The regiment, p.14
The Regiment, page 14
That night the 48th Highlanders occupied the town without real opposition, and the way was cleared for the final battles against the central fortress.
8
MONTGOMERY’S
MOUNTAIN GOATS
First Canadian Division’s thrust through the mountainous heart of Sicily, in its attempt to force the withdrawal of the strong German forces in the Catania plains, was approaching its climax. Catania itself already lay south of the line of the advanced Canadian units and it was nearly time for the Division to swing eastward and drive towards the coast. But before the turn could be made there was a most formidable gate to be opened.
The enemy had established himself on the Leonforte-Assoro base where the mountains swelled abruptly out of the bed of the Dittaino River and lifted steeply towards the peak of Etna to the east. Of the many almost impregnable positions available to the Germans, this was by far the strongest. Astride the two roads leading out of the valley the Assoro feature rose nearly three thousand feet from the dead river and thrust itself forward from the main mountain massifs like a titanic bastion. On the slope of the highest peak the village of Assoro clung precariously while a few miles westward the town of Leonforte guarded the back door to the citadel. As long as this position was held by the enemy there could be no further advance of Thirtieth Corps towards Messina; and the Germans had chosen the formidable Fifteenth Panzer-Grenadier Division to garrison this natural fortress.
By July 20 the forward Canadian unit (again the Edmontons) had reached the Dittaino and had established a bridgehead across it. From the valley floor men could now look up to the sheer cliffs of Assoro and to the narrow, tortuous road that climbed the crags. The German defenders were unperturbed by the appearance of the Canadians. They had no reason to be worried, for it was obvious that any frontal attack must be suicidal. And they believed Assoro to be one bastion that could not be outflanked, since its only open side, upon the east, was a cliff face rising nine hundred feet to terminate in the ruins of an ancient Norman castle on the very peak of the mountain.
Brig. Howard Graham, entrusted with the assault of the fortress, believed differently. He knew as well as did the Germans that a frontal assault would be disastrous. But remembering Valguarnera, he found some faint hope in the prospects of an attack from the right flank and rear. The hope was very faint; nevertheless, he called Lt.-Col. Sutcliffe and asked him if the Regiment could do the job. Sutcliffe agreed to try.
With his Regiment committed, the CO. immediately went forward across the Dittaino to the most advanced positions in order to estimate the chances of success. With him was the Intelligence Officer, “Battle” Cockin. The two men crawled through an olive grove and far down the exposed northern slope, in their anxiety to get a clear view of the enemy position. Crouched beside a single tiny foxhole, too small to hold them both, they were soon engrossed in their study of the great mountain thrusting high out of the dun-coloured earth.
On the Assoro scarp the crew of an 88-mm. gun laid their weapon over open sights. And when the cloud of yellow dust rose clear of the foxhole, Sutcliffe was dead, and the I.O. lay dying.
Prior to this moment all of the soldiers of the Regiment who had been killed had died in the confusion and tumult of action. Their loss had not been deeply perceived as yet, and hatred had not grown from their graves. This new stroke of death was something else again.
The tragedy had a remarkable effect. It irrevocably and utterly destroyed the pale remainder of the illusion that war was only an exciting extension of the battle games of 1941 and 1942. The killing of the CO. before the battle seemed to be an almost obscene act, and when the news came to the men it roused in them an ugly resentment. The emotions stirred by the first skirmishes with war were only awaiting crystallization, and now they hardened and took form. Hatred of the enemy was born.
One more element had been added to the moods of battle and with its acquisition the Regiment reached a new level of efficiency as an instrument of war.
With Sutcliffe’s death the command passed to the Regiment’s adopted Canadian, Major Lord John Tweedsmuir. Tweedsmuir took over at a moment when the Regiment was faced with the toughest battle problem that it had so far encountered. He reacted to the challenge by accepting and putting into effect a plan so daring that failure would have meant not only the end of his career, but probably the end of the Regiment as well.
