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Authors: John Harris

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Swordpoint (2011) (8 page)

BOOK: Swordpoint (2011)
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A special cinema show was put on for them in a marquee. The film was about Jack the Ripper, and hardly fun, while the marquee wasn’t dark enough and the seats consisted of ration boxes. Even the unaccustomed smell of perfume that wafted down from a group of nursing sisters from the nearby hospital at Calimero, seated at the back, didn’t adequately compensate for the numb behinds.

‘I think the Navy would do it better,’ Captain Jago observed. ‘My brother’s in the Navy and they always make sure that any girls who appear at their functions are properly paired off. I wouldn’t mind the one with the fair hair, as a matter of fact.’

Major Warley said nothing, because he’d already found one with fair hair. He was itching to return to his billet and had already cried off from a visit to the mess on the excuse that he had letters to write.

Colonel Yuell hated deceiving them, hated allowing them to believe they were resting instead of merely having a brief respite in which to recover their spirits before being called on once more to pit their unwilling flesh against the steel of the German guns.

Orders had arrived. Like the good, the bad followed the same route downwards – from division to brigade, from brigade to regiment. The divisional general’s conference was held in the mayor’s office in Trepiazze, with only lieutenant-colonels and above in attendance. Many of them were still in their twenties and early thirties, young men with old eyes and the whole weight of the war on their shoulders. The soldiers watched the jeeps arrive with sardonic expressions on their faces. Conferences meant battle and battle meant death; and it was usually the troops, not the generals and the brigadiers, who were involved in that part of it.

The plan would normally have been discussed in outline by General Tonge with his staff – and perhaps even amended – at a meeting with the infantry brigade commanders and the commanders of the engineers, artillery, signals, supply and medical services. But, with things brewing up further east and Tonge constantly in Caserta, much of the plan had been drafted by Heathfield, and it was now all set up for the lower echelons to inspect.

Heathfield was doing most of the talking, and Brigadier Tallemach and Brigadier Rankin were listening hard, their brigade majors and DAQMGs in the background scribbling like mad with chinagraph pencils on the talc covers of their map cases. Brigadier George Rankin was a bull of a man – heavy-featured, heavy-shouldered, moustached and red-faced. Insensitive and not considered over-bright, he had, however, a good reputation as a fighting soldier. Brigadier Thomas Tallemach was thin and sensitive and looked more like an artist. In fact, a lot of his spare time was taken up with painting. He was good at it and it calmed him, because his was a nervous spirit and he was able to do a lot of thinking as he applied colour.

His orders were simple – ‘7th Brigade will attack northward from the area San Bartolomeo-Capodozzi-Foiano’, followed by instructions about routes, timings, advance parties, administration, preliminary arrangements for the positioning of supplies and transport, and the movement of artillery ammunition.

He had studied them carefully. It was always important to impart clearly the mass of information, the method, the signals and the location of units on the flank; and these orders seemed curiously hurried and at the same time surprisingly rigid. Tallemach suspected that the uncertain methods which had produced them had begun to extend in the 19th Indian Division to other departments such as Intelligence. To Tallemach, who had made a point of exploring the forward area, Heathfield’s assumption that the Germans were ready to throw in their hand was the height of wishful thinking.

When the idea of a river crossing had first been put to him, in fact he had been sceptical enough to make a joke of it.

‘Is this just a casual enquiry?’ he had asked. ‘Or an order? Because I have very few men trained in walking on water.’

Heathfield now set up the position for them. ‘This will not be an easy operation,’ he said. ‘But we expect it to be made easier by the Liberators and Fortresses drenching the area with anti-personnel bombs. The aim is to knock the enemy back from the river bank so we can dominate it by patrols and fire, and the attack will go in after a heavy bombardment.’

He went on to explain that the advance up Italy was in danger of coming to a stop and that it was necessary to keep up the momentum. Colonel Yuell listened thoughtfully, knowing only too well how right he was. There was no difficulty with a single rush, but wherever the line had paused to be regrouped it had always lost its forward movement.

