The Gothic Line Read online

  Because of the traffic backups, some regiments made the entire journey by day. The recently unhorsed Princess Louise Dragoon Guards departed at 0815 hours on August 21 and were soon snarled in long traffic jams. Many of the diversions over streams had been washed away by storms. What had started out as an orderly column, with the Canadians travelling as one continuous unit, became hopelessly broken up as British truckers barged out of side roads to bully their way into the column.27 The British drivers seemed to take it for granted that the colonials would give way, while the Canadians were equally convinced of their own priority right to the road. Where the traffic control officers were was anybody’s guess.

  Somehow all the convoys managed to get through with a remarkably small number of vehicles lost and very few punches thrown. Most regiments reported only two to three trucks abandoned to breakdowns. The Canadians, wrote the corps engineering unit’s war diarist, “had mushroomed into being on the Adriatic front.”28

  Some Canadian units were more pleased with their new homes than others. The 3rd Field Regiment, Royal Canadian Artillery was directed to an area too small for all of its guns, trucks, ammunition stores, and tents. There was little shade and scant cover, so almost everything had to be concealed with camouflage nets. There was, however, “a pleasant little stream” on the edge of their rear boundary and “since a bath seemed even more important than food and sleep many made it their first stop.”29

  The Governor General’s Horse Guards “set up under a great spreading [stand of] evergreen with a magnificent view of the valley to the south.” Just behind the area stood a small white villa that the officers considered using for their headquarters until it was found to be swarming with bugs and mosquitoes. Medical officers, fearful of malaria infestations, put it off-limits instead.30

  On August 18, the Royal Canadian Regiment set up six miles behind II Polish Corps’s front lines and just completed digging in and concealing the vehicles with camouflage by nightfall. Three days later, Major Strome Galloway set off to try purchasing eggs, green vegetables, and other provisions to break the regular diet of bully beef or Spam and dehydrated potatoes. In a little house, he encountered “a really beautiful blonde, either a patrician or a prostitute, lolling about in a yellow silk gown with a magnificent full-length green Chinese dragon embroidered or appliquéd on its back. She spoke good English and when I complimented her on it she demonstrated her French, German, and native Italian. I thought afterwards she might have been a spy left behind by the Germans, perhaps with a radio set to tell them what was going on. . . . The cottage was remote from anywhere. It was little more than a hovel and certainly a very strange place for a woman of her apparent education and refinement to be living.”31

  Galloway duly reported the woman’s presence to Lieutenant Colonel Jim Ritchie, “who immediately set out to investigate the blonde enigma. After much skillful parrying in both English and French [he] found that the woman spoke German, French, and some English and that to all intents and purposes was of Italian parentage. Many enemy agents had been operating behind our lines and it was thought that she may be one of them. Needless to say, [Ritchie] arrived at no definite conclusion regarding the blonde menace and it was hoped that the matter would be investigated more fully at a later date.”32

  Aside from having a possible Mata Hari in their midst, I Canadian Corps staff were satisfied with the manner in which the hastily organized move to the Adriatic coast had been executed. The engineers’ war diarist claimed, “The rapid and comparatively unobtrusive movement of such a ponderous force over long distances across mountainous country was a tribute to the staffs concerned and a true example of the mobility of the modern Army.”33 Corps staff estimated that the Canadians had moved “a million shells… and 12 million gallons of petrol. The Canadian Corps alone moved some 280 carriers, about 650 tanks, and some 10,700 wheeled vehicles.”34 It was a significant achievement for any army and it was completed none too soon. For even as the last Canadians concentrated around Jesi, Burns and his divisional commanders were scrambling to prepare for an attack that was to begin in just thirty-six hours.

  PART TWO

  DRIVE TO THE GOTHIC LINE

  [ 7 ]

  We Begin the Last Lap

  NEVER BEFORE had Eighth Army carried out such a grand offensive on such short notice. Having scrapped weeks of careful preparation for a central Apennines operation after one brief consultation carried out under the wing of a small airplane, General Harold Alexander, Deputy Supreme Commander, Mediterranean and Eighth Army’s General Oliver Leese could spare not a moment reconsidering the wisdom of the new scheme. Neither could the corps commanders charged with carrying off this risky gamble.