It was his appreciation that only by a wide right-flanking sweep through the mountains, culminating in the scaling of the Assoro cliff, could the enemy’s position be reduced. Therefore the Regiment would scale the cliff.
It was already late afternoon and preparations had to be hurried. Alex Campbell was ordered to form a special assault force, a volunteer unit, consisting of one platoon from each of the regular rifle companies. The men in this special group were stripped of all their gear except for essential arms and ammunition, for it was to be their task to lead the Regiment; to scale the cliffs, and before dawn broke clearly, to occupy the mountain crest.
The approach march began at dusk and it was the most difficult forced march the Regiment ever attempted, in training or in war. The going was foul; through a maze of sheer-sided gullys, knife-edged ridges and boulder-strewn water courses. There was the constant expectation of discovery, for it seemed certain that the enemy would at least have listening posts on his open flank. Absolute silence was each man’s hope of survival — but silence on that nightmare march was almost impossible to maintain.
There were terrifying moments; once, when the scouts saw the loom of a parapet that could only be a masked machine-gun post. Incredibly it was deserted, but so recently that fragments of German bread upon the ground were still quite fresh. Hours later there was a faint sound of stones, disturbed by many feet, ahead of the assault company. Men sank into the shadows tensed for the explosion that never came. Instead a young Sicilian boy came sleepily out of the darkness driving his herd of goats. The youth stared unbelievingly at the motionless shapes of armed men that surrounded him on every side and then passed on, as in a dream.
There was a desperate urgency in that march for there were long miles to go, and at the end, the cliff to scale before the dawn light could reveal the Regiment to the enemy above. A donkey, laden with a wireless set, was literally dragged forward by its escort until it collapsed and died. The men went on.
By 0400 hours the assault company had scaled the last preliminary ridge and was appalled to find that the base of the mountain, looming through the pre-dawn greyness, was still separated from it by a gully a hundred feet deep, and nearly as sheer as an ancient moat. It was too late to turn back. Men scrambled down into the great natural ditch, crossed the bottom, and paused to draw breath. First light was just an hour away. Under the soldiers’ hands were the cliff rocks towering a thousand feet into the dark skies.
Each man who made that climb performed his own private miracle. From ledge to ledge the dark figures made their way, hauling each other up, passing along their weapons and ammunition from hand to hand. A signaller made that climb with a heavy wireless set strapped to his back — a thing that in daylight was seen to be impossible. Yet no man slipped, no man dropped so much as a clip of ammunition. It was just as well, for any sound by one would have been fatal to all.
Assoro and Nissoria
July 21/25 1943
Dawn was breaking and the whole cliff face was encrusted with a moving growth that like some vast slime-mould oozed upward almost imperceptibly. This was the moment. If the alarm was given, nothing could save the unit from annihilation.
The alarm was never given. The two men at the head of the leading assault platoon reached the crest, dragged themselves up over a stone wall and for one stark moment stared into the eyes of three sleepy Germans manning an observation post. Pte. A.K. Long cut down one of the Germans who tried to flee. The remaining enemy soldiers stood motionless, staring as children might at an inexplicable apparition.
Ten minutes later, as the sun cleared the eastern hills, the Regiment had overrun the crest and the companies were in position on the western slopes overlooking the whole German front. Close below them the village of Assoro showed a few thin spirals of grey smoke as peasant women prepared the morning meal. Half a mile below, in the steep valley leading to the front, a peaceful convoy of a dozen German trucks carried the day’s rations forward to the waiting grenadiers.
Twenty Bren gunners on Assoro’s crest vied with one another to press the trigger first.
The appearance of the Canadians must have come as a shattering surprise to the enemy and had his troops been of a lesser calibre, a debacle must have resulted. But the Germans here were of a fighting breed. Although they were now at a serious disadvantage, they had no thought of giving up.
