The plan itself was immensely complicated, for it had to be adjusted to the differing tasks and circumstances not only of assaulting divisions, but of brigades. It was in four parts. The first was directed at the enemy artillery, the second covered the assault crossing itself, the third was to look after unexpected targets appearing as the battle continued and the last – or rather one continuing throughout from the moment when the infantry and sappers emerged from cover and advanced to the river – was for smoke to conceal the sector under assault from the artillery observers on the heights to right and left. None of these plans could be imposed from above: the requirements of each individual division had to be taken into account, and the rival claims on artillery fire reconciled with the aim of using the artillery in the most efficient and effective manner.
Leese delegated the planning and control of the artillery to his chief artillery officer (Brigadier, Royal Artillery) Frank S. Siggers, and the magnitude of his task can be illustrated by the following statistics. Between April 4 and May 3 he held six coordinating conferences with one major-general, US Army, the Fifth Army artillery officer, and twenty-one British, Polish, Canadian and New Zealand brigadiers. Between the Liri and the Adriatic, including some welcome and valuable US artillery reinforcements, there were 124 regiments (or battalions) to deploy or redeploy, of which seventy-five, including heavy anti-aircraft batteries and eight US heavy or super-heavy battalions (155-mm guns, 8-inch and 240-mm howitzers), or just under 70 per cent of the total, were to be concentrated to cover the front of the 2nd Polish and British 13th Corps; total 1,554 pieces; engaged in the fire-plan, 1,087. The expenditure of 25-pounder ammunition alone for the battle was 1,220,000 rounds, the rest pro rata. The orders issued by the commander Royal Artillery of the 4th Indian Division for the opening phase with traces, appendices and schedules of fire (time-programmes) ran to 46 pages. The total number of artillerymen of all Allied armies employed was 3,700 officers and 70,000 NCOs and rank and file.
From dawn on May 12 (D-day plus one) until the bridgehead was secure and the enemy artillery observers forced back, a smoke screen was laid by generators across the whole front by the men of a complete light anti-aircraft battalion. This was monitored by a special observing officer on M. Trocchio (a height east of Montecassino commanding the Liri sector) who, if he saw a gap appearing, ordered smoke shell to be fired at the areas likely to be occupied by enemy artillery observers. This device was completely successful, but none the less considerable casualties were inflicted, especially on the devoted engineers during the crossing, mainly by close-range fire from mortars and machine guns on fixed lines. The German artillery fired a good deal, but blind (or “predicted”) and casualties from shell-fire were but a fraction of what the enemy could have inflicted had the observers on the heights been given free play.
Brigadier Siggers was also given the task of coordinating close air support. The system employed was to establish a control also on M. Trocchio, connected through artillery signals channels to observers with the forward infantry and armoured units. Relays of fighter-bomber squadrons arrived over the battlefield ready briefed to attack pre-selected targets. If the Trocchio controller received requests for a target of opportunity or an emergency target he immediately rebriefed the pilots in the air who switched to it and the quickest recorded response was five minutes. If he had nothing for them they went on to bomb the targets already allotted.1
Some senior American officers scoffed at the British reliance on what they called “Ypres-style barrages” but then they had not been at Ypres or yet encountered a defence system that could not be infiltrated or outflanked and had to be cracked open by brute force. They were to learn, but by bloody experience and not from the British experience. It is perhaps significant that among the team of artillery commanders assembled by Siggers twelve of the British brigadiers had, like he himself and the commander of the 13th Corps, all cut their operational teeth on the Western Front during the First World War.
Lieutenant-General Anders and Lieutenant-General Burns each had unique and difficult problems to solve. Anders’ preparations were made difficult by the order that he was to refrain from close, active patrolling of Heidrich’s defensive positions in case the loss of a prisoner or a dead man left behind enabled his opponent to identify the presence of the Polish Corps and so compromise the surprise value of the whole DIADEM plan. All the routes leading across the Rapido up to the heights above the Monastery were under close observation and the slightest movement subjected to accurate artillery harassing fire. The considerable tonnage of ammunition, food, motor-fuel and water – a cubic foot of water weighs sixty-two and a half pounds – had to be hauled up by night in four successive lifts; first in lorries, then in light vehicles, mule-pack and finally on the backs of the soldiers. As Anders said in his account, “The front burst into hectic activity as soon as dusk fell as if some giant ant’s nest were working overtime.” As Anders was determined to use his tanks his engineers had to work by day as well as by night to convert the goat tracks leading up the mountainside to roads fit for tracked vehicles and their supply lorries. Exposed sections of the route were concealed behind a framework supporting camouflage netting. Even with all these precautions the preparatory work was not completed without casualties Anders could ill afford. He had only two instead of three infantry brigades in each of his two divisions and being cut off from his native country had no reservoir of man-power on which he could draw for replacements. Discussing this with General Maitland Wilson he said that his best hope was a good haul of German prisoners of war, which could be combed for impressed Poles. He knew that Leese had given the Poles the post of honour in what would inevitably be a bloody struggle that might write his corps off altogether, but he was sustained by the knowledge that his soldiers were determined, in the awful and literal meaning of the phrase, “to conquer or to die”.
