The regiment, p.3
The Regiment, page 3
Mowat’s main contention is that the regimental family spirit, born in the armouries back home, grown through training and in battle was a powerful tonic. It offered a coping mechanism, protecting all those who survived against bad news from wives back home, fear of strange new battlefield terrors like the shrieking German Nebelwerfer rocket-mortars, from their first taste of failure on the slopes of Nissoria Ridge, and the loss of close friends. This theme is the most powerful thread binding this book together and represents Mowat’s most important contribution to the history of Canada at war. Mowat was able to convey how powerfully that regimental spirit armoured all those who wore the Hasty P insignia because he wore it too. Mowat wrote that when news reports from back home about conscription riots and wage strikes reached them at the end of the fighting in Sicily, the links back home faded. “It was one more step to spiritual exile, and again the Regiment grew strong because of it; becoming more and more the living home.”
Soldiers of the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment enjoying a well-earned break along Sicily’s east coast, after their first actions of the war, August 15, 1943.
Canadian Armed Forces Directorate of History and Heritage, DHH 112.3P1
Mowat’s case for the power of the Canadian Army’s regimental system as a key to combat effectiveness and motivation is not incongruous with the latest research on the subject. Robert Engen’s findings in his new book Strangers in Arms: Combat Motivation in the Canadian Army, 1939−1945 suggest that Canadian infantry soldiers were more confident in their training and skillful with weapons and tactics than many critics from the 1950s to the 1990s gave them credit for, including the Chief of the Army Historical Section, Princeton University Professor C.P. Stacey. Engen’s new work is the latest shot fired in the growing counter argument that Canada’s armed forces made an effective contribution to winning the war that emerged with the likes of Terry Copp at Wilfred Laurier University and Marc Milner at the University of New Brunswick in the 1990s.
Canadian veterans of that war line up on both sides of the debate, some arguing the war might have been won sooner and at a lower cost in blood, and others believing they performed well in trying circumstances. Mowat’s study of the Hasty Ps allows both interpretations to co-exist. For example, in Sicily members of the Regiment felt that a rushed plan imposed on them by higher headquarters resulted in their first failure at Nissoria in Sicily, but neither that nor any other command decision in the field was ever enough to completely unravel their faith in higher command and especially in the British and Commonwealth Eighth Army, of which they proudly formed part in Sicily and Italy. Instead, that faith became guarded as the Regiment realized how their generals were human and not infallible. Mowat’s honest handling of this sensitive issue remains as relevant to the Canadian military effectiveness debate today as it was when first published in 1955.
The Regiment’s fighting effectiveness, at least among the original volunteers or ’39ers as they were known, faced new challenges on mainland Italy. Italy’s surrender and shift to the Allied camp resulted in a massive flow of German reinforcements from all over Europe to take over duties of the nearly two million Italian soldiers, sailors and aircrew that had previously guarded the Mediterranean shore of Hitler’s “Fortress Europe.” The Germans responded as the Allies hoped they might and more, by stripping forces away from the Russian front, from northern France, and elsewhere in western Europe, and despatching them to the Mediterranean theatre to block any Allied advance beyond southern Italy. But someone still had to fight those shifting German troops in late 1943. Mowat describes this military problem as akin to breaking down a thickening wall. The enemy’s troops, guns, and tanks had assembled for a major stand, lining up from Cassino to Ortona in late 1943 on what became known as the Gustav Line.
After introducing this historical context, Mowat reverts to status as a participant and casualty in the cruel December of 1943 spent between the Moro River and Ortona, which turned into what General Bernard Montgomery called a “killing match.” There the Hasty Ps fought their most vicious battle to date, helping to cement 1st Canadian Division’s hold on the Moro River bridgehead and to soundly defeat two powerful German regiments, 90th Panzer Grenadier and the infamous 1st Parachute. That battle did not result in a great advance northward; rather, the Regiment’s victory in it was measured by the killing and capturing of hundreds of elite German troops, something that was aided tremendously by supporting artillery observers calling down the fire of Royal Canadian Artillery batteries positioned a few thousand yards behind them.
Lieutenant-Colonel A.A. “Bert” Kennedy led Dog Company into Sicily and was later promoted to command the Regiment through southern Italy to the Moro River and Ortona.
Canadian Armed Forces Directorate of History and Heritage, DHH 112.3P1
Here Mowat engages the question of whether Second World War victories were defined by miles travelled toward Berlin or by casualties inflicted on the enemy. He remains divided on the question, especially given how the fighting cost his regiment so heavy a price in dead, and men wounded both in body and mind.
Intense combat around the Moro and Ortona culminated a six-month-long, physically demanding campaign through Italy’s rugged hills in deteriorating weather and nearly broke the Regiment. Mowat’s work is at its best here as he describes a precarious combination of tactical achievement, exhaustion, and the painful loss of so many characters who made up the regimental family, including his dear friend Alex Campbell, killed on the infamous Christmas Day, 1943, just west of Ortona. Considering when this book was first published, in 1955, Mowat is refreshingly open about the question of “battle exhaustion,” the shell shock of the previous war, though this is perhaps not surprising given that he succumbed to it himself in the aftermath of Ortona.