From the ditches beside the burning trucks German drivers returned the Regiment’s machine-gun fire with rifle shots. The crews of four light anti-aircraft pieces, sited beside the road, cranked down their guns to fire point-blank at the Canadians upon the crest. Machine-gun detachments, hurriedly withdrawn from the front, scrambled up the road, flung themselves down behind stone fences and engaged the Brens in a staccato duel. With commendable, but frightening efficiency, the enemy’s batteries, which had been concentrating their fire on Second Brigade in front of Leonforte, slewed their guns around to bear upon Assoro. Within an hour after dawn the crest of the hill was almost hidden in the dust of volleying explosions.
The Regiment dug in. Able company and the assault company on the south and southwestern slopes; the balance of the unit on the north and northwestern side. A series of narrow terraces gave scant shelter but the men scraped shallow slit trenches in the stony soil, using their steel helmets as shovels. The enemy’s fire grew steadily heavier, while that of the Regiment died away as realization dawned that this would be a long battle, and there would probably be no new supplies of ammunition until it ended.
But the surprises of that morning were not all one-sided. Before the infantry companies moved off it had been agreed that two green Verey flares, fired by the assault group, would indicate that the enemy position had been overrun and that it was safe for the unit’s transport to move forward. Sometime after midnight, while the infantry was still struggling through the maze of hills and valleys far from the objective, a German in the positions overlooking the Dittaino sent a routine signal to his own artillery. The signal that he fired was two green flares.
Although there had been no sounds of battle as yet, the transport group accepted the evidence of its eyes and began moving north. Before dawn it had crossed the valley and the leading carriers had been halted by a crater blown in the road by German engineers some time earlier. Things were still quiet and some of the men of “F” echelon got out of their vehicles and lay down on the gentle slopes to catch a little sleep.
The Panzer-grenadiers defending the road must have found it hard to credit their eyes as the grey light revealed thirty Canadian trucks and carriers drawn up in a neat line almost under the muzzles of the German guns.
The men of “F” echelon were rudely awakened. Some of them, leaping up out of a pleasant sleep, yelled horrid threats at their comrades who, they believed, had gone mad and were firing upon them. Others, more alert, realized that they were in a most unhappy situation and did what they could to remedy things. While one of the three-inch mortars was hastily put into action, the drivers tried to turn their vehicles on the narrow road. Someone, thinking with great rapidity, began throwing smoke grenades around the leading vehicles and under this thin protection the carriers managed to turn and clatter wildly down the slopes. One of them was driven by a motor-cyclist who had lost his own mount. He missed a turn and his carrier skidded off the road and somersaulted all the way down to the valley floor. The driver was miraculously uninjured and when he had dragged himself to his feet he stood for several minutes, in full view of the enemy, cursing his steed as if it had been a horse that had thrown him, and angrily banging its steel flanks with his boot.
It was fortunate for the transport and carrier men that at this juncture the balance of the Regiment on Assoro’s crest carried the battle to the enemy’s rear. In the ensuing confusion, and not without casualties — four trucks destroyed and four men badly wounded — “F” echelon managed to make good its retreat to the Dittaino and beyond. But it was in a chastened mood, and for some weeks afterwards it was notably suspicious of all orders to move forward to a “captured” area.
Meanwhile the position of the men on Assoro was becoming critical. The five hundred infantrymen were almost completely surrounded on the three-acre crest of the mountain, and they could neither withdraw nor advance. Patrols were sent scuttling through the curtain of small-arms and shell-fire into the village. The place was cleared, but its capture brought little relief. The Regiment’s threat against the enemy supply route could not be fully implemented, for already the scanty ammunition supplies carried on men’s backs up the cliff, were growing perilously low. Confined to the congested area on the crest, the Regiment was exposed to an increasing fury of artillery shelling which was suddenly, and terrifyingly, supplemented by the fire of a number of German rocket batteries. This was the unit’s first experience with the weapon nicknamed “The Moaning Minnie” and there was not a man who was not shaken by the initiation. The shells were nine inches in diameter and they were fired in salvos of five or six. The screaming of their rocket motors was an intolerable sound, as if the heavy shells were being forced through interminable rusty cylinders, slightly too small for their diameter. In addition there were single twelve-inch rockets, each containing a hundred and fifty pounds of high explosive, that screeched their way slowly overhead and burst with a tremendous blast. More than four hundred rocket and artillery shells crashed into the crest of Assoro in the first two hours of that bombardment.
