Ortona (21 page)

Given the known German strength that could be brought to bear against the RCR and 48th Highlander dual assault, and the lack of tank support, it was obvious the Canadians needed some major artillery and air power in their corner. This they were promised. In addition to the Canadian artillery formations of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Field regiments of the Royal Canadian Artillery, the British 57th Field, 4th and 70th Medium regiments of the Royal Artillery, the British 98th Army Field Regiment of 105-millimetre self-propelled
guns, and the 8th Indian Division's artillery would participate in what was to be the war's heaviest barrage fired to date by a western Allied force. Three hundred and fifty guns would lay on a sixty-minute barrage. Additional firepower would be provided by 108 fighter bomber and 72 light bomber sorties. Even a couple of Royal Navy battle cruisers would be on hand to throw their guns into the pot. During the barrage's last thirty minutes, the Saskatoon Light Infantry would bring the full weight of its 4.2-inch mortars and Vickers medium machine guns to bear against the German forward positions across the river.
²⁶

It was hoped that the German Panzer Grenadier regiments defending the Moro would suffer devastating casualties. Those defenders lucky enough to survive the barrage were expected to be dazed and disoriented by the mass of explosives going off around them. Before the confused troops could emerge from their holes to organize a defence, the Canadian infantry should be rolling over their positions. The bombardment was scheduled to begin at 1530 hours on December 8. The infantry battalions would begin their assault precisely at 1630 hours, going “over the top” in what everyone involved recognized as dramatically similar to a World War I attack plan. Lacking immediate tank support, however, Vokes had no alternative. Stealth had already failed. The steel and explosive of artillery and the flesh of infantry must win the day.

Orders cascaded out of Vokes's HQ and from Eighth Army's HQ, which endorsed the overall plan and committed the British and Indian artillery, the aerial bombardments, and the involvement of the Royal Navy. Trucks laden with shells and powder charges lumbered up to the artillery gun pits. Gunners worked desperately to stack the crates of shells near their weapons. Eighteen-year-old Gunner Bill Strickland had never seen anything like it in the two years he had been in the army. One truck after another came forward and the men staggered through deep mud with the boxes to get the shells to the guns. The fields were too wet for trucks to leave the road. Manpower had to suffice. Four 25-pound shells to a box, a total weight of 110 pounds. Two men carried a box together, each holding a rope handle on the box's side in one hand. Often the boxes had to be carried 200 yards from the road to a gun.

Sweat poured off Strickland's body. Some of his comrades
stripped off their shirts and jackets despite the night's cold and the occasional icy shower. The work continued for hour after deadening hour through the night and well into the morning. The gunners had been told success depended on them. If they failed to shatter the German resistance, the infantry would die. Strickland hated that thought. He ignored the sweat, ignored the pain in his arms and back, ignored the quiver in his legs. There were still more shell cases to carry to the stack that was now shoulder high. Strickland and his comrades worked on.
²⁷

H
E
began every radio broadcast the same way: “This is Matthew Halton speaking from Italy.” The thirty-nine-year-old native of Pincher Creek, Alberta, was the most renowned Canadian war correspondent and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's senior European correspondent. A small, balding man possessed of a cultured and eloquent voice, Halton had followed the 1st Canadian Infantry Division from Sicily to the Moro River. Halton reported little of the grand strategies and tactics that directed the troops forward into battle. Instead, he attempted to enable Canadians at home to visualize the soldiers' day-to-day experience. His sympathies were always with the men in the front lines. To capture their stories meant getting up close to the fighting. Halton and his assistant, Arthur Holmes, were often to be seen in a jeep well inside the Germans' field of fire.

If Halton was war's narrator, Holmes was the means behind the voice. He was a recording engineer genius. Having spent ten years as a wireless operator on ocean-going ships before joining the newly founded CBC in 1933, Holmes was fascinated by the challenge of
producing disc recordings in unstable conditions. At the time, all recording had to be carefully undertaken in an environment that ensured the 78-rpm disc recorder cutting the track was perfectly level. With the outbreak of war, Holmes recognized that radio's great advantage over newsprint was the ability to bring the sounds of war into the nation's living rooms. That would only be possible if the recording equipment could function on the battlefield. In January 1940, Holmes toured the French Maginot line and the British Expeditionary Force positions to acquaint himself with the conditions under which the recording equipment must operate. He then set to work designing what the CBC overseas unit required.

As the war progressed, Holmes designed and equipped the European correspondents with several mobile units that worked well enough while the Canadian army was based in relatively static camps in Britain. He knew, however, that once the army took the offensive the large civilian vans required to carry the heavy recording equipment would be too unwieldy and prone to breakdown. Holmes decided the gear had to be customized to fit into the army's Heavy Utility Personnel (HUP) carriers, which were basically four-wheel-drive station wagons. Inside the cramped space of a HUP, Holmes installed three turntables, amplifiers, a regular four-input sound mixer, sufficient batteries to run everything, and a battery charger. Having three turntables enabled Holmes to keep recording as long as there were discs and to simultaneously play back recordings already cut. This made it possible to dub from disc to disc, edit a finished broadcast, and then feed it through short-wave transmitters without the technician ever leaving the interior of the HUP.

