The Gothic Line Read online

  Lieutenant Colonel Reid was setting the CADence.4 He pressed on relentlessly, unmindful or uncaring of the complaints and threats brewing in his wake. Reid was tough and a seasoned infantry officer, but he also marched light. He did not carry a heavy pack, a Lee Enfield rifle or Bren gun, and web belts crammed with ammunition that added up to a hundred pounds or more of weight, on a day when the temperature was crackling just under one hundred degrees Fahrenheit.

  Men started falling out, staggering off the track and flopping down under any kind of shade. The rest tromped past. “Sweat poured down our faces, soaked the collars of the denim we wore, and the constant rubbing of the coarse, salt-laden cloth against our necks chafed us something terrible—but there was nothing we could do to ease the irritation except swear and keep on going.

  “A thick layer of dust, as fine as talcum powder, swirled upward like white smoke from under our boots. It settled into the corners of our mouths, and with every intake of breath the dust built up in the mucous of our nasal passages and coated the soft tissue of our throats. Breathing came in laboured gasps, and all along the way it was a spit, gag and cough affair. Sweat dripping off our foreheads ran into our eyes and blurred our vision. And to make matters worse, salt in the sweat mixed with gritty dust irritated our eyes to such a degree that we had to constantly use the water in our canteens to wash it away. A steady demand for water brought on by extreme thirst, rinsing out dust-contaminated mouths, and washing out our eyes had soon drained our water-bottles dry.”5

  Every hour there was a five-minute break. The men spent it frantically refilling canteens from farm wells before the column started moving again. Scislowski verged on delirium, his only bearing being the back of the man ahead. Where that soldier went, so went Scislowski. In time, each forward step also rendered the sounds of a battle ahead clearer to the ear—the pop of rifle fire, the angry sharp rip of a German MG42 answered by the slow thudding of a Bren gun.

  Finally, after twenty miles, and with the long shadows of evening slipping down the hills, the Perths halted behind a ridge lined by umbrella pines and cypress. There was a pool, fed by “crystal-clear cold water from an underground stream.” Men tore off their clothes and leapt in naked, “shouting, laughing, splashing and dunking in the cooling depths.” The pain and feverish heat literally washed out of Scislowski’s body, as the refreshing water revived his spirit and strength.6

  They were not to linger here. At midnight the orders came and, groaning under the weight of their packs, the Perths resumed the march, moving through a night so black Scislowski was unable to see the man ahead. If anyone hesitated, the man behind banged into him and the column would collapse inward like an accordion that left men cursing and shoving each other.

  Then Reid, still out front, lengthened his stride and unbelievably the Perths were nearly jogging. “It went something like this: walk faster, break into a run a few paces, walk again, jog five or six paces, walk. It was like this all the way right up until first light.”7

  As August 29 dawned, they entered Mombaroccio, where they paused for four and a half hours as the Loyal Edmonton Regiment finished clearing Monteciccardo and the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada the other villages overlooking the Foglia River. Jeeps arrived, carrying welcome corned-beef sandwiches. Scislowski bit into his and almost gagged on the thick, waxy margarine slathered on the bread. Ravenous, he wolfed the sandwich down anyway and sucked tea gratefully from a cup. At 0900 hours the march began anew. By noon, “the Perths were strung out for miles on the dust choked road stretching back over hillocks and down valleys. Man, but was it ever hot! Steel helmets by now had become brain-baking ovens. Pack straps had taken on knife-edges, cutting sharply into aching shoulders. Thigh muscles strained at every incline, and feet throbbed from the pounding they’d been taking over the past twenty-four hours.”8

  The column left the road, heading cross-country. Scislowski initially thought this might offer easier marching than the hard, dusty road surface. “Brambles tore our knees. Potholes, field stones, and erosion ruts on the slopes added another dimension of discomfort as we plodded sullenly and bleary-eyed towards the sounds of battle, now little less than a mile away.” Scislowski tripped on a root and sprawled face first into the dirt. “I cursed the army. I cursed the officers. I cursed my NCOS and I even uttered a few choice words of profanity up to God for having chosen the infantry to serve in.”9 There was another hill, steep and covered in scrub. Men sobbed aloud that they couldn’t go up another, only to do so anyway.

