by Mark Zuehlke
But how the hell did a brigade’s regimental commanders plan and execute a major attack when, one day before, it still remained unclear whether the operation was on or off? The brigade was supposed to move toward the start-line positions at noon on May 22 and prepare for the attack to begin at 0600 hours on May 23. Noon came with no orders. Instead, Major General Chris Vokes kept telling Brigadier Graeme Gibson to keep his regiments in readiness for a sudden shift south to exploit through 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade. Never noted for demonstrating personal initiative, Gibson did as directed. That left his regimental commanders to prowl their respective headquarters and hope a decision was made soon that stuck.
Lieutenant Colonel Cameron Ware, commander of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, spent the day drafting one plan and then shelving it in favour of another. First, he was to carry out the attack on the right flank against the Hitler Line. Then Gibson phoned and said Ware should prepare to march south to charge through a breach there. An hour later, the phone jangled and the old plan was reinstated, only to have the 1 CIB scheme resurrected thirty minutes later.1 The same thing was happening at the headquarters of the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada and the Loyal Edmonton Regiment, where Lieutenant Colonel Syd Thomson and Lieutenant Colonel Rowan Coleman respectively duplicated Ware’s efforts and grew increasingly frustrated and worried.
For all intents and purposes, nobody from 2 CIB had seen the ground on either flank. If they went with the left option, this mattered less because they would be punching through an existing breach in the line. There they would just go hell-bent for leather as far as possible. But on the right, the Hitler Line was an unknown bastion. There had been no opportunity for reconnaissance patrols to test the strength of the German wire or to probe into the defensive line behind. No points had been identified for tanks to break through and the engineers had been unable to lift mines to clear the way for either the armour or the infantry. Only the start line had been taped, so they knew precisely from where to begin the attack.
Finally, the right-flank attack was confirmed at 1600 hours. This left the three regiments only fourteen hours to conduct whatever preparations they could in the way of mine clearing and personal reconnaissance of the line. Like his counterparts, Syd Thomson still knew little about what opposition his Seaforths would face. He had received conflicting reports on which enemy units held the line and there was much uncertainty about their dispositions. Somehow the intelligence revealing that the line was held by the tough 90th Panzer Grenadiers never filtered down to his level. The only sure knowledge Thomson had was the width and height of the barbed-wire field. He also knew that beyond the field were many weapon pits and slit trenches, but what these contained was uncertain. This uncertainty also existed with regard to the disposition of antitank weapons. Worse, “it was at this time believed that the enemy intended to make only a delaying action and that a stubborn resistance would not be encountered.”2
During the day, Thomson, Coleman, and Ware crossed paths or had opportunities to discuss the developments by phone. They shared their uneasiness about the manner in which the final preparations were coming together and the brigadier’s seemingly laissez-faire attitude. The three men were veteran infantry officers who had worked their way up to regimental command positions after serving as company-level combat officers. Ware was the most experienced. The thirty-year-old officer had joined the militia as a boy soldier of fourteen in 1927 and entered Royal Military College in 1931. Upon graduation, he had joined the PPCLI. The beginning of the war found him already a captain and he soon earned major’s crowns. Since becoming a PPCLI officer, Ware’s dream had been to command the regiment. That dream was realized during the Sicily campaign when, on August 9, 1943, then 2 CIB Brigadier Chris Vokes sacked PPCLI commander Lieutenant Colonel Bob Lindsay and gave Ware the regiment. Since then, he had led it with great competence, winning a Military Cross during the fierce fighting in the Moro River phase of the Ortona Battle at a hamlet called Villa Rogatti.3
Whereas Ware’s military path had always been directed toward membership in the club of Permanent Force officers, Thomson had never envisioned becoming an officer. Born on November 14, 1914, in Salmon Arm, British Columbia, Thomson had joined the local Rocky Mountain Rangers militia unit in 1931 as a private. Among other jobs, Thomson used to thin apple trees for a family whose son, Ed Turner, was scheduled to report for officer training days before war broke out in 1939. With the apple harvest in full swing, Turner was lifting a box full of fruit and badly strained his back — an injury that caused permanent damage. Thomson by this time was a sergeant, so he was called up instead of Turner to attend the officers-training course. With the outbreak of war, the Rocky Mountain Rangers served primarily as a feeder-regiment to the Seaforths, so Thomson was transferred into that regiment along with a number of other men from the Okanagan and Shuswap valleys. When the Seaforths hit the beach in Sicily, Thomson was a company commander. He was wounded on the first day, but returned to duty five weeks later. During the march up the Italian boot, a sharp fight at a crossroads named Decarta won him a Military Cross. When Bert Hoffmeister was promoted to command of 2 CIB, Thomson took over the regiment in time to lead it through the December 1943 fighting. For his bravery during the Ortona street battle, Thomson won the Distinguished Service Order.4 He also proved himself tremendously popular with the rank-and-file Seaforths.
