by Mark Zuehlke
Vokes began consolidating his hold on the farm, deploying his other squadrons and the self-propelled guns of the 98th Anti-tank Battery into positions around the farm buildings. As the Irish Regiment had not yet arrived, the reconnaissance squadron dismounted and, along with some other tankers serving as infantry, swept the buildings and mopped up various German strongpoints that were still resisting. This done, they dug in to form a defensive ring around the tanks and await the Irish. They also awaited Griffin Force, which had been ordered by Smith to leapfrog through Vokes Force and press on to the Melfa River.
21
OUR SOMEWHAT WEARY SHOULDERS
Throughout the morning of May 24, Lieutenant Edward J. Perkins and his Lord Strathcona’s Horse reconnaissance troop doggedly followed Vokes Force until it reached Mancini Farm. Perkins’s troop travelled in Stuart tanks from which the turrets had been removed, so that they were open-topped. For firepower, each five-man crew had a mounted .50-calibre and .30-calibre Browning machine gun, a Bren gun, a PIAT launcher, and four Thompson submachine guns. An assortment of prepared explosive charges and boxes of grenades bolstered the crew’s gunpower. Perkins believed that the crew’s combined firepower per man was “as large as any force in the army.”
Normally, his troop consisted of eleven Stuarts. However, six had been taken away and manned by engineers accompanying Griffin Force. Then, crossing the start line in late morning, Perkins’s Honey broke down. He and his crew replaced the crew in one of the others, so he now had only twenty men in four Honeys. Perkins’s task was deceptively simple. The moment the B.C. Dragoons consolidated around Mancini Farm, he was to charge the remaining 4,000 yards to the Melfa River. Once there, his tiny force would seize a crossing and hold it until the Strathcona’s tanks and the supporting Westminster Regiment infantry arrived to consolidate and expand the bridgehead.
During the planning phase, Perkins and Strathcona’s commander Lieutenant Colonel Phillip Griffin had examined countless aerial photographs of the Melfa River. They had identified two possible crossing points. The first and best was obviously the main crossing still being used by the Germans. Since, logically, the Germans would defend this route heavily, requiring it to extricate their retreating forces from the east bank of the river, Griffin told Perkins to secure the less viable crossing. A short distance to the north of the main crossing point, the meandering river narrowed between two wider flood plains at this spot.
At 1340 hours, Perkins led his little troop past the Dragoons, rolling straight up the centre line marked for Griffin Force’s advance.1 Following a short distance behind the reconnaissance troop was ‘A’ Squadron of the Strathconas. In trail behind this squadron were, respectively, Griffin and his regimental headquarters team, ‘A’ Company of the Westminsters in their armoured White scout cars, and the Anti-tank Battery with its M-10 “tank destroyers.” To the right of this column, Lord Strathcona’s ‘B’ Squadron was deployed abreast of the regimental HQ unit and ‘C’ Squadron held a similar position on the left flank.2 Each flanking squadron was accompanied by a scout platoon of Westminsters in Bren carriers. The country was close, crisscrossed by narrow gullies. Dense brush and groves of trees limited visibility. Perkins found the map next to useless, but his aerial photographs enabled him to keep his bearings.
About a thousand yards beyond Mancini Farm, Perkins spotted a German half-track with a crew of seven Germans standing around it. The Canadians opened up with their machine guns, killing five outright and sending the two survivors running for cover. When he was approximately a thousand yards from the Melfa, a Panther tank cut across Perkins’s path from the right flank. The German tank was about 300 yards ahead of the reconnaissance troop, moving at top speed, with the crew commander standing out of the turret hatch. Perkins ripped off a burst with the .50-calibre and saw the German slump forward out of his cupola. The death of their commander seemed to stun the Panther crew. Knowing that his Honeys were no match in a firefight with the Panther, Perkins led his troop in a dash past the German tank. Two more tanks appeared through the foliage on his left. Hearing on the radio that a troop of ‘A’ Squadron had flushed the German tanks, he left them to the Shermans. Perkins discovered that he was now down to only three Honeys, the fourth having taken a wrong turn somewhere.
