Ortona (3 page)

For the past few months, Richards all too often had witnessed the costs the German strategy exacted on the Eighth Army. Only the month before, his mortar platoon had been advancing in its trucks toward a village called Cercemaggiore not too far south of Campobasso, where a small action was under way at an intersection of Highway 17 dubbed Decorata Crossroads. Richards's truck was leading the platoon convoy of six vehicles, each loaded with the five men of a mortar section and their weapon. His truck was a leftover from the African campaign, its roof cut off to keep the cab cooler. Richards was fearfully worried because his driver drove like a man possessed. The truck hurtled down the narrow dusty track past columns of marching infantry also using the road to reach the fight. Any second, Richards was sure, the truck would hit one of these soldiers or career out of control into the ditch. After unsuccessfully ordering the driver to slow down several times, Richards realized the truck's lower gearing barely worked and the brakes weren't very good either. He was just absorbing this information when there was a deep crumping sound and he suddenly soared upward.

He came to in the ditch alongside the road, unsure how long he had been unconscious. Blood ran down his face from a scalp wound and, fingering it, he realized he must have landed in the ditch directly on his head. His helmet had probably saved his life. Staggering out of the ditch, disoriented, with no idea where he was, Richards wandered about for several moments on the road until some of his men ran up from the following trucks and hurriedly bandaged his head. By the time they finished, Richards had become aware of his surroundings and saw the truck nearby, its badly twisted front end standing directly over the crater left by a German land mine. Richards staggered shakily over to the truck and saw the unconscious driver still behind the wheel. His legs were torn off
above the knee, both stumps spurting blood into a rapidly growing pool on the cab's torn floor. Richards crawled into the wreckage and hastily put a tourniquet on each stump to keep the man from bleeding to death. Then he and the other soldiers carefully loaded the driver into a jeep along with the other troops who had been in the back of the truck and suffered broken legs when the blast threw them to the ground.

After a long delay when the jeep driver got lost and nearly strayed into what Richards believed was the German lines, they reached a field dressing station. By this time Richards thought the wounded driver looked like hell. The medical team went to work, putting him on intravenous fluid drips and rebandaging the stumps, but there was little else they could do. Blood loss and traumatic shock rendered the outcome inevitable. Richards stood beside the wounded soldier for the fifteen to twenty minutes it took him to die. Dispirited and still woozy from his scalp wound, Richards then lay down on a stretcher beside the body of his driver and fell into a troubled sleep.

The driver's death seemed typical of the insanity of war in which Richards and the other Canadians of 1st Infantry Division found themselves. Yet it was a war to which most of the soldiers seemed addicted, driven by a sense of duty to their regiments and responsibility to their comrades. Two days after his wounding and the driver's death, the young lieutenant was resting outside the field hospital when he saw a truck from the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry driving by. Richards ran over and asked the driver, “What's happening up there? Are we in action?” The driver nodded his head. Richards told him to wait, ran into the hospital, and told the chief medical officer he was leaving. “You can't do that,” the doctor said. Richards replied, “Well, they need me up in battalion. My platoon's already short-handed. I can't lie around here when I'm not badly hurt.” His head wrapped in a large khaki bandage that looked like a turban, Richards grabbed the little gear he had, jumped into the cab of the truck, and raced back to war.

In fact, Richards seemed to have been racing toward war ever since the Canadian declaration on September 10, 1939. The then seventeen-year-old had been working part-time at the
Calgary Herald
as a cub reporter and completing a trigonometry course to finish his high school education. On September 1, he and the other reporters
had logged hours of overtime issuing an extra edition of the paper devoted to coverage of Germany's invasion of Poland. Nine days later, they repeated the effort with an edition on the nation's declaration of war. Full of indignation about what Adolf Hitler was doing in Poland and lured by the excitement war promised, Richards decided the day after the declaration to enlist in the local militia regiment, the Calgary Highlanders. Lying about his age, he was accepted as a private. Within a year, Richards was in Britain and had been promoted to the rank of sergeant. He then passed an officer's qualification test, was shipped back to Canada in the early days of the Battle of the Atlantic for training, and returned to Britain with the rank of second lieutenant in February 1943.

As the Calgary Highlanders had a surplus of lieutenants, Richards found himself languishing in a replacement depot waiting for a spot in his regiment to open when a call was issued for volunteers to transfer to 1st Canadian Infantry Division. In the words of the colonel issuing the call, this division was “expecting some wastage.” Richards, fully aware that “wastage” was an inelegant euphemism for battle casualties, volunteered along with many of the other officers in the replacement depot. Days later, he and a platoon of infantry reinforcements under his command were en route in the invasion fleet sailing for Sicily. Richards now wore the unit insignia of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, one of three regiments designated as battalions in the division's 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade.

Still a replacement, Richards missed the July 10, 1943, amphibious invasion of Sicily and remained in reserve until the battle for Sicily was almost won. By early August, there had been sufficient wastage for him to be called to the regiment. He joined the PPCLI's line units at Mount Seggio, in the foothills of Mount Etna, where he took command of a rifle platoon. By then the fighting for Sicily was largely ended and Richards's contribution to the victory was to lead one uneventful patrol up the slopes of the massive volcanic mountain.

Richards also missed the initial fighting in the invasion of Italy when he was first designated Left Out of Battle — a precautionary measure that saw a small number of officers, non-commissioned officers, and lesser ranks for each line unit held in the rear. In the event that the regiment was wiped out, the LOB troops would form a core nucleus around which the regiment could be rebuilt. Being LOB put
Richards in the vicinity of battalion headquarters, where the battalion commander assigned him to brigade headquarters as the battalion liaison officer.

