by Farley Mowat
Waking the ancient couple who inhabited the place was easy, but dealing with them, once awake, turned out to be something else.
Terrified by this invasion of their remote mountain canyon, the old woman began screaming like a banshee while her husband, who had emerged from his bed naked as a babe, hysterically beseeched the Lord Almighty to spare their lives.
We were so appalled by the noise these two old folk together with the mule (which was braying to its own gods for help) were making, and so fearful it would alarm the Germans, wherever they might be, that we abandoned the interrogation and fled down the newly discovered trail—fled straight onto the muzzles and cocked weapons of Charley Company which, being also lost and lonely, and equally horrified by the demented caterwauling we had unleashed, was preparing to defend itself to the death against God only knew what terrors of the night.
Such was the relief of both companies at having found one another that it was some time before Alex and Rolly Cleworth, Charley Company’s commander, could get us organized and on the move again.
The track now led steeply downhill toward the north and as the false dawn began to silhouette the eastern peaks we reached a paved road. Cautiously we scouted some distance along it in both directions but saw nobody, nor could we find any indication of what road it was or where it led. However, one thing was certain: as the deep imprint of tank treads testified, it had been in recent heavy use by military traffic that could have been none of ours.
It was time to make a halt. Across the road from us stood a dome-shaped hill whose slopes, terraced and stone-walled, seemed to offer good concealment. Covered by Bren gunners, our six platoons nipped smartly across the broken pavement and climbed the rising ground to take up an all-round defence from which we could command the road in both directions.
We were startled to find that the hill was already occupied by several score of refugees who had come here seeking safety from the fighting between 3rd Brigade and the Germans to the westward.
Pat Amoore discovered from these frightened farm folk that Valguarnera lay only a mile away, though hidden from our view by an intervening ridge, and that it was full of Tedeschi—barbarians, as the Germans were known to the Italians. They also told him that the road was the main lateral highway to Catania and was much used by German military traffic.
By guess and by God we had accomplished the first part of our task. However, we could not report our success to the rest of the battalion—or to anyone else for that matter—because our pack radios, which worked reasonably well over short distances and level ground, were useless in this mountainous terrain. Neither could we hope to obtain the support of friendly troops or of artillery. Under these circumstances, even Alex Campbell was unwilling to risk our small force in a frontal attack upon the town. He and Cleworth concluded that, having cut the road which linked the German forces to their own rear areas, the best thing we could do was stay where we were and try to keep it cut.
Dawn had broken and the great white sun ballooning over the far mountains began to banish the night’s chill. My eyes hung heavy, and drowsily I heard a murmur of women’s voices from the group of refugees. Then my eyes closed and I dreamed of summer sun on a sandy beach where a group of slender girls were begging me to join them in an erotic dance. As I swam slowly toward them through air which had become cool water, the dream suddenly exploded in a crashing staccato of machine-gun and rifle fire.
I leapt to my feet to find the road no longer empty. Six immense, green-painted trucks were grinding to a halt below us. As I stared, incredulous, the lead truck nosed ponderously into the ditch, canted slowly on its side and spilled out two or three dozen grey-clad soldiers. Now I was screaming at my men, some of whom were still drugged with sleep, wildly urging the Bren gunners into action.
Over a hundred and fifty German infantrymen were packed into those six trucks. They had been driving all night, en route to reinforce their comrades who were holding up 3rd Brigade’s advance, and most of them must have been drowsing or asleep when they were engulfed in gunfire.
For a moment I was distracted by Sharon and Robinson, that pair of usually phlegmatic farm boys, clamouring to know if they should bring our anti-tank projector into action. Then a furious bellow made me turn to see Alex Campbell launching himself down the slope. He was holding a Bren tucked under his one good arm and firing quick bursts as he ran. Although a spare mag was clenched between his teeth, he was still able to roar like a maddened minotaur.
For precious seconds our fire grew ragged as we stared at Alex, appalled and awed by what he was doing. A few of the Germans tried to make use of the respite to bring rifles and Schmeisser machine pistols into play. Alex was by then only a few yards from the nearest of them and I momentarily expected to see his mighty bulk come crashing to the ground. We all must have shared that fear, for suddenly every man in the two companies began to fire again as fast as he could load. The rattle and roar of small arms and grenades rose to a crescendo... and the stretch of road below us became a slaughterhouse.
Alex concentrated his berserk fury on a single truck, and when he had finished firing into it from a range of a dozen yards, his consuming hatred of the enemy must surely have been sated. Within that truck twenty or more Germans writhed and died.
Meanwhile, soldiers from the other trucks were desperately trying to bail out through a thickening curtain of bullets, grenades and mortar bombs. Not many reached the dubious shelter of the roadside ditches, and most of those who did were wounded. As they and the few others who survived began making frantic efforts to surrender, the firing petered out and soon little groups of our men began herding prisoners off the road and up the hill.
Guarded by Corporal Hill’s section with rifles at the ready, Amoore and I descended to the road to gather intelligence. This consisted mostly of counting the dead and wounded and of searching through blood-soaked tunics for unit identifications—documents and Soldbuchs (the German version of our paybooks). But after a time I could no longer stand the stench and sight, and left Pat alone to the gory chore.
