The Liri Valley

by Mark Zuehlke

  Private Edmund Andrew Kidd found himself the only company stretcher-bearer who was neither dead nor wounded. While tending to one casualty, he was struck by mortar fragments. Ignoring his injuries, Kidd dressed the wounds of two more men and then started crawling forward to help others. With bullets and shrapnel snapping all around him, Kidd tended and evacuated six more men to safety. He remained with the wounded until his own condition became so critical that he was ordered to report to the Regimental Aid Post. He won a Military Medal.

  Coleman, too, refused evacuation. Instead, he set up a forward tactical headquarters in the ditch where he lay wounded. The only tanks that were up near the wire were three disabled by mines, but still possessing operational machine guns. At 1100 hours, a Mark V Panther tank appeared about 500 yards ahead of ‘A’ Company and engaged the three helpless tanks. In minutes, they were burning.

  When Major Archie MacDonald came up to the rear regimental headquarters, Coleman handed command to him. MacDonald started up to Coleman’s position, stopping to compare notes with Ware en route. Both MacDonald and Ware recognized that much of the fire cutting their two regiments to pieces came from Aquino. MacDonald, who had a functioning radio, called for smoke to be fired along this flank. After leaving Ware’s headquarters, MacDonald had to run across a field to reach Coleman. Just as he started out, a sniper bullet hit him in the heel. MacDonald radioed Coleman with a report on the situation and provided the location of Ware’s headquarters, suggesting Coleman withdraw there. He then limped to regimental headquarters and relinquished command to Major F.H. McDougall.

  By noon, ‘A’ Company, now commanded by the wounded Lange, extricated its forward sections from the wire and formed a circular defensive position in the open, just in front of the wire. Coleman, meanwhile, tried to crawl with his tactical headquarters back to a small gully, but he soon became too exhausted to continue. The headquarters staff carried him out to the safety of the gully, where they evacuated him by Jeep to the Regimental Aid Post.22

  While the Edmonton attack ran out of steam, the two leading companies of the PPCLI were still well inside the wire. The only officer left standing in ‘A’ Company was its commander, Major “Bucko” Watson. With him were just five men, one of them a lance corporal. They paused next to a derelict German tank, so Watson could attempt to gather together more of his company. Men were spread out all over the battleground, moving about in ones and twos. Some were going forward, others backward. Many were wounded and having difficulty moving in any direction.

  Suddenly, the supposedly derelict tank fired its main gun toward the Canadian lines. With no weapons capable of knocking it out, Watson and his party scampered away before the crew realized their presence. In the confusion, Watson and the lance corporal became separated from the others. Then the lance corporal was killed. Watson, himself twice wounded, carried on toward the objective. He reached it alone and could find no trace of his men.23 Some scattered elements had, however, reached the Aquino-Pontecorvo road. Bits and pieces of PPCLI-marked equipment and gear were strewn around. Whether the men who lost the stuff had been taken prisoner or had withdrawn, Watson had no idea. Suffering from loss of blood and exhaustion himself, he was too weak to return to the wire. Watson crawled into a large shell hole, where he stayed until he was found the following day by a PPCLI patrol.24

  At divisional headquarters, the reports coming in from 2 CIB proved that the promised feint by the 78th Division in front of Aquino had failed to materialize. Yet shortly before noon, Major General Chris Vokes received a telephone call from the 78th Division’s commander asking that he refrain from directing any artillery fire toward Aquino, “as his troops were about to enter the village.” Vokes didn’t believe a word of this. If that were true, why was 2 CIB taking so much fire on its right flank? He sent a liaison officer to determine the exact position of the 78th’s most forward troops. The officer soon returned to say they were at least 1,000 yards from the Hitler Line and not moving. Vokes told artillery Brigadier Bill Ziegler that he needed him “to bring down on the enemy defences about Aquino a concentration of fire from all the heavy and medium artillery regiments within range of the target.”25

