Ortona (4 page)

The Germans grudgingly gave ground to the V Corps divisions, withdrawing toward the Moro River, about seven miles north of the
Sangro. Here, German engineers were busily constructing fortified positions on the northern ridge that overlooked the narrow river valley. In the distance, approximately three miles up the coast from the Moro's mouth, the small Adriatic port town of Ortona was visible. By December 4, the Germans were firmly entrenched on the northern ridge of the Moro valley while the British 78th Division held most of the southern ridge. But the British division desperately needed relief. Since the invasion of Sicily, the 78th had suffered more than 10,000 casualties, more than 4,000 incurred in the advance across the Sangro. The division was so whittled down by casualties to front-line troops that it was no longer combat effective.
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In anticipation of the need for the 78th to be relieved at some point in the Sangro River battle, Montgomery had issued orders on November 25 for the 1st Canadian Infantry Division to prepare for a move from the Campobasso area to the 78th's rear. That move started late on December 1, with the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, Seaforth Highlanders of Canada, and Loyal Edmonton regiments of the 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade in the vanguard.

Just over two months before, 2 CIB had undergone a major change in command when Vokes was promoted from brigadier to major general and assumed command of 1st Canadian Infantry Division. His promotion came after Major General Guy Granville Simonds, divisional commander since the preparation for the Sicily invasion, was confined to quarters on September 20 with a severe case of jaundice. On the 27th, Simonds was evacuated to a British casualty clearing station and Vokes took over his job.

The same day, 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade held a sports day in the Italian town of Potenza, where it was enjoying a rest and recuperation posting. Lieutenant Colonel Bert Hoffmeister, then a twenty-six-year-old commanding the Seaforths, was sitting in the roughly constructed stands overlooking the sports field when he spotted a divisional runner approaching Vokes in another section of the stands. About three minutes later, a liaison officer tapped Hoffmeister on the shoulder and said, “The Brigadier wants to see you.” Hoffmeister walked over to sit next to Vokes. Without preliminary, Vokes informed him, “As of now, you're commanding 2nd CIB. I'm going to take command of 1st Canadian Division. . . . Good luck to you.”
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Hoffmeister said he would let Major Doug Forin know that
he now had command of the Seaforths and would meet Vokes within the hour at divisional headquarters.

Despite Vokes's rough exterior and unsophisticated manner, Hoffmeister considered the man a competent commander. He also genuinely liked the veteran soldier whom many considered a disagreeable and coarse bully. The two had worked well together within 2 CIB, and Hoffmeister had no doubt that both he and Vokes were up to handling their new jobs.