The HUP recording studio was an amazing feat, but Holmes hadn't stopped there. Although the HUP could keep up with an advancing army, it was still too cumbersome to deploy on the front lines. What was needed was a more portable studio that could be installed on a jeep or even carried by hand. Holmes's solution was a small studio system that was contained in two large boxes weighing eighty pounds apiece. Mounted on the back of a jeep, and drawing power from the vehicle's battery, the mobile unit featured a twelve-inch recording turntable and vacuum-tube amplifier in one box, and a motor generator with leads to clip to a six-volt battery in the other. When the HUP and portable equipment followed 1st Canadian
Infantry Division into battle in Sicily and Italy it worked like a charm, enabling Holmes to record the voices of Halton and his alternate correspondent, Peter Stursberg, in every imaginable battlefield and weather condition.
¹

On December 8, the portable set was positioned inside an old building in San Vito Chietino. A hole blown in the wall during earlier fighting provided a perfect view of the entire Canadian front facing the northern ridgeline of the Moro River valley. Behind this position, the artillery regiments of the division were scattered in the fields and folds of ground, gunners hunched over their weapons, munitions at the ready. It was 1526 hours.

“In four minutes,” Halton announced into the microphone, “there will be a tremendous artillery barrage on the enemy positions across the Moro from here. The barrage will continue intermittently for an hour or so and at half past four our infantry — I can't say which infantry — will move across the valley, across the little river, and up out of the valley to attack the enemy positions. It is incredible that one is watching the battle, and that one should have such a dramatic view of the battle, and that on such a gorgeous day — with the warm sun and the Adriatic dancing in the light. War on such a day seems particularly tragic and unreal. . . . It's so beautiful, I mean the view from here. The other side of the valley, an enchanting patchwork of vivid reds, greens, and yellows, like daubs of paint, like a painting by Cézanne, but the enemy is waiting there. Only two to three thousand yards away.”
²

Not far from where Halton was recording his broadcast, another non-combatant observer lay in long grass on the skyline, mindful of how exposed this position rendered him and his companion to enemy eyes. Forty-three-year-old Captain Charles Comfort of the Historical Section of General Staff was a painter. His job was to capture the Canadian war with pencil and brush. Beside him lay another artist, Major William Ogilvie. The two painters were fast friends, both dedicated to the execution of their historical task. Together the artists waited for the guns.

Like Halton, it struck Comfort that this was not a day suited to war. The afternoon sun was warm. “Nearby a lizard basked on a
stone, still, like ourselves, except for the rapid pulsing of his soft belly; a lark's song descended from the zenith. . . . To our right was the headland that marked the estuary of the river, now held by the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment, beyond it, the empty Adriatic, shimmering in the late autumnal sunshine. The valley below was typical of the water courses that channel this coastal plain, two hundred feet perhaps to its floor, a thousand yards across. At the bottom, a muddy stream, high at this season, meandered through shrubs and vetches and occasional clumps of willow. . . . The reverse slope, with its burden of olive, rose in gentle folds to its crest, the highway snaking up its flank toward San Leonardo. The plain beyond undulated off to the horizon with its plotted fertility and cube-like white farm buildings. Ortona gleamed attractively in the distance, clustered about the cupola of San Tomasso.

“. . . As the minutes ticked away, insects buzzed in the sunshine; a magpie, followed by its pendulous tail, flitted in deep swags across our line of vision. Five minutes to zero. . . . An idle shell whined across the valley; the horizon wavered in the cordial-like heat haze. . . . One minute.”
³

Twenty-one-year-old Lance Sergeant Victor Bulger of Cobourg, Ontario, stuffed wads of cotton into his ears, knowing the scant protection this safety measure provided his eardrums. Bulger was second-in-command of one of the four twenty-five pounder guns belonging to ‘D' Troop of the 1st Field Regiment's ‘B' Battery. The battery's guns were dug into heavily mudded positions about half a mile south of San Vito Chietino.

As the second hand ticked down, the six-man gun team prepared the weapon. One shoved the gleaming brass shell into the gun breech, another rammed it into the barrel. Then the cartridge case was added. 1530 hours. Like a rippling wave running through the gun lines positioned around San Vito, the artillery fired.
⁴
The order was for “intense fire,” so the gunners' pace was rushed. Five rounds a minute. Three hundred and fifty guns hurled more than 1,500 shells every sixty seconds toward the German lines in a barrage that crept across the landscape, leaving nothing in its path unscathed.