Ortona (11 page)

Johnson had reported to the enlistment office of the Loyal Edmonton Regiment in Edmonton on March 25, 1942, along with his friend and fellow University of Alberta Canadian Officers Training Corps cadet John Alpine Dougan. The recruiter recognized Dougan's last name and asked whether he might be the son of World War I cavalry veteran Jack Dougan. John said he was and added that his father now lived in Lethbridge. That was the extent of their pre-enlistment interview. They were offered positions in the regiment if they agreed to enlist as privates, rather than seeking a commission on the basis of their COTC training. Both agreed immediately. Over the next few days, three of their fellow COTC cadets — Keith McGregor, Jimmy Woods, and Earl Christie — also enlisted under the same terms.

The decision to enlist was easier for some than for others. Dougan suffered considerable anxiety over the possibility that enlisting might completely derail his dream of becoming a historian. It was just two weeks before the third-year exams of his honours history baccalaureate program. Would he lose the year? And when the war was over, would he have the opportunity to return to university? Dougan could only afford post-secondary studies because he had received a scholarship from the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire. With these concerns in mind, he sought out the dean of the Arts and Science faculty to see what future might await him after the war if he were to interrupt his studies.

A veteran of the Great War, the dean assured the twenty-year-old Dougan that if he felt the need to enlist immediately rather than wait until completion of his schooling, the university would support his decision. Relieved, Dougan left the dean's office and headed off to war without further hesitation. He, like his friends, desperately wanted to get into it and do his duty. Later, Dougan received word from the university that he would be granted his degree in absentia due to having volunteered for military service.

The five cadets quickly revealed during training at the Edmonton barracks that they all had potential as leaders. Soon they were sent to Non-Commissioned Officer school at Currie Barracks in Calgary. All but Woods completed the course successfully. The four graduates
were then shipped to Gordon Head Military Camp near Victoria as officer cadets. By June they had their second pips as lieutenants on their shoulders, Dougan had fallen in love with Victoria and hoped to retire there, and they were back in Calgary completing the last stages of officer training. Johnson graduated second in the class, Dougan third. Then the four headed for Britain as replacement officers, slated to assume command positions in the Edmonton regiment as they became available.

No slot presented itself for any of them until after the invasion of Sicily, when the Eddies suffered heavy casualties in a vicious tangled battle in the streets of the small village of Leonforte. With several platoon commanders killed or wounded, Dougan and Christie were called out of the replacement depot and assigned to two platoons in ‘D' Company. Christie took No. 17 Platoon and Dougan No. 16. A fifth-year medical student with a quick, inquisitive intelligence, Christie was older than Dougan. In Dougan's opinion, his friend was undoubtedly destined for an outstanding career in medicine.

Two weeks later, the Eddies went into an attack against a hill northeast of Regalbuto, designated Hill 736. To strengthen the lead force, Christie's and Dougan's platoons were attached temporarily to ‘B' Company, commanded by Major Archie Donald. The entire lead element was nearing the crest of the hill when it came under intense German machine-gun fire. Dougan saw some of the enemy soldiers crouched behind one of the guns and then he felt as if a club cracked his skull. One bullet had hit him square in the centre of his helmet, another had struck his left forearm, and splinters from another had pierced his right forearm. He lay on the ground, knocked senseless for a few moments, then scrabbled to his feet. Unable to find his rifle, bleeding from both arms and a cut on his scalp, Dougan painfully dragged his service revolver out of its hiding spot inside his shirt, gripped it in both hands, and led the remnants of his platoon across 300 more yards of open ground in a wild charge to clear the summit.

In the aftermath, Dougan learned that Christie lay dead back on the slope. Dougan knew it was pure luck that he had not met the same fate. Canadian helmets were made of fairly thin steel and were not normally capable of repelling the strike of a machine-gun bullet. If the angle of the bullet had been slightly different, it would have pierced the steel and entered his brain instead of coursing a grooved
circle around the outer edge and ricocheting away. Surviving was enough of a blessing, but he also had another reason for relief. One of his buddies had salvaged the helmet immediately after the hill was cleared, intending to mail it as a souvenir to Dougan's mother, but had lost it during a long march. Dougan did not like to think of the shock his mother would have experienced if she had unexpectedly received the macabre souvenir. As for Dougan, his wounds took several months to heal, and he did not rejoin the Edmonton regiment until it was resting in Campobasso in November.
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Random chance often dictated who lived, who died. Since the invasion of Sicily, the three Turnbull brothers — Joe, Gord, and Bill — had seen enough buddies killed and maimed to feel nothing but amazement that they all still lived. The three were members of the 12th Canadian Armoured Regiment, known as the Three Rivers Tanks, all men on the sharp end who served in ‘A' squadron. Joe and Gord were Sherman M-4 medium tank commanders, Bill a crewman in another Sherman.