The question of Hoffmeister's competency was undisputed in the ranks of 1st Canadian Infantry Division. Soldiering ran in his blood. The Hoffmeister family had been military for generations. The man the soldiers of the Seaforth regiment affectionately nicknamed “Hoffy” had joined the regiment as a cadet in Vancouver when he was only eleven years old. By the time he was sixteen, Hoffmeister was cadet commander. In 1937 he became a commander in the regular regiment. In October 1942, following a staff training course, Hoffmeister had been promoted to lieutenant colonel and had assumed command of the Seaforths. In Sicily, and during the early months of the Italian campaign, Hoffmeister had proven himself to be a top-notch battalion commander and a fearless leader.
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Major Thomas de Faye, who commanded the Saskatoon Light Infantry company that provided heavy weapons support to 2 CIB, thought Hoffmeister undoubtedly the most talented battalion commander in the Canadian army. Within days of Hoffmeister's assuming command of the brigade, de Faye thought him the army's best brigade commander as well. “Not only a very brave soldier, but also a compassionate man,” de Faye said of him.
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The major was less impressed with Vokes, whom he had worked alongside when the red-haired brigadier had commanded 2 CIB. Adequate, de Faye commented: “A tough old bird, great boxer, tall, wide, and built like a bulldog, which also summed up his personality perfectly.” Before the war, Vokes had served as district engineer officer of Military District No. 3 at Kingston and had been in charge of building Dundurn Military Camp with relief camp labour. Faced with a hostile labour force, Vokes had gained their respect and cooperation by offering to take any of the unemployed young men out behind the barracks for a boxing match. None took him up on the offer. Merely an adequate leader Vokes might be, but de Faye
respected the man's courage and figured that guts was what it took to lead soldiers effectively during war.
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Although de Faye and some other officers in the division were not overly confident in Vokes's command ability, he was generally well regarded by the troops. Twenty-six-year-old Private Elwyn R. Springsteel, serving in No. 18 Platoon of the Loyal Edmonton's ‘D' Company, was always glad when Vokes came up to visit upon the regiment one of his short, sharp speeches. Most of the time when Vokes arrived Springsteel and the other men would be paraded in full kit with packs on their backs, rifles strapped over their shoulders, helmets on their heads. Vokes would always immediately order the men to sit down and take off the tin hats. “I want to be able to really see you,” he would say as the men settled comfortably before him.
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Lieutenant Don Smith of ‘B' Company, Carleton and York Regiment, shared de Faye's contention that Vokes was merely competent as divisional commander, but he also found the major general's habit of imitating Montgomery irritating, especially the way Vokes insisted on swishing around his horsetail swagger stick. When he dropped in to visit the troops, he would always tell the officers to have the men “gather round the jeep” in an affected accent that sounded much like Monty, crisp and haughty. Usually he called such sessions immediately prior to the troops' going into battle and would end his brief address with the same words — “Go in there and kick 'em in the crotch.” It was a line the men loved.
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Regardless of their opinion of Vokes, officers and men alike were glad that he was a Canadian — even if he did affect British mannerisms. Loyal Edmonton Lieutenant John Dougan, a platoon commander in the same company as Private Springsteel, had first seen Vokes when the regiment was going into an attack in Sicily. Vokes was standing on the side of the road talking to the men as they passed, giving them encouragement. Later the twenty-two-year-old officer realized that Vokes might not be the best divisional commander ever, but he and most of the men he knew would rather have an average Canadian commander than the best commander the British could offer. Dougan was proud to serve in an all-Canadian division where all the senior officers were also Canadians, which was not the case in World War I. He thought that most of the other young line officers and the troops they commanded felt the same. Not a soldier in the
division, Dougan believed, would put up with any sharp criticism of those officers' abilities — particularly from anyone not asked to risk their lives in response to their command.
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Dougan and every other officer in 1st Canadian Infantry Division knew Vokes now faced his most difficult command challenge to date. Becoming divisional commander had come as something of a shock to Vokes, who was only second senior officer at the time. Brigadier Howard Penhale, commander of the 3rd Canadian Infantry Brigade, was senior to him. By tradition, when Simonds was relieved, divisional command should have fallen upon Penhale. Overweight, and a veteran of World War I, Penhale lacked Vokes's inarguable command presence, but that seemed insufficient reason for Vokes to be promoted over him. Vokes never learned why command fell his way. But shortly after his appointment to major general was confirmed as a permanent promotion in November, Vokes quietly shuffled Penhale out of the division. He gave Penhale's command to Brigadier Graeme Gibson, just transferred from England to Italy. He told the new brigadier it was his job to turn around what he considered the worstrun brigade in the division.
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Vokes's first major challenge was to quickly move the whole division about fifty miles from the Campobasso area to a rallying point at Termoli, and then another twenty miles up the coast to the south of the Sangro River's mouth. Given the dreadful condition of the roads in the region, it was a daunting task. During the first four days of December, 1st Canadian Infantry Division was to complete the move in its entirety. This included pulling the 3rd Canadian Infantry Brigade out of front-line positions in the upper Sangro River region near the base of the Apennines. Approximately 15,000 soldiers travelling in hundreds of vehicles started the difficult process at 0700 hours when 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade climbed into their vehicles and set off under a clear cold sky to pass through Campobasso and descend to the coast.

