Ortona (50 page)

It became immediately clear how the tactics of 1st Parachute Division differed from those of the 90th Panzer Grenadiers. The paratroopers had made no attempt to stop the Canadian advance to the base of the hill. Instead, all their strength was concentrated in a network of fortifications dug into the side of the hill and along the ridgeline itself. The 3rd Battalion of the 3rd Regiment now tore into the Hasty P's with heavy machine guns, mortars, and light artillery. ‘A' and ‘C' companies were brought to an abrupt halt by the German fire within one hundred yards of the ridgeline.
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Never one to steer clear of a fight, Lieutenant Colonel Kennedy
collared his assistant, Lieutenant Farley Mowat, marshalled up ‘B' Company, which had been following behind the battalion HQ unit, and rushed forward to rally the faltering attackers. Mowat was impressed by Kennedy's refusal to surrender to the natural instinct to hunch one's shoulders when enemy bullets and shells whizzed close overhead. The commander strolled across the battlefield, issuing orders in an icily calm voice. By setting such a courageous example, Kennedy stiffened the determination of his regiment. The riflemen advanced again into the face of the enemy fire.
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While Kennedy was rallying his men, the tanks had ground up a gravel track to a point a few hundred yards to one side of the infantry. From here, the only route was through the vineyards. Lieutenant A.W. Hawkins led off with his Sherman to test the ground north of the track. Slogging through the mud, he soon found himself confronted by a shallow gully not indicated on his map. The sappers sweeping ahead of him for mines started descending into the gully, but were immediately forced back by machine-gun fire covering its entire length. Hawkins decided to proceed on his own. The tank rolled over the edge, and minutes later was disabled when an anti-tank mine tore off a track. It was 1100 hours. The tanks could go no farther toward the Hasty P's until darkness allowed the engineers to find a path for them through the heavily mined vineyards.
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Despite losing the tank support, Kennedy was able to keep his men advancing. By midday, the Hasty P's had fought through to the objective on the ridge. Kennedy then brought up ‘D' Company and positioned it off to the battalion's right. Casualties during the day had been heavy, with thirteen men killed and at least twice that many wounded. But the paratroopers had also suffered heavily. Kennedy walked through the ranks, unmindful that he was presenting himself as a target for German snipers. “Take it easy, lads,” he told his men. “No matter what happens we will look after you.”
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For their part, the soldiers had started calling the ridgeline over which they fought “the bulge,” an accurate description of what their position inside the German lines looked like on a map. Officers soon picked up the term and the battalion's after-action reports each day referred to the ridgeline fight as the Battle of the Bulge.

Infantry and tanks remained separated and susceptible to being overrun by counterattack. Links to the Canadian main front line were
fragile and could easily be severed by determined German action. In light of the situation, phase two was postponed until Kennedy's men could work their way forward from the regiment's main objective to a position that would serve as the 48th Highlanders' start line. Advancing ‘B' Company forward the necessary 400 yards took several hours. Once this objective was taken, word was sent back to the Highlanders to come up to the extended perimeter.
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The Hasty P's were 1,000 yards ahead of the main Canadian lines and linked to the main line by an L-shaped thread running back to the Ortona-Orsogna lateral. This was an extremely tenuous position from which to continue an offensive, but Spry believed the risk had to be taken. He ordered the Highlanders to go forward at 1400 hours.

Meanwhile, Hasty P's Quartermaster Sergeant Basil Smith set to work getting rations up to the rifle companies. During the night, he led a ration party forward. The men in his party strapped food-laden dixie cans on their backs and carried the rations to the front-line soldiers. Several times along the way, Smith's party nearly blundered into the German lines. Once the food had been delivered, Smith volunteered the party as stretcher-bearers to bring out the half-dozen wounded men urgently requiring evacuation. He carried out a soldier named Jack Telford, who had enlisted on October 3, 1939, at the same time and place that Smith had joined up. Telford had been hit in the spine, thigh, and head by mortar fragments. Back at the RAP, Smith waited around until he learned of Telford's prognosis. The new medical officer, Dr. Homer Eshoo, told Smith that Telford would live and probably regain most of his health, but that his soldiering days were done.
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In the forward position, the rifle companies spent the night fending off small, determined infiltration parties. The paratroopers were employing another of their favoured tactics — slipping about ten men at a time through the extended Canadian formations to strike at them from the rear. Heavily armed with machine guns and Schmeisser submachine guns, these teams caused the battalion a largely sleepless, nerve-wracked night.
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W
HILE
the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment fought its way along the ridgeline toward the Tollo road, the fighting inside Ortona continued unabated. The Seaforth Highlanders of Canada had, as planned, moved behind the Loyal Edmonton Regiment's rear during the night of December 22. In the morning, the Seaforths undertook a slow, costly advance through the narrow streets of the western part of the town's old quarter. The Edmontons, meanwhile, slogged their way through Piazza Municipali and started a crawling advance up Corso Umberto I, a wide esplanade along which summertime tourists had strolled in the prewar days. Progress for both battalions was measured in a house or two gained every hour.

With the tanks finding street movement hampered by mine-laden rubble piles, the Canadians manhandled the battalion six-pounder antitank guns into the town. They turned the guns into house-busting weapons, and also used them to blast gaps in the rubble piles. Two seventeen-pounders of the division's 90th Anti-Tank Battalion were deployed on the coast road just outside the town and started bombarding the old castle and other large buildings inside Ortona. It was
discovered that the armour-piercing shells of the six-pounders, designed to penetrate a tank, would also punch good-sized holes in the walls of the old stone or brick buildings. Once a hole was opened, they switched to high-explosive shot and gutted the structure with shell after shell until the Germans inside were either killed or forced to retreat.
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Sometimes the antitank gunners continued punching a building with armour-piercing and high-explosive shells until its outside walls or the roof collapsed. A slow, bloody task that exposed the antitank gunners to machine-gun and sniper fire, this house-clearing technique offered little hope of driving the paratroopers out of Ortona before the end of the year.

