Operation Husky Read online

  Several hours later, a troop of Shermans from the Three Rivers Regiment rolled into town. Using the troop commander’s wireless, Atkinson notified 2 CIB headquarters that a general in Modica wished to surrender.4 Eventually, a Jeep arrived with 2 CIB’s Brigade Major Richard S. “Dick” Malone and his driver aboard. After concluding a stint as staff secretary to the minister of national defence, Malone’s army career had blossomed. He had returned to Canada to attend the Canadian War Staff College, been posted back to England, where he served briefly in the Queen’s Own Rifles before being assigned as a staff captain in the 5th Canadian Armoured Division, and then had been promoted to brigade major in the fall of 1942. A soldier whose experience was confined to staff appointments, Malone was nonplussed to find himself virtually alone in the midst of hundreds of Italian troops, most of whom had either a “small bundle or shabby suitcase of personal belongings” at their feet. He was approached by an Italian naval aide, who spoke English and who took him to the Italian headquarters to meet the general—the latter having been released from jail for the surrender. For awhile Malone was left idling in a waiting room, growing more anxious by the minute as he imagined the general and his staff burning and destroying vital intelligence papers. Finally, he burst into the office waving his pistol and shouting in broken Italian that he demanded an unconditional surrender. This was duly offered. Leaving his driver armed with a Bren gun to ensure no papers were destroyed, Malone, the general, and several Italian officers crowded into a Fiat staff car and drove off to find Simonds, because d’Havet was once again insisting he would turn over his pistol to none other than an equal. Before the car departed, Malone took the precaution of removing the general’s pennant from the flag staff mounted atop the radiator and replacing it with his rather soiled white handkerchief.

  On the town’s outskirts, Malone met Lieutenant Colonel Leslie Booth, who was leading more of his Three Rivers Regiment Shermans towards Modica. Malone had neglected to even notice Atkinson, his small party, or the tank troop, so he told the tanker the only Canadian in the town was his driver, and that reinforcement would be appreciated. Booth promised to get there immediately. Next, to his astonishment, Malone encountered a car carrying Lieutenant General Oliver Leese. The xxx Corps commander had no interest in wasting time taking d’Havet’s surrender. He told Malone to get Simonds to do this and also tell him to get his men cracking past Modica. This dithering around the town was taking far too long.5

  Near divisional headquarters, the Italian staff car was spotted by a motley crew of war correspondents crammed so tightly into a Jeep that two army cameramen were sitting on the hood. There were five men aboard, all burdened by the gear correspondents carried—still and movie cameras, cartons of film, portable typewriters, their personal kit. The men were Canadian Press war correspondent Ross Munro, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reporter Peter Stursberg (who had neither a microphone nor any sound recording equipment and so was reduced to filing paper copy), two army photographers, and Captain Dave Maclellan, whose job was to keep them all out of mischief. Like the good ambulance chasers they were by instinct, the correspondents set off in hot pursuit of the staff car.

  Malone found divisional headquarters in an olive grove. Simonds, donning his beret as he walked, came towards the car. Stursberg thought the two generals a study in contrasts—the Italian old and portly, the Canadian lean and vigorous. His pistol still holstered at his side, d’Havet insisted he should not have to relinquish it because his coastal division had consisted of only nine battalions and had been facing an entire Allied army. Deciding not to argue military protocol, Simonds just ensured the gun had no ammunition. Stursberg suspected the Canadian general probably rued losing what would have been a wonderful souvenir.6

  Less interested in the surrender proceedings than in the Italian staff car, Malone was trying to slip away in it before anyone noticed. Simonds, however, caught up and, after returning Malone’s salute, circled the car in a slow inspection. “Finally, he paused in front of the hood. Then, without a trace of a smile, he slowly unscrewed the little silver flag staff from the radiator cap.

