Ortona (47 page)

When night fell on Ortona, the tanks withdrew to the town's outskirts. In the narrow streets, they were too vulnerable to being destroyed by paratrooper raiding parties. The lines between friend and foe were hopelessly blurred. Germans and Canadians sometimes were directly opposite each other or even shared the same house. In the darkness, movement was dangerous, the guards on both sides jumpy and firing at any sound.

The Seaforths' ‘D' Company started taking over the area held through the day by Major Jim Stone's Loyal Edmonton company. As Captain Alan W. Mercer had been wounded the day before, the Seaforth company was now commanded by Lieutenant John McLean. Company strength was only forty-two men of all ranks. Both Canadian and German artillery and mortars were at work. The town rocked with explosions and the racket of collapsing walls and roofs. McLean's men hived off in small groups to replace the equally scattered Edmontons. Whispered passwords proved to Edmonton and Seaforth alike that they met Canadians. McLean left four men here,
five men there, two men in another shattered building. ‘D' Company was soon scattered in a thin semi-circle facing northwest toward the town's heart.
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Company Sergeant Major Jock Gibson and McLean spent the night circulating from section to section, ensuring the men were alert, and generally boosting morale. In the sections, the soldiers tried sleeping in shifts. The din of the shelling, however, made sleep nearly impossible. So, too, did the knowledge that mere feet away the Germans were also clustered inside houses. When the shelling eased, they could hear guttural voices talking in soft whispers. Sometimes the voices grew loud and boisterous, as if the paratroopers were in a beer hall back in Germany enjoying a fine evening of camaraderie.
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Obergefreiter Karl Bayerlein was exhausted. The last two days had passed in a frenzied blur of demolition and mine-laying tasks. The twelve engineers in his section had sown innumerable Teller antitank mines into the forward rubble piles. If a tank tried bulling its way over the rubble, almost certainly one of its tracks would trip at least one mine's pressure detonator and be immobilized.

There were three detonators built into a Teller mine, one on top, one on the side, and another on the bottom. The paratroopers could position a mine against a building or inside a room, hook a length of wire to the side detonator, and reel it off to a secure position many yards away. When Canadian infantry came near the mine, a paratrooper would give the wire a yank and out popped the detonator pin. Seven and a half seconds later the mine would explode with an enormous blast. By attaching the third detonator to a stake buried underneath the mine, Bayerlein and the other engineers were able to create a deadly booby trap. Once the mine was discovered, the Canadians would think it could be safely picked up and disarmed. But when they lifted the mine, the detonating pin hooked to the stake would pull free, setting off the mine.

German mines were all steel-cased and vulnerable to detection by Canadian engineers using metal detectors. To heighten confusion and make every obstacle even more difficult to surmount, Bayerlein's team laced Italian wooden-box mines in among the Tellers and anti-personnel S-mines.

As they fell back in front of the Canadian attack, Bayerlein and his men packed Italian box mines or boxes of blasting powder into outside stairwells and behind doors. Tripwires were strung across the stairs or hooked to the doors. If a soldier tripped the wire by going up the stairs or by opening a door, the detonator immediately ignited and the explosive charge blew up. In the dark gloominess of hallways and stairwells, it was almost impossible for anyone to spot the tripwires. At times the booby traps were set with a macabre sense of humour. Quite a number of the homes in Ortona had been updated by the installation of water closets. Bayerlein and his men attached a bomb to the flush handle. When a soldier took advantage of the comfort of indoor plumbing and flushed, “boom.”
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As the day wore on, Bayerlein and his team finished their mining work and took to the roofs of some of the higher buildings behind Piazza Vittoria. They lay just back from the edge of the roofline and sniped at the advancing Canadian infantry with rifles. Bayerlein wrote in his diary that evening: “As soon as we were spotted the enemy brought in tanks. These fired shells until the buildings fell. The only possibility of escape was to jump on the other roofs of adjacent buildings. The enemy artillery is constant and falls everywhere in the city. The visibility was limited because of the dust of the explosions and houses collapsing. . . . In the evening we move closer to the front line. Our quarters are in the basement of a chemist shop near one of the main crossroads.”
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The paratroopers in Ortona ended the day pleased by the defence they had offered. Casualties had fallen within acceptable limits and they had made the Canadians pay in blood for every bit of ground given up. The channelling effect achieved by the creation of rubble piles on the narrow side streets served its purpose. The Canadians were forced to follow the path of least resistance up the main Corso, bringing them into one pre-selected killing ground after another. Generously equipped with Schmeisser submachine guns, light machine guns, and medium machine guns, the paratroopers were able to lay down vicious curtains of close-quarters gunfire that rendered the streets almost impossible for the Canadians to use. Scattering snipers throughout the buildings added to the hazard of any attempt to move along the street.
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While General Richard Heidrich's paratroopers were confident
that they could hold out as long as required, the view at Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring's headquarters was gloomier. His chief of staff, General der Kavallerie Siegfried Westphal, telephoned the Tenth Army chief of staff, Generalmajor Fritz Wentzell, in the early evening of December 21. Kesselring and Westphal had misinterpreted signals from the battlefront and believed that Ortona had fallen. These messages had also reached Berlin. “High Command called me on the phone,” Westphal said. “Everybody was very sad about Ortona.”

