Ortona (58 page)

A little festive spirit was needed, Galloway decided. Captain Sandy Mitchell had earlier found an old mandolin in the house. So Galloway and Mitchell proceeded to entertain the troops. Galloway would establish radio contact with one of his company commanders dug in on the front line. Then, while the commander held the mike close to the mandolin, Mitchell strummed a few bars of “Silent Nigh” or another Christmas carol. The two men worked their way through all the companies this way. One of the officers in the HQ had bartered some wine and bread from the Italians, to which the artillery forward observation officer contributed a batch of bully beef. Feeling blessed to have even this meagre ration, the men settled down to Christmas dinner.
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At Santa Maria di Costantinopoli, the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada battalion headquarters staff were ready at 0900 hours to start rotating the forward rifle companies through for their Christmas dinner. The war diarist wrote: “The setting for the dinner was complete, long rows of tables with white table cloths, and a bottle of beer per man, candies, cigarettes, nuts, oranges and apples and chocolate bars providing the extras. The C.O. Lt.-Col. S.W. Thomson, laid on that the Companies would eat in relays in the order of C-A-B-D, as each company finished their dinner, they would then go forward and relieve the next company. The first company was to be in at 1100 hrs, 2 hours was to be allowed for each company for dinner. The menu for the dinner being: Soup, Pork with apple sauce, cauliflower mixed vegetables, mashed potatoes, gravy. Christmas pudding and minced pie.”
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Promptly at 1100, the men of ‘C' Company came into the church. The war diarist continued: “From 1100 hrs to 1900 hrs, when the last man of the Battalion reluctantly left the table to return to the grim realities of the day, there was an atmosphere of cheer and good fellowship in the church. A true Christmas spirit. The impossible had happened. No one had looked for a celebration this day, December
25th was to be another day of hardship, discomfort, fear and danger, another day of war. The expression on the faces of the dirty bearded men as they entered the building was a reward that those responsible are never likely to forget.

“When C Company had finished their dinner, they relieved A Company so that they might come back the 300 or 400 yards for the same, and so A Coy relieved B Coy and B, D Coy.

“The latter were to become reserve Company, but the situation had grown tense with C Company on the left flank.

“Capt. [Jack] McLean took his [D] Company back into the fight. Christmas day was no less quiet than the preceding ones, but it is one that this Regiment will never forget. Pipe Major Edmond Esson played his Pipes several times throughout the meals. During the dinner, the Signal officer, Lieut. [Wilf] Gildersleeve played the church organ, and, with the aid of an improvised choir, organized by the Padre, Carols rang throughout the church.”
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As the dinner progressed, Padre Major Roy Durnford recorded in his diary that outside the church there was the “deathly chatter of machine guns. Rumbling of buildings falling, roar of guns. . . . Shells whine and explode.” When ‘A' Company came in for dinner, he noted that Captain June Thomas looked “weary, strained, dirty.”
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The field kitchen was set up behind the altar. Soon dirty plates were piled across the altar, rattling noisily whenever German shells fell close by. Durnford noted on the faces of the men new to warfare a “reluctance, the far away look, the nervous strain, the slight inebriation in a few cases.”
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While each man only received one beer, wine circulated freely and some of the soldiers took greater liberty with it than others.

Throughout the course of the day, Gildersleeve played the organ. It was pump-operated, located in a loft overlooking the altar. Various officers and men took turns operating the pump to keep the music flowing. As was customary for regimental dinners, the enlisted men were served by officers. None of the men in the line rifle companies had to lift a finger. Many chose to join Durnford in the chapel for prayers.

A few men, boisterous from the beer and wine, called out for soldier songs. Gildersleeve cringed each time, silently thinking, “Shut up, will you. Carols are the things to sing at Christmas time.” He
wanted none of the crude songs favoured by soldiers on a march. Gildersleeve was poignantly aware that for many of the men gathering at this table the meal and this Christmas would be their last. He played for hours, even after his fingers started aching. Gildersleeve had been the organist in a small church in North Vancouver. For some reason he could not explain, he had carried to war a single music hymn book that contained all the popular carols.
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As dusk closed in, candles were lit. ‘D' Company arrived for the last sitting. Padre Durnford stood next to the organ in the loft and sang several Christmas songs solo. Then in the “flickering and shadows” he strolled among the men, taking time to speak with all and to ask how they were feeling.
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Earlier in the day, one junior officer had received tragic news. His wife, a young war bride in England, had committed suicide. Lieutenant Colonel Syd Thomson and Durnford had broken the news to him together and then taken him aside to a private corner where they offered what little consolation they could.
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For some of the men attending the dinner, the scene seemed utterly surreal. Lieutenant Dave Fairweather had only rejoined the battalion on December 20. Having been attending various officers training courses, he had missed all the previous fighting from Sicily to Ortona. His baptism of fire was Ortona, a hellish introduction to war. On Christmas Day, he assumed command of ‘D' Company's No. 18 Platoon. When he arrived at the church, Fairweather learned he was getting six reinforcements. That was good news, for earlier in the day he had lost five men. With the reinforcements, his platoon strength would be bolstered to nineteen, still far short of the normal complement of thirty-five.