Morale is too dry, too technical a word to describe the mood of the soldiers of the Polish Corps, while fanaticism implies a lack of rationality. Their attitude was rooted in the history of their unhappy country. In the eighteenth century it had been partitioned between Austrians, Prussians and Russians, but they had resisted every pressure to alter their loyalty, or to change their religion, language and culture. The Polish state was re-established after the First World War, but fated to last a mere twenty years. The opening act of the Second World War was the invasion of Poland by Hitler, when Soviet Russia was quick to seize the eastern half of the country. The Russians herded a large part of the Polish Army and many civilians, including women and children, into captivity, where many perished. Anders himself was imprisoned in the Lubianka gaol and treated as a German spy. After Hitler invaded Russia, Stalin, after prolonged and difficult negotiations, persuaded some but by no means all of his captives to move to the Middle East. (He had no intention of allowing them to take part in the reconquest of Poland.) There under British protection and with British aid Anders was able to form and train the Polish Corps. The ardour of the Poles was not simply fuelled by an understandable desire for revenge. An intensely political people, even the humblest soldier perceived that if they helped to gain an Allied victory the road to a free and independent Poland might be open once more.
We must now turn to the Canadians, equal as soldiers to any of the Allies, though more relaxed in their approach, but reckoned formidable by the Germans. The Canadian Army was a militia of intelligent, adaptable, part-time soldiers controlled by a nucleus of no more than 6,000 regulars; too small a seed-bed to provide the number of competent senior officers required to command an army and staff the HQ of corps and divisions. That was the view, at least, of such senior British officers as Brooke, Montgomery, Alexander and Leese, and not an unreasonable one. What was crass on their part was to ignore the determination of the Canadian government to field a Canadian Army under Canadian commanders and not to allow Canadian units to be used piecemeal under the British commanders, and that they had to accept this political fact cheerfully and make t
heir command arrangements accordingly. What was even more unreasonable was what the Canadians rightly saw as a circular or “Catch 22” argument; the British argument that Canadian commanders could not be trusted to conduct operations on the corps level because they lacked experience, and they could not gain experience because they were not trusted to command. The Canadian generals were too tactful to point out that this British attitude was hardly justified by previous British performance. The British Army had also suffered from a shortage of competent senior officers for very much the same reasons, and the performance of some of its corps and army commanders in the earlier stages of the war hardly gave them the right to feel superior to the Canadians or anyone else. Their 1944 team had been arrived at by hard-bought experience and the elimination of the unsuitable by the harsh test of war.
A complicating factor in the equation was that though Montgomery had told General Crerar, the first commander of the Canadian Corps in Italy, that he wanted neither him nor his HQ in Italy, nor the 5th Canadian Armoured Division, he greatly admired the 1st Canadian Division, and made it clear that he did, a sentiment that was reciprocated. The Canadian Army resembled the British in that it was an assembly of disparate social groups each with a strong sense of identity: what in the British Army is cherished as the “regimental system”. A population a quarter the size of Britain’s was contained in a country whose vastness can be illustrated by saying the distance from coast to coast, from Vancouver to Halifax, is the same as from London, England to Sverdlovsk, in Siberia, or from Cairo to Durban. Geographical distance imposes social diversity. A “Maritimer” from Nova Scotia or New Brunswick has more in common with his neighbour in Maine, USA than with a man from Ontario in “Upper Canada”.
The appropriate equivalent to, say the “Geordies” of the British Durham Light Infantry was the private of the Carleton and York Regiment from the Saint John River area, with his own peculiar outlook and regional dialect. The “Hasty Ps” (The Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment), the “Loyal Eddies” (Loyal Edmonton Regiment, from far-away Alberta) and the “Vandoose” (Vingt-Deuxième, the Royal 22e Regiment from French-speaking Quebec) cherished their difference with the same pride as the British Royal Sussex or the Rifle Brigade. This common institution of the “regiment” was a bond on the working level and made for mutual understanding. For instance the British 98th Field Regiment RA (The Surrey and Sussex Yeomanry), itself originally a Militia and later a Territorial unit, was on such good terms with the regiments of the 1st Canadian Armoured Brigade (Three Rivers, Ontario and Calgary Regiments) and other armoured units that when the whole Canadian Corps was transferred from Italy to north-west Europe in 1945 the 98th went with it. The pilots of the British “Air OP” squadrons attached to the Canadian Corps put up the red patch on their sleeves.*
There was another bond between the lower echelons of the two armies. The staff of the 1st Division soon found that the commanders and staff of the Eighth Army and its corps HQ were quite unlike their stereotypes of superior, aristocratic generals with funny accents and staff officers embusqués in chateaux far behind the front line. “Monty” soon won them over, giving one of his typical performances when he first visited the Seaforths of Canada in Sicily, calling for the men to gather round his Jeep and addressing them, standing on the bonnet. “Who have we here?” he demanded, the reply being a roar of “The Seaforths!” “My Seaforths!” was his rejoinder, and he proceeded to the genuine flattery of telling them his future plans and their part in it. (Curiously enough it was this same battalion that back in England in May 1942 booed Montgomery when they marched home past him after Exercise “Tiger”.) The Canadian units were a mixture of city or industrial workers officered by corporation lawyers, accountants, managers and business men, and men of the farms, prairie and woods from a large rural population, who were accustomed to looking after themselves and their own affairs without any state assistance. If something went wrong they repaired it, if they wanted something they made it; it is quite usual even today for a rural Canadian to build his own house. The military mixture made for adaptability; the townsmen better at the carefully organised modern battle, the countrymen at improvising when such structured operations were fragmented by the shifts and turns of warfare. They were all happy with the absence of bullshit, the informal efficiency, the use of Christian names, the cutting of paper-work and the use of standard operating procedures of the largely young, ex-civilian and immensely experienced British staff officers.
