The Gothic Line Read online

  Although Spry and Dick tried to push the name issue through, CMHQ and Ottawa had to grant final approval and dragged their heels over the matter. It soon became evident that the new regiment would fight its first infantry battle wearing the shoulder flashes of an anti-aircraft regiment. Although the majority of its men were former 1st Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment gunners, a nucleus of experienced infantrymen was attached to provide the infantry knowledge necessary to quickly instil infantry skills and experience. The veteran infantrymen were drawn from convalescent centres and reinforcement depots.

  SERGEANT FRED CEDERBERG of the Cape Breton Highlanders had been struck down in late May by both jaundice and malaria. Since his recovery, the tall twenty-one-year-old had been sent to the replacement depot in Avellino. When Cederberg was ordered to the anti-aircraft regiment, he groaned at the news.

  “I have no choice, my boy,” the assigning officer said sympathetically, “none at all. My orders—along with every other holding unit CO—is to ship up one battle-experienced sergeant and one corporal at a minimum. And you’re the only three-striper I’ve got on strength.”33

  When Cederberg asked if his friend Corporal Albert MacNeil could go as the corporal, the captain agreed. That night, the two soldiers polished off a bottle of Seagram’s VO on the grass outside their barracks. The next day, they trucked to their new assignment. “Welcome to the outfit without a name,” Sergeant Scotty Morrison said, as he logged them in. “According to headquarters we’re supposed to get 10 officers and 156 men. You’re among the first.” He handed the men each a Thompson submachine gun and showed them to their quarters in the Bren carrier platoon, which was Morrison’s own unit. “Like I said,” Morrison reiterated, “we got no name, so we’re kind of screwed up. But it’ll all fall into place.”34

  Cederberg and MacNeil reported for duty to Sergeant Eddie Kerr, an antitank regiment veteran, who said that the duty the gunners had seen previously had been one of endless tedium waiting to drive off German Luftwaffe planes that never came because the Allies dominated the Italian skies. It was up to the infantry veterans, like them, to show the gunners how to be infantrymen. “What’s it all about?” he asked.

  MacNeil, who had been wounded by shrapnel in the Liri Valley, picked up a handful of dirt and tossed it into the humid air. “Mostly an awful lot of fuckin’ noise. You get used to it.”35

  A sergeant’s mess party that night, which was intended to bring the infantry sergeants and artillery sergeants together, proved disastrous. Cederberg noticed “an invisible, frigid wall… between the newcomers and the remaining old battery sergeants. . . . The former line regiment infantry three-hookers were neatly but almost casually turned out, wearing their former unit patches. But those from the ack-ack batteries looked like British guardsmen. You could cut butter with the creases in their summer drill trousers. Their shoulder lanyards and hooks had been white-ohed, each tiny herringbone stripe done individually.”

  Sergeant Tommy Graham, a stocky newcomer who had won a Distinguished Conduct Medal during the Dieppe raid as a Royal Hamilton Light Infantry soldier, tossed loud jibes at the gunners that were cuttingly returned by a regimental sergeant major named Stinson. “You guys will forget all that chicken shit stuff,” Graham growled, as he casually flicked one of the artilleryman’s stripes with a finger.

  Stinson snapped, “It’s too bad you infantry people never learned to dress like proper soldiers. When I look at you, I sometimes think…” Graham’s fist smacked into the man’s mouth and the flood of words was replaced by blood.36

  “You’re all Canadians, you’re all on the same side, and you all know what you have to do—help win a war we didn’t start,” a disgusted Lieutenant Colonel Dick scolded the sergeants in the morning. Hoping to mollify the men, he added that plans were afoot for the battalion to become the “second” battalion of the 48th Highlanders. The sergeants all disliked that idea. “We may be a bastard unit,” Sergeant Morrison said to Cederberg, “but I don’t like being called a ‘second’ battalion.”37

  AS JULY TURNED into August, the no-name battalion learned the infantry trade from its experienced draft of officers and non-commissioned officers. They spent hours doing bayonet drill, learning how to cope in the hell of a minefield, practising on crudely constructed firing ranges to competently fire Lee Enfield rifles, Bren guns, Thompson submachine guns, PIATs, and two-inch mortars, and to handle grenades. Cederberg thought this training missed some essentials and said as much to Sergeant Eddie Kerr. The sergeant told him to do whatever he thought necessary to ready the Bren carrier platoon for combat.

