by Farley Mowat
To our amazement, we beheld clusters of German soldiers strung out all along this road, gathered around their morning fires in a scene of cheerful, almost domestic tranquility. Through my binoculars I could see some of them shaving. Others stood, stripped to the waist, enjoying the first warmth of the sun. A dispatch rider puttered lazily along on his motorcycle, waving to some anti-aircraft gunners who were breakfasting from a steaming portable field kitchen. There was a rumble of heavy engines and the head of a supply convoy appeared out of the north. One, two, a dozen trucks hove slowly into view, gears grinding on the steep gradients as they brought forward their loads of rations, water and ammunition.
Lying beside me, Sergeant Bates was fairly wriggling with excitement.
“Shit a brick! Will you look at that! Let’s clobber the sons a bitches quick!”
Before I could give an order, a Bren gunner in one of the other platoons tightened his trigger finger. Instantly the dozen Brens of the assault company went into action, reinforced by several 2-inch mortars and three score rifles.
This outpouring of fire from Assoro’s crest must have come as a shattering surprise to the Germans down below; and had they been troops of a lesser calibre, a debacle such as had oc-curred at Valguarnera must have ensued. But the 15th Panzer-Grenadiers were old soldiers, toughened in Africa and of a fighting breed.
Although several trucks were hit and two or three burst into flames, the surviving drivers flung themselves into the ditches and began returning our fire with their machine pistols. The 20-mm anti-aircraft troop leapt to their guns, cranked down the barrels and were soon hosing us with streams of tracer high explosive. I even saw two cooks abandon their pots and pans to seize rifles and open fire upon us.
They were a courageous lot, but we had the advantages of surprise, good cover and overwhelming fire power, and one by one their weapons fell silent.
The alarm had swiftly reached the Germans manning the forward positions hidden from our view half a mile south of us. At once they began sending their front-line vehicles back up the road to prevent them from being cut off. Trucks and weapons carriers in groups of two or three came roaring along at full speed with rifles and machine pistols flaring up at us as they ran the gamut. Some got through, but before long the wreckage of those that failed had completely blocked the road. Thereupon, three armoured half-tracks veered off onto the verges and ground up the slopes toward us through a tangle of vineyards. Immune to our small-arms fire, they were only halted by the increasing steepness of the slope. Once stopped, medium machine-gun and 81-mm mortar teams leapt out of them, took cover and engaged us fiercely.
The battle was not yet half an hour old and already the Germans were counterattacking. Worse was soon to come. Several field and medium batteries located just to the north of us, covering the approaches to Leonforte, swivelled their guns to bear at almost point-blank range upon Assoro’s peak.
At Valguarnera we had sown the wind. Now the whirlwind burst upon us.
I HAD JUST moved my platoon a little farther down the slope to a more protected position when the world exploded in an appalling cacophony of sound and fury. The cramped plateau onto which nearly five hundred men were now crowded virtually vanished under a mounting pall of dust and smoke, shot through with malevolent tongues of flame.
Dicky Bird, who had been left behind at rear Battalion Headquarters on the far side of the Dittaino, was anxiously observing Assoro.
“It looked absolutely ghastly! The whole top of the mountain seemed to blow up. I was sure I’d have to indent for a brand-new battalion. I didn’t see how any of you poor sods could possibly survive.”
Although most of the shells were falling to the north of my platoon position, the fury of that barrage was paralyzing. I lay flat on my belly behind a section of stone fence, scrabbling at the rock-hard ground with my tin hat in a frenzied attempt to burrow into the heart of the mountain. A consuming desire to become a mole was, I suspect, common to most of us as we endured this, our first heavy artillery bombardment.
But we were not moles and we could not escape. Neither could we retreat, as we had done at Valguarnera, since any attempt to descend the cliff would have invited massacre. We could not even relieve our situation by attacking, for our supplies of ammunition were already perilously low. Yet to stay where we were meant piecemeal destruction under the shattering weight of fire and steel which fell upon us.