  Entering a cluster of houses, they stopped behind a low cinderblock wall following the ridgeline. This was Ginestreto. The Perths’ gruelling route march was over. Scislowski’s platoon sprawled on a patch of pavement, each man panting as if he had just crossed the finish line after a flat-out 880-yard dash. When Scislowski’s heart rate steadied, he tottered over to the wall to look down at the new battlefield. It seemed unremarkable, like any other Italian valley. There was no sign of the dugouts, trenches, and amoured cupolas reported as forming the backbone of the Gothic Line.10

  THE MILE-WIDE Foglia Valley was almost entirely flood plain, vegetated by reedy grass and low brush. Where the ground rose slightly to form narrow shelves, there were fruit trees and vineyards. The Germans had felled any tall trees to open fields of fire, and the gentle slope running up from the valley to a low ridge on the north was sparsely vegetated. Just beyond the ridgeline, a deep antitank ditch ran westward from the village of Osteria Nuova to Montecchio directly in front of a parallel road. West of Montecchio, the valley walls steepened to form a natural tank obstacle.

  North of the road that parallelled the Foglia River, the ground rose sharply into the low, broken hills of the Monte Luro–Tomba di Pesaro feature, which thrust several spiny ridges towards the valley like the fingers of a splayed hand. At 948 feet, Monte Luro formed the highest point.

  I Canadian Corps headquarters staff had divided the slightly more than three-mile Canadian frontage into two roughly even lanes. The eastern lane would be 1st Canadian Infantry Division’s responsibility and the western one 5th Canadian Armoured Division’s. Monte Luro lay in the centre of 1 CID’s ground. Running southwestward from its peak, a ridge cut sharply across 5 CAD’s front and extended well into V Corps’s sector. Tomba di Pesaro perched on the crest of a spur that jutted northwest from this ridge. Immediately southeast of the village was Monte Peloso, also identified as Point 253. The village and Point 253 dominated alternate flanks of a vital north-south running road and both were believed heavily fortified. Two other spurs extended south from the main ridge. One ran about a mile southwest of Point 253 before dividing into three fingers that reached the edge of the lateral road and were separated by deep gullies. The most easterly of these terminated at Borgo Santa Maria, the centre finger midway between this village and Osteria Nuova, and the longer, more irregular, third finger passed just east of Montecchio. Two points of high ground dominated the latter spur—points 147 and 115. On the far left, another narrow, steep-sided ridge curved in a southwesterly direction and culminated in a three-hundred-foot promontory, identified as Point 120, which overlooked the road immediately west of Montecchio. A small summit called Monte Marrone rose up out of the ridgeline at the point where it started trending more sharply southward towards Point 120. The promontory was thought to be heavily fortified and enjoyed a clear two-hundred-degree field of fire that commanded both the flats to the front and the deep draws on either flank.

  The only decent road in 5 CAD’s entire sector followed a narrow draw from Montecchio towards Tomba di Pesaro, and Point 120 served as a roadblock to any force trying to enter this road from the south. This made the promontory a key objective.11

  But before there could be any assault on Point 120, 11th Canadian Infantry Brigade must win a bridgehead across the Foglia River. The same held true for 1 CID’s planned drive towards Tomba di Pesaro. While the Foglia presented no significant natural obstacle to either infantry or armour, the forward teeth of the Gothic Line fo
llowed the riverbank from Pesaro to a point twelve miles inland. Behind this line, more defences were layered in rows back at least as far as Monte Luro.

  Fronting the defensive works were thousands of mines that had been sown in overlapping panels, each about fifty feet wide. Inside each panel were six to seven rows of mines. The rows and the mines inside them were methodically spaced between seven to eight feet apart. The zigzagging antitank ditch just south of the lateral road was fourteen feet wide and only broken for a one-mile stretch of steep embankments between Borgo Santa Maria and Osteria Nuova. Backing the antitank ditch was a long string of machine-gun, antitank, and field-gun emplacements linked by a communication trench that had been protected by a wood roof covered in a thick layer of dirt and sod.