  “Every man’s going to need a slit trench,” Cederberg told them. “You should know how to convert a tank rut into a slit in twenty seconds. Or know that a lousy little fold in the ground can save your ass when the 88s or mortars come whistling in.” Someone asked about ditches. Cederberg said he didn’t like them. “They’re too friggin’ wide open at both ends. Like if a mortar slams into one, the shrapnel will slice the shit out of you. And there’s always the chance some Jerries have them covered with machine guns.”

  Cederberg and MacNeil hammered home their lessons on getting down into the ground for shelter. MacNeil told the men, “Most of you guys think your weapon is your key to survival. Well, it isn’t. And don’t laugh when I tell you it’s your friggin’ shovel. Don’t go anywhere without it.”

  “What about bayonet fighting?” one man asked.

  In the ranks was veteran Loyal Edmonton Regiment Private Alex Greenwood. He was a thirty-one-year-old general store owner, father of three children, and a University of Alberta graduate. Greenwood said, “I never saw a bayonet fight. And I never took part in one. I’ve walked a long way. I’ve been shot at with a variety of deadly weapons. And I was wounded in the Hitler Line. But I don’t know anything about bayonet fighting.”

  MacNeil added, “If I was that close to a Jerry, where we could use bayonets, one of us would have already surrendered.”

  The gunners fretted about what to do when confronted by a German tank, particularly the massive Tigers that were so feared by Allied soldiers. “If you got time,” MacNeil said, “get your ass out of the area. Right quick.”

  But if you had a PIAT, one of the men persisted. “It depends on your choices,” Cederberg said. “If it lumbers by you, like only twenty or twenty-five yards away, and your PIAT is loaded and there are no German infantry with it, take a shot. Go for the shoulder. Or better still, get it in the rear after it’s gone by. Then, get your ass out of the area like Corporal MacNeil said.”

  Cederberg and MacNeil took No. 4 Platoon (Carriers) out that night on an exercise. The mosquitoes were so bad the men wore netting over their faces. Throughout the night, they showed “how to move up silently, cross a crest on their bellies, dig in and take up all-round defensive positions. To a man, they took it seriously, learning that loose shovels and weapons can make one helluva lot of noise in the stillness.”

  After the exercise was over, Cederberg told platoon commander Lieutenant Claude Nadeau, “They’re going to make one damned good platoon.”

  The chain-smoking officer replied that he always knew they would. Cederberg said, “I bet you didn’t notice they’re beginning to walk like infantrymen, Mister Nadeau, did you?”

  “How’s that?” Nadeau asked.

  “Well,” Cederberg replied, “you know how artillerymen walk. Like they take themselves seriously. Like they’d like to know who owns the place. Infantrymen swagger a bit, like they don’t give a goddamn who owns the place.”38

  BY THE END of July, the new brigade was as combat ready as was possible after such a short, intensive training period. From July 28 to August 7, I Canadian Corps had concentrated south of Florence, with 1 CID moving into the southern outskirts of Florence itself on August 5 and 6. The entire corps movement northward was undertaken with great secrecy, as all identifying markings on uniforms and vehicles were covered or removed.

  That Eighth Army was massing divisions south of Florenc
e for a major offensive against the Gothic Line seemed clear. A fiery pronouncement by General Alexander was read to 1 CID’s troops just before they entered the Florence line. “Now we are completing an extensive regrouping in order to bring about the collapse of the enemy. This is taking place according to plan and it is my intention to proceed with the second and perhaps final stage of the destruction of the German forces in Italy. The eyes of the world and the hopes of all at home are upon us—we shall not disappoint them. We shall continue as we have begun to destroy the enemy wherever we find him and to march along the road to the last battles where final victory awaits us.”39