It was not the dead that distressed me most—it was the German wounded. There were a great many of these, and most seemed to have been hard hit. We could do almost nothing for them. We had no medical supplies to spare, or even any water. One of their medical orderlies was among the handful of uninjured prisoners but he too was helpless for he had neither drugs nor field dressings.
One ghastly vignette from that shambles haunts me still: the driver of a truck hanging over his steering wheel and hiccupping great gouts of cherry-pink foam through a smashed windscreen, to the accompaniment of a sound like a slush pump sucking air as his perforated lungs laboured to expel his own heart’s blood... in which he was slowly drowning.
Shortly after I returned to the company position a subaltern, who shall be nameless, suggested that the best thing we could do for the wounded Germans was to put them out of their misery. When this was received with hostility by the rest of us, he tried to justify himself.
“Goddamn it, they’ll only bleed to death or die of thirst. Surely to Christ it’d be kinder to put a bullet through their heads!”
“That’ll be enough of that!”
Alex, who had come up unseen behind us, was flushed and furious.
“There’ll be no killing prisoners! Try anything like that and I’ll see you court-martialled on a murder charge!”
The anomaly of hearing such sentiments voiced by a man who had just butchered twenty or thirty Germans did not strike me at the time. It does now. The line between brutal murder and heroic slaughter flickers and wavers... and becomes invisible.
ALTHOUGH WE HAD no way of knowing it, Dog and Baker companies had also managed to reach the lateral road several miles to the west of the town. Here they used their anti-tank weapons to knock out a number of German vehicles, including an armoured half-track towing an Eighty-eight. As a result of our twin thrusts the German position in front of 3rd Brigade had now been isolated; but we had st
irred up a veritable hornet’s nest in Valguarnera.
Shortly before 1000 hours a group of trucks moved cautiously eastward down the highway toward us but halted under cover half a mile away, and soon thereafter we were being attacked by a couple of companies of infantry supported by 81-mm mortars. This assault fell mostly on Charley Company and was beaten off with losses to us of two men killed and three wounded.
The lull that followed was short-lived. A troop of 12-cm heavy mortars began dropping 35-pound bombs among our all-too-shallow slit trenches. Simultaneously a number of armoured cars began to edge down the road firing 20-mm cannon and machine guns to cover yet another infantry attack. And shortly thereafter the crashing impact of a 105-mm shell gave us the bad news that a German artillery battery was ranging on us. This was too much for the Sicilian refugees who scattered like a gaggle of barnyard fowl and fled full tilt down the road, hastened on their way by some desultory rifle fire from the Germans who may, just conceivably, have mistaken them for some of us.
Had we been able to call for artillery fire ourselves, we might have held out a little longer, but our supply of small-arms ammo, mortar bombs and grenades was already perilously depleted, and there was also the certainty that if we stayed where we were we would eventually be surrounded. Consequently, Alex, as senior company commander, reluctantly ordered our withdrawal.
His reluctance was not shared by me. It was not hard to imagine what the Germans might do to any Canadians they captured—once they had seen the carnage we had made of their lorried infantry. Charley Company withdrew first; and when it came my turn to lead my platoon on a dash across the bullet-swept road and up the exposed slopes on the far side, I moved as if with winged feet.
I had not long gained the shelter of a rocky knoll some two hundred yards from the road and well above it—and had just finished siting my Brens to provide covering fire for the following platoons—when Alex plumped down beside me.
“I’ve sent Charley on ahead,” he grunted. “They’ve taken the prisoners and the worst of our wounded and left us all their ammo. We’ll stick it out as long as we damn well can... Try to keep those bastards from using the road...” He nodded toward Valguarnera from which direction yet another convoy of trucks had appeared, escorted this time by several tanks. “But you’ll be rearguard when we have to quit.”
At first our new position was not so bad. The enemy, milling about in the valley, was uncertain of our exact location and so his fire, though growing in volume all the time, remained relatively ineffective. Shortage of ammunition restricted our response to sniping and occasional bursts from a Bren, so it was difficult for him to spot us.
Our worst enemy on that sun-baked slope was thirst. All our water bottles had long since been drained and we had become so thick-tongued and dry-mouthed that talking required a painful effort. I could not tolerate a cigarette, even though I yearned desperately for one. However, if things were uncomfortable for the rest of us, they were ten times worse for our wounded, of whom Able Company now had nearly a dozen.
At this point Alex gathered his four subalterns—Paddy Ryan, Al Park, myself and Pat Amoore—in a fold of ground out of view of the Germans.
“I want an officer to take a party back down into the valley and get water,” he said bluntly. “Who’ll it be?”
I glanced surreptitiously at Park and Ryan, and found them covertly glancing my way. None of us said a word, for we all three were sure a descent into the valley would be tantamount to suicide.
It was Pat Amoore who, in his perfectly accented English, broke the impasse.
“Right oh, Skippah! I’ll have a go. Hate to be idle, don’t you know?”
He took with him only a Sten gunner and two riflemen, and within an hour they were back, staggering under a load of dripping water bottles which they had filled at a farm well—after surprising and killing several Germans in the courtyard. As we three Canadian subalterns gulped down our share of that precious stuff, we were also eating crow.