  The Germans had also braced this section with great amounts of concrete. “Approximately twenty casemates large enough to contain antitank guns or light field guns are placed out among the other defences and all of them cover the river, the antitank ditch, or the minefield west of Montecchio,” 1 CID intelligence staff noted. “Numerous pillboxes of various sizes ranging from the two- to three-man types to those capable of containing light guns are seen along the entire length of this sub-sector, the majority of which also fire south to cover the anti-tank obstacles.”12

  Positioned immediately behind the front band of defences was another broad belt of barbed wire, in turn covered by a second system of pillboxes and emplacements. Well sited on the Monte Luro–Tomba di Pesaro feature were several concrete-based Panther V turrets—Panzerturms. These faced a wide skyline against which any Allied tank crossing the ridgeline south of the Foglia River would be immediately silhouetted and remain exposed during the entire one- to two-mile advance to the base of the feature.

  To construct this detailed report on the Gothic Line’s defences, Canadian intelligence had relied on reports by Italian partisans, interrogations of German prisoners, and, most importantly, photo intelligence provided by the Mediterranean Air Interpretation Unit (MAIU). Since early August, MAIU had flown hundreds of reconnaissance missions that meticulously photographed the Gothic Line from the Adriatic to a point fifteen miles inland. By following a precise grid pattern, they were able to develop a detailed interlocking photographic map on a scale of 1:15,000.13

  SEEING THE FOGLIA RIVER valley for the first time, Saskatoon Light Infantry Captain Howard Mitchell felt a chill of despair run through his body. “I fervently wished,” he later wrote, “that my God would take me or do anything to spare me this. The Hitler Line was in fairly flat country between two mountain ridges. This was different.” Here there was a mile-wide valley and a high crest behind which the German artillery and mortars could remain hidden and invisible to the Canadian artillery gunners, mortarmen, and medium machine-gunners. In the river valley itself, Mitchell saw “no trees, no bushes, no houses. It was a bare valley and every inch of it from our side of the river to the far side of the valley was covered by everything the Germans had. The Hitler Line was terrible. This could only be a stupid slaughter.”14

  Lieutenant General Tommy Burns shared the same worries; hence his earlier desire to “gatecrash” the line. But he now figured the advance from the Metauro to the Foglia had taken too long for this to still be possible. As 11 CIB and 3 CIB took over the corps’s front lines on August 29, Burns was discussing with Eighth Army commander General Oliver Leese the need to heavily bomb the German defences the next day. He also wanted twelve regiments of field artillery available to support an inevitable set-piece attack. Leese assured Burns that by September 1 he would have his artillery, as well as two naval destroyers mounting either four or six 4.7-inch guns apiece and a gunboat bearing two six-inch guns standing offshore.15 The aerial attack on August 30 would kick off several days of artillery concentrations and air raids that would culminate in the launching of the set-piece attack on the night of September 2–3 under the light of a full moon.16

  Even as Burns was teeing up a set-piece offensive, a new exciting possibility was gelling in the mind of 5 CAD’s Major General Bert Hoffmeister. Never one to hang back at divisional headquarters, he spent the afternoon of August 29 touring the front in the company of 11 CIB’s Brigadier Ian Johnston. Crawling on their bellies up to a point where they could look at the valley undetected by the Germans, the two men examined the antitank ditch and the ridge. Hoffmeister thought the ridge was “just a real fortress in itself, this great rocky thing.” He noted several concrete gun emplacements, the swaths of barbed wire, and the obviously extensive minefields. But Hoffmeister noticed something else that made his pulse quicken. “There was no life around the place,” he later said. “I didn’t expect German officers to be swanking up and down, but the whole thing looked terribly quiet. There wasn’t a shell coming over our way.” A dirt road running from one side of the valley to the other showed obvious signs of recent use, but amazingly the bridge crossing the Foglia was still intact. He would have expected it to be blown.