  While, as the British official history would later relate, “changing plans at so late a stage took great moral courage,” it also required digressing from the methodical operational planning process that had distinguished Eighth Army’s previous battlefield successes.1 The invasion of Sicily had taken months of planning. So, too, had Operation Diadem, which had carried the previously deadlocked Allies up the Liri Valley. Every imaginable contingency had been studied and prepared for before the attack order was drafted.

  Operation Olive, as the present operation was codenamed, was to be altogether different. The involved divisions would have just a few scant hours to study the ground and probe enemy positions with patrols. Despite this lack of deliberate planning, an air of heady optimism prevailed.

  As I Canadian Corps’s Lieutenant General Tommy Burns and V British Corps’s Lieutenant General Charles Keightley got down to work, Leese took a noticeable back seat. Burns and his staff were primarily concerned with the six-mile-wide corridor or defile that was bordered by II Polish Corps on the right and V British Corps in the foothills of the Apennines to the left, for this was to be the Canadian area of operation.2

  Their first obstacle was the Metauro River. Burns gave the 1st Canadian Infantry Division—which would initially lead the offensive—the task of establishing a bridgehead across the river in the face of inevitable German opposition. The 21st British Tank Brigade’s three regiments would support the Canadians. Fortunately, the corps had spent the past two months training for opposed river crossings, so Burns believed 1 CID “could accomplish this task rapidly and without heavy loss.”3

  Once across the river, the division faced a twelve-mile advance through broken, hilly country to reach the Foglia River. Immediately behind this river lay the Gothic Line proper. About midway between the Metauro and Foglia rivers, a ridge rose in front of the village of Mombaroccio. Approximately 1,200 feet high, the ridge constituted the highest ground the Canadians would have to traverse during this first phase of the operation.

  Facing Eighth Army were three divisions of the Tenth Army’s LXXVI Panzer Corps. This corps had another two divisions in reserve. Despite the corps’s panzer designation, its divisions were all infantry. On the seaward flank, the 278th Infantry Division had been badly battered following almost three months spent trying to check II Polish Corps’s advance. In the centre, the 71st Infantry Division stood opposite the Canadians. This division was reportedly demoralized and only at half strength. Holding the line in the foothills through which V Corps was to attack was the 5th Mountain Division. Lurking behind the 71st Infantry Division was the 1st Parachute Division and 162nd (Turcoman) Division. The latter division was of poor quality, but the same could not be said for 1st Parachute Division. The Canadians had fought the paratroopers on many occasions, most notably at Ortona and the Hitler Line, and knew they would offer a tough fight whenever they entered the front line. Burns ruefully noted that 1st Parachute Division had become a legend, “even described by some enthusiastic Allied journalists as the best fighting division in any army—Allied or enemy. This became rather a sore point with [Major] General Chris Vokes, who used to point out, not without some heat, that whenever his 1st Canadians had met the parachutists the latter had had the worst of it.”4

  Burns fully expected 1 CID to qu
ickly bludgeon the Germans back to the Gothic Line fortifications. Here the battle should reach its climax. Through aerial photographic reconnaissance, intelligence officers had provided Burns with a fair appreciation of the defensive fortifications. If a slugging match were required to breach the line, there was no question it would be costly. But Burns “hoped that our advance would be rapid enough to reach the position before [the fortifications] could be completed, and before the German garrisons could be settled down in them ready for a protracted defence.”5 Indeed, Burns hoped to arrive before any German reinforcements and “bounce” the line “through quick thrusts by tanks and infantry. Otherwise, there would have to be a set-piece attack, with an elaborate, coordinated plan involving heavy artillery preparation and support.”6

  This actual breakthrough was to be 5th Canadian Armoured Division’s job. Just before 1 CID reached the Gothic Line, 5 CAD would form up to its left and press right on through. The armoured division would then drive to Cattolica on the coast and run up Highway 16 to Rimini. It was at Cattolica that II Polish Corps would be pinched out of the advance and left behind to mop up Pesaro.