  “‘I think I can use this,’ he said. That was all. The car was mine, and I lost no time sorting out the gears and driving off to dangle my prize before old Chris [Vokes].” Malone still had d’Havet’s general’s pennant wadded in his pocket and he kept it as a personal memento.7

  Having seen the surrender through, the war correspondents headed north. Their hope was to catch up with the rapidly advancing brigades on divisional point. They rolled up the highway that Atkinson and his lost RCR troops had taken, driving past where the Seaforth truck had been ambushed. The body of the driver still lay beside it, but was now covered by a white tarpaulin upon which some civilian had rested a bouquet of flowers. Long lines of Italian troops marching towards the beaches clogged the road and impeded their progress. Many, seeing the correspondents and their cameras, waved and made Churchill’s famous V-for-victory sign in hopes of being immortalized on film. By the time the correspondents passed through Modica it was late in the day, and the infantry brigades were long gone.8

  WHILE RCR LIEUTENANT Sherry Atkinson and his group were carrying out their exploits around Modica, the rest of the battalion had spent the early morning of July 12 capturing Ragusa. This they achieved by the simple expedient of having a battery of the Royal Devon Yeomanry fire a salvo into the town—which, like Modica, was tucked into a valley rather than perched on a hilltop. Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Crowe then sent Captain Dick Dillon and his carrier section from the Support Company, under the protection of a white flag, to accept the Italian garrison’s expected surrender. Dillon returned to report that the town had already been occupied by a company from the 45th U.S. (Thunderbird) Division and he had decided against sticking around to see how they felt about being shelled.9

  The American presence in Ragusa meant there was no further need to have the Canadians advancing westward, for Seventh Army was already there. So Simonds swung both the 1st and 2nd brigades northward towards Giarratana. This was a classic Sicilian hilltop village about fifteen miles away by road. With the 45th Division so close on the left and the 51st Highland Division coming up on the right towards Palazzolo—a village just three miles east of Giarratana—the Canadians were being squeezed out by these faster advancing divisions. The Americans were highly motorized—so much so that the RCR groused that it seemed they all whizzed about, with their distinctive shoulder patches featuring a yellow eagle over a red square, in Jeeps each mounted with a small-calibre gun, “while ninety percent of our moves take place on shank’s mare.”10 The British on the left were less of an irritant, but they still had landed in Sicily with all their transport and so were not reduced to marching everywhere.11

  Reliant on boot power, the division’s advance became increasingly ragged during the morning, and by afternoon a pause was needed to bring the two leading brigades into alignment. There were also several villages along their route that had to be swept for enemy troops. The Loyal Edmonton Regiment took responsibility for ensuring that Modica was completely secured. Lieutenant Colonel Jim Jefferson also sent ‘B’ Company with a troop of tanks to Scicli, midway between Modica and the coast. Applying the now standard ploy, the tanks fired three shots into Scicli and the infantry advanced to accept the predictable surrender—this time bagging 1,100 troops. Fortunately, the Italians had their own transport and so were loaded into trucks and driven back to a prisoner-of-war cage that had been erected in Ispica. The rest of the battalion, meanwhile, travelled aboard tanks and various Canadian and captured light transport to Ragusa, which lay within Eighth Army’s assigned zone of responsibility. Finding the Americans still ensconced here, the Edmontons established a defensive position on the northern outskirts. The PPCLI arrived soon after and set up on some high ground east of the town.

  Both the PPCLI and the Edmontons had enjoyed the advantage of advancing on the relatively good road running through Modica and on to Ragusa without being seri
ously challenged. Not so the Seaforth Highlanders. Advancing east of Modica, with Captain Syd Thomson’s ‘A’ Company leading, the battalion had come upon a truck parked crossways in the road. Drawing his revolver, Thomson started walking with a couple of men towards the vehicle. With his first step the captain realized “the revolver marked me as an officer. Several shots were fired from the side of the road and I got one on the inside fleshy part of my right thigh which just missed providing me with the voice of a tenor. Fortunately the bullet went clear through. We were wearing shorts with two very small belt buckles, difficult enough at the best of times, but quite impossible for my shaking fingers. I could not drop my shorts for an examination. However, by putting a hand up one leg I was reasonably satisfied that I was not to become a eunuch.” While the battalion pressed on, Thomson was put in the manger of a large barn after having his wound dressed by the medical officer, Captain W.K. “Ken” MacDonald. Doped up on morphine, he fell asleep only to be suddenly awakened by sounds. Approaching were two Sicilian farmers carrying pitchforks. Fearing they planned on running him through, Thomson raised his covering blanket so they could see the revolver in his hand. The two men backed off carefully and then proceeded to fork hay into a manger containing two oxen. Later, two Seaforth stretcher-bearers arrived, bundled the captain into a donkey cart, and evacuated him to hospital.12

