Ortona (5 page)

Unlike his father, a Canadian soldier in 1943 might also carry a Thompson submachine gun or a Bren light machine gun. Every platoon had at least one two-man crew armed with a Bren. With an empty weight of 22.38 pounds, this air-cooled, gas-operated gun was considered one of the most reliable and finest light machine guns made during the war, far superior to the American Browning M1919A6 (commonly known as the BAR) and a match for those carried by the Germans. The normal rate of fire from the Bren's thirty-round distinctively curved magazine was five bursts of four or five rounds a minute. It was generally fired from a prone position with the barrel resting on a bipod, the gun tucked into the firing
man's shoulder, the assistant crouching nearby to provide fresh clips as the one in use emptied. A good firing team could put out 150 rounds a minute in measured bursts or 500 on full automatic.
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Officers and troops alike were fond of the Thompson submachine gun, especially for close-up fighting where its short firing range was irrelevant. The troops of the Eighth Army considered the Thompson about the only weapon the Americans designed and manufactured that was worth the money paid. Its only drawbacks were that it was a heavy clunker, weighing 10.62 pounds empty, and that it fired .45-calibre ammunition, whereas the Lee Enfield and Bren both conveniently shared the same ammunition. Because its ammunition was, however, heavier than just about any other used on the battlefield, the Thompson proved devastating when its bullets hit a target. An enemy soldier struck by a .45 slug from a Thompson usually went down and stayed down, either dead, dying, or badly wounded.
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When the Canadians had been preparing to deploy to Sicily, they had been provided with some 9-millimetre Sten submachine guns, a British-designed weapon that was stamped out like metal cookies from a cutter. Inexpensive to make and popular with the commandos and European underground, the gun was held in disdain by the Canadians and generally ditched as quickly as possible. All too often its primitive safety switch came off and the gun accidentally discharged, causing friendly casualties. By the time the Canadians reached the Sangro River, hardly any Stens were in use by front-line units.

The other weapon the infantry carried was the Type 36 grenade. Its segmented metal exterior was thought by the soldiers to resemble a pineapple, so it became known as the pineapple grenade or simply a pineapple. Filled with high explosive that, upon exploding, turned the metal exterior casing into about eighty pieces of deadly shrapnel, the 36 was effective to the range a man could pitch it in an overhand throw. Once the fuse was activated, however, there was no deactivating it and the weapon was dangerous to thrower and immediate comrades alike if improperly used. Some soldiers hated and avoided grenades. Others, such as Seaforth Highlander Private Harry Rankin, loved them. Rankin loaded up all the grenades he could carry, used them whenever possible, and even kept notes in his pay book setting out the safe times that a grenade with each fuse length could be held and still be thrown out a safe distance.
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In addition to these weapons and their ammunition, each rifleman carried a bayonet, water canteen, some emergency rations, perhaps some extra socks, and a few personal effects, as well as a bandage for dressing a wound. It was not uncommon for a soldier's canvas pack to hold one hundred pounds of gear. In a haversack across his shoulder was also an anti-gas respirator that he hoped never to use. Two pouches attached to combat webbing held numerous five-round clips for the rifle, extra loose .303 cartridges, and normally a couple of thirty-round .303 magazines for the Bren gun. Secured on the webbing and stuffed into pouches would be a varying number of grenades based as much on personal preference as any standard requirement.

An infantry division's fighting strength depended on the number of riflemen fit for duty in the rifle companies. Seldom did this strength exceed what the army called light scale. Light scale dictated a company strength of 110, battalion strength of 440, and a total strength of 3,960 in a division's nine infantry battalions. These were the troops who went head to head against the enemy infantry. Bren carrier, mortar, and antitank platoons were left out of these calculations because they were seldom in the immediate front line. To keep each rifleman properly equipped, supplied, and medically cared for required almost a three-to-one-ratio of divisional support personnel for every front-line soldier.

Increasing the firepower of the infantry were support companies with various types of mortars; the artillery regiments with their twenty-five-pounder guns; the antitank units equipped with six-pound and seventeen-pound antitank guns; the reconnaissance regiment with its armoured cars; and the armoured regiments with their Sherman M-4 tanks. But always it was the infantry that had to go forward and root the enemy out of their holes, clear the buildings, sweep the dense stands of trees. The infantry led, and it was the infantry who most often bled and died.

As the infantry trudged once more on foot toward new positions immediately behind the 78th Division, their transport and support vehicles continued to jockey across the Sangro. It took six hours of waiting and lurching yard by yard for the PPCLI's transport to finally get over the bridge. The trucks linked up with the infantry near the
small hamlet of Fossacesia. And there, as was so often the case in the army, the soldiers were told to wait. Soon they learned that the fighting south of the Moro River was not yet concluded. The 78th was still trying to shove the Germans out of San Vito Chietino, a town just south of the Moro valley. Word came back that the 78th would not hand over the front to the Canadians until it had bloody well thrown the last German over the other side of the river. Few complaints about this turn of events were heard among the ranks. Nobody was that anxious to start mixing it up with
Tedeschi
, the Italian word for German, which the Eighth Army had quickly adopted as its favoured slang for the enemy.