Closing on the river, Perkins saw movement in a farmhouse. The crews of the three Honeys blazed away at the building and a white flag appeared after a few seconds’ firing. Eight 1st Parachute Division soldiers came out with their hands up. Although not wanting to be distracted with prisoners, Perkins paused long enough to await the arrival of a Westminster section to take the Germans off his hands. Then he pushed on to the river, arriving on its bank at 1500 hours.
Parking beneath some trees, Perkins and Sergeant Clifford Macey dismounted to reconnoitre the crossing point. Macey had been riding shotgun with Perkins during the advance. About seventy-five yards to the right of their position, Perkins found a kind of ledge running down to the riverbed. Although steep, he figured the tanks could negotiate it. The riverbed was about fifty yards wide at this point, so tanks or men crossing would be exposed to fire for only a minute or so. As the previous two days had brought heavy rains, the river had filled most of its flood plain. The riverbanks were riddled with slit trenches and other fighting positions. Given the amount of equipment lying around, Perkins realized the Germans had pulled out in a hurry.
He and Macey descended into the streambed. As they started up the opposite bank, a German machine gun chattered. The gunner was firing at Perkins’s troop on the other side of the stream and one man was hit in the shoulder. Macey and Perkins scrambled up the slope and wriggled into some cover. They had just crawled into the brush when they came under friendly fire from a Sherman tank’s machine gun. Neither was injured by it, but Perkins found “the experience nerve-wracking, not only because the fire was close, but because we did not know how soon it would be followed by a high explosive round from the .75. Fortunately the squadron leader saw what was happening and ordered the tank to stop.”3
Although Perkins was sure the Honeys could get down into the riverbed, he knew they would have difficulty getting up the opposite bank. Still, he thought some rough engineering work would make it possible. While two men armed with Brens took up protective positions on the riverbank, the other thirteen developed the crossing. They used explosives to blow away a portion of bank that posed an obstruction. Then they dragged some fallen tree trunks over to construct a quasi-retaining wall and filled the gaps between the trunks with dirt. Working fiercely with picks and shovels, the men carved out a ramp braced by the retaining wall. Perkins prodded the men to ever greater haste, knowing that sooner or later the Germans would cotton on to what the Canadians were up to and bring them under fire. Macey was a literal tower of strength, encouraging the men to greater effort with a stream of curses, while wielding shovel and pick with immense energy.
Once the crossing seemed adequate, Perkins had the Honeys brought over. All made it and were soon hidden in hull-down positions on the river’s edge. To the left of their position was an apparently occupied house. Perkins decided it needed capturing. Accompanied by Macey and three other men, Perkins moved alongside the river-bank to a position screened from the house by its courtyard wall. Perkins rushed through the courtyard, kicked in the back door, and found himself standing behind eight paratroopers all looking out windows and loopholes toward the main crossing point. “Drop it!” Perkins yelled and raised his Thompson. The Germans spun as one to face him. They were big men, and heavily armed. Perkins had gone in alone. The Strathcona officer was itching to open fire, but aware that a shootout at such close quarters would almost certainly end in his being killed or wounded, no matter how many of them he got first. The tension broke as one German dropped his rifle and the others followed suit. Perkins had single-handedly bagged an officer, a sergeant, and six other ranks. This and a string of subsequent heroics during the course of the ensuing day would win the officer a Distinguished Se
rvice Order and immediate battlefield promotion to captain. Macey would win the Distinguished Conduct Medal.
Since the newly won farmhouse offered a good defensive position and dominated the river crossing, Perkins moved his Honeys there and set them up, hull down, to the right of the building. Two men manned the machine guns in each Stuart. The rest, armed with the Brens, Thompsons, and PIATs, formed a perimeter. One trooper escorted the prisoners back to Griffin Force, while Macey crossed the river to guide ‘A’ Squadron over. That left Perkins and twelve men to hold the bridgehead. The entire action since their arrival at the river’s edge had taken only about thirty minutes.
