Ortona (2 page)

A grant from the British Columbia Arts Council helped make writing this book feasible. Literary agent Carolyn Swayze found a home for it. Thanks, Carolyn. Elizabeth McLean provided her meticulous editing and, as always, was a pleasure to work with.

I was blessed to have the unfailing support and companionship of Frances Backhouse during the research and writing of this book. She also spent long hours reading the manuscript and offering many suggestions for needed changes. Any remaining errors and omissions are mine.

As this book was being researched, several old soldiers who fought at Ortona died. The stories they did not tell are lost now. If there is a veteran in your family, I urge you to help him write or tape
his memories. With each passing on, a wealth of historical memory is forever lost.

The many battles of World War II in which Canadians fought have largely gone ignored by historians as individual subjects worthy of in-depth attention. This book has been an effort to redress that neglect with regard to the Battle of Ortona. This is a work of remembrance. I hope it also contributes to our collective understanding of both the experience of battle and its inevitable human costs.

W
HEN
Canada declared war against Germany on September 10, 1939, the nation had a professional army numbering 4,500 and a partially trained militia of only 46,000. By October, 70,000 Canadians wore soldier's khaki. In December, 15,911 sailed for Britain as part of the 1st Canadian Division. Poland had fallen. A spring invasion of France by Germany was certain. Britain was at risk.

For the next three and a half years the Canadian army in Britain grew ever larger — reaching 500,000 by 1942. The soldiers trained and they waited. Meanwhile Canadians fought in two major battles, each ending disastrously. On December 25, 1941, Hong Kong was surrendered to Japan. Two Canadian battalions were among the vanquished defenders — 290 dead, 493 wounded, 1,184 sent to slave labour camps. Then came Dieppe on August 19, 1942. The Canadian debate over this battle's purpose and execution will never cease. In a single dreadful day, 907 died, 1,946 surrendered, and a nation was left with a legacy of shame and glory.

All this time 1st Canadian Division waited. The soldiers joked that theirs was the only military formation in history whose birthrate
was higher than its deathrate. Many a soldier had come to Britain at twenty and was now a father at twenty-four. Then the waiting and the fun abruptly ended.

The delay in committing Canadian divisions to battle resulted from Ottawa's initial desire to keep its volunteer army together. But as the war dragged on, popular opinion at home called for Canadian troops to fight. Where mattered little, so long as it was sooner rather than later. The decision was made to split the army. The 1,851 officers and 24,835 enlisted men of the newly redesignated 1st Canadian Infantry Division and the 1st Canadian Army Tank Brigade were sent to the Eighth Army, commanded by General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery. Along with the U.S. Fifth Army, the Eighth Army was to invade what British Prime Minister Winston Churchill called Europe's soft underbelly. Sicily first, Italy second, then through the back door into Austria, and perhaps right into Germany. That was the plan at its most optimistic. At the least, it was hoped, they would knock fascist Italy out of the war and divert thousands of German troops from the Russian front and France's Atlantic coast. Already the massive buildup for an invasion across the English Channel was under way; a 1944 invasion of France was inevitable.

Most of the 26,000-strong Canadian contingent waded ashore in Sicily on July 10, 1943. In thirty-eight days the island fell. Canadians marched 120 miles, fought several small, fierce engagements, and took 2,310 casualties. Of these 562 died. The nation now had the bloody battle honours it had sought.

When on September 3 the Allies invaded Italy, Canadian troops were in the Eighth Army vanguard. The Italian army was in tatters after suffering massive losses in Africa and Sicily, so offered little opposition. On September 8 Italy surrendered, but German divisions quickly advanced and engaged the invading Allied forces. Through the fall of 1943, the Eighth Army fought its way up Italy's eastern coastline, while the American Fifth Army followed the western coast. Between the two armies stood the Apennine Mountains. Every dusty mile had to be hard won.

December 1943 brought the Canadians to the southern bank of the Moro River. Beyond lay the coastal town of Ortona. In Sicily the Canadians had been blooded, on the march up Italy's boot they had
become veterans of the long campaign. During the entire month of December, the Canadians in Italy would endure one of the most bitter battles in the nation's history. This is their story.

R
IDICULOUS
that a piece of paper should leave him feeling so uneasy. Lieutenant Jerry Richards knew this, but the unease remained, forming a lump in his gut. November 25, 1943, and the weather was growing ever colder and wetter in the Apennine foothills where most of the 1st Canadian Infantry Division was assembled in and around the medieval town of Campobasso.

The twenty-one-year-old lieutenant commanding the three-inch mortar platoon of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry Battalion thought the weather would prove no friend to soldiers on Italy's narrow Adriatic coastal plain. Yet the warning order accompanying the rather unusual Order of the Day from Eighth Army commander General Bernard Law Montgomery directed the Canadians to prepare to embark by convoy down the rough tracks running from the mountains to the coast. The divisional move would bring the Canadian infantry division, its supporting artillery regiments, and what was now known as the 1st Canadian Armoured Brigade together south of the Sangro River for what promised to be the first major battle fought by a combined force of all Canadian units in Italy.
Richards figured this battle would prove more bitter than those seen since the invasion of Sicily five months earlier. The promised soft underbelly was proving instead to be a pelvis of steel.
¹

Yet Monty appeared to have no doubts that the Germans were almost done. His Order of the Day promised that the Eighth Army would support the American Fifth Army's efforts to take Rome via an offensive up the western flank of Italy. The Eighth Army, he said, would do its “part in a manner worthy of the best traditions of the Eighth Army and the Desert Air Force. . . . The enemy has been outfought by better troops ever since we first landed in Sicily, and his men don't like what they are getting. The Germans are in fact in the very condition in which we want them. WE WILL NOW HIT THE GERMANS A COLOSSAL CRACK.”
²
Rather than infusing him with patriotic fervour, the blustery rhetoric of Monty's Order of the Day depressed Richards. It seemed a strange conceit to the young soldier to broadcast intentions so openly as to cast aside all element of surprise. With every soldier in the Eighth Army hearing the order read aloud by his commander there was scant hope German intelligence would remain in the dark for long about Montgomery's intentions.

The “colossal crack” was meant to shatter the Bernhard Line stretching across Italy's waist from the east coast to the central Apennines, where it linked up with the Gustav Line extending to the Tyrrhenian Sea. Both the Gustav and Bernhard lines were part of the vital defensive network the Allies had dubbed the Winter Line. If either one was breached by Allied forces, a road leading to the capture of Rome could be opened. The Gustav and Bernhard lines were each heavily fortified and designed to be defended in depth by German Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring's Tenth Army.

It was clear that this time the Germans were determined to put up a fierce defence rather than slip away soon after, or even before, battle was seriously joined. The German strategy had so far been to conduct a slow, carefully controlled withdrawal up Italy's boot. Utilizing the defensive characteristics of the rugged terrain to their limit, Kesselring's divisions would dig into fortified positions. To break through whichever German line they faced at the particular moment, the Allies had to fully deploy their forces and prepare a major offensive operation. When the assault went in, the Germans would usually hold for only a very brief time before retreating in
good order to a new well-prepared defensive line. This strategy slowed the Allied advance to a crawl. It also ensured that German casualties and loss of precious war matériel remained tolerably low. The opposite was true for the Allied forces. Losses absorbed were always out of proportion to the ground gained and the casualties inflicted on the defender. Kesselring had drawn the Fifth and Eighth armies into a costly war of attrition which he and his divisions fought exceedingly well.