Everywhere the Canadians looked they found innumerable signs of how bitter the battle for the Sangro had been. Loyal Edmonton Regiment platoon scout commander Lieutenant Alon Johnson, waiting his turn to cross the bridge, sat in his jeep and surveyed the detritus of war about him. Utility poles were down or tilted erratically and trailed wires, burned-out hulks of German tanks and antitank guns stood in the fields, shell craters were everywhere, dead horses and mules lay swelling on the roadsides. A British officer from one of the line units that were starting to trickle past stopped to chat with Johnson. “You must have had quite a battle here,” Johnson said. The officer paused, looked reflective for a moment. “Yes, a bit of a do,” he replied drolly and proceeded on to the rear.
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Dawn found many Canadian units still trying to get over the Sangro bridge. And with the dawn came sporadic German artillery shelling of the bridgehead. Shells thumped down on either side of the bridge, sending up geysers of water, and erupted on and around the road. As shrapnel sang through the air, men piled out of helplessly jammed trucks, Bren carriers, and jeeps to scramble into the dubious shelter of the ditch. When a barrage lifted, any vehicles damaged too badly to continue moving were pushed into the ditch to allow the rest of the column to advance.

Major de Faye and his Saskatoon Light Infantry troops were stuck in the column just before the bridge at about midday. He thought the bridge a bloody poor effort, a sagging pontoon construction that seemed on the point of washing out. Only two vehicles could cross at a time, explaining what the Canadians were finding to be the worst traffic jam of the war. The major's SLI unit was a mini-battalion of
about 500 men divided into three companies. One company was composed of three platoons, each equipped with four medium Vickers .303 machine guns and loaded into tracked, lightly armoured Bren carriers. The second company was broken into two platoons each armed with four 4.2-inch mortars mounted in fifteen-hundred-weight trucks (15 cwt.), with Bren carriers for the forward observation officers, who went up to the line with the infantry and radioed back firing coordinates for the mortars. His third company was armed with single-barrel twenty-millimetre Oerlikon anti-aircraft guns organized in four platoons with four guns each. A single gun was loaded by hand into the back of a 15-cwt. truck.

Originally, most of the men in the SLI had hailed from Saskatchewan and many from Saskatoon. But a reorganization in England prior to the Sicily invasion had boosted the numbers of the battalion and now de Faye had soldiers and officers from all parts of Canada in his unit, although the majority of the men were still from the prairie provinces.

The major was a career soldier, who had joined the SLI as a sixteen-year-old private in 1934. He had lied about his age, so he could receive the full soldier's pay that would go to a man of eighteen. When war broke out, de Faye had gathered enough Canadian Officers Training Corps courses at the University of Saskatchewan to qualify for the rank of captain and, with a shortage of officers in the rapidly expanding army, found himself promoted to this position at the age of twenty-one. He was the first to admit that the idea of a twenty-one-year-old captain was ridiculous. What he did not know about soldiering “would probably have filled every military manual ever written.”
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7 But he had also the supreme self-confidence of youth, as did so many of the officers in Canada's amateur and entirely volunteer army.

And now he sat in a jeep, right up next to the damned bridge. His men were jammed up behind him in their vehicles, every man undoubtedly wondering if they would get across the Sangro and away before the next German artillery salvo arrived. Traffic was completely stopped. Minutes passed, as the tension mounted. Every man in the column grew twitchier and twitchier. Next to de Faye's jeep, a British dispatch rider was parked on the verge, lying back on his motorcycle with his feet up on the handlebars. “Waiting, waiting,
always bloody waiting,” he sang in a clear, high voice. The soldiers in the vehicles all laughed, breaking the tension. Moments later the convoy lurched forward again. In a few minutes the bridge was crossed, the moment of immediate danger past.
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Throughout December 2 and the early part of December 3, as the rest of 1st Canadian Infantry Division started assembling in the 78th Division's immediate rear south of the Moro River, 3rd Canadian Infantry Brigade was engaged in the more complex manoeuvre of disengaging from its front-line positions in preparation to join the rest of the division. December 2 also saw 1st Canadian Armoured Brigade begin rolling its tank battalions across the Sangro to support the upcoming Canadian advance. Everything progressed relatively smoothly throughout the Canadian forces and it appeared that the scheduled takeover of all 78th Division positions by December 4 would proceed more or less as planned.

Third CIB's West Nova Scotia Regiment had withdrawn from its forward positions on December 1. The men were able to rest for a couple of days just back of the upper Sangro River line in the village of Agnone in billets that were complete with lights, running water, and a movie theatre showing the 1930 film
Gambling on the High Seas
. Meanwhile, the Royal 22e and Carleton and York regiments were still carrying out light patrolling along the upper Sangro front, the Van Doos hearing heavy enemy transport beyond the German lines. The Carleton and York, for its part, was unable to put patrols over the Sangro due to the presence of a network of German heavy-machine-gun posts that fired on anyone, including civilians, who tried crossing the river section facing its front. By December 3, both battalions had been relieved by the British 5th Division and were moving slowly over rough terrain and in worsening weather toward the coast, as were the better rested West Novas. The brigade was scheduled to link up with the rest of the division on December 4 and to move into a reserve position, while 1st and 2nd Canadian infantry brigades assumed the front-line positions being handed over by the 78th Division.
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