The Day of Battle (54 page)

Canada’s hour had finally come. The country had entered the war in 1939 with fewer than five thousand professional soldiers and a callow militia of under fifty thousand. Within three years, the force grew to half a million, but Canadian troops had seen little action except for nine murderous hours in the French coastal town of Dieppe, where in August 1942 a raid gone awry left more than nine hundred Canadians dead and nearly two thousand captured. Canadian troops had fought with distinction in Sicily, but some feared that the war would end without a chance to avenge Dieppe or to prove the national mettle.

That chance would come fifteen miles south of Pescara, at Ortona, a port town built on its Adriatic promontory by Trojans fleeing their burning, high-walled city in the second millennium before Christ—or so it was said. Centuries of prosperity had ended in 1447, when Venetians fired Ortona’s fleet and arsenal. Now a decrepit sandstone castle beetled over the harbor and a few scraggly palm trees ringed the Piazza Municipale. But the more beguiling local landmarks included a domed twelfth-century cathedral that held the bones of St. Thomas the Apostle, and an even older church founded by Mary Magdalene—or so it was said. Most of Ortona’s ten thousand souls had fled to the mountains or toiled in German labor battalions; Wehrmacht sappers also blew holes in the harbor mole and sank two hundred boats to block the anchorage. The coastal road from the south, Highway 16, was easily severed by dropping a bridge below the town,
leaving but a single approach road, which hugged a narrow ridge from the southwest. Still, the Germans were likely to fall back to more easily defended ridge-and-furrow country to the north—or so it was said.

The Canadian division commander, Major General Christopher Vokes, was a burly engineer who had been born in Ireland to a British officer and his wife but educated in Ontario, Quebec, and England. “A tough old bird, great boxer, tall, wide, and built like a bulldog, which also summed up his personality perfectly,” said one aquaintance. Given to roaring through his red pushbroom mustache, Vokes at age thirty-nine was described as “a roughneck” by a Canadian reporter, who added, “I never knew a more profane man.” Others considered him “a pompous bully” who imitated Montgomery by carrying a fly whisk and affecting a British accent. He preached a bracing stoicism, claiming that “a man’s fate is written the day he is born and no amount of dodging can avoid it.” The tactical corollary of this eschatology appeared to be the frontal assault, which Vokes ordered in sufficient numbers at Ortona to be known thereafter as the Butcher.

As commanded, the Canadians attacked across the Moro, a mustard-hued creek that emptied into the sea two miles south of Ortona. A lunge on the left flank gained sufficient surprise to find food abandoned on German mess tables. Other thrusts met stout resistance; when a Canadian gunner yelled that he was out of ammunition, his company commander yelled back, “Why, you stupid bastard, make military noises.” So intense grew the shell fire that one corporal declared, “It was like a raving madhouse.” Sweating artillerymen stripped to their bare chests, as blood trickled from their concussion-ruptured eardrums and gun barrels glowed a “translucent red.” “The situation was undoubtedly confusing to the enemy as well as to ourselves,” a staff officer wrote. But on December 9 the Moro line was breached, with 170 Germans killed in a single day. Montgomery sent Vokes “hearty congratulations.”

The plaudit was premature. Beyond the Moro lay a ravine running northeast to southwest, and labeled Torrente Saraceni on Italian maps. Just south of the ridge road that offered the only access to Ortona, this gulch was more than three miles long, two hundred yards wide, and two hundred feet deep. Italian farmers had planted the bottoms with grain and olives; German sappers replanted with mines and booby traps. Troops from the 90th Panzer Grenadier Division, many of whom had escaped from Sardinia and Corsica in September, dug into the slopes and barricaded the stone farmhouses along the north lip. Vokes failed to sense how formidable was the barrier posed by the Gully—as Canadian troops called it—and beginning on Saturday, December 11, he flung a sequence of piecemeal attacks into the breach. Of eight assaults on the Torrente Saraceni, five
were made by single battalions, and only the last involved as many as three. When Montgomery dispatched a messenger to ask why the Canadians had stalled, Vokes snarled, “You tell Monty if he would get to hell up here and see the bloody mud he has stuck us in, he’d know damn well why we can’t move faster.”