  While 1 CID deployed outside Florence, 5 CAD concentrated south of Lake Trasimeno. On August 1, Hoffmeister’s headquarters and 11th Canadian Infantry Brigade had just arrived when new orders were circulated directing the division to relocate to a concentration area near Foligno and take over this sector from the 10th Indian Division. No sooner had 5 CAD started assembling there, however, than the division was instructed to remain in its concentration area and conduct such “intensive training… as security would permit.”40

  On August 8, 1 CID left Florence under “the strictest security regulations” and moved by truck thirty miles south to a staging area outside Siena. Two days later, the division rejoined I Canadian Corps in the Perugia-Foligno area. The Canadians were baffled as to the point of all this manoeuvring.41 Chris Vokes just wanted a battle. “We came to Italy to fight, not to sit on our asses!” he declared.42

  [ 3 ]

  Inevitable Wrangles

  WHERE TO FIGHT, or even whether to fight at all, was precisely the issue plaguing the Allied high command in Italy. By early summer, the pursuit of the German Tenth and Fourteenth armies to the north of Rome had slowed to another grinding, costly contest of attrition. Having quickly regrouped, the Germans defended every river crossing, mountain pass, and hill town lending itself to fortification. The past months of fighting up Italy’s boot had proven the Germans to be masters of this form of strategic fighting withdrawal. This time, the Allies raced against a clock, for every day they were delayed south of the Apennines granted the Germans more time to transform the Gothic Line in the mountain range’s heart into an impenetrable fortress.

  When the U.S. Fifth and British Eighth armies first swept north from Rome and chased the Germans into Latium and Tuscany, General Harold Alexander, Deputy Supreme Commander, Mediterranean, had expected no serious opposition to be offered in front of the Apennines. As for the mountains themselves, he anticipated they would pose only a minor obstacle to the advance into the Po Valley beyond. At worst, Alexander expected to quickly breach the Gothic Line with a hasty frontal assault that would send the Germans reeling.1

  This early optimism was dashed in late June, but not by German action. Instead, the culprit proved to be the Allied Combined Chiefs of Staff, who decided to rewrite the entire Allied Mediterranean strategic plan on the spur of the moment. Up to now, Alexander had been doggedly working towards an outcome far more ambitious than just winning Italy’s liberation and destroying the German divisions there. Having drawn his two armies together on the western flank of Italy in order to capture Rome, Alexander believed that he now had “two highly organized and skilful Armies, capable of carrying out large scale attacks and mobile operations in the closest co-operation. . . . Neither the Apennines nor even the Alps should prove a serious obstacle to their enthusiasm and skill.”2

  Alexander envisioned achieving the grand design that had first prompted British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill to advocate invading Italy. If the two armies could drive through the Ljubljana Gap into Austria, Churchill and Alexander believed the war could be shortened and Austria denied to the advancing Soviet hordes. Churchill rightly feared that any Soviet-liberated country would be transformed into a Communist puppet state. But if Alexander’s armies won the race to Vienna, a key central European nation would be preserved as a democratic bastion that would significantly weaken the Communist spectre.3

  Churchill’s post-war concerns, however, were little shared by the Combined Chiefs of Staff. They were more anxious to break the deadlock in Normandy, where the invading Allies had bogged down in the face of determined counterattacks from a gathering number of German infantry and panzer divisions. The chiefs had always envisioned launching an invasion of southern France on the heels of Operation Overlord. By mid-June, they decided this invasion was urgently required to relieve pressure on the forces in Normandy. To quickly cobble together an invasion force of sufficient strength to be assured of winning a beachhead and developing it, the chiefs decided that many divisions currently fighting in Italy must be reallocated to this purpose. On June 14, they ordered Alexander to detach the U.S. VI Corps and the Corps Expéditionnaire Français for the southern France invasion—codenamed Operation Dragoon. Virtually overnight, seven divisions were stripped from the U.S. Fifth Army, slashing it from 249,000 men to 153,000. Because mastery of the air over southern France had yet to be won, seventy per cent of Alexander’s fighter and bomber squadrons were also assigned to Operation Dragoon.4 With one sweeping order, the combined chiefs dealt a stunning blow to the Allied forces in Italy.

