Ortona (44 page)

Canadian intelligence officers advised Vokes that: “Having lost control of the [crossroads], the enemy is likely to fall back under pressure in the Northern sector, abandoning Ortona, and making his next stand on the line of the Arielli. . . . This is difficult country, well suited to delaying tactics and should provide a firm hinge for an eventual withdrawal in the Northern sector.”
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Vokes felt confident that once Brigadier Bert Hoffmeister got his two infantry regiments up to the Ortona outskirts, the 1st Parachute Division would withdraw to the north of Ortona.

Eighth Army headquarters staff were so convinced that the Germans would make no serious stand at Ortona that they were busily developing plans to turn the town into a maintenance and rest area. The high stone buildings of the town were thought ideal for providing comfortable winter quarters for a tired army. It was imagined that the port could soon be reopened and the damage caused there by the Germans easily repaired. For this reason, Ortona had been spared serious aerial or artillery bombardment. This contrasted starkly with the fate of Orsogna to the west, which had been reduced to rubble by almost daily aerial attacks by heavy bombers, light bombers, and fighter bombers flying out of bases in North Africa.
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One British intelligence summary breezily predicted, “Eighth Army is going to reach the line of the Arielli by 24 Dec.”
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As so often in
European and North American wars, the promise of the end of battle for Christmas was being extended to the soldiers on the front lines. It was a promise that relied on the Germans putting up only a token act of defiance in Ortona.

Unknown to the Canadians, 1st Parachute Division had accepted on the evening of December 18 that its defensive line based on The Gully and Cider Crossroads was lost. As the Carleton and York Regiment patrol discovered, the Germans started pulling men out of the deep fighting holes in The Gully soon after nightfall.

In Ortona, the Germans were preparing for far more than a token defence. Paratroop engineers and infantry worked frantically side by side to strengthen the defences. Obergefreiter Carl Bayerlein's Fallschirmpionier platoon had set up quarters near the old castle. Already the streets in the area were so full of debris from buildings shattered by Canadian artillery fire and the German demolitions that reaching his quarters entailed climbing over large rubble piles.

On December 18, Bayerlein and two comrades had gone back to Pescara to bring up more mines from the supply depot there. After loading up a truck with mines, the three men started driving back to Ortona. It was dark and they drove without headlights. Visibility was extremely poor. The driver failed to make a corner and the truck ploughed into a ditch on the right-hand side of the road. Unable to get the truck out of the mud, the three men spent the rest of the night in an abandoned nearby farmhouse. In the morning, the truck was spotted by the Canadians and artillery shells fell near it, but failed to score a direct hit. Bayerlein's companion Marcus, however, was badly wounded by shrapnel. He was evacuated to Pescara by motorcycle.

Bayerlein became separated during the day from his remaining comrade. Deciding nothing could be done to rescue the truck, he started walking back to Ortona. Near an abandoned German artillery piece, he found some captured British grenades and a revolver. He stuffed the booty into his pockets. Ortona was across a ravine. He could see it, but there appeared no easy way to get across the ravine and into the town. Endless salvoes of Canadian mortar shells flew overhead, many detonating harmlessly in the nearby sea. Coming across a large new home, Bayerlein entered it and found a group of
men, women, and children in hiding. They offered him warm soup made from tomatoes and beans. He wolfed it down. It was the first food he had eaten since setting off for Pescara the day before. After leaving the house, Bayerlein came upon a railroad tunnel that passed under the ravine to the Ortona docks. Emerging from the far side of the tunnel, he saw for the first time the docks and fishing boats that had been destroyed by German engineers earlier in the month.

As he started following a track up the hill toward Ortona, Bayerlein came under friendly fire. Hitting the dirt, he saw that right ahead of him the path was sown with anti-personnel mines. He retreated, feeling very alone and frightened. Finally he found another route up the escarpment. Exhausted from the climb and his walk across the embattled terrain north of Ortona, Bayerlein flopped down not far from the body of a dead civilian. He slipped into an exhausted stupor.
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Soon after the 1st Parachute Division engineers started blowing up buildings, Americo Casanova's mother Angela, sister Maria, and brother Mario left Ortona. While she had sent Americo much earlier to Tollo, Angela had kept her nineteen-year-old daughter and twenty-one-year-old son with her. They had camped out in the countryside, maintaining a protective vigil over the four-unit apartment building that provided both home and livelihood. The decision to stay placed all three of them at great risk. Allied artillery fire often fell almost on top of them and the German soldiers were less predictable than before. Angela thought their behaviour seemed increasingly menacing.