Coleman was new to regimental command, having only been promoted to lieutenant colonel’s rank on May 5 and assigned to command the Edmontons. The son of Canadian Pacific Railway president D.C. Coleman, he had served with distinction as a PPCLI company commander during the Sicily campaign. On July 22, 1943, Coleman had won the Military Cross for leading a flying column of troops riding on the backs of tanks that burst into Leonforte and relieved the embattled Loyal Edmonton Regiment, caught in a bloody house-to-house battle for the ancient hilltop town. Coleman’s appointment had come as a surprise to the Edmonton regiment, which believed Major Jim Stone had earned the command as reward for his brilliant performance in the Ortona street battle. However, Stone was considered insufficiently trained at regimental command level and, consequently, he departed on May 5 to attend a Unit Commanders’ course in Britain.5
Operation Chesterfield’s attack plan called for the PPCLI and Seaforths to lead the assault, with the PPCLI on the brigade’s right flank opposite Aquino. Once the PPCLI reached its objectives, the Edmontons would pass through and widen the breach sufficiently to enable 5th Canadian Armoured Division to drive its combined tank-and-infantry regiments west toward Rome. Coleman and Ware were, therefore, mutually concerned about the terrain through which their regiments would move.
Both commanders thought there were too many unknown factors at play on the right flank. On their immediate right flank, the Forme d’Aquino followed a gentle northwest curve before turning sharply toward Aquino about 500 yards behind the Hitler Line’s wire. A deep gully through which the river ran precluded any tank operations north of it and also protected them from German armoured counterattack from that direction. But it also greatly narrowed the good tank country within their line of advance, so that between the PPCLI’s right flank and its left-hand boundary with the Seaforths there was only a front of about 150 yards suited to armour.6
This meant that tank and infantry coordination must be very tight to ensure that the tanks had adequate protection while still retaining room to manoeuvre. To effect this, Ware met with Lieutenant Colonel Holton of the 51st Royal Tank Regiment. Since the Germans were shelling the tank harbour at the time, the two officers conducted their planning session lying under a Churchill tank where its body and tracks provided some shelter. The PPCLI and 51st RTR commanders had trained together from May 8–11 near Lucera, in preparation for a combined operation against the Hitler Line. They had developed a good rapport during that training operation. Ware and Holton hammered out five report lines between their forming-up point and the wire, which corresponded to tactical features in interval
s of about 300 yards. They would follow the barrage forward in bounds from one point to another.