  Sir Henry Maitland Wilson, Supreme Allied Commander, Mediterranean, Alexander, and Churchill all loudly protested the decision in vain. Notably, they were all British and Operation Dragoon was an American idea. It was as much a political stratagem as a military one, for it was intended to frustrate British intentions in the Mediterranean. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, U.S. Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall, and Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force General Dwight D. Eisenhower were in agreement that Britain’s proposed Mediterranean strategy sought more to rebuild empire than defeat Germany. Not sharing Churchill’s suspicion that the Soviet Union was intent on creating a post-war empire of its own, the Americans neither thought Austria a worthwhile objective nor the liberation of Italy militarily important.

  In the American mind, the purpose of Allied forces in Italy was simply to tie down the German divisions there, preventing them from being shifted to Normandy. This narrow American focus had always resulted in a rift between the Americans and the British regarding the Italian campaign’s grand scheme. As early as October 1943, Eisenhower, who served as Supreme Allied Commander, Mediterranean from the invasion of Sicily until January 8, 1944, had dismissed the Italian campaign as “a distinctly subsidiary operation.”5His opinion remained unaltered in June. Marshall had no interest in Italy at all. What he wanted was the liberation of Marseilles, one of France’s largest ports. Forty American divisions were whiling away the days in the United States for want of a major French port that could handle the unloading of the hundreds of ships required to carry such a massive military force across the Atlantic. Several French divisions were similarly stalled in place in North Africa.

  Marshall also believed the Germans in Italy no longer constituted an effective fighting force capable of defending the Gothic Line. He expected they would retreat to the Alps, leaving Alexander punching only air. If Alexander advanced to a line running from Pisa to Rimini, he would control the Apennines and be standing on the edge of the Lombardy Plain. From here, the Allies could simply watch the Germans slink out of Italy without further bloodshed. By then, the German divisions leaving Italy would also be too depleted and late in withdrawing to have any effect on Allied operations in France.6

  On June 23, Eisenhower endorsed Marshall’s arguments. “France,” he wrote, “is the decisive theater. . . . In my view, the resources of Great Britain and the U.S. will not permit us to maintain two major theaters in the European War, each with decisive missions.”7 Time was of the essence, he said. Either Dragoon must be launched by the end of August or the divisions assigned to this task should be diverted directly to the Normandy beaches.

  No amount of contrary intelligence reports would dissuade the Americans from believing that Marshall’s appreciation of German plans in Italy was correct. In mid-June, Hitler had declare
d in a message to Commander-in-Chief Southwest Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring that the Gothic Line was the “final blocking position.” If the Gothic Line were breached, he said, “an Allied entry into the plain of Lombardy would have incalculable military and political consequences.” Hitler cautioned that “the misconception, existing in the minds of commanders and men alike, that there is a fortified Apen-nine position, must be scotched once and for all.” It would, Hitler added, take “mighty labours for months to come” to get the line into full readiness. Kesselring was ordered to slow the Allied advance to buy time for completion of the fortification work. Duly intercepted by the top secret Ultra operation—which had broken the codes used by Germany’s Enigma encryption machines—the message was forwarded to the Combined Chiefs.8

  When Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke saw the intercepted signal, he decided it was “all-important… the most marvelous information.” Now, he confided to his diary, “there could be no argument that the Germans were about to retire in front of us.”9 The Americans, however, dismissed the message as unimportant. At the end of June, Roosevelt threw his weight behind his generals in a strongly worded memo to Churchill. Operation Dragoon must continue.

  On July 1, Churchill registered a formal protest against siphoning off almost 100,000 men from the Italian theatre. Roosevelt’s reply was icy. “I always think of my early geometry: ‘A straight line is the shortest distance between two points.’”10 That line ran from Normandy to Berlin. It did not zig from Rome to Vienna and then zag to Berlin. Churchill grumbled to the British Chiefs of Staff on July 6: “Let them take their seven divisions. Let them monopolize all the landing-craft they can reach. But let us at least have a chance to launch a decisive strategic stroke with what is entirely British and under British command. I am not going to give way on this to anybody. Alexander is to have his campaign. . . . I hope you realize that an intense impression must be made upon the Americans that we have been ill-treated and are furious. . . . If we take everything lying down there will be no end to what will be put upon us.”11