A puzzled Wentzell replied, “Why? Ortona is still in our hands.” As far as Wentzell could see, the paratroopers were exacting such high casualties from the Eighth Army attackers that there was no reason to give up Ortona until the 1st Parachute Division's flank was turned and the soldiers in the town faced being surrounded.
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A bold dash. Another madman's gamble. Major Jim Stone believed he knew how to smash through 1st Parachute Division's defences along Corso Vittorio Emanuele. If the German intent was to funnel the Canadians down its length through one killing zone after another, and there was no way for the Loyal Edmonton Regiment to outflank these zones, then the solution was to do the unexpected. Running like wildmen up the ditch had allowed his mangled company to win entry to Ortona. So why not do the same thing on a grander, more daring scale? Was not the Corso itself rather like a ditch?

After the first day's dreadful fighting in the Ortona streets, Stone knew that the Germans would expect the Canadians to advance cautiously in the morning. But moving into the face of the enemy could only result in a prolonged and bloody house-to-house fight. Yesterday had proven how costly such an approach would be. Stone sought a way to prevent the regiment being decimated by the heavy casualties that a protracted battle in a town must entail. It was entirely likely that the paratroopers were not holding the town in great depth. They probably had a strong, well-manned defensive line. Behind that,
there was unlikely to be any significant number of defenders. The paratroopers would be planning on withdrawing in staged steps from one prepared defensive position to another, bleeding the Canadians every step of the way. Stone was certain that the parachute division was implementing in Ortona a small-scale version of the strategy which Tenth Army had implemented so effectively to slow the Eighth Army's advance all the way up the boot of Italy.

If he could pierce the line and get behind the Germans, they would be unable to re-establish a blocking line in front of his advance. The paratroopers would have to abandon Ortona or be isolated inside the town and face destruction. Boldness was the key. What Stone needed was to hit the paratroopers with a miniature “colossal crack” that would send them reeling right out of Ortona.

Stone tracked down the Three Rivers Tanks commander and explained his plan. “Let's start at first light tomorrow morning,” he said. “You put your tanks in low gear, get your sirens going, and fire your main armament at every building forward of you and your machine guns at the houses on the side of the road. I'll put my infantry alongside the tanks and let's try and go through.”
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It took some argument, because the commander started quoting chapter and verse from armoured tactical doctrine that stated tanks were not only of limited value in fighting within built-up areas but also extremely vulnerable to being destroyed by enemy action. Finally, however, Stone won the tank commander's somewhat reluctant agreement to give the gamble a try.

That Stone was developing the tactics for the Edmontons' December 22 attack reflected a shift in the regiment's lines of command. Lieutenant Colonel Jim Jefferson had established his battalion headquarters on Ortona's outskirts. This was unlike Seaforth Highlanders of Canada battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Syd Thomson, who had set up shop right on the town's edge in Santa Maria di Costantinopoli. In fact, Jefferson's headquarters was almost as far back as 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade commander Brigadier Bert Hoffmeister's. In a battle where troops were facing each other across distances of mere feet, trying to exercise effective control or to dictate strategy from such a distance to the rear was difficult, if not impossible.

Because of the distance between Jefferson's headquarters and the rifle companies in Ortona, command of the Edmonton Regiment
effectively shifted to the senior commander on the immediate scene. That was Major Jim Stone. The officer was well suited to the role. He was resourceful, independent-minded, determined, brave to the point of near recklessness, and, because he had come up through the ranks, well versed in small-unit tactics.

Stone's attack went forward as planned. Tanks of the Three Rivers' No. 2 Troop moved out in single file down the very centre of the Corso. Stone's ‘D' Company led for the Edmontons, the other two companies following. Losses on December 21 had been so high that Jefferson had ordered the rifle companies reduced from their normal strength of four companies to three. Even so, each company, including a reinforced ‘D' Company, barely mustered 60 men apiece instead of what should have been a total strength of more than 400. Stone found the noise made by the tanks' sirens and the thunder of their 75-millimetre guns in the narrow street “terrifying.”

The distance from Piazza Vittoria to Piazza Municipali, where a small cathedral and the municipal hall stood, was 300 yards. The Corso descended from the Canadian-held square to the municipal square on a grade of about 3 percent. This meant that the Canadians would be well silhouetted for the German defenders during their advance. The buildings lining this section of street were relatively modern, built in the last two centuries. To the west of the Corso, for the entire length running from the Piazza Vittoria to Piazza Municipali, the streets and buildings dated back to the Renaissance. Beyond Piazza Municipali, past the shattered ruin of Cattedrale San Tomasso to the ancient castle overlooking the sea, the Corso narrowed and the surrounding buildings and streets became a warren of buildings dating back to the 1400s.

Stone was elated. The attack rolled forward against virtually no opposition. He figured the Germans were frozen by fear and confusion. Progress toward the main square was rapid. Ahead stood a massive rubble pile, perhaps twenty-five feet high. It appeared to have been constructed by blowing the better part of the cathedral on the edge of the square out into the street. Despite the height of the pile, Stone thought the tanks could get over it. If tanks and men kept going, they would get right through to the castle and the battle would be won.