  Because he had no specific targets, Ziegler decided to throw everything he could into the general vicinity of Aquino. He called the commander of I Canadian Corps’s artillery, Brigadier E.C. Plow, at 1227 hours and requested a “William” target designation for Aquino. This was a request that all divisional, corps, and army artillery regiments within range bring their guns to bear. Plow pulled out the stops. Thirty-three minutes later, the guns were ready. Precisely at 1300 hours, 668 guns from nineteen field, nine medium, and two heavy regiments, as well as several other batteries, fired. In little more than a minute, 3,509 rounds amounting to a total weight of ninety-two tons of shells crashed down on Aquino. The fire from that flank lessened significantly thereafter.26 Ziegler’s “William” target was the first time in World War II that all the guns of an entire army had been directed against a single compact target area.27

  Even though the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada were screened from much of the Aquino fire, their attack had also run into trouble the moment it kicked off. The same counter-barrage that had caught the PPCLI also fell upon the Seaforths.

  As the men had formed up on the start line, twenty-four-year-old Sergeant Harry Rankin pondered what it meant to go into an attack outfitted as a human bomb. Rankin and several other pioneers had been assigned to a section armed with either bangalore torpedoes or beehive bombs. Several such sections were to rush up to the wire ahead of the infantry platoons. Those men armed with bangalore torpedoes, which were long pipes filled with explosives, would thrust them deep into the wire. When the torpedoes were ignited, they would rip holes in the barbed wire through which the infantry could then pass. The pioneers carrying beehive bombs were to lead the way. Weighing about five pounds and consisting of plastic explosive crammed into a beehive-shaped metal casing, the bombs were to be placed on top of concrete pillboxes and the fuses lit. The bomb, whose shape focused the force of the exploding charge, should rip a hole in the pillbox and kill the Germans inside. At least that was the plan some officer had dreamed up. Rankin was dubious because nobody knew how thick the concrete was or whether it would be possible to get on top of one without getting killed.

  Standing next to him on the start line was a nineteen-year-old private, who was the batman for a new officer, Lieutenant Don S. McLaughlin. Rankin, who had enlisted in 1939 at the same age as this boy, kept forgetting his name. It was hard to remember names of soldiers who were new and the lieutenant and his batman had just arrived on May 14. There was a tendency for the old hands to avoid learning the names of new men or getting to know them well, because so many didn’t last long. The boy was nervous, fear etched all over his face. It was painfully obvious that he had no idea what was going on. Rankin said, “Stick with me. Follow me. You’ll be okay.” The whistles blew and the leading companies, accompanied by the pioneer assault sections, rushed forward.

  Rankin had the beehive strapped across the small of his back with some mercury-fulminate igniters and short lengths of fuse stuffed in a front pocket. If any shrapnel hit the bomb or the igniters, Rankin figured they would never find a piece of him to bury. Explosions burst all around. Suddenly, something hit him hard between the shoulder blades. He was on the ground, then back on his feet. Blood poured from a batch of shrapnel punctures across the top of his back. The young batman lay dead in a pool of blood.

  Stumbling toward the rear, Rankin passed a young Canadian with one leg severed at the hip and the stump was lying in a two-inch-deep pool of blood. The man’s eyes were open and sightless. Rankin thought how easily it could have been him lying there dead rather than walking out with a wound that would heal.

  In No. 7 Platoon of ‘A’ Company, Corporal Charles Monroe Johnson led one of the platoon’s three sections. Johnson was an American from Tennessee. He had enlisted in the Canadian army in 1940 because it seemed
the United States was going to steer clear of the war against fascism and he thought that wrong. Lieutenant Don McLaughlin was in charge of the platoon, but had made it clear that he was just along for the ride. Sergeant Jim Needham, who had been with the regiment since December 1939, was in charge. Johnson liked that. The last thing anyone needed in a tough battle was a new lieutenant who thought he knew it all. That sort of attitude got lieutenants killed quickly and usually a lot of good men died too.

  There would obviously be a fair amount of dying this day. The cacophony of noise buffeting Johnson was terrific. He had never seen such heavy German fire. The machine guns firing at them were drowned out by the sounds of shells and mortar rounds exploding, both their own and the Germans’. Only the flicker of tracers arcing through the air, almost lazily, told Johnson they were taking machine-gun fire. The platoon advanced with rifles at high port across their chests to keep them out of the dew-wet wheat. Johnson saw a figure in the top of an olive tree ahead of him and fired at it from the hip. Several other men did the same. Nobody stopped to see if the shots killed the German sniper. Their orders were to stop for nothing, to get through the wire and take out the emplacements behind.