‘There’ll be an artillery bombardment,’ Heathfield was saying, ‘and then the infantry will advance with close support fire from tanks.’

Provided, Yuell thought, that the Germans hadn’t held their fire to conceal their positions, so that when they opened up the infantry would have to entrench or withdraw; and then, with the attack halted, the artillery would have to start up again and repeat the rhythm, as it had been repeated all through the dark foggy weeks of winter.

‘7th Infantry Brigade will make the crossing,’ Heathfield said. ‘Your people, Yuell, going in by Route A along the main road in front of San Eusebio; and the Yellowjackets further east by Route B in front of Castelgrande where the footbridge used to be. As soon as you’ve established your bridgeheads and the tanks have crossed, the Baluchis will push across to join you, giving the greatest support at whichever bridgehead appears to be most successful. It’s expected that the crossing will take roughly three minutes; the infantry will be behind the barrage and there will be a safety period for the artillery to plaster the opposite bank. However–’ Heathfield paused – ‘some of our guns are so worn they can’t guarantee there won’t be an odd round up to six hundred yards short. That means we shall have to form up three hundred yards short of the bank on our own side, and the artillery will have to lift six minutes before the start.’

‘Which,’ Tallemach pointed out quietly, ‘will give the Germans six minutes to emerge from their shelters.’

After the divisional commander’s conference with the brigadiers asking the questions, it was the brigade commander’s turn with Heathfield sitting alongside, holding a watching brief, and the battalion commanders doing the worrying.

Brigadier Tallemach gestured at the blackboard behind him where a simplified plan of the countryside in front of and around San Eusebio had been chalked up.

When he had been forward to look over the territory they were to attack, what he had seen hadn’t encouraged him. Heathfield and his staff had worked with feverish activity to prepare the detailed plans but they seemed to have overlooked the fact that the river, the main line of resistance, was unfordable, twelve feet deep and fifty feet wide, with steep banks, a swift current, only one bridge – with its centre span smashed – and a rumoured 24,000 mines sown on both sides.

Behind the river, beyond the railway line that ran to Rome, San Eusebio was built on a bluff. Once there, they could expect to be protected by the surrounding escarpment from the German guns above and on the flanks. But since the Germans would be just as much aware of this as they were, it was clear they’d have taken every possible precaution to prevent the capture of San Eusebio taking place and Tallemach’s battalions would be in full view of the heights until the minute they’d finally captured the village.

He had tried to point this out to Heathfield, but Heathfield had seemed to be wearing blinkers. Despite all protests, he determinedly held to the view that the piecemeal methods used during the winter would again cause the Germans to withdraw.

However, it wasn’t Tallemach’s role to question orders, and now he tried to make some sense of them for the men under him.

‘The idea’s to establish a bridgehead to the east of the village,’ he said. ‘We know that it’s built on a bluff a hundred-odd feet above the river, but to the east the ground’s broken and rolling and should provide plenty of cover for us.’

For the Germans too, Colonel Yuell thought.

Tallemach cleared his throat and went on briskly.

‘The Yellowjackets will be crossing well to the east of the town,’ he said, his voice crisp but unusually low, ‘so between them and the North Yorkshires we ought to be able to keep the enemy busy. When we’ve linked up, and the 3rd Baluchis are across in support, 9th Indian Brigade will go through us for San Eusebio.’

‘It’s difficult country down to the river on this side, sir.’ The words came softly and Tallemach studied Yuell over his spectacles.

‘The river’s inundated the land, sir,’ Yuell continued, ‘and the country’s flat and open to observation from San Eusebio. And we all know the Germans have established posts and strongpoints right to the river’s edge and there isn’t a scrap of shelter to hide a gun or a tank.’

There was a long silence. ‘Go on,’ Tallemach said.

‘There are minefields on both sides of the river and, on the other side, gun emplacements built into the river bank itself and near the railway. Farm buildings have been fortified with pill-boxes and tanks dug into the ground. Every one of these strongpoints will have to be reduced individually.’