For most of the initial advance up Italy's boot, Richards spent his time as a glorified errand boy, riding a motorcycle from one place to another to bring back information to the brigade command about what was transpiring at the front. Although it was dangerous work, the main threat to life and limb was posed by Canadian tanks and trucks competing with him for a place on the dirt tracks that passed for roads in southern Italy. Richards hated the duty, longing to rejoin the battalion and be a line soldier again. He also intensely disliked the brigade's commander, Brigadier Chris Vokes. Richards thought the big, red-haired man a pompous bully. He also didn't care for Vokes's apparent imitation of Montgomery, right down to carrying a fly whisk and speaking in an affected British accent.

Finally Richards obtained permission from the battalion commander to switch back to a rifle platoon if he could find his own replacement. He approached his best friend, who had taken some staff training courses. “You'll live a lot longer at brigade HQ than you'll ever do commanding a rifle platoon,” Richards said. “Why don't you put your knowledge to work and switch with me?” His friend, who admitted to having seen quite enough combat, agreed.
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Richards returned to the regiment and to commanding a rifle platoon but was soon switched to command of the mortar platoon when its officer fell sick. Since then, Richards had seen enough war close up to lose his taste for the excitement it provided. He was now solely concerned with fulfilling his responsibility to support the rifle platoons with fire from his six mortars and with doing his best to keep the men of his platoon alive.

These sometimes contradictory responsibilities plagued his thoughts as he issued the orders that set his mortar platoon troops to work preparing their gear and weapons for the impending move to the Sangro River. Every detail was vitally important and he carefully oversaw the soldiers as they cleaned the mortars, loaded the ammunition, and organized their personal battle kits and gear. Throughout the battalions, Richards knew, many other lieutenants issued similar orders and thousands of young Canadians from every part of the nation and every walk of life readied the division for a march toward
battle. The order to move had not yet come, but when it did the troops would be ready. All that remained was for the British 78th Division, the 2nd New Zealand Division, and the 8th Indian Division to put in the main attack against the Sangro River defences and set Monty's “colossal crack” into operation.

The Eighth Army offensive against the Bernhard Line was to be the first part of the kind of one-two attack favoured during the African campaign by British Field Marshal Harold Alexander, Deputy Supreme Commander, Mediterranean. The plan called for Montgomery's Eighth Army to push boldly over the four-hundred-yard-wide Sangro River, cross the mile-wide flat plain on the other side, and seize the low northern ridge overlooking the valley. Once control of the Sangro was achieved, the Commonwealth troops would advance briskly against a disorganized enemy to break into the wide valley that extended inland from Pescara on the coast through the Apennines to Avezzano, fifty miles east of Rome.

It was Alexander's strong belief that when the Eighth Army seized Pescara and broke westward to Avezanno, the Germans would have to shift divisions positioned along the Gustav Line facing the American Fifth Army in order to halt Montgomery's advance on Rome. With the line fronting the Fifth Army weakened, American General Mark Clark would be able to punch through the Gustav Line at Cassino and link up with a planned amphibious invasion behind the German lines at Anzio, just twenty miles southwest of Rome. Once the Americans had closed upon the city's outskirts, its surrender would be inevitable. Clark's part of the plan was designated Operation Raincoat. Its success depended almost entirely on whether Montgomery could not only capture Pescara but also advance up the valley to Avezanno before Christmas Day.

Outwardly both Clark and Montgomery, who privately despised each other, exuded nothing but supreme confidence in their ability to pull off their respective tasks. Clark blithely told Alexander, “Oh, don't worry. I'll get through the Winter Line all right and push the Germans out.”
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For his part, although promising a “colossal crack,” Montgomery worried that Lieutenant General Charles Allfrey, whose V Corps divisions would bear the brunt of the Eighth Army's offensive,
was the least capable of his corps commanders. Allfrey, Montgomery thought, was overly inclined to fiddle with details and demonstrably lacking in boldness. He was also increasingly anxious about the deteriorating weather. “I
must have
fine weather,” Montgomery wrote. “If it rains continuously I am done.”
⁵

Worries aside, the generals manoeuvred their armies into position and began to unleash them against the Germans. Montgomery's first step was to initiate a diversion on the upper reaches of the Sangro River to draw German forces into the Apennine foothills and away from his planned main thrust near the river's mouth. Involved in the diversionary actions were the British 5th Infantry Division, elements of the 8th Indian Division, and the three battalions of the 3rd Canadian Infantry Brigade: the West Nova Scotia Regiment, the Carleton and York Regiment, and the Royal 22e Regiment — the French-Canadian regiment more commonly known as the Van Doos.

By November 25, when Montgomery issued his “colossal crack” Order of the Day, it was unclear whether the diversions had succeeded in luring German forces away from the river's mouth. Intelligence reports on the success of these diversions remained contradictory, but there was no option except for Montgomery to plunge ahead with the main offensive. On November 28, the Eighth Army's V Corps offensive centred on the advance of three divisions, the British 78th Division, 8th Indian Division, and 2nd New Zealand Division, supported by the British 4th Armoured Brigade. Their attack was preceded by a massive artillery barrage. Initial success put the divisions across the Sangro, advancing aggressively toward the ridgeline beyond. Montgomery boasted, “My troops have won the battle as they always do. The road to Rome is open.”
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Even as Montgomery spoke, the offensive was losing its impetus in the face of stiff counter attacks launched by a battle group composed of the 26th Panzer Division and the 90th Panzer Grenadier Division, which Kesselring had hurriedly shifted from the west to the Sangro River. Although the combined German armoured and infantry counterattacks failed to force back the Allied advance, they succeeded in blunting it, transforming the battle into a bloody punching match between two fairly evenly matched opponents.