  While Thomson had been lying in the manger, the Seaforth rifle companies had veered off the road onto a mule track. They were strung out in one long snaking file through “a continuous cloud of fine white dust which when mixed with the perspiration of the body made a white layer of dust over each man. It seemed to work into every nook and cranny, into our boots and up to the hair on our heads,” the war diarist recorded.13 Shortly before midnight, the Seaforths entered Ragusa en route to their assigned concentration point two miles northwest of the town. In the past twenty-four hours they had covered about thirty miles on foot.14

  Padre Roy Durnford had been on the march with the troops as they descended into Ragusa. “We came upon it in the moonlight, the pale green light of the moon gave the city a ghostly appearance. Not a sound was about as we entered, marching at well-spaced intervals in single file. The streets were empty and the houses were all shuttered. Churches looked vast as they towered above us in black silhouettes against the sky. The business part of this strange city was impressive ... Through the winding streets of Ragusa we went till we came to a gorge separating the business section of the city from the unbelievably fascinating part of the ‘residential’ area. On the steep slopes of the gorges abounding in all directions houses huddled precariously. Some were cave dwellings cut into the sheer sides of sandstone walls. In odd designs and weird flourishes these houses in their hundreds resembled nothing quite so much as a dream—a dream of a lost city, of ancient days and strange people. One could almost feel for certain that through the latticed shutters in a hundred windows, the eyes of unfriendly, not to say menacing, people were staring down at us as we descended into first this gorge and then that.”

  After the Seaforths passed through the town and ascended out of the valley, Durnford looked back and realized Ragusa “was quite hidden from the plains above it...The empty streets, the shuttered windows and the silence broken by the hollow sound of marching feet had made us all feel that we had intruded upon forbidden places.” Reaching their destination in the late evening of July 12, the Seaforths fell out in an orange grove and happily dug into rations before collapsing into sleep.15

  MIDNIGHT ON THE night of July 12-13 had brought no such release from the march for 1 CIB’s battalions. The Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment and 48th Highlanders had made a gruelling effort that day to catch up with the RCR near Ragusa. The 48th’s ‘A’ Company had led the way, and one of its soldiers later scribbled down some fragmented memories. “It was soon terrifically hot. We marched and marched. It grew terrifically dusty. It was dust, dust, dust. We marched. I was thirsty, thirsty, thirsty—and there was no water. We marched and marched. Our tin hats would fry eggs. We marched. Men collapsed from heat exhaustion. We marched, counting one, two, three, four. Some were crying (literally) from blistered feet. We marched. Some had dysentery. We marched, one, two, three, four. We stopped for one hour for lunch. There was no lunch but a biscuit. We marched. There were terrible sun blisters. We marched. About 1400 hours we fell out. We were to rest. We did, but we marched in the heat in our sleep.”16

  During the lunch and short break at 1400 hours, many of the men who had earlier fallen out of line due to sunstroke were able to catch up. In the late afternoon, the 48th Highlanders formed ranks again and punched out another two and a half miles to come alongside the RCR.17 The Hasty Ps, too, had men felled by the “terrific heat.” But most of these managed to catch up when the battalion reached the brigade rendezvous point. There both battalions collapsed.18 Men “lay in the ditches, stupefied, and simply waiting. In two and a half days they had fought a battle and then marched almost fifty miles. It was not credible that they could do more,” wrote the Hasty Ps’ regimental historian.19