For nine days the Gully held the Canadians in what infantry officer Farley Mowat called a “filthy limbo.” A corporal with a notebook sketched the configuration of slit trenches around him, then listened to the shriek of an approaching shell and placed a pencil tick on the trench where he guessed it would land; he called the game “Dots and Spots.” Horribly burned by white phosphorus, a sergeant cried to those rushing to help him, “Don’t come near me, boys, don’t let this stuff get on you.” In agony he died, alone.

The limbo grew filthier on December 14, with the discovery of a German corpse wearing a round helmet and a Luftwaffe uniform—evidence that panzer grenadiers had been replaced by the 1st Parachute Division. Commanded by a corpulent, gray-eyed major general named Richard Heidrich, whose uncanny resemblance to Churchill extended to a fondness for enormous cigars, the paratroopers were “the best German troops in Italy,” in Alexander’s estimation. Their presence suggested to Allied intelligence
that Kesselring intended to hold Ortona and not simply delay the Canadian advance.

On and on went the primordial struggle across this boggy rent in the earth. Heavy losses and exhaustion beset both sides of the Gully, now also known as Dead Man’s Gulch for the bodies bricking the scorched heath. “You feel nothing,” a Canadian soldier reported. “Only a weariness so great you couldn’t sleep if they let you.” Inexact maps led to errant Canadian shelling, including a barrage that straddled the Gully to hit friendly regiments on either side. So many shells puckered the landscape that one tanker was reminded of “a large porridge pot bubbling.” An intrepid captain managed to capture Casa Berardi, a farm at the west end of the Gully, but Vokes lacked reserves to exploit the flank and instead launched another bootless frontal assault. “He frittered away everything, and everything was committed and he had no reserves, which is a terrible thing,” the Canadians’ chief engineer lamented.

A flanking attack from the west, code-named
MORNING GLORY
, finally unhinged the German line and by dusk on December 19 the Gully belonged to Canada. To plant the Maple Leaf flag had cost a thousand casualties. Two Canadian battalions were reduced to the size of companies, and one company was commanded by a corporal. The reporter Christopher Buckley entered a battered cottage to find “an old woman, her eyes closed, her face the colour of old parchment, moaning and keening to herself…. Stretched out on the floor lay the corpses of four young children.”

A mile to the north, Ortona town still belonged to Germany. Any illusions that the enemy planned to quietly decamp should have been dispelled by a captured German paratrooper. Blinded by his wounds, he told his captors, “I wish I could see you. I’d kill every one of you.”

A man’s fate is written the day he is born and no amount of dodging can avoid it.
Perhaps that also held true for towns, and if so Ortona had been doomed from the moment those fabled Trojans shipped their oars off the beckoning promontory. As the burning towers of Troy presaged Ortona’s ashes, so did Ortona’s fate offer auguries for a hundred towns to come. For here was fought the first large, pitched urban battle in the Mediterranean—not a skirmish against Italians as in Gela, or a village brawl as in San Pietro, but a room-to-room, house-to-house, block-to-block struggle that foretold iconic street fights with heavy weapons from Caen to Aachen, and from Nuremberg to Berlin.

Ortona had been spared razing because of a wan hope in Montgomery’s headquarters that it would fall quickly to become an Allied port and winter hostel for weary troops. That fantasy vanished in a great roar at dawn on
Tuesday, December 21, when German demolitionists blew up a watchtower adjacent to the cathedral, leaving St. Thomas’s dome “split in half like a butchered deer,” in one witness’s description. At the same hour, Canadian infantry and Sherman tanks rushed the town from the southwest, sirens wailing and every gun blazing. Machine-gun bullets chipped the cobblestones in a spray of orange sparks as riflemen crouched in the doorways and fired at every window. Just after noon Kesselring’s chief of staff rang Tenth Army headquarters to report that Berlin assumed the town was lost. “The high command called me on the phone. Everybody was very sad about Ortona,” he said. “Why?” a Tenth Army staff officer replied. “Ortona is still in our hands.”