The noise, smoke and confusion were so great that I was cut off from everyone, except Bates and a couple of men from Nine Platoon who were huddling behind the same broken wall that sheltered me. I did not know that several members of my assault platoon had already been wounded, nor that Sharon and Robinson, that steady and inseparable pair, had been obliterated by a direct hit on their shared slit trench. I only knew our situation was desperate and growing worse.
But desperation sharpens wits. At this juncture someone remembered the artillery spotter’s telescope which A.K. Long had captured. And some brave soul dodged the shell bursts in order to retrieve the instrument and carry it to a partially ruined goat shed on the northern slope where Tweedsmuir and Kennedy had set up their command post. From this vantage point they could look northward into the valleys where the enemy artillery was sited. Having once been an artilleryman himself, Kennedy knew how to direct counter-battery fire. With the aid of the spotting-scope, whose vernier scales enabled him to calculate distances and angles, he began pinpointing the enemy gun positions. He was able to relay these back to our own artillery because, since our backpack radios had proved useless at Valguarnera, Tweedsmuir had insisted that our signallers bring along a massive, long-range set of a kind normally mounted in tanks. The signallers got this radio to the foot of the precipice on the back of a mule, which then collapsed and died of exhaustion. Hoisting it up the cliff must have been a near-Herculean task, but somehow they succeeded.
Slowly now the tide began to turn. As the enemy guns fired up at us, their muzzle flashes gave them away, and short minutes later salvos from our field and medium batteries came crashing down upon them. Kennedy kept up the counter-battery work until by noon many of the enemy guns were permanently out of action and the rest had withdrawn to safer sites out of range of Assoro’s Cyclopean eye.
The initial bombardment having subsided to sporadic shelling, we collected our wounded—more than a score in number—and carried them to the shelter of a shallow cave where they were laid upon a common bed of straw. The narrow space soon looked and stank like a slaughterhouse. Blood was everywhere, glaring from torn, dust-whitened clothing, naked grey flesh and yellow straw. Captain Krakauer, our medical officer, had only first-aid kits with which to work and so could do little except try to staunch the gaping wounds. Yet there were no outcries of agony, perhaps because the blessed anesthesia of shock still dulled the pain. I found I had lost one man killed and three wounded from my hybrid platoon, but most of the other platoons had suffered heavier losses.
We survivors were slow to recover our wits. The several hundred shells which had fallen within the narrow confines of the battalion area with such violence had left us almost comatose. Action was the only effective antidote; but there was not a great deal to distract us once the casualties had been dealt with, except to deepen our shallow scrapes of foxholes in anticipation of a renewal of the fury. I was actually grateful when Alex sent his runner with a message ordering me to take a patrol into the village and see if it was free of Germans.
I decided to take only one man with me, and I chose A.K. Long. Any doubts I might earlier have had about his soldierly capabilities had vanished after his performance on the cliff.
With a casualness that amounted almost to negligence—a reaction to the intolerable impact of the bombardment we had just undergone—I led the way along a zigzag cobbled path descending steeply toward the clustering stone houses. Although bursts of small-arms fire were coming from somewhere to the north of the village, the whistle and whine of passing bullets seemed almost harmless by comparison
with what we had so recently endured.
We were crossing a stone footbridge over a deep ravine, walking upright and carelessly silhouetted against the skyline, when Long lurched against me, jerking me to my knees.
“What the hell...?”
“I’m hit!”
He crouched over, peering at his right thigh... and then began to chuckle.
A bullet had gone clean through the stock of his slung rifle and glanced off the brass fittings on his web belt, dealing him a bruising blow but not even breaking the skin.
“Born lucky, I guess,” was his only comment.
We finished crossing the bridge at a run, bent double behind the protection of the parapet, and much more circumspectly now we entered a tangle of steep and narrow alleys. Everything around us bore testimony to the great antiquity and equally great poverty of the village. The squalid stone houses hunkering against the slope seemed rooted in windrows of filth which had built up since the last heavy rain and would continue to accumulate until a new deluge washed the offal and excrement down the reeking streets and tumbled it into the valley below. The townsfolk must all have gone to ground during the shelling, for the place seemed lifeless and abandoned except for black waves of flies that rose and eddied at our feet.