  Burns was confident the Canadians could carry out their assigned tasks without requiring reinforcements—a necessity because Eighth Army had no reserves the Canadians could draw upon if the attack bogged down. After XIII Corps’s transfer to the U.S. Fifth Army, Eighth Army had only eleven divisions and all but two of these were committed to the forthcoming attack. As Alexander noted later, “We had all our goods in the shop window and it was impossible for me to create a central reserve with which to influence the battle.”7 Although 2nd New Zealand Division was concentrated near Jesi as a floating reserve, Leese had made no allowance for it to support I Canadian Corps. As in the Liri Valley, the Canadians were left with just two divisions that must succeed or fail on their own.

  ON AUGUST 22, 1 CID began moving from Jesi to assembly areas for the Metauro River assault. The Royal Canadian Regiment tromped through the night to a midpoint position that lay five hours of cross-country marching from their final assembly point two hundred yards south of the hilltop village of Montemaggiore. Although it was night, temperatures hovered in the nineties; the air was lifeless and heavy. Underfoot, the ground was cracked and fissured from weeks of exposure to baking hot sun. Staggering under the weight of their heavy packs, the men sweated and quietly cursed every time they had to climb another of the steep slopes in this crazily rolling countryside.

  At first light, the column stumbled into a cluster of olive groves. While the troops flopped under the scant cover of the trees to wait until nightfall and the last leg of the march, Major Strome Galloway and several other officers went ahead in a jeep to scout the final assembly area. They were soon standing out in the open on a small hill, looking down on the virtually dried-up Metauro. Galloway calculated that the water trickling over the stony-looking riverbed was no more than ankle depth. While the river itself wound oxbow fashion towards the coast, parallelling it at a distance of between three hundred and five hundred yards was the Via Flaminia Highway. Centuries might have passed, but the Roman engineering that had created the original great highway was still obvious. As Galloway started pointing out the various positions from which the RCR’s rifle companies would launch their attacks, Lieutenant Geoff Wright remarked casually, “I feel as though some bloody Jerry is staring at me through a pair of Zeiss field glasses.”8 No sooner had he spoken than an artillery shell struck a house to the front of the officers.

  As two more shells shrieked down, the men scattered. Flinging himself into a pigsty, Galloway pressed his trembling body against “the filthy hide of a huge, squealing sow.”9 Captain Ted Maxted ran towards the beckoning safety of an open door belonging to the house struck by the opening round. Just as he reached the door, however, an Italian peasant inside slammed it in the officer’s face. No other cover available, Maxted jumped into a ditch. The other officers had meanwhile wormed their way into a small cave. The Germans pounded the hill for six minutes with what Galloway estimated must have been seventy-five shells.10

  If the Germans had this forming-up position so well registered that they didn’t hesitate to waste that much ammunition on five officers, Galloway realized a deluge of explosives and shrapnel would greet the regiment’s arrival here. He raced back in the jeep to 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade headquarters and warned commander Brigadier Allan Calder of the danger. Calder said it was too late to dramatically shift the regiment’s forming-up position. All he could do was give the RCR a slightly wider front line so that it could disperse the rifle companies farther afield to take advantage of available cover inside the farm buildings. Being almost all built of stone, these could withstand some battering by artillery.11

  On the night of August 23, 1st Canadian Infantry Division’s headquarters arrived at its planned forward position to find the area likewise subject to random artillery and mortar fire. Everyone was so exhausted by the move, however, the divisional war diarist wrote, that “we nevertheless go to sleep and the night is relatively quiet.”12

  In the morning, the headquarters staff discovered itself on “the side of an easy sloping hill. The fighting front moves with us [so] we are still some five miles from our Forward Defence Lines. However, though a multitude of trees offer good cover, this piece of ground is under enemy observation. Movement on routes must be kept at a minimum, no queuing is allowed for meals, slit trenches must be dug under trees and even latrines have to be camouflaged!”13