Perkins knew the Germans were starting to recover from their surprise when a sniper began firing from a tree about 150 yards off. He was a remarkably poor shot but, finding him “very annoying,” the lieutenant took a PIAT and fired two rounds into the tree. The second round exploded in the branches, the sniper’s rifle hit the ground, and the German visibly “slumped across a branch like a bag of grain.” The position quiet once again, Perkins settled in to await arrival of the Westminsters and Lord Strathcona’s Sherman tanks.4
Behind Perkins’s reconnaissance troop, the Strathconas had enjoyed a largely uneventful advance until they closed to within a few hundred yards of the Melfa River. The leading troop of ‘A’ Squadron under Lieutenant R.A. Gartke reached the river in the late afternoon, but the remaining troops “encountered heavy opposition and a very hot battle developed” just as the squadron came astride a crossroads code-named Benedictine.5 A mixed bag of Panthers, Mark IVs, and self-propelled guns struck ‘A’ Squadron’s left flank. Thick vegetation made it impossible for the squadron commander, Major G.L. Symms, to exercise effective control over his subunits. Instead, each ‘A’ Squadron troop fought alone. Sometimes a troop itself broke up and individual tanks had to fight in isolation. In quick succession, Symms and Captain J.B. Windsor were wounded when their tanks were knocked out.
During its approach, ‘C’ Squadron’s two leading troops had become confused by the terrain and were widely separated. One troop got entangled with ‘B’ Squadron on the right flank and the other swung far off to the south before realizing its error and heading back toward Benedictine Crossroads.6 As the ‘C’ Squadron troops came toward the crossroads from their varying directions of approach, the tankers could hear a sharp battle under way. Soon they spotted tanks and antitank guns all over in the brush and started blasting away frantically. After some minutes, the tankers realized they were engaging not only real targets but also an array of well-camouflaged dummy positions.7 When these drew fire, they betrayed the shooting tanks’ locations to well-concealed German units. The results were deadly. Squadron commander Major J. Smith was wounded, but refused to relinquish command. Captain R.G. Grimes was killed and Captain L.S. Payne wounded within minutes of the squadron entering into the melee.
All around the crossroads and to the south of it, Canadian and German tanks and self-propelled guns were burning. Others dodged from position to position, hammering away at enemy targets. It soon became clear, however, that the Germans were not so much seeking to destroy the advancing Canadian tanks as to check their advance in order to allow a withdrawal of men and equipment across the main crossing point and another crossing near Highway 6.8
On the western bank of the river, Perkins’s small force clung precariously to its bridgehead. Shortly before the tank battle began, two Panthers and a self-propelled gun mounting an .88-millimetre gun appeared about 400 yards to the left of the farmhouse. The German guns began shooting at the building with a slow rate of heavy explosive fire, but its stout walls withstood the battering. When ‘A’ Squadron’s lead troop showed up at the riverbank, the guns shifted their fire to greet them. Several ‘A’ Squadron tanks were quickly reduced to flaming wrecks. Perkins could see that the Canadian tankers were unable to locate the source of the fire that was killing them. Perkins ran down and splashed across the river, then jumped onto Captain Whittle’s tank and tried pointing out targets to him. He then moved to Lieutenant Angus MacKinnon’s tank and repeated the effort. Neither tanker was able to hit the Germans, either because they failed to identify the targets or the range was too long. Realizing he could not help the tankers, Perkins ran back to his men on the opposite side of the river. He found that Macey had also returned — the latter realizing that ‘A’ Squadron would be unable to reinforce the reconnaissance troop until the tank battle concluded. Whittle’s tank was soon destroyed by the German self-propelled gun and the officer badly wounded. Lieutenant Gartke assumed command of the squadron.