  “Get through this barrage, get through this barrage, get through this barrage,” Johnson repeated. He fired at another sniper in a tree out front of No. 9 Platoon and then saw the man brought down by a burst from a Thompson. The momentary distraction almost caused him to tumble into a slit trench in which two dead Germans lay in a pool of coagulating blood. To the left, a German suddenly stood up. Johnson thought he was raising his hands to surrender, but a Seaforth shot him too quickly for anyone to be sure. Directly ahead, a German stood up and fired a long burst with a light machine gun toward No. 9 Platoon. Every man in No. 7 Platoon cracked off a couple of rounds from the hip and the German folded in on himself. Without a second thought, Johnson stepped on his blood-covered head as he walked past. The number of Seaforths that were going down every minute did not leave him feeling merciful to the enemy.

  Seeing three Germans suddenly bolt from a slit trench toward the wire line, Johnson took a bead with the butt of his rifle pressed into his shoulder. He snapped off the last three rounds in his clip, and one after the other the Germans crumpled. Slamming a new clip into the Lee Enfield, he resumed walking forward with the rifle at high port. Next thing, he was lying on his back, rifle still across his chest. Bewildered as to how he had fallen, Johnson stood up and looked about for his section. They were lost in the smoke. But they had been there just a split second before, he thought, how could they have disappeared? He walked forward, calling out, “Where is everybody? Where is everybody?” Stumbling over a dead German, he suddenly saw Private T. Seibert on his hands and knees. He had a gaping wound in his back and was calling out, “Am I hit?”

  “You bet you are,” Johnson said. The wound was about seven inches long and the man’s ribs were showing. Johnson bound the wound with a shell dressing. Seibert pointed at his leg. “Where did you get that?” Looking down, Johnson saw that a big chunk of his left thigh was missing just below the hipbone. The pants and underwear there had been torn away and the skin for about six inches around the hole was black with powder burns. He applied a field dressing and flopped down next to Seibert.

  A few minutes later, Corporal Bob Peebles hobbled up with a wound in his knee and lay down beside Johnson with his face about a foot away. Even then, the explosions were so loud it was hard to hear each other. Finally, after a shell exploded just feet away from the wounded men, Peebles said he would go for help and hobbled off. Time passed and nobody came, so Johnson left too. Finding a house filled with captured Germans and wounded Seaforths, Johnson crowded in and joined them. Seibert was eventually brought in as well and treated for his wounds.28

  Up front, Johnson’s company was taking terrible casualties. The new lieutenant, McLaughlin, was dead; so, too, was Sergeant Needham. Lieutenant Don Tuck “caught a sizeable chunk of shrapnel through the open collar” and had to hand off command to Corporal E.S. Weston. They still had not reached the barbed wire and already ‘A’ Company had no lieutenants left and few sergeants. ‘A’ Company’s commander Major John McLean was unhurt, but he was having trouble keeping track of the whereabouts of his platoons.29 McLean told Sergeant Rod McGowan, commanding No. 8 Platoon, to hold his men in front of the wire until he found out what had happened to the two already inside. He found Weston and learned that the two platoons had “generally broken up.” McLean fetched No. 8 Platoon. When they were about fifty yards past the wire, McLean thought he saw a German machine-gun post on a facing low ridge.

  He also encountered a platoon from ‘D’ Company commanded by Lieutenant T.E. Woolley on his right. The two platoons linked up under McLean’s command and attacked the German position, which turned out to be a large bunker. After a short fight, the Germans inside surrendered and were sent back toward the Canadian lines. McLean pushed on with his platoon and Woolley took his unit back toward the right flank to try to find his company. At about 0700 hours, McLean and No. 8 Platoon reached the Aquino-Pontecorvo road. The major got on the radio and reported he was at Aboukir. McLean urged Lieutenant Colonel Syd Thomson to send up reserves, for he had too few men to hold the objective. Thomson replied that there were no reserves, but that he would try to get tanks through. While the platoon dug in, McLean and Weston went forward to find the rest of ‘A’ Company, which appeared to have overshot the objective.