  Reconnaissance parties from many of the division’s regiments received equally rough treatment from German artillery as they scouted their new forward positions. As a patrol from 3rd Field Regiment, Royal Canadian Artillery was descending a long hill towards its assembly position, the men belatedly realized their jeep was fully exposed to anyone on the opposite side of the Metauro. Lieutenant D.W. Chute jumped from the jeep and started guiding the driver into a sheltered position between two buildings only seconds before a salvo of shells crashed down. The officer was killed. “Lefty,” as he was known in the regiment, had been an immensely popular veteran who had served with 3rd Field Regiment since 1942. “Imperturbable and cheerful in action or out,” the regiment’s war diarist declared, “he was the friend of all and a competent officer. It is hard to think of ‘B’ Troop without him.”14

  Another artillery unit, 5th Canadian Armoured Division’s 17th Field Regiment, was plagued by tragedy from the moment it arrived on the Adriatic front. On August 19, its commander, Lieutenant Colonel R.W. Armstrong, was seriously injured when his jeep overturned. He died four hours after the accident. On August 21, four officers suffering from either jaundice or malaria were hospitalized. “The regiment will go into action short of officers unless reinforcements arrive very soon,” the regiment’s war diarist lamented.15 The following day, Lieutenant G.W. “Cass” Garnett was killed trying to clear a mine blocking a road scheduled for use during the August 25 attack. Noted the war diarist, “Cass… was not only a willing war horse but did his job with a cheerfulness and efficiency you enjoy in a person. His memory will live on in this regiment not only because he was a soldier, but also a man who knew men and loved to work with them and for them.”16

  At 2030 hours on August 23, the regiment headed for its forward gun position near Montemaggiore. All went well until the regiment left the main road for the gun positions. In the darkness, with only sidelights switched on, the long, twisting track they followed proved extremely hazardous. Four vehicles rolled over into ditches or broke down. Despite using the cover of night to slip into their position, the Germans opened fire as the regiment’s vehicles pulled up. An exploding shell killed the regiment’s new commander, Lieutenant Colonel F.T. McIntosh, and Lance Corporal T.A. Kennedy.17

  The new position clustered the entire regiment together on a half-acre shelf in the bottom of a deep valley. About four hundred feet above their position, Montemaggiore perched on its hill. To the front of the village was the Metauro River.

  Lie
utenants Alexander Ross and Fred Cooper arrived here in the morning from a reinforcement depot. Ross was soon taking the roll call of seventy strangers serving in his new home, the 76th Battery. Shells were exploding all around the battery position. Between salvos, Ross dashed from slit trenches to crannies inside a house to find the gunners, so he could introduce himself and check them off as present and accounted for. Ross suddenly realized his training days were done. This was the real thing. As this reality sunk in, Ross saw a burial party carry McIntosh towards a freshly dug grave. The body was “wrapped in a grey army blanket secured with signal wire, just his carefully polished high boots showing.” A piper followed along playing a Toronto Irish lament, “The Flowers of the Forest.”18

  Ross was assigned to command ‘F’ Troop. The troop’s four 25-pound guns were all well camouflaged and positioned in deep revetments. His men had also dug their slit trenches in more deeply than normal because of the persistent shelling. Ross’s command post was a coffin-shaped hole covered over crudely with planks and a tarpaulin to prevent the escape of light at night.19

  Like everyone else, Ross was frustrated by the regiment’s inability to fire back at the German artillerymen. The Canadian gunners were under strict orders to maintain gun silence until they were to open fire in support of the infantry attack. The German shelling was so intense that the resulting dust made it difficult for Ross to see his guns from the command dugout. Fortunately for everyone, most of the shells exploded harmlessly in olive groves behind the regiment’s position. When one shell, however, set fire to camouflage covering one of the troop limbers—a trailer loaded with cartridges of high explosives, Ross and his men had to brave the incoming fire to quell the blaze before the trailer’s load of explosives detonated. A terrifled Ross was grateful that he had found the courage to join his men in suppressing the fire. Failing to have done so would have left a damning first impression. Ross was greatly impressed by his men, who were mostly prairie farm boys; muscular, large framed, and spare of speech.20