I Am Canada: Sniper Fire

by Jonathan Webb

  For Vivian

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: Colle d’Anchise

  Chapter 2: Going to War

  Chapter 3: Baranello

  Chapter 4: From the Moro to the Gully

  Chapter 5: The Road to Ortona

  Chapter 6: Piazza della Vittoria

  Chapter 7: Via Cespa

  Chapter 8: Mouse-holing

  Chapter 9: Dead Horse Square

  Chapter 10: Christmas in Ortona

  Chapter 11: The Hostages

  Historical Note

  Images and Documents

  Credits

  Author’s Note

  Other books in the I Am Canada series

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Colle d’Anchise

  October 23, 1943

  “The Jerries are up there,” says the Gaffer, pointing.

  “Up where?” says Derrick O’Connor. “All I see is fog.”

  “You’ve got your eyes closed then, you idiot,” says Paddy. “There’s nothing but fog in that head of yours.”

  The Gaffer ignores them, like he usually does when the brothers are bickering. “There’s at least a couple of companies of Grenadiers on the mountain,” he says. “They’ve turfed the civilians out of a village and taken over their houses. That’s what G2 says anyway. The village is called Colle d’Anchise.”

  “What?” says Derrick.

  “Collie Dank-he-say,” says Doug. Doug’s been studying Italian.

  “That doesn’t sound right to me,” says Danny. “How do you say it, Baldassara?”

  “I dunno,” I say. “It’s not how my ma would say it. But maybe it’s close enough.”

  Danny never calls me by my first name, which is Paul, though my ma still calls me Paolo. Danny thinks my last name is funny. I pretend to have trouble saying his. It’s Polish: Kurlowitz. Curl-o-wuv-itch.

  “Put a sock in it, boys,” says Strong John Stonechild. Strong John doesn’t talk much and sometimes he likes it best when we don’t talk either. But this time Doug, who likes to talk, supports him.

  “He’s right,” he says. “Sound carries over water.”

  “Aw, they probably know we’re here,” says Derrick. But he shuts up just the same.

  We keep legging it up the hill, in the dark, with the mist wrapped around our heads, while the Biferno River splashes beside us. Somewhere below us a squadron of tanks from the Ontario Regiment has been mobilized to support us, but our battalion of Edmonton riflemen is spearheading the attack. Lieutenant Gold says it will be a piece of cake. The Gaffer, who doesn’t believe there’s any such thing as a piece of cake, says nothing.

  It’s not much of a river, the Biferno. Just another in a series of streams that rolls down from the mountains in a winding path to the Adriatic Sea. Maybe it’s deeper when it gets to the end. We crossed it yesterday, just waded in, barely got our butts wet. Of course, it’s not like the army gave us waterproof boots, so last night we had to wring out our socks and dig in our packs for dry ones.

  “What’s your single most important piece of equipment, Baldassara?”

  This is one of the Gaffer’s favourite questions. There are plenty of answers. One of them is rude. You can never be sure what the right answer is because it changes depending on the Gaffer’s mood. This time I guess right.

  “Dry socks, Sergeant.”

  It sounds like a joke, but it’s awful what happens if you don’t take care of your feet. The skin turns black and falls away like the leaves from a rancid cabbage. Smells like bad cabbage too. Some of the guys use army-issue foot powder. I just try to keep my feet dry. Like Danny once said, we can defeat the Germans if the army doesn’t de-feet us first.

  * * *

  We crossed over from Sicily to the mainland back in September. We had it pretty easy for the first month or so. It seemed like the enemy was disorganized. The Italian dictator, Mussolini, who used to be Hitler’s buddy, was kicked out. Another government was formed and it was supposed to come over to the Allied side, but in the meantime a large part of the Italian army surrendered. In fact, most of the Italian soldiers we saw were so eager to stop fighting that they met us on the beach, threw down their rifles and helped us unload the landing craft. They pointed in the direction where they said the Germans had gone. They couldn’t have been more helpful. It was kind of embarrassing, to tell you the truth, to see soldiers from my parents’ home country in such a hurry to give up. What the other guys had to say about them was brutal. They called them cowards and worse. Much worse. I kept my mouth shut. But I was glad the Italian soldiers were surrendering too. I mean, I was ready to kill them when they were the enemy. That’s what I’d been trained to do. It’s what I signed up for. But now I didn’t have to.