The emptiness of the streets made us uneasy. Cautiously we hugged the flaking walls until we came to a tiny square. As we crouched uncertainly beside a crumbling building, I saw an arm beckoning to me from a nearby doorway. A.K. covered me with his rifle as I slid sideways to investigate, carbine cocked and ready. Then the owner of the arm stepped out into the brilliant sunshine and I found myself being effusively greeted, in excellent English, by a tall Italian captain.
Full of camaraderie and goodwill, he explained that he and his company had been hiding in nearby cellars since dawn—hiding not from us but from their German allies. His story was that he and his men had been sent forward during the night to take over a part of the German-held front, but that they had deliberately lost themselves.
“We are finished with this war. It is the Germans’ business, so let the Germans have it. Barbarians that they are! Now we happily surrender to you Britishers who are our liberators.”
“Canadians, actually,” I replied as I somewhat reluctantly accepted the automatic pistol he extended, butt first, toward me. I did not think the addition of forty or fifty Italian prisoners to our beleaguered garrison on the summit would prove much of an advantage to us.
“It’s pretty hot up where we are,” I suggested. “Might be better if you fellows stayed down here until things cool off.”
The tall capitano smiled and nodded agreeably.
“Just how close are the Germans anyway?” I asked.
He continued to smile as he pointed down one of the mean little streets leading out of the square.
“They are there,” he said cheerfully. “In the casas at the bottom of that strada. They just came up. Many of them. Very well armed. Perhaps you should bring down a few more of your men?”
“Jesus!” I gulped. “Perhaps I should! Grazia, grazia... Come on, Long, let’s vamoose!”
We made a precipitate withdrawal, arriving back rather breathless at Company Headquarters, which Alex had established in a break in the castle walls.
Alex was not surprised by my report. He told me that a Baker Company platoon attempting to descend toward the road at the northern outskirts of the village had just been driven back by heavy small-arms fire. The Germans were closing the ring around us.
I had scarcely rejoined the platoon when the day was rent by a rasping, metallic screeching that rose to an ear-splitting pitch and volume, culminating in a series of stupendous explosions that shook the solid rock beneath my cringing flesh. A blast of furnace-hot air buffeted me, and six coiling plumes of smoke and dust sprang, towering, above the castle ruins.
This was our introduction to the chief horror of the front-line soldier’s life in World War II, the rocket artillery which the Germans had misleadingly code-named Nebelwerfer—smoke thrower—and which the Eighth Army, encountering it during the last stages of the North Africa campaign, christened Moaning Minnie.
There were two varieties of these frightful things. The largest contained a bursting charge of 110 pounds of TNT. A smaller version held a charge of only 40 pounds, but was fired in salvos of five or six at a time. These projectiles needed no guns to speed them on their way. They were fired electrically from simple angle-iron or even wooden frames, or from clusters of “stovepipe” tubes mounted on two wheels. They could readily be concealed in any ditch or behind any wall or shack, and our counter-battery fire was of little avail against them since the Germans seldom fired twice from the same position.
The Moaning Minnie bombardment which followed was well-nigh unendurable. Although I had experienced spasms of fear during the previous few days, what I felt now was undiluted terror. As salvo after salvo screamed into our positions and the massive explosions and shuddering blast waves poured over me, my whole body grew rigid, muscles knotting so tightly they would no longer obey my orders.
Mercifully this new bombardment did not last long. Unable to bring transport forward because of Kennedy’s observation of the approach roads and the devastatingly accurate fire of our guns, the Germans were having difficulty replenishing their ammunition and so had to practise some economy. On the other hand, as we had begun the day with only the ammunition we could carry on our backs up Assoro’s precipice, we were now literally reduced to counting every round. We had virtually no food; and what muddy water we could obtain from a shallow well near the castle barely sufficed to meet the needs of the increasing numbers of wounded, let alone the rest of us lying, parched and baking, on that shard of rock under the pitiless Sicilian sky.