As Ware and his Intelligence Officer walked back through the West Nova Scotia Regiment’s lines en route to their regimental headquarters, an anxious-looking PPCLI adjutant, Captain R.G.M. Gammell, met them. Operation Chesterfield was definitely on, he told Ware, but 51st RTR was being sent elsewhere. The North Irish Horse would instead provide 2 CIB’s tank support. It was a regiment unknown to 2 CIB. ‘A’ Squadron would support the PPCLI. Ware rushed to the Irish regiment’s harbour and briefed its commander on his and Holton’s plan. He also arranged for ‘A’ Squadron’s troop commanders to confer with his own infantry company commanders. This way, at least everyone should know who was whom and the tankers might understand some basic elements of the plan.7
Ware was dismayed to learn that the 51st RTR was being shifted to provide two squadrons of tanks to support the Carleton and York Regiment’s attack on Operation Chesterfield’s left flank. Its remaining squadrons would stand in reserve, ready to move up with the Edmontons. He was completely baffled as to why the 51st RTR was given this task rather than the North Irish Horse, for the Carleton and York Regiment had worked with neither armoured regiment in the past. There was, however, nothing to be done about it. Orders regarding which tank regiment went where came down from Eighth Army headquarters and, once issued, were sacrosanct.8
The regiments of 2 CIB moved toward forming-up positions at 1715 hours and by 1930 hours most were in place. As they moved in, the West Nova Scotia Regiment, which had been holding this sector of the line, side-slipped to the south to a position in reserve behind the Carleton and York Regiment. This placed the three regiments tasked with the initial assault in a continuous line, with the PPCLI on the extreme northern flank, the Seaforths in the centre, and the Carleton and York Regiment on the southern flank. The Edmontons were in reserve immediately behind the PPCLI. Before midnight, the tank squadrons joined their assigned infantry regiments. The infantry hunkered down in slit trenches. Some tried to sleep; others went over their weapons one more time and then repeated the process. Letters were written, prayers offered.
Ware and Coleman were still trying to limit the degree of danger into which their regiments would march at dawn. The ground to the north of the Forme d’Aquino was slightly higher than that through which the two regiments would be advancing. Operation Chesterfield called for the 78th Division to conduct a feint into this area to prevent the 1st Parachute Division from bringing flanking fire against the PPCLI and Edmontons. If that feint failed to develop or did not soak off the German fire, the two Canadian regiments would face a deadly situation. Nothing Ware or Coleman had seen so far reassured them that their right flank was secure.
Finally, the two officers decided they had to discuss the matter with their brigadier. They wanted an assurance that the paratroopers around Aquino would be suppressed, either by artillery high-explosive rounds or by smokescreens. Then it would matter less whether the 78th Division succeeded with its feint.9 The two men arrived at Gibson’s headquarters just after midnight to find the brigadier already in bed and not wishing to be disturbed. When they pressed the matter, “a sleepy voice informed the officers that no further changes could be made.”10
While Ware and Coleman returned from brigade headquarters, small patrols of infantry and engineers slipped toward the German wire. One, led by the Royal Canadian Engineers Lieutenant Kenyon, consisted of a combined force of sappers and Seaforth Highlander riflemen, who were soon lying in the grass near a clutch of Germans sitting around a fire. They crawled past the Germans toward a house and spotted two immobilized British tanks next to it that had been knocked out during the failed Royal 22e Regiment attack of May 19. Several Germans were moving around in the vicinity of the house, precluding any investigation of the field stretching out west of it. Alternately crawling or moving forward in a crouch, the men made slow progress. It was difficult for Lance Sergeant Lloyd, armed with the mine detector, to work efficiently. When they did manage to sweep the ground, there was no sign of any mines.