  We didn’t see the Germans for a while. We saw their planes, the Luftwaffe. Sometimes we were strafed by them. Mostly what we saw was the destruction they left behind as they pulled back from the toe of the Italian boot, where we landed, to the middle. Sometimes we ran into German demolition parties. They blew up bridges and busted up roads as they retreated, anything to slow us down. I think they also wanted to punish the Italians for deserting them, by making their lives miserable. If that was their plan, they did a good job.

  We had a few scraps in the first few weeks and sometimes we got shelled. And then things got bad. The Germans would set up a defensive position on high ground or behind a river. They would establish fields of fire with their machine guns aimed at us in overlapping arcs. They would dig bunkers to conceal their big guns. When we advanced, they would lob mortar fire at us, and cut us up with their heavy machine guns. We took a bunch of casualties.

  The truth is that we lost as many men to sickness as we did to the Germans. We were told not to pick fruit from farmers’ orchards or vegetables from their fields. Yeah, right! Never mind the juicy peaches, boys: dig into this army slop instead! Some guys got the runs so bad from eating dirty fruit, they had to be pulled out of the line. And it wasn’t just diarrhea that thinned out our ranks. Soldiers turned yellow and weak from jaundice and had to be sent back. Others caught malaria, which made them see things that weren’t there. They got sent behind the line to get better too.

  On the other side of the mountains, working their way up the western side of the boot, the Americans are closing in on Rome. On our side, the eastern side, we’re part of the British Eighth Army commanded by General Montgomery, and our objective, as far as I know, is to keep going, to keep pushing the Germans back to where they came from. One river and mountain-top village at a time.

  * * *

  We climb the last stretch of mountain in silence. The mist is getting thinner and the sun is beginning to show itself when we halt behind an outbuilding near the summit. It’s so quiet: not a horse whinnies or rooster crows. There’s nothing to suggest that a sentry has been posted, no sound of a match being struck or of stamping feet. I can make out Danny’s lean face now, as he peers around the shed. The sun lights a spark in his dark eyes.

  “They’re not ready for us,” he says softly. “We’ve got them, Baldassara.”

  “You think so?”

  The others are gathered around us, grey shapes breathing clouds into the cold air.

  “Five minutes,” says the Gaffer.

  Somewhere to our right, the lieutenant is bringing the remaining sections of the platoon into position. Beyond them, the rest of our company is moving up. And on our left, out of sight, is B Company. The battalion is under strength. We’ve lost a lot of men since Sicily, to the Germans and sickness. But we have more than enough to take a village, I guess.

  Colle d’Anchise, as it shows
itself in the grey dawn, is tiny. A single street stretches out before us with a row of houses on either side. We move forward carefully through someone’s vegetable patch, conscious of the noise we make each time we step on a twig or kick a stone. We stop again at a point where the dirt path we’re following meets the road.

  “Are they all sleeping?” says Derrick.

  “Are there even any Germans?” says Paddy.

  “Keep your voices down,” says Strong John.

  We wait. A runner hands the Gaffer a piece of paper, waits for an answer and then departs. I gulp water from my canteen. Paddy checks his rifle’s magazine. Derrick mutters a prayer.

  At 0610 hours, we stand in line and on a signal from the Gaffer move forward at the double. I hear the sound of boots pounding stone, the creak and rustle of leather and cloth, and the men’s soft breathing. And then, as we spread out, the noise we make grows softer. My face is coated in sweat. Danny is jogging beside me, his rifle in both hands. Sunlight flashes off the bayonet that’s attached to it. I have my rifle at the ready too. We stop at the third or fourth house we come to as the others move past us. I glance up and down the street, first to one side and then the other. Inside of a minute our men are in position, poised to knock down doors and start shooting. But for an instant we stand still, as if we can’t believe that it can start like this, in the quiet of an October morning.