This made life difficult for General Burns and his regular staff. He himself was a reserved, even shy officer with the reputation of being an author and a military intellectual. The Canadian troops did not warm to him or to his staff who, compared with the British, seemed to be stuffily formal, bureaucratic, did tilings “by the book” and were apt to fuss about polished boots and blouse buttons being done up. Burns was faced with the double task of convincing both Leese and Alexander that he could command a corps in what was to be a severe test of any general’s ability, and also his own battle-hardened subordinates; Chris Vokes of the 1st Division, Bert Hoffmeister a militia officer of the 5 th, who had arrived at that appointment after commanding the Seaforths of Canada and the 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade in active operations, or the equally experienced Brigadier W. C. Murphy. They were not to treat their corps commander with anything but respect, or indulge in what Montgomery used to call in his own brand of slang “bellyaching”, but Burns was aware that neither they nor the British authorities had welcomed the establishment of a Canadian Corps, and he was too intelligent to be unaware that he was being silently appraised by his subordinates as well as by Leese. Burns was not temperamentally suited to such a psychological ordeal. For him the hardest part of it must have been waiting in the rear for the opportunity to prove himself while Kirkman swung the battering ram to open the road to the Hitler Line.
* Leese went to Burma as 11th Army Group commander, where in the course of a misunderstanding extraordinary in so senior and experienced an officer he relieved General Slim of the command of the Fourteenth Army after that officer had completed a victorious campaign, on the ground that he was tired out and in the belief that Slim had agreed. Leese was himself shortly relieved for exceeding his powers. It may have been that the accumulated strain of high command had told on him.
* “For want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse was lost, for want of a horse the message was lost, for want of the message the battle was lost.”
* At the battle of El Alamein in October 1942 the British had revived the complex artillery techniques developed on the Western Front in 1917, and used them in all deliberate attacks against strong defences. Mechanised artillery traction, the introduction of self-propelled field guns and the use of radio as a primary means of tactical control as well as fire-control conferred speed and flexibility to the artillery arm, and enabled it to use scientific gunnery in both set-piece and mobile operations.
* The Air Observation Post squadrons were a British innovation, part of the RAF equipped with light aircraft capable of landing on any short flat piece of ground and piloted by captains of the Royal Artillery, who controlled and directed artillery fire direct using normal artillery techniques.
17
TIGER DRIVE
There is nothing special going on. Yesterday I called at the HQ of the two corps. Both commanders told me they did not yet have the impression that anything was going on.
Von Vietinghoff to Kesselring, 9.05 a.m., May 11
On D-day minus one, May 10, Generalmajor Friedrich Wentzell, chief of staff Tenth Army, who had just returned from leave, held a long telephone conversation with Colonel Beelitz, acting chief of staff to Kesselring. Wentzell was an able officer judged even by the exacting standard of the German General Staff, but even he was deceived, although as the record shows his fingertip feeling warned him of impending danger:
Wentzell: To my great pleasure everything is quiet. Only I do not know what is going on. Things are becom
ing ever more uncertain.
Beelitz: I told this to the Field-Marshal [Kesselring]. He looks very intently towards the coast. Yesterday there was another very interesting landing down there near Naples. The Marshal thinks that they have selected an area that typically resembles the Gaeta–Formia–Minturno sector.
Wentzell: Why that area in particular? One could well say that it is up there at Civitavecchia.
Beelitz: No. Up there it is different …
And a little later:
Wentzell: In past times one heard at least once in a while that such and such a division had left Africa, but now one hears nothing … since the 10th Indian Division appeared without any warning I have become quite sceptical [i.e., of the performance of the German secret intelligence service, the 10th Indian Division had only been located when it joined the 5th Corps on the Adriatic coast]. I think it not impossible that things are going on of which we have no idea … but if they do anything in the near future, it must be Rome.
Beelitz: In which case the question is: mouth of the Tiber, or Civitavecchia? The Marshal thinks, however, that it will be Terracina …
Tug of War Page 31