by Mark Zuehlke
‘C’ Squadron of the Governor General’s Horse Guards had initially got off to a confused start that left the right flank of the Dragoons — unknown to them — unprotected from the moment they crossed the San Martino River. Originally, the GeeGees’ squadrons were to have followed through behind the Dragoons. With the original crossing point unavailable, however, the commander of ‘C’ Squadron, Major George Allan Burton, had requested permission to bypass the stream, whose headwaters originated out of a modest height of land halfway between Pontecorvo and Aquino, by going directly north and behind the stream’s headwaters. Permission granted, ‘C’ Squadron raced off.
They soon came upon a clutch of wrecked 25th Royal Tank Regiment tanks and a smoking German Mark IV. The leading tanks radioed back to Burton that they were seeing a lot of suspicious camouflaged objects and taking sniper fire. German artillery and mortar fire was also increasingly heavy. Suddenly, Sergeant Sewel in No. 4 Troop realized that one of the camouflaged objects was actually a hidden .88-millimetre gun and reported this to his troop leader, Lieutenant Murphy. Rushing his tank up on Sewel’s left, Murphy plunged into a pocket of mud. With the .88 firing their way, but still not finding the range, Sewel hooked a line onto Murphy’s tank and dragged his commander to firm ground. The two tanks then scuttled back about a hundred yards to a hull-down position, from which they fired several rounds at the German gun. The shells bounced harmlessly off the concrete emplacement.
What would have become a deadly stalemate between the squadron and the virtually impregnable gun position was broken by a report that the engineers had managed to bridge the stream at the original crossing point. ‘C’ Squadron disengaged and retreated to the crossing. They arrived to find ‘B’ Squadron also in the process of crossing the stream and a traffic jam slowed the advance to a crawl, with each squadron competing for position and the provost officers doing little to coordinate or calm things. ‘C’ Squadron then headed north again with two troops out front and two behind. All around the advancing tanks, German artillery and mortar shells exploded.
As the squadron approached a low height of land called Massa di Falco, southwest of Aquino, No. 2 Troop commander Lieutenant Gaskin spotted Germans rushing to man a .75-millimetre antitank gun located at the side of a house about 900 yards ahead. Gaskin’s Sherman was alone, his sergeant having become lost and the two Stuarts that were also part of his troop stuck back at the crossing. Gaskin radioed Burton, asking for permission to fire. Burton gave him an immediate affirmative. Firing his machine guns, Gaskin charged the German gun, whose crew fled for the farmhouse. Gaskin smashed his tank right over the gun. When the Germans broke for some nearby woods, the assistant driver took them under fire with his machine gun and Gaskin stood up in the turret blazing away with a Thompson. Three of the Germans fell dead and the remainder surrendered. “They came crawling back on their knees, hands in the air and weeping profusely,” wrote the regiment’s war diarist. “While Mr. Gaskin was giving his attention to the prisoners attempting to look as ferocious as possible, with a Tommy gun in one hand and a grenade in the other, shells began bursting at the rear of his tank. In no time at all the seven prisoners were scrambling wildly over the tank, attempting to enter the turret. Swinging with his Tommy gun Mr. Gaskin cleared them off, and sent them back to the farmhouse while he reorganized his troop.” Unable to identify the source of the fire, he then withdrew.
No. 4 Troop was actually the source of the fire, more precisely Lieutenant Murphy’s tank. Murphy was unaware that Gaskin was already at the farmhouse and soon he was also blasting away at his own Sergeant Sewel’s tank. The Irish sergeant complained over the radio, “Yer firin’ at me. Toimes is hard enough as it is.” Somehow his comment served to break the tension the combat neophytes had been experiencing. Everyone settled down and stopped making so many mistakes.14
Meanwhile, ‘B’ Squadron banged into its first resistance from pockets of German infantry bypassed by the Dragoons and the Irish Regiment. They slogged forward through almost constant harassing fire from small arms. Various infantry positions were overrun and they destroyed an .88-millimetre gun position by calling down artillery fire on its position. The GeeGees’ baptism of fire on May 24 was remarkably light, with only one man dead — a tank driver in ‘B’ Squadron who was killed when his tank received a direct hit from an antitank gun.15
While 5th Canadian Armoured Division was moving toward Mancini Farm, 1st Canadian Infantry Division also had a regiment moving toward the Melfa River. In planning the breakout from the Hitler Line, Lieutenant General Burns had been concerned that 5 CAD’s assault would prove too narrowly concentrated to force a general German withdrawal to the western bank of the Melfa. He therefore ordered Chris Vokes to create a mobile strike force, similar to that employed by Hoffmeister’s division, that would push up the road paralleling the Liri River and secure a second crossing over the Melfa River.
