Ortona (56 page)

Captain June Thomas's ‘A' Company reached the edge of Piazza San Francesco in the early afternoon. The Canadians were unaware of its proper name. Previously it had just been marked on the map as an
open space surrounded by some large buildings. Sprawled in the street before the San Francesco cathedral was a dead horse. Accordingly, the Seaforth commanders reported to battalion HQ that they now faced Dead Horse Square.

Thomas and his men had come up on the square by a narrow lane. Looking around the corner into the square, he could see that Germans were firing from the cathedral. Its bell tower already had a gaping hole in the southern side and other shell holes had been blown in the roof and walls of the building. The school was similarly smashed up, but there seemed to be no enemy fire coming from it. That was odd. Still, the Germans had not consistently defended every large building.

He decided to secure the school with one section of his depleted company.
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Lieutenant Stewart Lynch slipped over to the school with the six-man section and ordered the corporal in charge of the men to sweep the building and then hold it.
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The section consisted of reinforcements, mostly veteran Seaforths, who were returned from bouts of illness or who had been on other duties in North Africa until being rushed to Ortona. Among them was a twenty-six-year-old private, Gordon Currie-Smith, who had been cooling his heels in the reinforcement camp in Philippeville, Algeria, since arriving in North Africa from Canada en route to returning to the Seaforth Regiment.

Currie-Smith was a very small man, barely five feet tall and weighing hardly more than one hundred pounds. Yet he had been a professional soldier since the mid-1930s, serving first in the Irish Fusiliers and then in the Seaforths. Currie-Smith had not gone overseas in 1940 with the Seaforths, being detailed instead to the training camp in Vernon, British Columbia, to serve as a sergeant-trainer. With the Sicily invasion, Currie-Smith decided he had had enough of being out of the action and applied, as he had several times before, for a return to his regiment overseas. Called into the camp commander's office, Currie-Smith was informed he could have his transfer, but only if he agreed to a demotion to private. Knowing in advance this was likely to be the condition, Currie-Smith had already loosened the stitches from his stripes. He yanked the stripes off and hurled them on the desk in front of the commander, telling him in no uncertain terms where he could put them. The officer curtly sent Currie-Smith on his way.
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Now, looking over at the schoolhouse, neither Currie-Smith nor the corporal commanding the section liked the situation. It seemed ridiculous that the Germans would just hand over a large three-storey building without exacting their normal pint of blood. The corporal and Currie-Smith had only been in Ortona for a day. But they had already heard enough about the German penchant for booby traps to think the Canadians were being deliberately lured into the building. Lynch ignored their protests and told the men to follow their orders.

The small section entered the school, swept it, and then scattered throughout the ground floor. There were so few of them that each man had to operate alone. Currie-Smith was frightened. He felt tremendously uneasy about being in this building.
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Currie-Smith's concerns were warranted. Within an hour of the section's occupation of the school, an enormous explosion shook the square. Thomas was down an alley and didn't see what happened. Company Sergeant Major W.C. Smith did. The entire building simply erupted in a vast shower of masonry. When the debris stopped falling, Smith ran over to the rubble pile, hoping to find some survivors. He scrabbled his way through the debris, but it seemed all the men had been completely buried or blown apart. As he started back to the Seaforth lines, a sniper fired a shot from the church bell tower and the round creased Smith's backside. The man ran for cover.
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At least one man was still alive. Currie-Smith was wedged tightly on all sides by concrete blocks. Rubble covered him from feet to neck. Miraculously, a small space was clear around his face and a trickle of air flowed down past the concrete block looming immediately over his head. He could not see the sky. His legs, hands, and arms were all pinned tightly. Currie-Smith was entombed inside the ruin of the school.
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German Fallschirmpionier Karl Bayerlein heard the explosion. He wrote in his diary at day's end, “Close to us, during the day, a whole building on the enemy side exploded under a huge bang and parts of the building flew hundreds of metres away. We were able to get under cover before the debris came down on us.”
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Bayerlein thought perhaps the explosion had resulted from the water-closet trap. Many buildings had been mined this way in recent days. The amount of explosives being packed inside some of the buildings was unbelievable. They packed as many boxes of explosives in as they possibly could, using up the great surpluses of Italian mines and dynamite they had brought into Ortona. All day long, Bayerlein and his comrades alternately destroyed or mined buildings. They blew most of them down into piles of rubble to serve as tank obstacles and to clear lanes of fire for the machine guns.