When the soldiers entered the apartments, Angela would go down and try to keep the place from being ransacked. At about the same time that Cider Crossroads was falling into Canadian hands, she realized the futility of her mission when the Germans wired the entire apartment with explosives. Angela tried to reason with them, but was left with the impression that she was being punished for the many American furnishings and other goods that the family apartment contained. She tried to explain that these were from her husband, who worked in the chocolate factory in Hershey, New Jersey, and that she was neither pro-American nor anti-German. The soldiers ignored her. Finally realizing they intended to follow through with their plan, Angela fled. Minutes later, the Germans
blew the apartment building in upon itself. Angela Casanova found her two eldest children and the three of them left Ortona, walking north toward Pescara.
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Throughout the night of December 19 and well into the following morning, the sappers of 4th Field Company, Royal Canadian Engineers, worked frantically to repair the concrete bridge crossing The Gully adjacent to Cider Crossroads. Although the Germans had attempted to destroy it with explosives, the structure still stood. By 1000 hours on December 20, the engineers had laid a new deck and reinforced the minor structural weaknesses. The bridge could now support the massive weight of a Sherman tank or a Bren carrier pulling a six-pounder antitank gun. There would be no more need for the armour and other support weapons to slog across the muddy track curving around The Gully's westernmost extension. They could now come directly from San Leonardo to Cider Crossroads on the old coast highway. The new coast highway, following the Adriatic shoreline to Ortona, remained closed where The Gully widened to meet the sea. The Germans had succeeded in destroying the bridge there and ownership of the surrounding ground remained contested — something the Canadians were determined to change by day's end.

Precisely at noon, the Loyal Edmonton Regiment and the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada kicked off a joint attack toward Ortona. Their objective was to occupy a straggle of buildings bordering an escarpment a short distance from the town's southwestern flank. The Edmontons had farther to go — 3,000 yards, or almost two miles. However, their line of approach would be relatively flat, with the Ortona-Orsogna lateral road to the south and the raised bed of a railroad to the north. Sherman tanks from ‘C' Squadron of the Three Rivers Tanks followed the two lead companies forward.

‘D' and ‘C' companies advanced, walking no more than seventy-five yards behind the forward creep of the artillery fire. ‘D' Company's Lieutenant John Dougan and his platoon led that company's attack. Like all of the Edmonton platoons, No. 16 Platoon had only about twenty men instead of the thirty-five that constituted normal strength. The battalion's losses on Vino Ridge had not been completely replenished. Today, however, the low strength hardly mattered. The
Germans put up little resistance. Dougan's troops advanced through a system of zigzag slit trenches. They crossed one line of trenches after another. He caught only brief glimpses of the defending paratroopers through the smoke and explosions of the Canadians' creeping barrage.

“They'd pop up like bloody jackrabbits,” he said later, “and you would have had to have a shotgun to get them before they scampered off down the trench. We pressed right on.”
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As was typical of the man, ‘D' Company commander Major Jim Stone had his HQ right up behind Dougan's platoon and the advancing tanks. The lead infantry need only look over their shoulders to see his towering six-foot-five form walking briskly along. For many it was a reassuring sight. Stone, meanwhile, was starting to doubt what he would later describe as the “efficacy of the barrage.” Out in the middle of a field, over which the barrage crept with methodical devastation, five large white oxen grazed away in complete disregard of the deadly explosion of shells in their very midst. As the barrage moved on toward Ortona and Stone walked past the still grazing animals, it was apparent that not one had been touched.
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While the advance was proceeding well for the Edmontons, the Three Rivers tanks were having a tougher time of it, thanks to mud and Teller antitank mines. Shortly after crossing the start line at Cider Crossroads, Lieutenant T.E. Melvin radioed that his tank was finding it impossible to keep going along his assigned advance line to one side of the railroad. He requested permission to climb up on the road itself, where the traction would be assured. ‘C' Squadron commander Captain F.W. Johnson, moving forward in his own tank, agreed.

A few minutes after Melvin's tank gained the road, there was a tremendous explosion. Fellow tankers and Edmonton infantrymen watched in horror as the tank blew apart. Tank parts, including the gear box and tracks, sailed in all directions as far as sixty and seventy yards away. The thirty-two-ton tank was lifted about twenty feet into the air by the blast. The crew — Lieutenant Melvin, and Troopers E. Kemp, J.B. Hughes, A.J. Rau, and G.B. Steenhoff — were all killed instantly.

Engineers, wrote the Three Rivers' war diarist at the end of the day, estimated that the explosion was caused by a remotely triggered charge of 200 pounds of TNT dug into the roadbed. A small group of
Germans, he added, had been left behind in a nearby house, “with instructions to set off the charge and retire if possible or give themselves up. The charge was set off at the opportune moment ‘killing two birds with one stone,' and then [they] surrendered to the infantry who were some distance in front of the tank. The infantry took the Germans prisoner before the realization of what had happened dawned on them.”
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The surviving tanks then became snarled in a heavily sown Teller antitank minefield. Despite a team of pioneers working with mine detection equipment and advancing ahead of the tankers, three tanks ran over mines and had tracks blown off. Another tank got mired in a mud hole just before entering the minefield. The remaining tanks lumbered on and, along with the infantry, arrived at the final objective just outside Ortona at 1426 hours. Stone radioed the signal “Crocus” back to Brigadier Bert Hoffmeister at 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade HQ. There had been a short, sharp tussle with some paratroopers just in front of the objective. But the combination of the artillery fire, the direct gun support of the tanks, and excellent fire and manoeuvre tactics by the two lead companies had overwhelmed the paratroopers trying to hold the final trench line. Fourteen prisoners were taken.
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The Edmontons started digging in and waited for the Seaforths to come up on their right-hand flank.