As they moved through a hedge and into the last stretch of open country running up to the wire, they heard German tanks rumbling up and down the Pontecorvo-Aquino road and along an intersecting road that crossed through the wire to pass their position. That was going to have to be good enough. Kenyon “assumed that these roads would be safe for the advance of our own tanks” and the men warily withdrew. The best they had ascertained was that no obvious obstacles or minefields would hold up the tanks.11
“Tomorrow I hope and pray that the Canadians will break the Adolf Hitler line,” Eighth Army commander General Sir Oliver Leese wrote to his wife late on May 22. “Then we shall have finished with organized lines for a bit — they are expensive to deal with.”12
To I Canadian Corps Lieutenant General Tommy Burns he sent a message to distribute to the troops on his behalf. “I am confident,” Leese wrote, “that you will add the name of the Adolf Hitler Line to those epics of Canadian battle history — Sanctuary Wood; Vimy; Ortona. Good luck to you all.”13 Burns added no words of his own to the message. He had no interest in boosting morale through laudatory messages. The men would do their duty, just as he did. That would determine whether tomorrow’s battle became a national battlefield icon or a tragic footnote. Many would die, even more would be wounded, and he would not be troubled by guilt for having sent them into harm’s way. Burns believed that “a soldier who has reached the rank of general and commands a fighting formation is probably a fighter by nature. If he has no stomach for fighting he will not long remain in his post. . . . A general has spent most of his life training himself for the moment when he must make decisions — especially the decision to attack and destroy the enemy when the occasion is favourable. He has done it in the various tactical exercises, which have prepared him for the real thing. So he will take the action which he has been trained to take, his mind will be concentrated on victory, and he will hope that casualties will be few.” If the general has done his job properly, no more need be said. That job, Burns was certain, was “to strain every nerve to ensure that the action is planned and prepared to give the very best chance for success, success without paying a heavy price in blood.”14
As the evening progressed, 1st Canadian Infantry Division commander Major General Chris Vokes grew increasingly uneasy about 2 CIB’s right flank. In the afternoon, he had set up shop in a new divisional tactical headquarters positioned in a recently abandoned enemy dugout burrowed into the side of a sand hill. This put him within a 500-yard radius of all the brigades that would be involved in the attack and provided his chief divisional gunnery officer, Brigadier Bill Ziegler, with excellent line and radio communications to both the infantry and artillery regiments that would be providing supporting fire. The tall, bespectacled Calgary native was chiefly responsible for the attack’s intricately complex artillery program. He was also a neophyte, who had never before put together anything like it. Since the warning order for Operation Chesterfield had been issued, Ziegler and his staff had been housed in the dugout. They worked straight through, with no breaks, little sleep, barely time for the occasional bite to eat. By the time the guns spoke just before dawn, Ziegler would have been awake for seventy-two hours.
What he was putting together was possibly the most complex artillery program to date in the history of the war on the western front. The program involved a series of massive concentrations on selected targets, which had to dovetail with a creeping barrage moving 100 yards every five minutes during the attack’s first phase and then 100 yards every three minutes in the second phase. Also tossed into the soup, but directed at specific targets, was a steady harassing fire of 1,000 shells every hour that had started with lesser rates of fire two days earlier. When German mortar and artillery positions were identified, they were logged in, assigned a map reference, and subjected to counter-battery fire. The same treatment was visited upon suspected supply routes, depots, and headquarters. Mist
akes could be costly and Ziegler worked hard to eliminate them. A wrong map reference could bring friendly fire down on the advancing infantry and tanks, so every reference was checked and double-checked. Sufficient munitions had to be available on the gun lines and, under the guise of the harassing fire, the guns had to be registered on the targets that each would take under fire during the attack. In all, 810 guns were available. Of these, 76 medium and heavy guns were tasked exclusively with counter-battery fire missions and 52 guns and mortars were assigned to counter mortar fire. That left 682 guns of all types for the divisional supporting fire plan.15
Additionally, 239 Wing, Desert Air Force would be in support. This wing had six squadrons with a total combined strength of 72 Kittyhawk and Mustang bombers. If needed, the full resources of 12 Tactical Air Command and all other DAF wings had been promised. The new tactical deployment of planes into “cab ranks” whereby six aircraft circled over the battlefield, ready to sweep down on targets as reported to them, would be available twice during the day. Each cab rank would be on hand for two to three hours.16
That evening, Vokes added a new complication to Ziegler’s artillery recipe by raising his fears about the right flank. If the 78th Division did its job, the danger would be minimal. But Vokes knew there was the risk that “the commander of that division and indeed his corps commander might both interpret the meaning of a ‘strong pressure’ to . . . making faces only.” If this proved the case, Vokes asked Ziegler, could he quickly bring “an overwhelming weight of medium and heavy gun fire on the enemy defences around Aquino?” Ziegler said that as long as the PPCLI could quickly provide targeting information, he could bring enough guns to bear without jeopardizing the overall plan.