The Gothic Line Read online

  With the tank now between him and Bovey, and the road following a spine of ground that would leave his men silhouetted in the false moonlight, Dougan led his men down the west slope of the spine into a patch of bamboo that provided good cover. The company then circled northwest through the bamboo to come up on the road on the other side of Bovey. As they approached the road, Dougan signalled No. 13 Platoon off to the left and took the other two platoons to the right.

  No sooner had the company split up than a column of men came marching up the road towards Bovey from San Lorenzo. Seeing coal-scuttle helmets, Dougan knew they were Germans. They were just forty yards away. The captain could see No. 13 Platoon getting into position beside the road to the front of the marching column and knew its commander would automatically form an anvil, while the men with him became the hammer in a classic ambush operation. No. 13 Platoon let the column almost into its midst before slamming the Germans in the front ranks with withering fire. At the same moment, Dougan brought his two platoons out of the road in a line and charged. Surprise was total. One German turned and started raising his gun towards Dougan, but the captain butt-stroked him to the ground. Most of the other Germans threw down their guns and surrendered. A few were killed, while a small number fled into the orchards on the other side of the road and disappeared into the night. Three officers were among the prisoners.47

  ‘C’ Company marched its prisoners up to Bovey, where at 0330 hours they found ‘B’ Company and the single platoon of ‘D’ Company. The other two platoons from ‘D’ Company had yet to arrive. As the company commanders started reorganizing and determining who would guard the prisoners, the Tiger tank Dougan had seen earlier rolled towards them. Some of the men brought up PIATs, but against the heavy armoured front the weapons would be useless. Sergeant H.O.W. Powell had what was needed. In his pack were several No. 75 Hawkins antitank grenades that he quickly armed and scattered across the road in a loose string. Intended to blow the tracks off tanks, the Hawkins grenades were fitted with a crush igniter fuse that set off an explosive charge when the tracks ground over the grenade.

  The Tiger triggered one grenade and broke a track. Powell, now armed with a PIAT, circled behind the Tiger and fired a charge at its less heavily armoured rear. The round glanced off harmlessly. After reloading, Powell calmly advanced to within fifteen feet of the Tiger and punched a round through a weak chink in its armoured hide. Moments later, the crew bailed out and surrendered.48

  Once the tank was dealt with, ‘C’ Company headed for San Lorenzo. A short distance from the objective, Dougan sent the lead platoon forward to probe the German strength. The platoon commander sent a runner back saying San Lorenzo was unoccupied. Dougan rushed the rest of the company in and established a strong-point in the church and several of the houses. Because the Germans could come at him from any side, he faced men in every direction. It was 0430 hours and Dougan quickly realized he had secured the objective just in time, for coming up the road from the north was another German column obviously sent to occupy the village. Dougan strung his Bren gunners out to face them from covered positions. “Our Bren gunners had a grand time,” he wrote later, “mowing them down right and left.”49

  Twenty minutes later, another counterattack struck from the west, with the Germans trying to infiltrate through the dense undergrowth on that flank. But Dougan had established radio contact with the Edmonton headquarters and was able to call artillery down. The shelling broke the counterattack before it began.

  The sun was starting to rise and Dougan could see that the church was a shelled-out ruin. But he also saw that San Lorenzo was a “beautiful location” offering a 360-degree panoramic view over the German positions. To the north stretched the wide-open expanse of the Po Valley. In every other direction lay the German defensive positions on the northern slopes of San Fortunato Ridge. There were five Tiger tanks among the houses of Monticello, midway between the base of the ridge and the Marecchia River. Dougan hoped they remained unaware of his little band’s presence. He had nothing with which to fight them.50

  The Edmonton presence on San Fortunato Ridge was extremely precarious—less than two hundred riflemen concentrated in two isolated pockets more than two thousand yards inside German territory. Both Dougan and McDougall in their respective little outposts could hear tanks prowling around on their flanks, but were uncertain whether this meant the tankers knew their whereabouts. Their radio reports back to headquarters alarmed Major Jim Stone. If the tanks rustled up some infantry and seriously attacked Bovey and San Lorenzo, the positions would be overrun.