Vokes, still justifiably enamoured of the performance of the Princess Louise Dragoon Guards, gave it the task. To give the armoured car regiment more punch, he had a squadron of the armoured car reconnaissance regiment — the Royal Canadian Dragoons — that was attached directly to I Canadian Corps headquarters and also two squadrons of Three Rivers Regiment from 1st Canadian Armoured Brigade, released to his command. Designated Adams Force, after the PLDG’s commander Lieutenant Colonel Fred Dean Adams, the unit also included one regiment of 3rd Canadian Infantry Brigade. Vokes left it to that brigade’s commander, Brigadier Paul Bernatchez, to assign a specific regiment to the duty. Bernatchez opted for the Carleton and York Regiment, which, despite being the first regiment to successfully breach the Hitler Line, had suffered fewer casualties than either the West Nova Scotia Regiment or the Royal 22e Regiment.16
‘B’ Squadron of the PLDGs was to lead Adams Force’s advance beyond Pontecorvo, but the morning of May 24 saw the armoured car squadron sitting impatiently on the outskirts of the town waiting for engineers to fill in massive shell craters that blanketed the road. It took until 0935 hours for the engineers to bring a bulldozer up and the work was not finished until 1115. Even then, forward progress was slow because the Germans had blocked the road with mines and with fallen trees that the armoured cars could not get over. In the lead, Sergeant Gordon McGregor was suitably prepared for the task of clearing both obstacles. The twenty-three-year-old from Kamloops, B.C., had been a logger before his enlistment. Originally enlisting with the Rocky Mountain Rangers, he had been fed into the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada. Shortly before reporting for service, however, McGregor had severed a tendon in his ankle with a chainsaw blade. The injury made it difficult for him to march more than about ten miles at a time without pain. Not good for an infantryman, so McGregor was allowed a transfer to the PLDG, enabling him to ride into war.
McGregor spent more than two hours outside his armoured car personally carrying out the removal of the log barriers and jerking German antitank mines. Snipers kept taking potshots at the sergeant, but that day he led a charmed life. Hooked to the front of his armoured car was a long cable that he had used many times previously for pulling mines. A standard German trick was to bury one Teller antitank mine under another. Lifting the one on top detonated the one below. To avoid being blown up by such a trap, the PLDG troopers would hook the top mine to a long cable, return to the safety of their armoured car, and pull the top mine clear. Both mines then exploded harmlessly. The method worked as well as always and was also ideal for dragging the three-foot-high log barriers apart. For his work under fire, McGregor was Mentioned in Despatches.17
Meanwhile, the Carleton and York Regiment had moved up in troop carriers along with the Three Rivers Regiment’s tank squadrons. Traffic bottlenecks and obstacles on the roads soon meant that ‘D’ and ‘C’ companies had to dismount from their trucks and “revert to the familiar foot-slogging method of advancing.” Neither the infantry nor the armoured regiment squadrons saw any fighting, but both had paused here and there to round up Germans bypassed earlier by th
e PLDGs.18 Mostly, the PLDG had faced only persistent sniper fire and sporadic attempts by Germans manning heavy machine guns to slow their advance.