Later in life, Mowat ended his own memoir, And No Birds Sang, on the Ortona front, but in early 1944 neither he nor the surviving members of the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment had the luxury of ending their war at so obvious a climax. And so, in the chapters following his description of that battle, Mowat continues his tale of the Regiment’s struggle to rebuild itself so as to be able to continue its fight northward in Italy. He offers fascinating insight into the reconstitution of the unit on and behind the front. Only two hundred ’39ers remained as the basis for rebuilding for the great spring offensive of 1944. The majority of replacements came from their own armouries back in Hastings and Prince Edward counties. The reserve regiment continued service as a recruiting and preliminary training depot, feeding some two thousand replacements to the regimental holding company in 1st Canadian Division’s Infantry Reinforcement Unit. In other cases, wounded or ill members returned to the regimental family after recovering in hospital. These two flows accounted for most of the men flowing in or back as the Regiment rebuilt in March and April 1944.
Some of the wounded were not returned to the Regiment, however, and Mowat saves his attention here to rage against rear-area administration for sending too many wounded Hasty Ps to other units after release from hospital. The Regiment was embittered by several memorable such cases. What happened was, wounded men’s positions were taken by soldiers from reinforcement units so the unit would not have to play short-handed. So, when a wounded man was released from hospital, he might find his position filled, meaning that he would have to wait to rejoin his regiment until new vacancies opened up due to combat and disease. Usually, the proud and healthy Hasty Ps who waited impatiently to return to their regimental home at least had the ability to do so in the comfort of the Infantry Reinforcement Unit’s Hasty P Company. But shells, bullets, and germs struck unevenly. In any given month, the burden of loss hit some units in 1st Canadian Division worse than others. Sometimes, veteran Hasty Ps were ordered to put on new badges and shoulder flashes and fill gaping holes shot in other units or to fill particular specialist or leadership shortages. Mowat and his band of brothers believed that these reassignments to other units stole good men away from the regimental family they so depended on. The policy also meant that sometimes new batches of replacements arrived in Hasty P lines from all over Canada rather than just the home stations in eastern Ontario. Although Mowat suggests newcomers were all made welcome, including blacks, First Nations people, Jews, and recent eastern European immigrants to Canada, he once again acts as a voice for his angry fellow veterans who were not properly informed as to why each and every wounded Hasty P could not return to their regimental home.
Despite the problems caused by the army reinforcement policy and Mowat’s frustrations with it, the Regiment was restored to its original numbers and fighting efficiency. Mowat recounts how, by May 1944, the Hasty Ps were ready to fight alongside their countrymen in the fourth assault in the Battle of Monte Cassino. His account of the Regiment crashing beyond the Gustav Line and into the powerful German fallback defence known as the Hitler Line brings alive the Regiment’s partnership with their Canadian artillery “foster brothers” and with attached British crews manning heavy Churchill infantry support tanks. The latter proudly wore the 1st Division’s red patch on their sleeves marking them as honorary members of the Canadian combined-arms team that won the hard-fought and stunning victory in the Hitler Line on May 23, 1944.
His chapter titled “The Road to Rome,” which is told from the perspective of one battalion and its attachments, remains among the best Canadian accounts of how that victory was won. But readers should remember that the Hasty Ps formed the core of only one of the combined arms teams that fought that day. They amounted to about 5 percent of 1st Canadian Division’s great mass, which included eight other infantry battalions, five artillery regiments, an armoured reconnaissance regiment, the equivalent of an engineer regiment, three attached British tank regiments, and thousands more Canadian transport, maintenance, and other support troops. Every one of the over twenty thousand men in the reinforced division contributed to the Herculean effort that opened the gateway to Rome on May 23.
Mowat committed no sin by focusing on the 5 percent that was his special subject, however; indeed, like most regimental histories, his stops short of acknowledging the Canadian collective accomplishment. In fact, Hasty P actions on the high ground at Point 106 and at Pontecorvo fixed the attention of the rebuilt and reinforced 90th Panzer Grenadier Division manning the toughest and most critical point in the Hitler Line on the Canadian left shoulder. Their efforts combined with western Canada’s 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade, which took it on the chin near Aquino at the right shoulder. All of this enabled eastern Canada’s 3rd Infantry Brigade to cleave through the enemy defenders in the centre and break into German rear areas.
The collective Canadian achievement launched two weeks of open warfare involving Canadian, British, U.S., French, New Zealand, Free Polish, and Free Italian units, who surged forward to pursue the shattered German units, inflicting such terrible loss on them that German high command despatched precious reserves of men and weapons to Italy in order to check the threat to their southern European flank. German reinforcements poured into Italy in late May and early June, just before the massive Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. The German transfers were no mere coincidence; in fact, they were part of the wider, continental Operation Overlord plan. Unfortunately in the aftermath, the Hasty Ps and other Eighth Army British and Commonwealth troops were so incensed at being denied a victorious entry into Rome on June 5 that most were blind to just how much they contributed to the success of the Normandy invasion on June 6. Readers should be aware to balance that soldiers’ bias in Italy against the international scope of their accomplishment.