But if the Regiment could not attack, it was not content to remain simply passive under this punishment. The Germans had decided that the crest of Assoro must be held by a very small number of Canadians and that, under cover of the shelling, it would be safe to withdraw the many vehicles which had been at the front. It was not safe. As the armoured half-trucks and open trucks came scuttling up the road the Regiment caught them in a withering small-arms fire and destroyed or forced the abandonment of almost a score of them. The Germans promptly reassessed the danger and prepared to counterattack the hill in force.
The Regiment’s situation now became desperate. Unless it could somehow silence the enemy artillery it could not hope to hold on. Desperation sharpens men’s wits, and in this extremity someone remembered the captured German observation post. It had been equipped with a fine pair of 20-power scissor telescopes and these were now hurriedly moved to the north end of the hill where Tweedsmuir and his second-in-command, Major Kennedy (who had originally trained as an artilleryman), could sweep almost the entire area from which the enemy guns were firing. There was only one radio — the short-range No. 56 set that had been miraculously carried up the cliff on a man’s back. It sufficed to save the unit.
In the next hour the Regiment gave the distant Canadian artillery a series of dream targets. As each German gun fired up at Assoro, its position was radioed to the rear and within minutes salvos of Canadian shells fell upon it. There was no escape, for every movement of the German gunners could be seen. Methodically, carefully, the officers at the telescope directed the counter-battery fire until by noon well over half the enemy’s artillery was out of action, and the rest was hurriedly withdrawing to safer sites.
But the vicious bombardment of the hill had added a new emotion to the battle mood. Men had discovered fear.
It was met by the beginning growth of a special type of fatalism, relieved by wit. The sort of thing that led one man to say: “When you dig a good slit-trench nothing can get you except a direct hit, and if it is a direct hit, it’s because you teased your grandmother — or pulled the wings off flies.” And another. “There’s no use trying to hide out from a shell. If it’s got your name on it, it’ll chase you into the house, follow you upstairs, push the pot aside and get you under the bed.” The humour was not uproarious — but it was adequate.
On the forward crest of the hill, pinned down behind a rock by a salvo of mortar bombs, Paddy Gahagen replied to the shout of his platoon commander who demanded to know what in the name of all the furies he was doing. “Looking for goddam four-leaf clovers with my nose” was the muffled reply. Never had there been a greater need for the solace of humour than on Assoro. As the first day drew on, the heat grew worse and though the continuous heavy shelling had ceased, there were spasmodic outbursts from hour to hour. Water was a problem for there was only one well on the crest and those attempting to reach it were exposed to sniping fire. There was little food, for the emergency rations had long-since been consumed. In Charlie company, Pte. Greatrix became the hero of the moment when he produced a can of sardines that had been secreted in his haversack, and gravely offered each man in his platoon one fish.
A small cave near the well had been converted into a medical station and here the wounded lay in silent rows. The padre, Capt. Reg. Lane, a man of more than forty-five years of age, who was not equipped either by nature or by training for the hardships he had undergone, performed his own private miracle of endurance as he helped the stretcher bearers care for the living, or helped the living bury the dead.
In the late afternoon the CO. gave up hope of a relief column breaking through to the Regiment that day, and called for two volunteers to return to the Canadian lines and attempt to guide a carrying party forward with rations and ammunition during the night. The R.S.M. and an officer accepted the task and set out down the great cliff, and across four miles of enemy dominated country, finally reaching safety in a state of complete exhaustion. But when darkness fell they were still able to guide a hundred men of the Royal Canadian Regiment laden with food and ammunition, back through the gorges to the foot of the mountain. The next morning the garrison received its first rations in thirty-six hours.
