Ortona (66 page)

Seaforth Highlanders of Canada Company Sergeant Major Jock Gibson was feeling particularly good about life. On New Year's Eve, he was showered, shaved, dressed in a clean uniform, and well fed. And now this. In the basement of an Ortona house, Gibson had discovered a vast wine cellar. Wooden casks lined one entire wall. Where to begin? That was the only question. It looked as if this would be a good New Year's Eve after all.

Outside he heard some German shells banging down nearby, but figured the cellar should be secure. He started into the cellar heading for the wine barrels, when suddenly they began coming away from the wall in a massive landslide. Barrels blew open, wine gushed out. Gibson stared in horror as a tidal wave of wine rolled toward him. As he turned to run, the wine enveloped him and swept him right out of the cellar and into the street. He lay on the cobblestones, gasping and choking, grateful to be alive.

For the next two days, the Company Sergeant Major of ‘D' Company shivered inside his soggy, stinking clothes until finally the quartermaster took pity on him and issued him a new uniform.
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New Year's Day morning, 1944, the rain stopped. Carleton and York Regiment Padre Ernie McQuarrie led a small burial party to a point directly behind ‘B' Company's No. 11 Platoon. Besides the padre, there were four men carrying the stretcher bearing the body of Major Winston Johnson. Lieutenant Don Smith knew Johnson by the nickname of Wink. He was the son of Smith's family doctor and was, at thirty-two, ten years his senior. Just before the war, Johnson had completed a law degree at Dalhousie University. He had been recently married when the war broke out. Smith remembered Johnson strolling with his fiancée down the streets of St. John, pausing to joke with Smith and his teenage friends.

Now he was to be buried in Italian mud, his grave marked by nothing more than a crude cross made from the wood of an apple crate. Johnson had been wearing one of the thin horsehide jerkins the Canadians wore over their uniforms for a little added warmth. The jerkin was riddled across the chest and stomach with bullet holes from a German machine gun.

“Why on earth are you burying him here behind my position?”
Smith wanted to ask the padre. It was hardly a quiet spot. Smith and his men tried forming up around the grave to pay last respects to the popular officer. Within a few minutes, however, German mortar and artillery rounds began falling and they all had to run for cover. But the padre was determined, a man Smith thought was a perfectionist in all he did — including the burial of the dead. This burial was started and the padre would finish the task regardless of the physical danger posed.
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Burial parties and larger ceremonies honouring those lost to the regiments during December marked the first few days of January 1944. The surviving Seaforth Highlanders of Canada gathered on a point of land overlooking the Adriatic Sea. Here, the regiment's dead were interred in a small cemetery. There were, thought Lieutenant Wilf Gildersleeve, far too many crosses set there in tidy rows.
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While Padre Roy Durnford led the men in prayers, Pipe Major Edmond Esson, described by Matthew Halton as “a handsome man with a silky black beard,” played “Skye Boat Song” and “Piper of Drummond.”
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The mournful drone of the pipes lifted on the breeze blowing in from the sea.

The Seaforths and all the regiments of 1st Canadian Infantry Division buried more than comrades on these chill days in January. They had gone to war in the manner that regiments of the Commonwealth nations had always marched toward the sound of the guns. Each regiment was formed on a regional basis. Many of the men had long served together in the prewar militia units upon which the regiments drew when the call to arms was heard. Most of the Seaforths were from Vancouver, Victoria, Kamloops, Salmon Arm, Vernon, and the other southern interior towns of British Columbia. The Carleton and York Regiment hailed from New Brunswick; the 48th Highlanders of Canada called Toronto home. Brothers served side by side. Men from the same street formed platoons. Officers and men had been friends, relatives, and acquaintances in the civilian world. All of this served to build a cohesion that was lacking in armies which paid scant attention to regional affiliations, such as those of the United States and Germany.

The Battle of Ortona broke that cohesion. During the height of the
fighting in Ortona, the Loyal Edmonton Regiment had received a draft of reinforcements on December 27. Most of the men sent to ‘C' Company had been soldiers pulled in from the Cape Breton Highlanders Regiment, which had just recently arrived in Italy. The Edmonton war diarist joked that ‘C' Company could now be “called the Bluenose Company.”
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What the Cape Bretoners thought of laying their lives on the line as part of a western regiment and a western brigade went unrecorded. It is doubtful, however, that they willingly left their own regiment.

After December 1943, the regiments of 1st Canadian Infantry Division would be divided internally. On one side stood the ever-shrinking ranks of old veterans who had marched to war together, landed on the shores of Sicily, slogged their way up the boot of Italy, and then fought through the mud and fire of the Moro River, The Gully, and Ortona. On the other side were the replacements, many of whom came from parts of Canada that were foreign to the regiments' veterans. Too many of these reinforcements survived only a short time before leaving on stretchers or being buried under Italian earth. Many a veteran made a studied effort to develop little or no relationship with these men, who were likely to fall by the wayside soon after arriving. The self-imposed isolation made all the more poignant the loss of each member of the old regimental guard.

