Ortona (22 page)

As the barrage started, Halton scrambled though the hole in the
wall of the old building. He held the microphone aloft, enabling Holmes to clearly record the tremendous volleys of fire. It was impossible for Halton to speak, the noise of the firing was deafening. Inside the building, Holmes hunched over the recording equipment, capturing the massive din for posterity on his discs. The day was moving toward dusk and it seemed to Halton that the bombardment hastened the onset of approaching darkness.

“Then inferno broke loose,” Comfort wrote in his diary, “the earth trembled with cataclysmic shock. Instantly the pastoral valley became a valley of death. From its fertile groves sprang the instant and terrible orchids of death. The first impact was of sound, gigantic and preposterous sound. One was shuttled from warm sunlight into the roaring darkness of an endless tunnel. It battered and pounded the eardrums from all sides. We lay stunned and fearful, clawing the earth, as flights of frightened birds crossed the valley and passed over our heads to a relative safety. Before our eyes sprang the grey-blue flowers of death, withering instantly in the breeze, to form a concealing veil of sulphurous vapour, struggling to hide the agony of the clamorous garden. . . .

“No sound of speech or movement could be heard above the infernal dissonance; all was lost in the tumult of its fury. The target pattern soon became clear; neat rectangles were searched and scorched with fire, the finger pointing here and then there. Soon they all fitted together with diabolical accuracy, like the parts of a gigantic puzzle. When the assembly was complete, all that the eye could encompass had been burned with fire. The valley was gone, hidden in an opaque cloud of acrid cordite. One was possessed of a great fatigue, a throbbing of the temples. What a dreadful monotony it was, of key, of tempo, of colour, of purpose and effect.”
⁵

At 1600 hours, the Saskatoon Light Infantry support battalion opened up with its Vickers medium machine guns, “spraying the enemy positions with penetrating bursts like pneumatic drills. To our astonishment, the enemy replied with the even faster falsetto of the Schmeisser. How could humans survive such a barrage? Why were they not helpless inarticulate blobs of quivering jelly?”
⁶

So intense was the rate of fire that Bulger and the other Canadian
gunners, like Gunner Bill Strickland, were amazed to see the barrels of their guns glow translucent red. They could actually see the shells sliding up the barrel prior to blasting off toward the enemy lines. Strickland's cotton padding fell out of his ears and minutes later a dribble of blood ran from each eardrum down his cheeks. Around him gunners had torn off their coats and shirts to work the guns barechested, their bodies dripping with sweat. Strickland was reeling with exhaustion, passing shells forward at a manic pace. His sergeant's mouth opened and moved, but Strickland heard no sound.
⁷

At 1630 hours the firing abruptly ceased. Bulger felt numb, his whole body oddly dislocated by the continuous concussion of the firing. The smell of cordite was choking and a light blue smoke fog cloaked the firing position. He could have dropped to the ground. But there was no time to rest. The gun required cleaning, the hundreds of spent cartridges needed piling up, and hundreds more shells waited to be carried from the roads through the mud to replenish the gun's ammunition supply. Any moment more firing plans could be announced, and the men would once again turn to the guns. During the long years of waiting in Britain, the artillerymen had been strictly rationed in the numbers of shells they could fire. It seemed at times that each shell had to be personally signed off by a regimental commander before it could be fired. Not so on December 8. The Canadian gunners had fired off thousands of rounds, rendering any accurate accounting of munitions spent impossible.
⁸

“So you could hear the barrage,” said Halton, speaking into the microphone. “You must have heard it. You can hardly see the valley, it's very ghostly now. . . . God knows what's happening down there, our men are down there. The enemy must have been dazed and bewildered by our barrage.”
⁹

Comfort wrote: “Everywhere destruction and disintegration: shattered buildings, mutilated trees, a spectral landscape of heaped-up fleshless bones, jostled by concussion and blast in a hideous monotonous danse macabre. Such was the new tempestuous world of cataclysm and shock we had inherited. Jesus Christ! How long can it go on? How long can this frail human mechanism stand it?”
¹⁰

Even as the Germans began to hammer the Canadian lines with a

The schoolhouse at San Vito Chietino that served as the Advanced Dressing Station throughout the battle.
— A
LEXANDER
S
TIRTON
, NAC, PA-114037

Canadian tank recovery crew rescues two Shermans that ran off the road during the December 9 assault on San Leonardo.
— T. R
OWE
, NAC, PA-131644

A knocked-out Panzer Mark IV stands abandoned in the ruined farmland between the Moro River and The Gully.
— A
LEXANDER
S
TIRTON
, NAC, PA-107937

‘B' Company of The Seaforth Highlanders of Canada advances up a trail toward Ortona, visible in the far distance.
— FREDERICK WHITCOMBE, NAC, PA-152749

A Seaforth Highlander killed by a sniper while moving through a vineyard on the outskirts of Ortona, December 20, 1943.
— T. R
OWE
, NAC, PA-141302

‘B' Company of the Loyal Edmonton Regiment advances into Ortona on December 21.
— T. ROWE, NAC, PA-116852