Bill, the youngest, had been first to enlist. Barely eighteen years old, he enlisted in early October 1940. Gord followed him into service a couple of weeks later and Joe enlisted on October 23. The oldest at twenty-five, Joe had served for three years in the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion during the Spanish Civil War, a fact he had not shared with the recruitment officer at Camp Borden, Ontario. A few weeks earlier, unemployed, discouraged by the way the world was going, and still full of hatred for Fascism, Joe had attempted to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force. When he mentioned that he had fought for the Spanish Republic and had only returned to Canada in 1939, the recruiters had conducted a furtive huddle. After a few minutes they returned and sternly rejected his enlistment application. Joe knew the cause. He had heard that other veterans of the 1,600-strong, all-volunteer Canadian force that had gone illegally from Canada to fight in Spain were being refused entry into the armed forces, because they were believed by the top brass to be Communists bent on fomenting revolution in the ranks. So at Camp Borden Joe conveniently forgot to mention his Spanish Civil War past and was welcomed into the regiment.
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The brothers had managed to stick together ever since and, through a combination of luck and determined effort, were assigned to the same squadron. They were close-knit, devoted to each other. Joe particularly felt a great responsibility to ensure that his two younger brothers got through this war safely. In Britain, the Three Rivers, like all the Canadian armoured regiments, had endured the long bleak years of seemingly endless reorganizations and re-equipping with one type of tank after another. Then came the Sicily invasion. In August 1943, eighty-four men in the regiment were killed or wounded. In one battle alone, ten of the thirty tanks of ‘A' squadron were knocked out of action by enemy fire.
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Throughout the months of his early service in Sicily and Italy, Joe tried with little success to write regularly to Peg, his new wife in Edinburgh. He had met Peg in the autumn of 1941 when the three brothers had gone up to Edinburgh from their base on the Salisbury Plain to visit the “land of our ancestors,” as Joe explained it to her. Peg was a friend of some of his Turnbull relatives in Scotland. She had been happy to help show the three men around the old city during their brief stay. Shortly after the brothers returned to duty Peg had received a letter. Joe wrote that she was going to come back to Canada with him when the war was over. They were married on November 29, 1942.

Joe knew that Peg desperately wanted to receive a letter that was more thoughtful and reflective than the curt notes he had previously sent her way since the Sicilian operation had begun. But how to find words that would be both truthful and yet still set her mind at ease. His reality was the noise and confusion of tank battle, the hammer of the 75-millimetre guns, Shermans broken, Shermans burning, the torn or immolated bodies of friends that had to be pulled from the tank wreckages in the aftermath of battle. He could not write the truth of that to Peg. On October 21, 1943, he finally mustered his nerve and put pen to paper. “We are not fighting Italians now,” he wrote, “but the Germans, and they are in every sense equal to the toughest and finest soldiers in the world. They will not retire, they have to be killed. And there is only one way we can beat them, Peg, we have to be just a little bit tougher, and that leaves us lacking in any of the finer human feelings. If you understand this you will excuse the abrupt attitude in my letters and know it is not deliberate.”
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He went on to describe how Bill and he had gone into an action recently with Bill acting as Joe's wireless operator. “We knew it was a bad thing to have two of us in the one buggie but we wanted to try it together.”
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Carefully sifting through the details of his daily life, Joe chose those stories that might bring a smile to Peg's face and make her less worried about the three of them. Among other things, he wrote of a battle where an enormous panicked dog had forced its way into the turret of Bill Stewart's tank, knocked the gunner out of his seat, and refused to be evicted until the fighting was over. In closing he wrote: “There are times when I'd let the whole job go to blazes just to see you for a wee while. But I still have a job to do and my little part of it is not finished. I don't know when it will end but I'll do my best until it is over.”
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Joe Turnbull knew, of course, that the end was far out of sight and many unforeseen dangers awaited the Canadians in their journey through Italy. By December 4, that journey had brought them all to the Moro River.

A
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1900 hours on December 5, the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment of 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade completed taking over the positions vacated by the last of the British 78th Division's infantry on the southern ridgeline near the Moro River's mouth. Major A.A. Kennedy, known to his friends as Bert, was frantic with worry. Only a few hours before, the veteran militia officer and ex-artillery man had attended an Orders Group at brigade headquarters and discovered to his dismay that the Hasty P's were expected to put the first Canadian troops across the Moro.

The battalion's attack was intended as a diversionary exercise to draw German attention away from the main inland assault of 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade's Seaforth Highlanders of Canada at San Leonardo, and a further secondary attack by the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry on the extreme left of the Canadian line fronting Villa Rogatti. While also undoubtedly rushed in preparing their plan of attack, Kennedy thought, the other two battalions at least had most of the afternoon to settle into positions, conduct some limited reconnaissance patrols down to the river, and had precious
remaining hours to assign individual companies with defined tasks for the forthcoming assault. Kennedy faced attacking in the dark, with virtually no time for preparation, across terrain his men had been unable to reconnoitre in daylight. As acting commander of the regiment in place of Lieutenant Colonel John Tweedsmuir, who had recently been evacuated to North Africa with a severe case of jaundice, it was Kennedy's dubious honour to organize a full-scale battalion assault under some of the worst logistical conditions possible.