The losses that 1st Canadian Infantry Division suffered during December 1943 were staggering, especially in the line rifle companies. Total casualties from December 1 to December 31 were estimated at 2,339 men. Of these, 502 were killed. The officer ranks were devastated. Thirty-five officers died, 127 were wounded, and 14 were missing. Casualties in the other ranks were also heavy, totalling 467 dead, 1,544 wounded, and 152 missing. Many of those declared missing were dead, their bodies lost, sometimes forever, in the quagmire of the battlefield or the rubble of Ortona. Sickness had further depleted the ranks. Seventy-seven officers had been evacuated with sickness, 1,540 other ranks. Taken together, the regiments lost 253 officers and 3,703 other ranks to battle as casualties or to sickness.
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Against these losses, reinforcements received approximated only 150 officers and 2,258 other ranks. This left the division, according
to a 1st Canadian Infantry Division report written at the end of December, short 60 officers and 990 men.
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The problem, however, went far beyond numbers. Most of the reinforcements arrived during the last days of the battle. This, Major General Chris Vokes wrote, meant that the men filling the gaps torn in the regimental lines “arrived at a rate which prohibited a normal and gradual absorption.” They were also undertrained troops, who required intensive training even as the regiments reorganized to adjust for their battlefield losses.
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“It is most notable,” Vokes added, “that the standard of minor tactics and unit tactics has deteriorated, and opposition which at one period would have been brushed aside in their stride, now causes untold delay and stickiness. The troops are tired and the team play within units is lacking. The men and officers are cheerful enough and in good spirits and morale is high, but units are not fighting fit.” Vokes recommended that the division be given a long break from combat, so it could concentrate on once again attaining that “fighting edge.”
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Another problem that plagued the division in a manner never before encountered was the heavy losses of men to battle exhaustion. Roughly 20 percent of all men evacuated as sick were battle-exhaustion cases. Divisional psychiatrists would return only between 20 to 25 percent of these to front-line rifle company duty.
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It was now recognized that battle-exhaustion cases were seldom able to function effectively when returned to direct combat duty. These men might serve with perfect competence in rear-area units, but the regiments, like all rifle units in wars, faced shortages in front-line troops. The rate of battle exhaustion critically weakened the division, both during the December fighting and after.

The casualties suffered by the Germans during December 1943 would remain shrouded in mystery and conflicting report. The war diaries of the 90th Panzer Grenadier Division would be lost later in the war, so no approximations of its casualties exist. Canadian intelligence estimates prior to its withdrawal, however, indicated that the Panzer Grenadiers had been effectively destroyed as a fighting unit. This was primarily due to the division's ill-conceived strategy of launching fierce counterattacks. Vokes would boast: “We smashed
90th Panzer Grenadier Division and we gave 1st German Parachute Division a mauling which it will long remember.”
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Vokes had it right. The Panzer Grenadiers would be out of the line rebuilding their regiments until the division was sent scrambling from its rest position near Rome on January 22 to attempt to stem an Eighth Army offensive across the Garigliano River. This attack was aimed at distracting the Tenth Army from the joint Anglo-American invasion at Anzio, thirty-five miles south of Rome. The division's performance on this front would reflect its diminished fighting prowess, itself a reflection of the loss of veteran troops suffered at the Moro River and The Gully.

What of 1st Parachute Division? After the battle, Fallschirmpionier Carl Bayerlein and Feldwebel Fritz Illi both boasted that the paratroopers left the field undefeated and according to their own timing. Certainly the division was not mangled in the manner of the 90th Panzer Grenadier Division or even the 1st Canadian Infantry Division. Their defensive action was wisely executed, with few costly counterattacks. Yet the record shows that the paratroopers, too, suffered heavy casualties during the two weeks of their fight in December. Most battalions of the German division started entering the line on December 20. By December 29, Tenth Army chief of staff Generalmajor Fritz Wentzell stated during a phone conversation: “All the battalions of Heidrich [commander of 1st Parachute Division] have now a strength of merely one company [120 to 150 men]. The necessary steps to obtain reinforcements will be taken.”
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Total casualties officially reported for the nine days of fighting from December 20 to December 28 were 455. Of those, 68 were listed as dead, 159 as wounded, 205 as missing, and only 23 sick.
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Yet there is little doubt that 1st Parachute Division entered the battle relatively fresh and not seriously understrength.

The figures don't add up, even assuming that most of the 205 missing were actually paratroopers who were killed. Unlike their Panzer Grenadier counterparts, the paratroopers did not surrender en masse at any point in the battle. Those few captured were usually isolated or overrun and faced the option of either giving up or dying. A surprisingly high number opted for the latter. In Ortona, the Canadians rounded up more than one hundred paratrooper corpses for mass burial. This reflected the unusual intensity of the battle and
the pressure placed on the Germans. The parachutists seldom abandoned their dead to the enemy.