  Hoffmeister turned to Johnston and said, “There’s something wrong with this whole situation. It just doesn’t sit right with me. There’s something radically wrong.”17

  Rushing to corps headquarters, Hoffmeister told Burns what he had seen and asked permission to send some patrols across the river. Burns agreed. At 1500 hours, several Cape Breton Highlanders scouts crossed the Foglia in a brazen daylight test. They climbed Point 120 and captured one lonely German manning a position there. Private Paul MacEachern discovered a couple of German antitank guns in an emplacement. Their breech blocks had both been removed, a sure sign that the Germans had abandoned the position. When a nearby Italian woman waved her white apron, the patrol—thinking she might be signalling the Germans—scooped her up as a prisoner. They then hurried back to the Canadian lines and excitedly reported that Point 120 was clear. The captured woman was found to have been merely calling her domestic geese back to their pen and was quickly released.18

  At 2200 hours, Perth scout officer Lieutenant D.L. Thompson and two men crossed the Foglia. In six hours, they circled up to the anti-tank ditch and back without seeing a single German. It took them so long to reach the road because the ground through which they passed was lousy with mines, mostly the Italian wooden box and Schümine varieties.19

  During the night, the Cape Breton Highlanders sent out another patrol consisting of a party of engineers and a platoon from ‘A’ Company commanded by Lieutenant W.F. Dean. Once across the river, they slowly wove through a series of minefields to the lateral road. Creeper vines had grown out of the ditches to cross its twelve-foot macadam width and some melons were also growing out on the road from vines rooted in the verges. Dean started leading the patrol down the road, but called an abrupt halt and signalled everyone into the ditch when he saw a wooden cart moving about fifty yards ahead. It lurched another ten yards towards them, halted, and then a voice barked out, “Hallo, Hallo, Hallo.” Dean’s men slowly slinked back the way they had come, trying not to betray their presence. Leaving the road, they had moved about five yards into the bordering minefield when there was “a challenge from [the] knoll, ‘Halt, Halt,’ imperious and gutteral.” Dean and his men froze for ten minutes and then moved on to the river without further incident. The lieutenant noted carefully that the stream was only twenty-five feet wide and just ankle deep.20

  These details were quickly passed to Hoffmeister, who hurried to Burns’s corps headquarters. But the lieutenant general was away, attending a meeting at Eighth Army headquarters. Leese, Burns, II Polish Corps commander General Wladyslaw Anders, and Leese’s chief of staff were finalizing the planned attack for the night of September 2–3.

  Even as they ground on with the task of setting out movement schedules and determining artillery assignments, Leese was receiving other evidence that the Gothic Line was not held in strength. Based on this information, he ordered the aerial bombardment that had begun at dawn halted at midday and moved the set-piece attack forward to the night of September 1–2. Meantime, the Canadians were to carry o
ut more patrols to gather further intelligence.21

  When Burns returned to his corps headquarters at noon on August 30, he found Hoffmeister waiting impatiently. “I think there’s just something very strange about this whole situation,” the major general said. “I think the Germans are possibly unprepared for anything other than a set-piece attack for which they’ll get plenty of warning. Whether they know we’ve concentrated in this area in front of them or not, we don’t know.” But Hoffmeister suspected the Germans had been caught flat-footed and a great opportunity to actually “gatecrash” the Gothic Line existed.

  Hoffmeister proposed lining 11 CIB into two columns, with the Cape Breton Highlanders leading the left column and the Perth Regiment the right column. Both columns would have inherent support from a regiment of 5th Canadian Armoured Brigade and backing by artillery batteries organized so that one section of guns could be laying down covering fire while the other was moving up on the column’s rear. Sappers would be right up front with the infantry to pull mines in order to open sufficient room for the tanks to slip through gaps and keep pace. If needed, the supporting tail of artillery and additional tanks could be switched quickly from one column to reinforce the other in order to effect a breakthrough wherever opportunity best presented itself. In reserve, Hoffmeister would still have the 12th Canadian Infantry Brigade and most of his division’s tank regiments. The entire action could begin that very night.22

  Intrigued and inclined towards the innovative attack plan, Burns told Hoffmeister to ready his division. At 1345 hours, Burns issued an order to both Hoffmeister and Major General Chris Vokes to start immediate vigorous patrolling north of the Foglia River to determine once and for all whether the line was a paper tiger. “Should results of the patrols indicate that the line is only lightly held, both divisions will send through strong fighting patrols, strength equivalent to at least one battalion per divisional sector. These patrols will penetrate the line and the necessary gaps and crossings through minefields and antitank ditches will be prepared. Should these patrols succeed in getting forward without heavy opposition both divisions will establish a bridgehead night of 30–31 August. . . . These bridgeheads will be established so that at first light both I Canadian Infantry Division and 5 Canadian Armoured Division will be able to advance through them and continue the advance in their respective divisional sectors.”23