About 150 yards left of the bridgehead was a house sheltering a German heavy machine gun. Perkins saw approximately twenty German infantrymen massing there, and assumed they were preparing a counterattack. Hoping to deceive the Germans into thinking there were more Canadians in the bridgehead than was true, Perkins ordered a heavy rate of fire directed at the house. He particularly shot it up with the .50-calibre machine guns. Meanwhile, the German tanks and self-propelled gun had returned to firing at his position. Most of their shots, however, whistled past about fifty yards overhead to explode harmlessly in the distance. Perkins was holding, but he knew that if the Germans put in a coordinated attack his little force would be snuffed out in no time. He desperately needed reinforcement by the Westminsters and radioed Griffin to that effect at 1600 hours. Griffin gave Perkins permission to withdraw, but the lieutenant replied that as they had so far succeeded in bluffing the Germans as to their strength, he would hold on a little while longer.9
‘A’ Company of the Westminsters, under command of thirty-two-year-old Major John Mahony, who would earn a Victoria Cross this day, was frantically trying to reach Perkins. The company’s White scout cars, however, were incapable of easily negotiating the rough track followed by the tanks. The Bren carriers in which the scout platoons travelled proved little more manoeuvrable. Irrigation ditches, tree stumps, and fallen trees presented impassable obstacles until they were cleared or filled in. Several times, Mahony had to lead the cars off the road and bushwhack across fields. “At those times,” Mahony — a prewar correspondent for the Vancouver Province — later wrote, “it became a nightmare of pulling our cumbersome White scout cars out of one drainage ditch after another.”10
The company’s mortar truck, loaded to the brim with 3-inch mortar bombs, took a direct hit from shell fire “and proceeded to put on a good 4th of July display, with mortar bombs exploding in every direction.” Finally, about half a mile from the river, a burning Sherman tank sitting in the centre of the road hopelessly blocked the Westminsters’ armoured cars. Mahony ordered the men to gather all the weapons and ammunition they could carry and follow him on foot to the river. At 1645 hours, an increasingly worried Perkins radioed Griffin. “Any sign of flatfeet?” Griffin responded, “They are coming up now — are near Benedictine.”11 Fifteen minutes later, Mahony and one platoon of ‘A’ Company reached the Melfa River.12
The Strathcona Regiment’s baptism of fire was proving to be the largest tank battle that Canadian forces had fought. They were learning tough lessons that resulted in men killed or terribly wounded by burns. During the planning for Operation Punch, brigade headquarters had issued an order for the tanks to carry more main-gun ammunition than could be stored inside the protected shell-storage bins. The reasoning had been that the regiments were going to be so far out front that ammunition replenishment might not be possible before they exhausted all the shells on board. Twenty-four-year-old Lieutenant John Francis Burton of No. 4 Troop in ‘B’ Squadron had .75-millimetre shells stacked on the floor of the turret and all over the tank like so much cordwood. The crew could barely move for all the shells.
Burton, seeing one tank after another blowing up on the regiment’s left flank, realized this extra ammunition was more a hazard than a necessity. Another problem was that the men had been trained to stay in their tanks and fight to the last round, even when the tank was hit by enemy shells. Burton realized the better
part of valour was to bail out the moment a shell struck the tank. If it failed to burn up, fine and good — crawl in and go back to war.
At 1645 hours, Burton spotted German movement near Highway 6 and requested permission to advance and engage targets of opportunity. His squadron commander, Major Bill Milroy, agreed. Burton’s troop headed toward the highway and soon happened on a battery of Oerlikon multi-barrelled anti-aircraft guns standing in a field. His tanks and the guns exchanged a rapid flurry of fire before the Germans decided they were outgunned and fled, leaving their weapons behind to be casually knocked to pieces by the tankers. The whole fight was over in seconds, but it seemed to Burton that time slowed down and that he had been in action for hours. Worrying that they might have seriously drained the ammunition stocks, he asked, “How many rounds did we use?” His loader said, “Twelve or thirteen.” They had barely used up one stack of the extra ammunition and come nowhere near to digging into their normal stock of seventy-five rounds.
Burton had another immediate response to his first combat, an urgent and simultaneous desire to urinate and to eat something. His men shared these urges, so they hastily broke open the emergency chocolate ration and handed it around, while one after the other urinated into one of the spent shell casings. Burton was wearing gloves when he took the casing and started relieving himself. He let out a shriek as his penis brushed the side of the shell and was seared by its still nearly red-hot casing. “I asked for a cool shell casing,” he snapped. “It’s the coolest shell casing we got,” the crewman replied peevishly.13
By the time Burton’s troop rejoined the regiment, the tank battle was over. It had lasted slightly less than ninety minutes. His squadron had suffered no tank losses, but ‘A’ Squadron had lost nine tanks, ‘C’ seven and the regimental headquarters one. Two officers were dead, seven wounded. Twenty other ranks had been killed and another twenty-seven wounded. The regimental HQ tank had been knocked out going to the aid of Westminsters under fire from a self-propelled gun. Second-in-command Major George J. Wattsford managed to destroy the gun, but lost his own tank in the process and was wounded. Milroy took over as second-in-command.14