  Crossing the road, McLean looked south toward Pontecorvo and saw what looked to be two companies of the Carleton and York Regiment moving past the road toward the second objective — the Pontecorvo–Highway 6 road. Finding no sign of the missing platoons, McLean and Weston started back. They were just coming up to the road when three German tanks rolled toward them. Weston and McLean dived into an empty German slit trench, hoping the tanks had failed to spot them. A moment later, one of the tanks opened up with its main gun and a shell struck close to the trench. Knocked out, McLean awakened later to see Weston dead beside him. The major was in considerable pain. Two Seaforth privates appeared and half dragged, half walked him to the shelter of some trees on the east side of the wire. Burning tanks were scattered across the field approaching the wire. He later wrote: “The scene was one of mass devastation, burning tanks, wounded men, shell holes, continual firing.”30

  At 0800 hours, ‘B’ Squadron of the North Irish Horse was right at the wire. Squadron commander Major G.P. Russell’s leading tank was only thirty yards from a concealed Panzerturm when it opened fire. In seconds, Russell’s tank and four others were ablaze. Russell was seriously wounded. The dust and smoke were so thick that the tank commanders were unable to see the gun firing at them. One after another, the tanks were picked off by the Panzerturm or by other antitank guns. The Panzerturm knocked out thirteen tanks before a North Irish Horse Churchill managed to destroy it with an armour-piercing round that penetrated the concrete base and detonated the gun’s ammunition.31 In all, the regiment lost forty-one of fifty-eight tanks.32

  Initially, some of the Seaforths would have been just as happy to not be supported by the tanks. Warned that Germans armed with sticky bombs might jump out of the trees onto the tanks and blow them up, one troop behind ‘D’ Company raked the treetops ahead of it with machine-gun fire as it rolled along. Seeing that his company was being hit from behind by heavy machine-gun fire, Major L.M. McBride looked back and saw with horror that, as the tanks wallowed in and out of ditches and small gullies, each downward pitch directed bullets toward his men. To escape this danger, ‘D’ Company scattered and by the time McBride reached the wire it was spread from “hell to breakfast.” Some ended up fighting alongside ‘A’ Company; others drifted into the PPCLI sector and fought there.

  McBride and his headquarters section entered a wire area heavily laced with mines. McBride carefully picked his way along by stepping over the wire onto what looked like hard, undisturbed ground. His runner, Private Herbert Johnson, was cautiously following McBr
ide’s footsteps. It looked as if they would all get through safely when there was a tremendous explosion. McBride woke up on the ground in front of the wire, apparently thrown there by the blast. Johnson was dead. So too was Private Vic Warner, a forty-year-old radio signaller nicknamed Pop because he was the oldest man in the Seaforths’ signal section. McBride’s other signaller had a bad shrapnel gash in his cheek. The major helped him reach a nearby ditch.

  McBride then continued searching for his company but found only a lost PPCLI private. Carrying on together, the men entered an open field and were immediately fired upon by a machine gun. Ahead of him, McBride heard the heavy thumping of .75-millimetre or .88-millimetre guns and knew he had stumbled across concealed tanks or antitank guns. He was trying to figure out what to do next when something struck him in the left eye. When he came to, McBride saw several Germans looking down on him. One of them bandaged his eye and they loaded him into an ambulance, which, moments later, was hit by a shell. McBride received light shrapnel wounds to his left shoulder and leg and was knocked unconscious. His next conscious moment found him in a German operating room in Rome. Once the operation was finished, he was loaded onto a German Red Cross train going north. McBride would spend the rest of the war as a prisoner-of-war.33

  Back at regimental headquarters, Thomson was having a terrible time following the course of the battle. He had no radio communications with most of the companies and was barely in contact with brigade. Half the time, the designated channels were clogged with unidentifiable voices and proper radio protocol was seldom followed. As noon approached, Thomson received a report that ‘C’ Company, commanded by Captain John Joseph Conway, was lagging on the left flank. Unable to establish radio contact with the captain, Thomson set off in his Jeep to check things out. When he got close to the company, Thomson left the Jeep and went up to the company headquarters section on foot. While he helped Conway reorient his attack, a soldier came up with two dead chickens. “You might as well have these,” he said to the regimental commander. Thomson went back to the Jeep and tossed the chickens in the back next to his bedroll before driving away.