  And then there’s a whistle, the crack of a rifle, a shouted command.

  Mayhem erupts.

  I blast the lock. Danny grabs the handle, swings the door open and I charge inside.

  “Gottverdammt!”

  “Schweinepriester!”

  A half-naked German appears in a doorway. He’s red-faced and white-haired, struggling to pull up his pants with one hand, raising a pistol with the other. Danny steps up, swings the butt of his rifle at the German’s head, then slashes and lunges, killing him instantly. Another shouting figure comes into view, this one at the top of the stairs; there’s another one behind him. I shoot once, twice, three times in their direction. The first one is down. I shoot again. The second one trips, bumps and rolls screaming down the stairs, his hands flailing wildly, clutching at the posts, grasping for something to hold on to. Danny swings his rifle round menacingly and the German, groggy-eyed, lifts his shaking hands above his head. I search him quickly for weapons and motion for him to go outside.

  We check out the house without saying a word. Danny darts through the downstairs rooms while I stand back, covering him. He does the same for me upstairs as I kick open doors, turn over beds and poke my nose into cupboards. There are no more Germans. No civilians either. Just the two of us and two corpses.

  Downstairs again, I almost lose my footing on the smooth wooden floor. Danny catches and holds my shoulder.

  “Steady!” he says.

  Hand-to-hand fighting is shocking. It happens so fast. You hear yourself yelling. Your muscles get tight. And the other guys — the ones who are trying to kill you — you see their rage and the fear in their faces. You see their eyes open wide when they’re struck and then go dull as death darkens them.

  And afterwards you feel empty. You don’t even notice the adrenaline that pumps through your body when the action begins, but when it’s over, you’re drained. It’s all you can do to stay standing.

  * * *

  We clear the houses on one side of the street. B Company works the other side. Not all the Germans are as sleepy as the ones Danny and I encountered. The snap of rifle fire and the rattle of machine guns can be heard nearby. Most of it comes from behind the curtain of houses on the high side of the mountain. The enemy is still out there.

  We’re jogging down the street, following the others to the yard behind the captain’s command post, when Danny lets out a yelp.

  “Aw, crap!”

  He has one hand on his neck. His face is screwed up in a grimace. There’s blood leaking from between his fingers.

  “Let me see,” I say.

  Whatever struck him — it might have been shrapnel or stone from a ricocheting bullet — has left a ragged 3-inch-long cut under his ear. I give him my handkerchief. He presses it against the wound and we start jogging again towards the far end of the street. Danny swears softly to himself the whole way.

  “You’re lucky,” says the medical corpsman at the command post. “It missed the artery.”

  “I feel lucky,” says Danny. He was getting over the shock of being hit. “I’m pretty sure this is my lucky day.”

  “I’ll have it stitched up in a jiffy,” says the corpsman. “Are you feeling dizzy? The cut’s pretty deep. I can send you back to the RAP.”

  “Nah,” says Danny. “That’s okay.”

  Later, I wish he had accepted the corpsman’s offer to go to the regimental aid post. But it’s like Danny to stay. He was never a quitter, Danny. No one ever called him that.

  * * *

  D Company, on the other side of the mountain, gets held up for a while. And the Ontario Tanks, which were supposed to help us hold the summit, get bogged down by the river. We can’t always count on the tanks to show up. But we can count on the Germans.

  The first wave of enemy infantry comes at us at around 1600 hours. As we half expect, they’re backed up by Panzers. By 1700 hours Danny and I and the others are holed up in a house in the middle of the village. A German tank has a bead on the house next door and for sure it will find us soon. Strong John Stonechild has the Bren gun upstairs, with Derrick feeding the ammunition, while the rest of us are shooting from the windows below. The Gaffer, Paddy and Doug face the street while Danny and I have our eyes on the hill behind us. I don’t see how we can stay here much longer.