  ‘C’ Squadron, 145th Royal Armoured Corps was trying to move up the forward slope of the ridge to reach Bovey, but the tanks were having a tough time. Several had already thrown tracks on the steep grade and the rest were crawling painfully towards the ridgeline. They would be hours getting through, even if they were to escape being shot up by the Germans.

  Never comfortable in the role of being regimental second-in-command—a duty that required long hours of administrative paperwork in the relative safety of headquarters—Stone decided he should directly help his rifle companies. He gathered the antitank platoon under Captain George Brown and had it hook one six-pounder up to a truck and another to a Bren carrier. With Stone in the lead vehicle, the small force headed up a narrow road leading to the ridgeline. It was another of the seemingly crazy gambles in which Stone and Dougan specialized. But Stone believed the odds tilted in his favour. The day before he had conducted a lone reconnaissance up onto the ridge and had discovered the same sunken road Dougan had used. His assessment had also been that the Germans had failed to tie the route into their defensive system. Instead, it was an open hole the bold might penetrate.51

  This proved the case. At 0700 hours, Stone’s antitank force pulled into Bovey without incident.52 Their arrival, however, immediately drew the attention of a self-propelled gun lurking on the ridge above the Edmonton position. Its fire knocked out the two vehicles. Under the direction of Sergeant Bill Ross, the crews pushed the guns into safe positions from which they kept the SPG at bay and also engaged other German targets. The guns started shooting at German infantry and vehicle targets. Perhaps the most lucrative target was a battery of horse-drawn field guns, which the gunners prevented from escaping until they could be destroyed by fighter-bombers.53 Ross’s courageous efforts in moving the guns to safety earned him a Military Medal, while Stone took home a Distinguished Service Order, and Dougan added a bar to the Military Cross he had won in Sicily. Stone was pleased that his gamble had paid off, but he also knew the risk had been somewhat less than it might first seem. As his force had headed up the ridge, more Canadians had been moving up the slopes into the face of the German positions and forcefully brushing them aside. By mid-morning of September 20, control of San Fortunato Ridge had shifted decisively into Canadian hands.

  [ 31 ]

  The Gallant Attackers

  AT 0220 HOURS on September 20, Lieutenant Colonel Syd Thomson was ordered to extend the Loyal Edmonton Regiment’s foothold with a three-company assault in one hour’s time against the eastern heights of San Fortunato Ridge. Thomson put the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada’s ‘D’ Company out front, followed by ‘B’ Company, and then ‘C’ Company, with instructions to move up to the ridgeline immediately to the right of the Edmonton route and then hook around the rear of San Fortunato village. From here it would advance northeast to the village of Le Grazie, situated on the ridge’s eastern edge.

  Major Davey Fulton, the twenty-eight-year-old son of a British Columbia Member of Parliament and grandson of a former B.C. premier, commanded ‘D’ Company. His lead platoon was crossing the ridgeline when a German soldier popped up and fired a Faustpatrone. The exploding round caused eight casualties and smashed the platoon’s single PIAT launcher.

  When Fulton deployed his other platoons to the right to outflank the German position from which the Faustpatrone had erupted, they came under close-range machine-gun fire. Determined to prevent
the attack bogging down, Fulton sent Sergeant Thomas Roberts to find a route around the German left flank. By 0430 hours, the sergeant guided the two leading companies in a sideslip move that turned the flank of the strong German position. Quickly reforming so that ‘D’ Company was on the left and ‘B’ Company on the right, the Seaforths moved down the ridgeline in a two-company-wide assault that carried them through the few pockets of German resistance. By dawn, the Seaforths were firmly in control of Le Grazie.

  When Fulton’s company had been temporarily blocked on the ridgeline, Thomson had ordered ‘C’ Company to break away from the attack line, follow the highway parallelling the base of the ridge for about one thousand yards, and then swing up to seize a road junction west of Le Grazie. This objective was named Covignano. Having been badly mauled at San Martino, ‘C’ Company was hardly fit for combat. Just a few hours before Major Haworth Glendinning learned he was to go into an attack, the company commander had been trying to integrate twenty-four reinforcements into his depleted ranks. Two of these were platoon commanders—lieutenants S. Dickinson and J.H.F. Mara. Glendinning hastily arranged for the reinforcements to be armed, equipped, fed, and then shuffled into the platoons.