By 1400 the Germans had assembled enough guns, men and armour below us to be able to launch a battalion assault. The time had come for us to move along. Alex banged me on the shoulder with one ham of a hand and pushed his flare pistol at me with the other.
“Okay, Squib, we’re pulling out. Nine Platoon with the wounded’ll go first. Then Eight. Al will go to ground just over the crest to cover your withdrawal. He’s got six rounds of mortar smoke—all there is left. The wounded’ll slow us down so we’ll need all the head start we can get. Stick it out as long as you can. When you have to leave, fire one red flare to let Al know you’re on your way.”
Alex left us Nine Platoon’s three Brens to free their crews from the weight so they could help with the wounded. Six light machine guns gave me a lot of fire power... or would have done except that we only had one or two magazines remaining for each gun.
Wriggling forward to the edge of the knoll, I passed the word to shoot at anything that moved—but to make every bullet count. Behind me I could hear stones rattling as Eight and Nine platoons broke cover and began their rush up the steep slopes. Instantly the metallic hail from an MG-42 swept over our heads in vicious pursuit of our retreating comrades.
I had my binoculars to my eyes at that moment and by the sheerest fluke glimpsed a flicker of flame and a filmy wisp of smoke coming from a pile of brush on the far side of the road. Mitchuk was lying next to me behind his section’s Bren, and I grabbed his arm and tried to make him see what I had seen but he could not locate the target. After a moment he rolled over and pushed the butt of the gun toward me.
“You take ’em, Junior!” he said... and grinned.
The feel of the Bren filled me with the same high excitement that had been mine when, as a boy during October days in Saskatchewan, I had raised my shotgun from the concealment of a bulrush blind and steadied it on an incoming flight of greenhead mallards.
There was a steady throbbing against my shoulder as the Bren hammered out a burst. A stitching of dust spurts appeared in front of the patch of brush and walked on into it. I fired burst after burst until the gun went silent with a heavy clunk as the bolt drove home on an empty chamber. Quickly Mitchuk slapped off the empty magazine and rammed a fresh one into place.
“Give ’em another!” he yelled exultantly. “You’re onto the fuckers good!”
Maybe I was. It is at least indisputable that after I had emptied the second magazine there was no further firing nor any sign of life from the brush pile. On the other hand, I never actually saw a human target, so I cannot be haunted by the memory of men lying dead or dying behind their gun. And for that I am grateful.
Clumps of 81-mm mortar bombs were now beginning to flute down upon the slopes, feeling for us and filling the air with the whine and whizz of metal fragments and rock splinters. Far down the road a Mk III tank cranked the muzzle of its cannon up to maximum elevation and began spitting 50-mm shells at us. Our situation was becoming uncomfortably hot in every way, and I looked anxiously behind to see how the other two platoons were faring. To my vast relief, they had vanished over the crest and were out of reach of directed enemy fire. But a glance at my watch revealed that they had been gone a mere ten minutes—not enough time to put a safe distance between themselves and any pursuit the Germans might mount once Seven Platoon had withdrawn.
And oh, how I ached to go! The German mortar and machine-gun fire was steadily intensifying. Three of my men had already been hit, though not seriously, thank God! We were just about out of ammo. The brass handle of the flare pistol was burning my palm. I held it away from me, and suddenly there was a poof and a red flare burst overhead. I was unaware that I had pulled the trigger.
The flare was still burning when the first smoke bomb from Al Park’s 2-inch mortar plummeted in front of our knoll and coils of white smoke began to shroud us from the enemy’s view. Another bomb and another fell and the smoke thickened.
“Get the hell out of here!” I screamed at the top of my lungs, and the platoon t
ook off like a clutch of gophers scuttling to escape a pursuing coyote. It was every man for himself, but luck was with us for every man made it over the crest before the smoke from the last of Al’s bombs began to dissipate.
The return journey through the mountains to our own lines was an anticlimax—more of the same sort of thing we had endured on the outward march, although made somewhat easier because we could at least see our way, and also because we were sustained against an overwhelming fatigue by the afterglow of a battle well fought and won.
All during that long afternoon and into the night, little groups of weary men staggered out of the hills, until by midnight the Regiment was almost whole again—except for the dead, and the wounded whom we had left hidden in a mountain valley guarded by one of Charley Company’s platoons. They were brought out next morning by our first-aid men who performed a small miracle in manoeuvring their laden stretchers through that formidable wasteland.
That night Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, commander-in-chief of the German armies in southern Europe, radioed his daily situation report to Berlin:
... and near Valguarnera troops trained in mountain fighting have been encountered. They are believed to belong to the 1st Canadian Division. Our forces have successfully disengaged from action with them.
Able Company was allowed to rest most of the next day, but late in the afternoon Alex sent me to Battalion Headquarters to deliver our casualty list to Jimmy Bird, the adjutant. Jimmy’s inevitable nickname, Dicky, fitted him admirably, for he was the ultimate brood mother, eternally—and usually disapprovingly—fussing and clucking over us as if we were a flock of bird-brained kids.