By early afternoon, 2 CIB had begun jockeying to crossroads and finding the snaking road that led from the mountains to Termoli plugged with 1 CIB and its supporting artillery vehicles. Formed up in a column in the twisted streets of the village of Busso, the PPCLI stared out at a seemingly endless line of vehicles rumbling past on the main road. At 1500 hours the road was still clogged with a solid traffic
jam and the regiment's officers started muttering among themselves, wondering how in hell they would be able to cross the assigned start point as scheduled at 1530 hours. To their amazement, precisely as the minute hands of their watches ticked to the appointed moment of departure, the roads suddenly cleared and “the unit rolled on to the road dead on time.”
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So it went for all the battalions of the two brigades moving out of the Campobasso region that day.

Although the descent from the mountains to the coast proceeded in orderly fashion, this proved not to be the case once the division exited the mountain road at Termoli and entered Highway 16 — the coastal highway that provided virtually the sole supply and transportation route for the entire Eighth Army. Here they joined the long, winding column of vehicles from various divisions all advancing toward the Sangro River at about the pace of an ox cart. Quartermaster Sergeant Basil Smith of the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment of 1 CIB had been happily enjoying the views as the column approached the coastal highway. No sooner had they managed to slip into the northward-moving stream of traffic, however, than a gale whipped up off the Adriatic and lashed the column with freezing rain. Smith scribbled in his diary: “The roads are damnably slippery, bridges are washed out up ahead and there is mile upon mile of transport, going both ways, lined up bumper to tailgate, this convoy is a driver's nightmare. Spent most of the night on the road, tried to grab a few winks of shut-eye but every time either Breakenridge (my driver) or myself dozed off, a limey red-cap would waken us, to proceed another fifty yards, or less. These red-caps certainly took a volume of abuse tonight, poor devils. We were at least in the cab of a truck, but they were out in the weather, trying to do a job. Finally pulled up into a field, about ten miles south of Vasto at 0200 hours of the 2nd and flopped in the seat until dawn.”
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F
IRST
Canadian Infantry Brigade dropped out of the column south of the Sangro in the early morning hours of December 2, while 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade continued to lurch forward in the midst of the endless flow to a position close to the river. Here, the infantry climbed down from the back of their trucks, shouldered field packs and weapons, and marched to footbridges slung by the engineering crews across the Sangro. With the vehicles all jammed before the single pontoon bridge the British had got over the river, the infantry would make better time on foot and the battalions of the British 78th Division were up ahead waiting to be relieved. With few complaints, the men accepted the march forward in the rain with a stoicism born of months of forced marches up and down the rugged terrain of southern Italy. Vokes described the march of his soldiers as “a shuffle and the only resemblance to marching was that they shuffled along in step. It ate up the miles with the least expenditure of energy. It was almost as if each soldier were praying: ‘Lord, you pick 'em up and I'll lay 'em down.' Soldiers on campaign are always tired.”
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The infantry would have said none were more tired than themselves. While the gunners of the artillery regiments, the tankers of the armoured regiments, the engineers, and the many soldiers who constituted the Royal Canadian Army Service corps moved forward with an array of motorized transport, the infantry line units walked as often as they rode. They walked the sharp end at the front of this long, winding column, and they carried the weapons that an infantry company required to fight the enemy up close. The commanders might define war in terms of corps, divisional, brigade, and battalion manoeuvres, but for the infantryman, survival rested on his mates in the platoon and, above that, in the company. On paper, thirty-five men and one officer to a platoon. The reality since Sicily was that most platoons numbered barely twenty due to losses caused by illness, and the killed and wounded who had not yet been replaced. Reinforcements arrived in a continuous trickle that was never sufficient to bring the ranks to full strength.

The infantryman's primary weapon differed little from that his father might have carried in the trenches at Ypres, on the Somme, before Vimy, or during the slaughter of Passchendaele: Lee Enfield Rifle, No. 4, Mark 1. The fastest-operating bolt-action rifle in the world, which, in the hands of a trained soldier, could pump out ten rounds of .303 ammunition a minute loaded into the gun in box magazines. Weighing 9.06 pounds empty, the rifle was simply a slightly updated version of the same weapon that had been standard equipment for British and Commonwealth troops since its introduction on November 11, 1895.
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