  Lieutenant Mara, commanding No. 13 Platoon, led the advance along the road. After advancing just a short distance, the leading section came under mortar fire and Private J.H. Bohan was killed. Mara’s men pressed on, fighting their way through a long string of houses bordering the road.1 Then they started climbing up to the ridgeline, with Lance Corporal D.G. Skinner’s section in the lead. When heavy machine-gun and rifle fire came from a house to the section’s front, Skinner led his men into a draw and crept up on the building’s blind side. The small force jumped the eight Germans inside and killed them with rifle fire and grenades. Skinner set his section inside the building, which provided a good position to cover ‘C’ Company’s right flank during its uphill advance.2

  Skinner’s covering operation allowed Glendinning to attack Covignano crossroads. While the two inexperienced lieutenants spread their platoons in a line to keep the Germans occupied with gunfire, Glendinning took No. 14 Platoon and conducted a wide sweeping movement to get behind the enemy. Having set this platoon in the German rear, the major ran back to his other two platoons. Along the way he encountered a wounded Seaforth signaller, hefted the man over his shoulder, and carried him four hundred yards to safety.

  By the time Glendinning reached the platoons, Skinner was desperately trying to stave off a fierce counterattack. If he lost the building, the right flank of the two platoons would be exposed to murderous fire. The little house was rocking from direct mortar hits and machine guns were ripping bursts through the windows and doors. One German crawled up close to the house and started blasting it with Faustpatrones. Skinner climbed out the back of the house, crawled around to where he could see the German, and killed him with a burst from his Thompson. Returning to the building, he continued to lead his men in fighting off one counterattack after another from 0830 to 1130 hours, maintaining the critical protection of Glendinning’s flank until the Germans withdrew. For his action, Skinner was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal.

  Glendinning meanwhile had set his anvil-and-hammer attack into motion, with the first two platoons serving as the hammer and No. 14 Platoon waiting in the German rear to be the anvil. The Germans were stunned by the ferocity of the Seaforth attack and forty surrendered almost the moment the two platoons charged. They pushed on, rooting Germans out of dugouts, until linking up with No. 14 Platoon. The final bag in this short operation was fiftytwo German prisoners. They also captured a small hospital where a doctor and three orderlies were treating twenty-four wounded.

  Opposition virtually collapsed and Glendinning’s men pushed on to Covignano without further delay, scooping up another twenty prisoners en route. With the crossroads secure at 1130 hours, Glendinning sent a runner to bring Skinner’s section in and soon the company was snug on its objective. In addition to the prisoners taken, Glendinning estimated they had killed another fifteen to twenty Germans. The company had suffered only one man killed and another wounded. It was a masterful operation and one that earned Glendinning a Distinguished Service Order.3

  WHILE THE SEAFORTHS settled into a triangular-shaped defensive position that largely controlled the eastern flank of San Fortunato Ridge, the Royal 22e Regiment had fought to hold Villa Belvedere on the western flank. Using the cover of darkness, the Germans had established snipers in trees growing close to ‘C’ Company’s position on the regiment’s northwestern flank. The sniper fire directed at Major Fernand Trudeau’s platoons was so heavy and accurate that any movement in ‘C’ Company’s perimeter became almost impossible. Trudeau reported that his men were pinned down.4

  The situation quickly became chaotic when the Germans struck the company with antitank and heavy machine-gun fire from positions to their front. Trudeau pulled back to reorganize, but was unable to withdraw one platoon of about fifteen men under Lieutenant P. Larochelle. This platoon holed up inside a little house next to a substantial mansion and was soon surrounded and in imminent danger of being overrun.

  When Trudeau reported his situation to Lieutenant Colonel Jean Allard, the Van Doo commander immediately radioed ‘D’ Company’s Major Tony Poulin and ordered a counterattack on the Germans threatening Larochelle’s position. Poulin, who had only fifty men and was in a position well south of Trudeau’s company, looked up the slope. He could hear Larochelle’s men firing like mad to keep the Germans at bay and see the building they were in. A long swath of steeply rising open ground lay between. Trudeau’s other platoons were down by Major Henri Tellier’s ‘A’ Company on the left flank and a lot closer to the action. Poulin wondered why the hell Allard ordered him to counterattack, rather than Trudeau. It was Trudeau’s platoon, after all, that had been abandoned and the ‘C’ Company commander at least had some idea of the ground. However, orders were orders.