The work was terribly dangerous. Bayerlein was very afraid a bullet would hit him while he carried a heavy load of mines and explosives. He was also slowed by the fact that the boots he had retrieved recently from an abandoned Italian supply depot had lost their soles. His attempts to secure the soles to the boot tops with wire had not been entirely successful.

Finally, the officer in charge told Bayerlein's section to go back to their basement in the chemist's shop and get some rest. To Bayerlein's amazement, the unit had come through the day without a single casualty.
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The Seaforths spent several hours trying to root the Germans out of the cathedral in Dead Horse Square with no success. Thomas was getting fed up. A paratroop machine-gun position in the broken bell tower made any attempt to get inside the church and clear the building impossible. The gun also blocked a proper search for survivors in the ruins of the school.

Finally, however, he had the means to destroy the enemy gun. A Three Rivers tank named
Agnes
had finally bulled its way up one of the narrow lanes and reached the square. Thomas ran over to the tank and pointed the target out to its commander. “As much as I hate blasting the tower of that church,” Thomas said, “I want you to get him out of there.”
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The ‘A' Squadron tank commander was Gord Turnbull. Turnbull said, “It's Christmas Eve and that's God's house.”
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Thomas insisted and Turnbull knew the officer was right. Although he hated to do it, Turnbull sighted the main gun on the steeple and blasted it to oblivion with one well-placed round. The machine gun was destroyed.

Thomas's men rushed the church and fought their way inside. The Germans retreated to the far end of the church and dug in around the pulpit. The ensuing bitter exchange of grenades and small-arms fire carried on throughout the night.
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With the machine gun in the bell tower silenced, a perfunctory search of the rubble of the school was conducted. No sign of survivors could be discovered. The Seaforths quickly withdrew from the destroyed building, as it was too exposed to German sniper fire to allow a more thorough search to be conducted.
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Back at the Seaforths' battalion HQ, Syd Thomson had given his blessing to an extraordinary notion in the midst of the worst battlefield the regiment had so far experienced. Shortly before noon, Quartermaster Captain Bordon Cameron had suggested organizing a real Christmas dinner that could be served to the rifle companies one at a time in Santa Maria di Costantinopoli. The moment Thomson gave his enthusiastic endorsement to the plan, Quartermaster Sergeant Stan Wellburn went to work. The company cooks were brought up to the church and a field kitchen was established behind the altar. The cooks gave Wellburn a shopping list for desired food.

Wellburn spent several hours roaring around the countryside between Ortona and San Vito in a jeep, buying fresh vegetables from farmers who still had some crops left. He and a few other men then scrounged through ruined buildings for tablecloths, candles, silverware, and anything else that would help with place settings. Tables were made of planks and erected in the centre of the large church.

Much of the work was done under fire, as the Germans heavily mortared all of Ortona throughout Christmas Eve. At 1500 hours, Padre Roy Durnford arrived at Santa Maria di Costantinopoli and smiled when he saw the battalion staff all busy either carrying out regular duties or organizing for the dinner. “Well, at last I've got you all in church,” he said, and then helped out with the preparations.
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For the Germans, the day had not gone well. Despite the commitment of another full battalion to the battle, 1st Parachute Division commander General Richard Heidrich had to report to Tenth Army
headquarters that “in hard house to house fighting enemy advanced to the centre of Ortona. Heavy fighting continues.”
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The 2nd Battalion of 3rd Regiment, which had been defending Ortona since December 20, had suffered too many casualties and been too overextended across the 500-yard width of the town to prevent the steady, remorseless advance of the two Canadian battalions and their tank support. Heidrich had also made a costly error. His reserve battalion, 2nd Battalion of the 4th Regiment, was located three miles north of Ortona at Torre Mucchia. When it became apparent that the reserve unit was required to bolster the German resistance in Ortona, it had taken most of the day just to get the battalion moved up from Torre Mucchia.
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With more than half the town now in Canadian hands, it was only a matter of time before the town had to be surrendered. Yet Tenth Army had received a troubling new directive from none other than Adolf Hitler. Hitler had always taken a close personal interest in battlefield developments on every German front. Ever since Stalingrad, he had also started issuing directives that routinely denied the commanders on the scene the right to make an essential tactical decision — the decision to retreat so that a unit could live to fight another day. On December 24, Hitler issued an order that Ortona should be held at all costs. Heidrich appears to have responded by simply ignoring the order. Instead, he accelerated the destruction of Ortona by engineering demolitions. It appeared he had decided that, if the paratroopers could not hold Ortona, they would leave the Canadians in final occupation of a ruin riddled with mines and booby traps. He would also continue to exact a costly toll for every yard of town surrendered.
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