While most of their guns were deployed in Ortona itself, the Edmontons' antitank gun platoon managed to dig two six-pounder guns into firing pits located on the southernmost mole protecting the harbour. From this position, the gunners could direct fire up against Corso Umberto I. They started systematically knocking down buildings facing the escarpment, blowing away every structure standing on the eastern edge of Ortona to a depth of one block. This reduced much of that part of the town to rubble, sparing the infantry the task of clearing it on a house-by-house basis.

These gunners were completely exposed to the enemy. As soon as they started firing, the Germans retaliated with a counter-barrage of mortar and light artillery. Antitank platoon commander Captain Ed Boyd was shocked to see that the loader manning the first gun on the mole was none other than Private Howard Mabley. Back in England, the thirty-year-old farmer from the Peace River District of Alberta had frustrated Boyd's determined efforts to turn him into a soldier. His campaign of sullen passive resistance against learning the art of war had ended in the man being shuffled off to work in the kitchens. This was despite the fact that Boyd had spent an entire week personally forcing Mabley to repeatedly go through the basics of gun drill. “Load. Aim. Fire. Load. Aim. Fire,” he had yelled as Mabley fumbled with the gun. It had been hopeless. The farmer was never openly insolent or disrespectful. There was nothing he did to provide an officer with an excuse to bring him up on charges of disobedience. He simply would not, or could not, do the job well, no matter how long he was made to practise. Finally, Boyd gave up. Mabley went back to the kitchens.

There the man stayed until December 23, when Boyd unexpectedly found him loading the six-pounder. “What are you using for brains?” Boyd demanded of Sergeant Jim de Young, who commanded the gun. The sergeant defended himself, saying that Mabley had insisted on loading. And look at the result, de Young told Boyd. “Never before or after did I see loading like it,” Boyd said later. “Eight hundred rounds went through that gun. . . . The crews would rush into the gun positions, fire fifteen to twenty rounds as quickly as possible, then rush back to safety before the counter fire started. . . . Every round through that gun was loaded by Mabley.”
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By the end of the day, Mabley was stone deaf, but he would man the gun for the rest of the battle despite the fact that his hearing would be permanently lost.

The second gun was better concealed than the first. It was positioned through a gap in a long brick wall. Behind its protective cover, the gunners were able to prepare themselves before lunging out to snap off a blaze of rounds. As soon as the German shells started to whine their way, they scampered back behind the wall. After leaving Mabley, Boyd stepped out from behind this wall as the men rushed once again to the gun, and heard a ping. A sniper bullet zipped between his spread legs, passing just slightly below his crotch. Boyd ran behind the wall before the sniper could chamber and snap off another, more accurate round.

The paratrooper working the sniper rifle had fired across a distance of close to a mile. Yet he had come within inches of killing or wounding Boyd. Throughout the battle for Sicily and the long march up the boot of Italy, German snipers had plagued the Allied forces. The Germans made extensive use of these soldiers. A well-placed, competent sniper could force an entire battalion to deploy in reaction to the threat posed. German strategy was for snipers to move out at night and crawl deep into positions that the Allies would have trouble finding and destroying. At first light, they would start killing. German gunpowder released virtually no smoke, and the sniper rifles emitted little muzzle flash. This made it extremely difficult to locate the sniper.

German snipers sought victims worth killing. An infantry private
was a poor target. His death would do little to destabilize an attacking platoon or company. Rather, the snipers were trained to focus on officers, non-commissioned officers, and radio signallers. After paying the price in the first days of Sicily, Canadian officers, from lieutenants to brigadiers, had ditched their holsters and pistols for rifles or Thompson submachine guns. Those who kept pistols stuck them inside their coats or shirts. Binoculars were similarly hidden. Some ripped the rank insignia off their uniforms. Every measure was taken to avoid looking like an officer, to blend with the soldiers around them. For an officer to stride about waving arms and yelling orders was to write a death warrant across his own forehead. The officers learned to give orders with a calmly spoken word or two that was passed along the line, or to exert control with a subtle movement of the hand or inclination of the head.

Even bold officers such as Major Jim Stone and Lieutenant Colonel Bert Kennedy took measures to make themselves appear less obviously in command. They did not shrink from enemy fire, but they did not seek through flamboyant demonstration of command to draw fire upon themselves. The truth was that Captain Paul Triquet of the Van Doos had been wrong during the attack on Casa Berardi. He had said, “Don't worry, they can't shoot.” But the Germans shot very well. Canadian military analysts thought the German snipers were inferior to none. They were also considered immeasurably patient. It was nothing for a sniper to allow an entire company of infantry to pass by his line of fire without taking a shot at obvious targets. Instead, he would wait for the company headquarters or even the battalion headquarters to come forward, then shoot the radio signaller. Betrayed by the antenna waving above the radio on his back, so burdened he often walked bent over, and rendered deaf by the headphones, a signaller was virtually helpless to defend himself. He was also linked by the umbilical cord of the radio handset to the most desired sniping targets on the battlefield, either a company commander, an artillery forward observation officer, or, better still, a battalion commander or even a brigadier.