  Sure enough the Gaffer turns, sees me and signals that he wants Danny and me to slip out the back. We’ll take up positions to cover the others when they retreat. I tap Danny’s shoulder. He wheels around and there’s something about the way he looks at me. He’s pale and for a second he seems not to understand me. This isn’t like Danny. He’s always so quick on the uptake. The bandage on his neck is soaked in blood. Seeing where I’m looking, he touches it and shrugs.

  “It’s fine,” he says. But his voice is thick.

  I go first and Danny follows me. I make it to a low stone structure, a chicken coop. I pause and look back. I don’t know what makes me turn around at that moment. There’s so much noise — the crash of the enemy’s cannons, the smack of rifle fire and the crackle of machine guns — it’s not as if I hear the shot that strikes him. But I turn.

  “Danny!”

  He’s sprawled face-down in the dirt. Not dead: I can see him moving. I run back. Paddy and the Gaffer join me and together we drag Danny to the chicken coop. There’s no chickens — the Germans made sure of that. Strong John appears behind us and gives us covering fire. We haul Danny inside and strip off his tunic. It’s bad. You can just about put your fist through the hole in his back. The Gaffer goes to work silently while the other guys call out encouraging words.

  “Hang on, Danny!”

  “We’ll get you out of here.”

  The Gaffer applies pressure to stop the bleeding. He administers morphine for the pain. Danny’s face is contorted and his body twisted. He makes an awful gurgling noise as his lungs fill up with fluid. His eyes are wide open but he’s looking past us at something we can’t see. His hand is cold in mine.

  “You’ll be okay,” I say. “You’re going to make it.”

  It seems like an hour goes by before the Gaffer says what I know already.

  “He’s gone.”

  There’s a bang, a cloud of smoke and dust, and the sound of something heavy hitting the ground behind us. The Panzer is blasting the house we were in. We have to move in a hurry.

  Chapter 2

  Going to War

  October 1942 – October 1943

  I knew Danny for just over a year. I was closer to him than I was to anybody. Losing him was like losing a brother. The army is like that: it brings people together and
then it takes them away in an instant.

  Three years ago, back in Red Deer, the Mounties took my pa to an internment camp in Kananaskis. They didn’t take everyone who was born in Italy, just people they thought were Fascists. They never told us why Pa was arrested. He couldn’t have cared less about the Fascists! We heard about Benito Mussolini when he took power in Italy. My parents got letters from relatives in the old country. But no one paid much attention to politics. It was the same when Adolf Hitler became chancellor in Germany. We had other things on our minds, like bringing in the harvest on my uncle’s farm and keeping the shelves stocked in the store. Pa was too old to be a soldier, and I was too young when war was declared between the Allies and the Axis powers — Germany, Italy and Japan. It all seemed far away.

  They may have picked on Pa because he was a reader. We had a lot of books at home. The Mounties took the books when they took Pa. They let him go after a few months when they decided he wasn’t dangerous. It was awful when he was gone. He sent us letters, but the guards at the prison camp read what he wrote and blacked out whole sentences. Meanwhile, we had to look after the store without him.

  The store was Pa’s life. He worked for the railroad for years to save up the money to start it. He was busy before it opened every day, checking stock, placing orders. He stayed late every night, going over accounts and making sure the place was tidy. We all helped, Ma, me and my sisters, Gia and Anita. I always hated working in the store, but we kept it going while he was gone. It was such a hard time. We were puzzled at first, and then we were angry. But we were scared too. People started looking at us funny, like we might be traitors. Some kids at school stopped talking to me.

  We knew about the war, of course. We followed the Allies’ progress in class. We knew about the Blitz over London, the U-boat war in the Atlantic and the struggle for Africa. Pa came home in the summer of ’41. That winter, the Eighth Army relieved the siege of Tobruk. The United States entered the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the German general, Erwin Rommel, started his second offensive in the African desert. In the spring, the news was still pretty bad. In the summer, General Montgomery took command of the Eighth Army and the war in the desert began to turn in favour of the Allies.