halted all of ‘A’ Company’s platoons short of the spur, except for Riley’s. Having dug in frantically atop the spur, they managed to fend off two determined counterattacks. Despite repeated efforts, Clarke and the other platoons could not reach Riley’s position.
Johnston saw that the attack was collapsing. There was no sense in throwing ‘D’ Company into the maw, for it had no room to manoeuvre and would just end up pinned down like ‘A’ and ‘C’ companies. There was nothing for it but to tell Rawlings and Clarke to hold where they were until nightfall. They would then disengage and fall back to the bridgehead, where the rest of the regiment was organizing to meet counterattacks. Having won a toehold inside the Hitler Line, Johnston was determined to keep it.
Several men in ‘A’ Company had been wounded during its beleaguered advance and at least four were scattered through the tall grain, too badly wounded to make it back to the bridgehead on their own. Knowing these men might die during the night if they went unrecovered, stretcher-bearer Private Alfred Glendinning undertook a personal mission to bring them in. The distance across open ground back to the bridgehead, where a forward aid post had been established, was about 400 yards. He and another man made two trips, carrying a wounded soldier out on a stretcher each time. On every journey, the grain field was swept by heavy machine-gun fire and subjected to random mortaring. Glendinning made two more trips to the front lines, both times carrying a wounded man out on his back. Returning to ‘A’ Company once again, he was wounded en route. Exhausted and bleeding, the private stumbled to the aid station.32
Just before nightfall, a troop of Shermans from ‘C’ Squadron of the 142nd Royal Tank Regiment managed to negotiate through the mines to cross the ditch and enter the bridgehead. They arrived too late to affect the outcome of the day’s fighting, but Johnston hoped they would prove valuable in the morning. At 0600 hours, he planned to resume the offensive on Point 106. His attack would go in at the same time that 2 CIB and 3 CIB kicked off the main Operation Chesterfield assault. Johnston thought that the two attacks would serve to take pressure off each other and increase the likelihood of one or both of them succeeding. The commander of ‘C’ Squadron promised to get the rest of the mixed Sherman and Churchill force into the bridgehead before morning.
When night closed in, the survivors of ‘A’ and ‘C’ companies crept out of their slit trenches and cautiously returned to the bridgehead perimeter. The Highlanders had paid a high blood-price for the tenuous position they held inside the Hitler Line: nine killed and thirty-three wounded.33
Commander-in-Chief Southwest Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring telephoned Tenth Army commander Generaloberst Heinrich von Vietinghoff late on the evening of May 22 to congratulate him on the 90th Panzer Grenadier Division’s determined stand against Johnston’s attack. He asked von Vietinghoff “to convey my full appreciation to the troops of Baade and Heidrich.”
Vietinghoff said, “There was not much action today on Heidrich’s front, but Baade fought brilliantly.”
“Yes, in their case one could cry with admiration; in the case of others from rage.”34 Kesselring referred to the 26th Panzer Division, which he had detached from Fourteenth Army at Anzio on May 19. This division was to have shored up the defence facing the Corps Expéditionnaire Français, south of the Liri River. He had assumed that the 26th Panzers “could reach a position of considerable natural strength by the morning of 20 May and would thus be able to close the gap.” That position was 1,542-foot-high Monte Leucio — a mountain that stood alone on the valley floor, less than one mile south of the Liri River and about three miles west of Pontecorvo. If the French could be stopped east of that natural obstacle, the crumbling German southern flank might be restored.
To Kesselring’s dismay, Fourteenth Army’s commander General-oberst Eberhard von Mackensen disobeyed. He delayed issuing the 26th Panzers’ movement orders while simultaneously engaging in an argument with Kesselring about the wisdom of removing his last reserves. Kesselring sympathized, but told von Mackensen that his army encircling the Anzio beachhead was in danger of being struck from behind by the U.S. Fifth Army. Blocking the French advance might rescue the situation, but doing so would only be possible if the 26th Panzer Division were shifted.
Arriving at the 26th Panzer Division’s new headquarters on May 21, Kesselring realized that it had “come up too late and had offered a fight in unprepared positions — with calamitous consequences. . . . An excellent defensive zone had been thrown away and the enemy handed an almost impregnable position.” With Monte Leucio now firmly in French hands, Kesselring thought that the “whole situation had thus become more difficult, but it was not yet irreparable.” He ordered von Mackensen to take units from the Anzio beachhead and close the gap opening on the southern flank of the Liri River. Ever optimistic, Kesselring maintained that the Allied drive from the east toward Anzio and Rome could be checked. All that was required was for everyone to fight with sufficient coordination and determination.35
As he arrayed his meagre force to meet the inevitable major offensive that was sure to come next morning, Generalleutnant Ernst-Günther Baade, commander of the 90th Panzer Grenadiers, faced a rapidly deteriorating situation. The fighting since May 20 had cost him almost 20 percent of his total infantry strength. There were no reserves to draw on. Instead, he had to ask 1st Parachute Division’s General Richard Heidrich to lengthen his line 985 feet to the south, so Baade could slide all his units south to shore up the crumbling 44th Field Replacement Battalion. As a result of casualties, only 875 infantry defended the line facing the 1st Canadian Infantry Division on the night of May 22. A fifty-man-strong company of the 2nd Battalion of the 3rd Parachute Regiment held the most northerly sector. The sector most likely to be attacked was held by two battalions of the 361st Regiment, each fielding only 150 men — a reduction in strength of about 25 percent owing to casualties. North of Pontecorvo, the 576th Regiment had two battalions with a total remaining strength of 325, compared to 375 on May 20. Hardest hit by the fighting of May 22 was the 44th Field Replacement Battalion, which had been chopped from 360 to 150 by casualties and desertions.
Added to the infantry strength, of course, were the men serving in the supporting artillery, Nebelwerfer, antitank gun, Panzerturm, tank, and engineering units. The
se could fill a partial infantry role, if necessary, and their firepower gave the line the punch that would determine whether or not it could be held. In terms of raw numbers, these units added another 400 to 500 men to the German strength. Like their counterparts in the infantry, however, the supporting arms had also suffered heavy casualties since May 20. At least one had possibly been eliminated. This was the platoon from the 190th Engineer Battalion that had been positioned in front of Pontecorvo. On the evening of May 22, I Canadian Corps intelligence staff reported it as “wiped out in toto.”36 It was a thin line of Germans that prepared to meet the Canadian onslaught.
16
THE HARDEST THING TO WATCH
They were three unhappy, even angry men. But each knew that there was nothing to do but soldier on. Lieutenant colonels Rowan Coleman, Sydney Thomson, and Cameron Ware believed that with Operation Chesterfield they risked sending their men into a slaughterhouse. The planning, they knew, was not primarily at fault. In fact, some of the planning had been brilliantly executed. They were certainly going in with the full support of the Eighth Army’s artillery and there would be excellent air support on hand. There would be no shortage of bombs and shells hammering down when the 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade marched toward the Hitler Line. There would be tanks, too. All in all, they would be undertaking a classic Eighth Army set-piece attack with all stops pulled out to ensure success. Or so they were promised.