On the PLDG right, ‘C’ and ‘D’ squadrons of the Royal Canadian Dragoons finally disentangled their armoured cars from the rubble-filled streets and minefield barriers of Pontecorvo at about 1400 hours. ‘C’ Squadron leader Major Veitch knew he was leading his armoured cars into one of the most confused military situations possible. “Operations in the rear of a strong line which has been broken are nightmarish,” the regiment’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel K.D. Landell, later wrote. “No one knows anything for certain and it is the unexpected which generally happens. Supply trucks join a column and find that they are in an enemy convoy. Infantrymen form up for the attack and discover that the objective is held by their own troops. Medical orderlies, on their way to the rear with wounded, pass through strongly held enemy positions and wave greetings, thinking that they are in their own reserve areas. Men are captured and in ten minutes accept the surrender of their captors. And above all the fear, exhaustion, and lack of information rises ever an insistent demand for speed, speed and more speed — deep into the rear of the enemy, to strike at his supplies, spread confusion wider and wider, turn his retreat into a rout and prevent him from forming another line.”19
The men of ‘C’ Squadron entered this nightmare immediately outside of Pontecorvo when they came upon a blazing German truck. Sprawled about the wreck were eleven Germans, killed by their own artillery fire. Nebelwerfer fire straddled the road as they plunged forward. The situation soon became confused as lead cars raced on alone, while those behind paused to round up surrendering Germans. At one point, the lead cars roared up on a group of Germans sitting outside their trenches smoking and chatting. Seeing the approaching Canadians, the Germans dived back into their holes to man machine guns. As the armoured cars raked the resisting Germans with deadly fire, just 100 yards away another group of Germans crawled through the grain signalling frantically that they wanted to surrender.
When Major Veitch climbed out of his armoured car to speak with one of his troop commanders, he was startled to turn around and find “three Germans, still armed, standing patiently at attention not six feet away, waiting to give themselves up.” And all the time during the advance, Veitch’s headset rang with the voice of Adams saying, “Speed it up! Speed it up!” Finally, at dusk, the RCD squadrons reached a little gully about two miles short of the Melfa River and were ordered to hold there for the night. As they started to consolidate, they nearly got into a firefight with the Carleton and York Regiment, which had come up on the gully from the south and mistook the armoured cars for Germans.20
With dusk approaching, McGregor was still leading the PLDG advance when he noticed a party of Germans stringing wire across the road. His troop opened fire and drove the Germans off, killing several. Next they spotted a clutch of Germans rushing toward a .75-millimetre antitank and cut them down.21 At 2025 hours, McGregor rounded a corner and was waved down by a badly wounded German soldier. McGregor’s crew jumped out and used three field dressings to stem the man’s bleeding. He was discovered to be an impressed Czechoslovakian. As one of the men in the troop was also Czech, a quick interrogation followed. The prisoner told the Canadians that there were three antitank guns lying in ambush around the next corner.
McGregor’s troop loaded up and careered around the corner at top speed, ripping into the German antitank gunners with their machine guns and the troop commander’s .37-millimetre cannon. Seconds later, it was over. The antitank gunners were either impressed Czechs or Poles and all were killed. Only a seriously wounded German sergeant, charged with keeping the others at their post, was taken prisoner.22
Adams Force ceased its advance at 2105 hours. Planning started immediately for a drive in force toward the Melfa River to begin at first light on May 25.23
By noon on May 24, the B.C. Dragoons were closing on Mancini Farm, having skirmished their way through light opposition the entire way. ‘B’ Squadron’s No. 4 Troop commander, Lieutenant Nigel Taylor, had seen little determined resistance during the day. Taylor had enlisted as a trooper on August 9, 1940, and worked his way up through the ranks to lieutenant in September 1943. Upon completing officer training, Taylor assumed it would be ages before he was called from the reinforcement pool to the Dragoons. Accordingly, he married his English sweetheart and then headed to Scotland for a honeymoon. Upon his return to the reinforcement depot, Taylor received orders to report immediately to the Dragoons. He boarded a boat shortly thereafter for Italy.
On this, his first day of battle, things appeared to be going well. It seemed almost too easy. The squadron was rounding up prisoners and machine-gunning any Germans who had the temerity to resist. When Taylor spotted a house that seemed to fit the perfect profile for concealing an antitank gun, he ordered it knocked down. All it took was one high-explosive shell fixed with a 25-second delayed-action fuse. The shell punched a hole through the exterior sandstone brick wall and the following explosion inside caused the building to collapse.24
As Taylor rumbled happily along, his commander, Acting Major David Kinloch, was starting to think that ‘B’ Squadron had wandered in the maze of tracks off to the left of the objective. Indeed, it seemed likely that the troop had entirely overshot it. He ordered Taylor, whose tanks were on the squadron’s left flank, to look for a ground feature over that way. If Taylor found it, Kinloch would be able to get his bearings. Taylor set off with the troop commanded by Lieutenant Howard Williams following, so that there were six tanks in his group.