  Poulin had two choices. He could charge right up the hill to Larochelle’s house or he could set off on a wide sweep to the left to strike the Germans in the rear. The first option was obviously suicidal, the second only somewhat less so. To balance the odds, Poulin hooked one of the six-pound antitank guns to a jeep. His company then began a long trek to the west that took them behind a line of trees and up a steep slope to the top of the ravine. His men had to push the jeep and gun up the last long, steep grade. Once they were astride the ridgeline, Poulin unhooked the gun and brought it to bear on the Germans surrounding Larochelle’s house. So far he had escaped detection. It was a cool, cloudy day but every man was dripping sweat. The major told ten men to position themselves so they looked down the reverse slope of San Fortunato towards the Po Valley. “Keep your eyes open,” he cautioned, “and shoot like hell if anything happens.”5 The gunners were told to open up in support the moment the Germans started opposing Poulin’s attack.

  From the ridgeline to where the German positions were formed around Larochelle’s house, the ground was sparsely vegetated and flat. Poulin knew he could do nothing but dash across it and hope to close with the enemy before they saw the forty Van Doos coming. They went down the hill quietly, almost sprinting. By the time the Germans realized they were being attacked, ‘D’ Company was on top of them. The enemy fled into a house, but Poulin was ready for that. He had a man with a PIAT rip into it with an explosive charge that marked it for the antitank gun on the ridge. The gunners slammed the house with one round after another, “knocking it asunder.” After a few minutes, the Germans still alive inside were signalling a desire to surrender. The PIAT man had meanwhile destroyed the enemy antitank gun, finishing the German resistance. Poulin hardly considered it a victory, however. He had gone into the attack with only three platoon and section leaders and the best of these had been killed by a machine-gun burst.6

  The counterattack against the Van Doos was part of a desperate last-ditch German attempt to regain San Fortunato Ridge. But the situation was hopeless. From his
position in San Lorenzo’s church, Loyal Edmonton Regiment Captain John Dougan made it impossible for the Germans to reinforce the defenders on the ridge. Anytime he saw enemy forces gathering in the Po Valley, he directed artillery fire onto their heads.

  On all sides of San Lorenzo, German troops and vehicles were trying to escape from the ridge. He counted twenty-four self-propelled guns or tanks rolling by at ranges varying from four hundred to a thousand yards, all in flight.7 Then a sixty-strong party of German infantry emerged from an orchard and marched boldly down the slope with a white flag flying overhead. Still heavily armed, these Germans were retreating rather than surrendering. Dougan’s men tore into the column with small-arms fire and inflicted heavy casualties.8

  ‘C’ Company’s exposed position remained dangerous, however, for the British tanks had still not arrived and everyone was critically low on ammunition. Dougan feared that he might have to withdraw when an unusual source of help arrived in the form of two surrendering German soldiers, who told him that they had abandoned a Red Cross half-track in a gully below San Lorenzo. Thinking the half-track could be used to evacuate his wounded, Dougan had some men take the surrendered German driver and retrieve the vehicle. Inside the half-track they found a cache of about one thousand .303-calibre rounds that were useless to the Germans but exactly what the Canadians needed for their Lee Enfields and Bren guns. ‘C’ Company was back in business.9 The half-track was used to shuttle the wounded, both Edmontons and German prisoners, from San Lorenzo and Bovey back to the Regimental Aid Post. Returning from the third trip to the RAP, a shell killed the German driver and knocked out the half-track.10

  By noon, the German resistance on San Fortunato Ridge consisted of only scattered pockets of fanatics. The entire defensive line was collapsing as more Canadian regiments and British tank squadrons attacked the ridge. The badly shot-up West Nova Scotia Regiment had struck again at first light. This time, with the Van Doos having seized the ground to the left and the Seaforths clearing the right flank, the leading companies met only weak resistance and were able to quickly secure their objective—Palazzo Paradiso, another country estate like Villa Belvedere.11 To the rear of the Seaforths, the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment mopped up the Germans caught between the two companies.