In the summer and fall of 1944, the 1st Canadian Corps still faced six more bitter months of fighting before it would succeed in reaching the north of Italy. During that time, thousands more were killed and wounded. However, if awareness of this immense sacrifice or of how much the Italian campaign mattered to the war in 1944 is limited, it is non-existent regarding the campaign there after the Battle for Normandy took over newspaper headlines. Mowat’s account of the little-known triumph in the Gothic Line and the hard fight over Coriano Ridge and on to Rimini against an enemy that once again matched Allied numbers in infantry strength, was for decades one of the only ones widely available in Canada. It remains among the clearest explanations of the continuing diversionary mission behind the fight in Italy after Normandy was won: to convince Hitler that the “8th Army posed a real threat to Austria or southern Germany.”
Though this was clear after the fact, the Hasty Ps were not told at the time that the Allied force in Italy was being denied the men, guns, planes, and ammunition to actually reach Germany because priority had been granted to the Allied force then racing toward Germany’s western border. Instead, the Allies in Italy were the bait, organized and given enough supplies to make it look like they might reach southern Germany, thus providing the incentive to keep enemy troops from massing decisively on any one battlefield. Mowat writes that creating the illusion of a threat meant pushing skilled and experienced units to “attack, attack, again and yet again” until their numbers whittled away from shot and shell, and exhaustion befell the survivors.
Victory over 29th Panzer Grenadier and 1st Parachute Division at San Fortunato Ridge and Rimini brought only the prospect of another wet winter in Italy, a steady stream of German reinforcements arriving on their front and only the barest trickle of replacements or comforts from home. Mowat reveals much about how tired and frustrated survivors persevered, even though many felt abandoned by their prime minister, who continued holding out on the conscription question, and by their countrymen at home, who seemed to be more concerned with building their post-war prosperity, even though the war remained yet to be won. Enduring that miserably long fall and winter of 1944–45 brought the Regiment ever closer to the Italian people, with whom they often shared billets, meals, and good company. Mowat’s groundbreaking revelations about the way Canadian troops interacted with the Italian civilian population on the battlefield remain an understudied element of the nation’s wartime experience in either world war.
The sense of abandonment on the flat, waterlogged Po Valley plain is the context for Mowat’s most powerful chapter, composed, ironically, about the most forgotten of all of Canada’s Italian campaign encounters — the Battle for the Lamone River in December 1944. Of all the word-pictures Mowat painted, his description of the formidable forces opposing the Hasty Ps — the high dikes enclosing the Lamone; the thick-walled farmhouses bristling with machine guns, sited to lash across the endless plains, saturated by cold, grim rain — best illustrates the infantryman’s struggle against the triumvirate of enemy, earth, and weather. Such were the wretched conditions in which the Regiment suffered its most painful reverse.
Here the book turns to a board of inquiry into all factors contributing to the disaster that befell the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment and the Royal Canadian Regiment on December 5, 1944. Mowat carefully navigates the Regiment’s acceptance of some responsibility while also venting their frustration with headquarters for again rushing them into action without time to properly patrol or plan. Frequently, rushed gambles paid off handsomely for the Canadians in Italy, resulting in them catching the Germans off-balance, but not at the Lamone. The question of what went wrong and who was responsible haunted Mowat, who had not been able to stand with his comrades at the front since he had been stationed in the rear, where he had watched helplessly. He wrote to his father the day afterward that “something hellish has happened … and it was all so goddamn stupid.” His dear friend Stan Ketcheson served as the Hasty P acting-commanding officer during the assault and came close to suicide in the aftermath. Mowat’s boss at 1st Brigade headquarters, Brigadier-General Allen Calder, was fired afterward. Calder’s place taken for the rest of the war by Desmond Smith, the very commander who ordered the hasty December 5 assault over the Lamone. Mowat’s letters home suggest his subsequent relationship with Des Smith, the last of four commanders he served under at 1st Brigade headquarters, was the most difficult.
Private Huron Brant being decorated by General Sir Bernard Montgomery with the Military Medal for his daring actions in Sicily in 1943. Brant was killed the following year near Cesena in northern Italy.
Canadian Armed Forces Directorate of History and Heritage, DHH 112.3P1
Mowat follows the Regiment though its second Christmas at the front, where it sank into the lowest depths of despair before once more rallying its spirit in time to end the Italian sojourn and journey to the Netherlands with the veteran 1st Canadian Corps. There they joined 2nd Corps to make First Canadian Army whole and nearly all-Canadian for the one and only time during the Second World War — the final spring of 1945. These chapters bring a fitting end to Mowat’s story of the war.