  What was credible and what was demanded by generals were two different things. As soon as darkness fell, weary officers and sergeants moved among their men, ordering them to their feet. As 1 CIB was now well in the division’s van it fell to it to actualize Leese’s instruction that the Canadians get cracking. Taking point from the RCR, the Hasty Ps mounted three companies on tanks and every other available piece of wheeled transport, which included artillery tractors, Jeeps, motorcycles, and only a handful of trucks. These companies set off on what they considered “heavenly chariots,” while luckless ‘C’ Company resorted to footslogging.20 They headed into country that became “increasingly rugged as the sprawling ridges of the Iblei Hills climb towards their junction with the Erei Mountains.”21 They were bound for Giarratana, and it was expected that the enemy—finally, Germans—would try to get there beforehand.22 It was a race, for perhaps the Hasty Ps could get to the village first and there would be no need to wrest it from a determined enemy’s hands. With the Hasty Ps at the head, followed by the 48th Highlanders and then the RCR, 1st Brigade staggered forward. At 2130 hours, the companies aboard vehicles entered Giarratana without having encountered any opposition. The Canadians had won the race. As the crow flies, 1 CIB was roughly thirty miles inland from the beach, but it had been more than fifty miles over rough roads. The advance had now stretched the division’s supply lines to the maximum for the small number of available vehicles. The troops—having covered most of this ground on foot and not yet being acclimatized to Sicily’s subtropical heat—were clearly exhausted.

  In the early morning of July 13, General Montgomery ordered a halt on his extreme left flank and said the Canadians should advance no farther than Giarratana for thirty-six hours. This would allow the division to regain its strength and reorganize for the next leg of the advance. Behind the leading brigades, the situation was becoming increasingly chaotic. The beach was a mess of supply dumps vulnerable to sporadic but destructive Luftwaffe air raids. Inland, the artillery regiments were struggling on inadequate roads to catch up to the infantry and being occasionally strafed by German aircraft.

  The 92nd Battery from 3rd Canadian Field Regiment, which had equipped itself with a captured horse-drawn artillery battery, was attacked by nine German fighter planes in quick succession on the late morning of July 12. Lacking maps, the battery had only shortly before wandered astray after leaving the area of Ispica. It was just passing a DUKW carrying a number of officers and men from the divisional artillery headquarters when the enemy fighters struck. The German fighters tore into the DUKW with machine-gun fire that wounded Brigade Major R.S. Dyer and five gunners. Dyer’s badly mangled leg had to be amputated.23

  Only three 92nd men were wounded in the wild seconds of the strafing run, despite there not having “been the slightest warning of the attack and none had even had time to get off the road. But the greatest damage was to the horses and guns. Sixteen of the twent
y-four animals were killed or wounded and had to be destroyed and the guns and wagons were so badly damaged that they were useless. And that was the sudden end of the history of the 92nd Battery (Horsed),” the 3rd Field Regiment’s official historian lamented. Turning the rest of the horses loose and abandoning the guns in a field by the road, the disheartened gunners trudged to Modica, where in the late afternoon their spirits rose as they took the surrender of about two hundred Italian troops on the town’s outskirts. By the end of the day, the 92nd Battery had linked up with the rest of the field regiment. Its gun lines now established four miles east of Ragusa, the regiment had yet to fire a shot during the invasion.24

  THE LUFTWAFFE AIR attack that surprised the artillerymen was one of many on July 12. Despite the massive weight of anti-aircraft guns positioned on the beaches and aboard the ships standing offshore, a number of German fighters risked destruction to carry out strafing and bombing runs. While these caused little damage on the British or Canadian beaches, they were still unnerving for the naval personnel. Coxswain Norm Bowen was aboard one of the Landing Craft, Mechanized vessels of the Canadian 80th and 81st flotillas working off the British beaches near Siracusa. He had just pulled up alongside the hospital ship Talamba with a full load of wounded Tommies when several German Stukas screamed out of the sun to attack a monitor and cruiser standing close by. “The stuff was coming down,” he recalled, “and water was coming in [to the boat from damage to its bottom] and we started slinging the wounded aboard.” Bowen was up in his chair behind the wheel so was level with the lowest deck of the hospital ship. Suddenly he heard this very cultured voice ask, “Would you like a cup of tea?” He turned to face an older, impeccably dressed nursing sister. Thinking he would like something a lot stronger than tea, Bowen replied, “Yes, Sister.” When she returned with the tea, Bowen hurriedly said, “Just the cup, not the saucer.” His hands were shaking so badly cup and saucer would just go flying. Gripping the cup in both hands, he drank its contents in one long chug. “It’s not much fun, is it?” the woman asked. “No, Sister, it’s not.” The nursing sister reached out and touched his cheek gently. “God bless you,” she said and was gone.