In the midst of the Ortona slaughterhouse, Fairweather later wrote, he “found it very unrealistic to sit down to [Christmas dinner] and then leave the table to go back into the battle, about twenty blocks away. It was a very subdued affair, and, I would say, that most of the men found it hard to take in, and it would be difficult to say whether they appreciated it at the time. My only criticism was that there was too much beer and liquor available. The vast majority did not take more than one bottle of beer, however, inevitably there was the exception and this ended in disaster.”
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More than one slightly drunken Seaforth, Fairweather thought, died in the hours immediately
after the Christmas dinner because of a foolish error the soldier would never have made sober.

Dinner over, Fairweather led his platoon back to the fighting lines. On the way, a German shell screamed down. In the aftermath of the explosion, Fairweather saw that three of his reinforcements were casualties. One was dead, the other two wounded. His platoon was down to sixteen men.

Not all the Seaforths attended Christmas dinner at Santa Maria di Costantinopoli. At least one section leader refused to let his men go. Twenty-nine-year-old Private Ernest Smith commanded a six-man section. When the time came for his company to rotate back to the church, Smith told his men he was not going. More to the point, he said, they were also going to stay right where they were. Nicknamed “Smoky,” Smith was a rough-and-tough former construction worker. He had enlisted in 1940 with the idea that going to war would be one way to see Europe and maybe other parts of the world. “I don't know what goes through the minds of those people who are in charge of this,” he said, “but people are going to get killed going to that dinner and others are going to die coming back from it. So you're all staying right here.”
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The men were angry and disappointed, but nobody dared argue the order. Most of the men were new reinforcements and Smith was their lifeline. He was teaching them the craft of soldiering right in a battleground. Earlier they had come into the building and one of the men had seen a much-prized German knife sticking out of a jar full of loose grains of wheat. The jar was on a windowsill, in plain view. When the soldier started to reach out to pluck the souvenir knife from the jar, Smith snapped, “Don't touch it.” Perhaps thinking Smith wanted the souvenir himself, the man scowled. “Why?”

“I'll show you,” Smith replied. With his rifle butt, he shoved the jar holding the knife out the window. Before it hit the street, the jar exploded. A grenade had been hidden inside the wheat grains. “There you are,” Smith said. Anything that looked like a good souvenir, he cautioned the men, was going to be booby-trapped. Smith's section respected the man's soldiering skill and judgement. So, angry they might have been to miss the Christmas dinner, but they stayed in their position. As far as Smith was concerned, his decision kept at least one of them from dying that Christmas Day.
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For the soldiers in the Loyal Edmonton Regiment, there was no elegant Christmas dinner. Many ate nothing besides their usual cold rations, despite an effort by the quartermasters to get roast pork and other luxuries up to the soldiers on the line.
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Major Jim Stone had his normal rations and a cold pork chop, hastily gobbled during an afternoon spent trying to get past Piazza Plebiscita.
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A massive rubble pile blocking the entrance to the square was frustrating efforts to get tanks through. Without their support, the Edmontons had little luck destroying the German machine-gun positions subjecting the square to a deadly deluge of fire. As the day wore on, Lieutenant R. Heggie managed to get his tank into a position on the rubble pile that allowed him to bring fire on the German positions, but Stone's ‘D' Company was unable to press forward despite this support. At dusk, both the tank and the infantry withdrew to their start line just outside the entrance to the square.
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Elsewhere on the Edmonton front, the advance was also stalling. Much of the problem was simply that the battalion had too few men left to do the job. There were also too few veterans to ensure the new reinforcements pressed on. Stone's company, for example, numbered barely thirty men of all ranks.
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Still, the Edmontons were slowly gaining ground against determined resistance.

‘B' Company Sergeant J.E.W. Dick's platoon was stalled in midafternoon by a combination of severe machine-gun fire, sniper fire, and searing blasts from a dug-in German flame-thrower. This was the first time the paratroopers had used flame-throwers against the Canadians. Spraying a jet of flame from a wand connected by a hose to fuel and pressurized air tanks worn on the operator's back, the weapon could reach across the width of a street. Although cumbersome and often dangerous to the operator, the weapons introduced a terrifying new hazard to the Ortona battlefield. If caught in the fire stream, a soldier was instantly burned to death.

Dick set out to find a way to outflank the enemy positions, including the flame-thrower operator. Crossing an exposed alley, he found a ten-foot-long water pipe that a section of men could climb to reach a small room overlooking the German position. From their perch in the room, the section was able to bring flanking fire against
the paratroopers, forcing them to retreat or die. Dick won the Military Medal for this display of initiative and boldness in the face of enemy fire.
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As night brought the worst of the fighting on Christmas Day to an end, Private Melville McPhee and his section received a small Christmas surprise. A man from the quartermaster section passed by and handed each man two bottles of beer and a few slices of cold pork. The beer tasted wonderful. Each man drank his two bottles slowly, knowing it would probably be many days before such a treat came again.
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Nobody expected the battle for Ortona to end soon.