Taylor never found the landmark. Instead, he found an enormous German tank that he quickly, and wrongly, assumed was a Tiger. What he had bumped into was a Panther, which fortunately had its gun pointing off in a right angle from the line of Taylor’s approaching wedge of tanks. The Panther commander must have seen Taylor at the same time, because the huge machine started backing up on the road. Taylor told his gunner, Trooper Cecil D. Shears, that the range was a thousand yards. Shears, who was a crack shot, blasted off two armour-piercing rounds. Slamming into the less heavily armoured side, the rounds finished the Panther off.
Shears said, “I got him, sir.” These were the last words he uttered, for suddenly two antitank guns that had been flanking the Panther opened up on Taylor’s Sherman. Taylor cried, “Smoke!” to the loader and “Reverse!” to the driver, but as the words left his lips an armour-piercing round struck the periscope, penetrated the turret to kill Shears, and ricocheted upward to tear Taylor’s cupola off as the round exited the tank. Had Taylor not been ducking to make sure the loader got the smoke round into the gun, the escaping round would likely have beheaded him. As it was, his helmet was forced down so hard by the concussion that it temporarily paralyzed him from the waist down.25 Taylor’s loader, Trooper Ferguson, and driver Trooper K.R. Anderson hefted the badly injured officer out of the tank. They carried him to the safety of a nearby ditch just “as it became a flamer and blew up.”26
The German antitank guns kept on firing, knocking out another No. 4 Troop tank with a round that killed the crew commander, Corporal E.D. Shumaker, and his loader. The remaining tank in the troop, commanded by Sergeant W.J. Range, returned fire and destroyed both German guns. The tally in an engagement that lasted mere seconds was two Shermans destroyed for one Panther and two .75-millimetre antitank guns.
Taylor, who ended up with a metal plate in his skull but recovered from the paralysis, lay in a ditch watching his tank burn spectacularly and thought vaguely about how this would likely be his one and only battle. Lying beside him, Trooper A.E. Olsen had a more immediate concern. “Christ, my smokes!” the man shouted. He then crawled over to the wreck, reached up through the open escape hatch in its bottom, jerked out a box containing 1,000 cigarettes, and scurried back to safety with bits of the tank singing through the air around him as ammunition inside cooked off.27
Kinloch’s tank, meanwhile, was stuck in mud. This left him unable t
o do anything to help his two embattled troops but follow the course of their sharp fight over the radio.28 What he heard marked the first Allied tank-versus-tank fight between Shermans and Panthers. Although the Germans in the Italian theatre had received their first Panther unit — the 1st Panzer Battalion, 4th Panzer Regiment — in early 1944, Commander-in-Chief Southwest Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring had so jealously husbanded them that he refused to allow the new tanks into action. Only on May 15, after persistent entreaty from Tenth Army commander Generaloberst Heinrich von Vietinghoff, did Kesselring send one Panther company as reinforcement. It was a Panther from this company that Taylor had engaged.29 Although not a decisive victory, the fact that Taylor’s gunner had managed to quickly destroy the German tank proved that the Sherman could, if circumstances were favourable, best the more heavily gunned and armoured Panthers.
While Kinloch’s squadron had drifted off course, ‘C’ Squadron under Major Jack Turnley and the Stuart Honey tanks of the reconnaissance troop reached Mancini Farm together at 1220 hours. They found the Germans dug in and a short, sharp firefight ensued.30 A shot from a self-propelled gun struck Sergeant G. Thompson’s tank, causing it to burst into flames. The badly burned sergeant managed to bail out along with the driver, Trooper J. Briscoe. Realizing that another crew member, Trooper A.M. Johns, was trapped inside the tank, Briscoe ran back to the burning wreck and managed to pull him out. One of the Honeys was also destroyed along with one man killed and four wounded. The Canadian tankers prevailed, however, as the Germans fled, surrendered, or were killed.31