So it would remain for another week. Side streets proved too narrow for tanks, and German sappers blew up stone buildings to block the intersections and canalize Canadian attackers down the Corso Vittorio Emanuele. Antitank guns hidden in alleys shot the Shermans in the flank as they passed; others, tucked in the rubble, shot the tanks in the belly when they crawled over street barricades. Booby-trap trip wires seemed to stretch across every stairway and from every doorknob. Two Canadian regiments—the Loyal Edmontons on the left and the Seaforth Highlanders from British Columbia on the right—inched forward on a five-hundred-yard front in fighting described as “a gangster’s battle” that raged “from cellar to loft, from one rubble pile to the next.” Progress was “measured in a house or two gained every hour,” wrote the historian Mark Zuehlke. No-man’s-land was measured in the width of an alley, and sometimes the width of a bedroom wall. “For some unknown reason,” a
New York Times
reporter noted, “the Germans are staging a miniature Stalingrad in hapless Ortona.” Soldiers told one another, “Only three more shooting days till Christmas.”

Rather than clear buildings conventionally, from the ground floor up, Canadian engineers perfected the art of “mouseholing” from one adjoining building to the next without setting foot in the street: a beehive explosive charge was placed on a chair next to a top-floor wall; after the blast blew a hole into the abutting building, infantrymen stormed through the dust, spraying all cupboards and bedsteads with “speculative fire” from tommy guns, then fought their way downstairs, floor by floor, grenading “any room which gave reason for suspicion.” Sheets draped from designated windows indicated a cleared house, which then required a small garrison to prevent Heidrich’s paratroopers from reinfesting it at night. Farley Mowat observed that his men soon developed an architectural “capacity to estimate the relative strength of a building at a single glance…the wall thickness, the firmness of the mortar, the number of rooms.”

“The stench here is dreadful,” one soldier wrote. “I can’t understand why the Germans decay differently.” Christopher Buckley spied a dead paratrooper with postcards spilling from his tunic, each featuring a photo of Hitler. An enemy sergeant, shot in the head and dying in a side street, told a Canadian in English, “We could beat you.”

Not for want of effort did they fail. Two dozen Edmontons were buried alive when a booby-trapped building near St. Thomas’s collapsed. Germans showered would-be rescuers with stick grenades; only four men were saved that day—a fifth, a corporal from Alberta, was pulled from the rubble three days later—and Canadian engineers retaliated by demolishing two buildings in which German voices were heard.

“We do not want to defend Ortona decisively,” Kesselring complained to General Joachim Lemelsen, who had taken temporary command of Tenth Army after Vietinghoff fell ill. “But the English have made it appear as important as Rome.”

“It costs so much in blood it cannot be justified,” Lemelsen replied.

“No,” Kesselring said, “but then you can do nothing when things develop in this manner.”

And then, as such things do, the battle ended. Squeezed into the old quarter around the shell-torn castle, Heidrich’s men waited until nightfall before slipping up the coastal road toward Pescara, leaving dead comrades spread-eagled on staircases and the grass-grown ramparts. “There is no town left,” a German officer told his diary. “Only the ruins.”

A new sign posted at the city limits disagreed: “This is Ortona, a West Canadian town.” Tacking up that sign had cost General Vokes another 650 casualties; Canadian battle losses for the month of December would exceed 2,300, including 500 dead. “Everything before Ortona was a fairy tale,” Vokes said. In one typical battalion, of forty-one officers who had landed on Sicily in July, only nine remained, and six of them had been wounded, according to the historian Daniel G. Dancocks. A Canadian psychiatrist who made his rounds from camp to camp on a motorcycle reported an alarming number of “gross hysterias with mutism [and] paralysis.”

Alexander’s plan had miscarried. In five weeks, Eighth Army had moved just fourteen miles, averaging less than thirty yards an hour. Pescara still lay ten miles to the north; Rome lay beyond the snowy Apennines, on the other side of the world. Montgomery recommended that the Adriatic campaign come to a halt, and Alexander agreed.