‘Don’t you think you’re making rather a lot of it?’ Heath-field interrupted from his chair alongside Tallemach’s desk.

‘My men are going to have to face them,’ Yuell retorted stubbornly.

‘We’re trying to get at Cassino from the side,’ Heathfield explained patiently. ‘Going at it from the front’s produced surprisingly little mileage so far. Both the Americans and the New Zealanders have been thrown back. And you won’t be under fire from all those posts you mention because you’ll be crossing in darkness.’

The regimental officers exchanged glances. The one thing nobody liked was a river crossing by night. There was another long silence before Heathfield asked:

‘Would you be satisfied if the heights on your flanks were under attack, although not actually in our possession?’

‘So long,’ Yuell said, ‘as the attacks are powerful enough to force the Germans to use every gun they’ve got to oppose them. Just two or three concealed 88s would be sufficient to destroy our bridges.’

‘I think we can guarantee we shall be able to prevent that. Division will be giving everything they’ve got and we also have Corps backing. Guns are being transferred even now.’

Heathfield didn’t say how many, but nobody quibbled and the conference came to a halt. As he returned to his room, Tallemach took out a cigarette. He felt tired and knew he was inclined to be crochety and over-critical. The war seemed to have been going on such a long time, and now that it was showing signs of approaching its final phase every day seemed to drag. Reaching across his desk he picked up a lighter, and as he did so his eyes fell on a photograph of his wife and the two sons she had borne him. Only the previous month he had learned that he now had only one son; his younger boy, barely out of school, had died from wounds received in a grenade accident while rehearsing in England for what they all knew was to be the Second Front. Tallemach drew a deep breath. Keep the other one safe, God, he begged under his breath, knowing all too well that Bomber Command was hardly a secure haven from which to fight a war.

Lighting up the cigarette quickly to stop himself from thinking, he moved to the window and peered through the rain-swept glass. If they were to keep their preparations out of sight of the Germans on Monte Cassino, he thought, there was going to be remarkably little elbow room to manoeuvre. Bridges couldn’t be established easily; there was no concealment for the Engineers in the open plain, and even smokescreens wouldn’t work because it would be no problem for the Germans to estimate where the bridges were and plaster the whole area with fire. When the Americans had tried it, at the beginning of the year, the result had been considered by them the worst disaster to their forces since Pearl Harbour.

He thought again of Heathfield’s plan. He’d even protested that it wasn’t wide enough in scope. There weren’t enough crossings, and too much pressure could be brought to bear on the ones that had been proposed. Heathfield had been smoothly ingratiating.

‘No enterprise in war ever turns out quite so well or so badly as the first reports lead you to believe,’ he’d said cheerfully. ‘I’ve no doubt we shall be worried at first, but I think it’ll work.’

Tallemach drew on the cigarette and stared out of the window. The sky was a violet grey and the rain was lashing into the puddles.

‘Let’s just hope the weather gives us a chance,’ he observed to his brigade major, ‘because all that sunshine Italy’s supposed to have is nothing but a fallacy. I often think the photographers who take those picture postcards you see with all that blue sky in ’em sit waiting in the cafés for the clouds to clear; then, when it stops raining, rush out, take their pictures, and bolt back to the bar before the next cloudburst. One of the things the travel brochures have always been reticent about is that Italy’s mostly mountains and that where there are mountains there’s usually rain.’

In Trepiazze, Yuell studied the map with Major Peddy.

‘It would make a lot of difference,’ Peddy said, ‘if
we
were on the hills instead of the Germans.’

Yuell nodded. ‘It’s notorious that enemy strength and morale always appear weaker to headquarters than they do to the chaps in more active contact.’

He turned to the battalion Intelligence officer. ‘What do
you
think of the appreciation of the German capabilities, Harry?’ he asked.

BOOK: Swordpoint (2011)
7.23Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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