By mid-afternoon an uneasy lull lay over Assoro. There was still some sporadic shelling, and when I made a visit to Battalion Headquarters on Alex’s behalf, I had to run a gamut of machine-gun fire. By then the Germans had occupied the whole of Assoro village and had sprinkled it with snipers who kept us under a desultory but dangerous fire from broken windows and from holes punched in walls and roofs. It was one of these unseen sharpshooters who, for the first time, made me feel real hatred for the soldiers who opposed us.
My platoon’s job was to guard the southeastern approaches to the summit, but there was so little enemy activity below our segment of the perimeter that I had allowed all my men, except for a few sentries, to take advantage of the lull and try to get some sleep. I too was dozing when a sentry called out to me. I crawled to the edge of the walled terrace where he was lying and cautiously peered over it, mindful of the snipers in the houses off to our right.
A couple of hundred feet below, a grey and obviously aged little donkey was laboriously picking his way through a thicket of vineyard poles in the direction of the village. He was carrying two wickerwork panniers slung on his back.
“Where’d he come from?” I asked the sentry.
“Don’t know, sir. One minute there was nothing on the hill, the next he was just there. What do we do about it? Might be some grub in his baskets.”
“Do nothing,” I said. “Too risky to try and reach him. Leave him be.”
There being nothing else of interest to see, I was about to crawl back to my slit trench when the sentry exclaimed:
“Goddamn!... the donk’s been hit.”
Something—a stray bullet was my guess—had struck the little beast in the haunch. It had hit him hard, for although he did not seem to realize he was wounded and continued struggling on through the vineyard, his left hind leg dangled slack and useless.
I had barely taken this in when a sharp crack from somewhere in the village signalled a shot from a sniper’s rifle. At almost the same instant I heard the meaty thunk as a bullet struck the donkey’s other hind leg close to the knee, shattering bone and flesh with such an impact that the little animal was flung over on its side. It lay there, seemingly stunned, but in a minute or two it began struggling to get ba
ck on its feet.
I realized then that the first hit had been no stray bullet. A German sniper was deliberately shooting at the beast, aiming to disable it, either to entertain himself or to demonstrate his marksmanship. A third shot cracked out. The donkey, which had somehow managed to lever itself up onto its front legs, collapsed again—with a third leg shattered! It was now completely immobilized, except for its lop-eared, grey-muzzled head which lifted... sagged to the ground... lifted... sagged again... lifted...
The soldier lying beside me, himself a farmer, could not contain himself.
“That rotten, fucking Kraut! I’d like to blow his fucking balls off!”
Two or three silent minutes passed, and still that stubborn old head rose up... and fell again. I could no longer stand it.
“For God’s sake, kill the poor bloody thing!”
I was talking to the unknown, unseen German, but the sentry beside me took the meaning. Quickly he raised his rifle, aimed and fired. The old donkey moved no more.
The lull drew on into the late afternoon. Both sides were waiting for night: we for the hoped-for arrival of reinforcements and supplies; the Germans so they could mount a counterattack in darkness.
An hour after sunset we came under another thundering bombardment and, as it ended, a battalion of Panzer-Grenadiers attacked from the northwest. They were met, halted and broken mainly by the massed fire of three regiments of our distant guns, called down upon them by Kennedy and that blessed radio set. Twice more the Grenadiers tried to clamber up the slopes. Twice more they were driven back. After the last attempt they retreated to the road. Shortly thereafter we heard an upsurge of vehicle noises. The Germans had given up Assoro, and were pulling out from their positions overlooking the Dittaino.
AS THE MORNING sun glared down upon us, the sounds of war became muted in the distance. Along the wreckage-strewn road below the village our own Bren carriers appeared, grinding up toward us. Around the precious well men washed the dust and grime out of their eyes. We could stand down now and take our rest. But a mile or so to the north of us the crew of a Nebelwerfer, preparing to abandon their position, fired a projectile in a last defiant gesture.