by Mark Zuehlke
As the day progressed, the division’s intelligence officers determined that the Germans the Edmontons had engaged were from 2nd Battalion, 104th Panzer Grenadier Regiment of the 15th Panzer Grenadier Division—meaning this division was shifting from its earlier positions in the western part of Sicily to hold the centre.43 The PPCLI’s Lieutenant Colin McDougall’s platoon from ‘C’ Company had taken a few Panzer Grenadiers prisoner. They struck him as being “lean, sun-tanned professionals, superbly arrogant,” and realized that such “soldiers always would take some beating.”44
From Piazza Armerina to Enna was a mere twenty-two miles by Highway 117, and Simonds fully expected 3 CIB to reach the city before sunset on July 17. The Carleton and York Regiment was at the head of the brigade, with one company mounted on Three Rivers ‘B’ Squadron tanks and the rest following in trucks. Behind this New Brunswick infantry regiment were all three field regiments of the division’s artillery stretched out in a long line. Then came the Royal 22e Régiment and West Nova Scotia Regiment, as well as the other two Three Rivers Tank squadrons. This extended column rumbled into Piazza Armerina at about 0600 hours to find the main street clogged with vehicles of the other two brigades, all moving in the same direction with no instruction from division as to which brigade had priority.45 The result was a “mammoth traffic jam in the narrow, winding streets . . . which took several hours to sort out.”46
Just four miles north of the town, the column came to a blown bridge over a dry streambed whose banks were too steep for either tanks or trucks to negotiate. No. 1 Platoon of the 4th Canadian Field Regiment, RCE brought a bulldozer up and began carving out a diversion. 47 While this work was under way, the Carletons sent foot patrols ahead to scout for enemy positions.
They were soon observing a road junction four miles beyond the blown bridge, where a side road branched to the right off Highway 117 and ran six miles to Valguarnera. This town overlooked the Dittaino River valley and western Catania plain from a high summit and had been identified as an important objective for the Canadian division. Not surprisingly, the Germans had realized that holding the junction blocked any advance along Highway 117 to Enna and also up the side road to Valguarnera. Topography encouraged this strategy. Immediately before the road forked, Highway 117 climbed “through a narrow gap in a long ridge which broke from the backbone of the Erei Mountains to bend around to the north-east and cover Valguarnera from the south and east sides.” This pass was called Portella Grottacalda and on its west flank stood 2,700-foot-high Monte della Forma. Manning this mountain and other heights on either side of the pass were troops of the 2nd Battalion, 104th Panzer Grenadier Regiment—who had withdrawn from Piazza Armerina the previous night—reinforced by part of the regiment’s 1st Battalion. On the north slope of Monte della Forma, the Germans had several heavy mortars hidden from Canadian view. The scouts, however, observed much enemy movement around the junction. Returning to the blown bridge, they warned brigade headquarters to expect resistance once the column entered the pass.48
It took until 1630 hours for the engineers to open a crossing for 3 CIB and Brigadier Howard Penhale ordered the advance resumed. Little more than a mile beyond the blown bridge, the column came under heavy machine-gun and mortar fire. ‘B’ Squadron “dumped” the Carletons it had aboard and “took hull down positions along the crest overlooking the valley towards Enna.” While the tankers began firing 75-millimetre rounds towards any German positions spotted, the infantry deployed hard by either side of the road and started creeping forward.49
The rest of the Three Rivers Regiment soon joined ‘B’ Squadron on the crest and added the weight of their guns to the attempt to blast the way open for the infantry, something the tankers were convinced they were achieving, even though much of the fire was aimed towards targets 2,500 yards or more away.50 A mile short of the pass, however, Lieutenant Colonel F.D. “Dodd” Tweedie signalled that his Carletons “were pinned down by long range mortars and machine-guns” and that the tanks “were of no help to our infantry.”51
As soon as the Carletons had run into trouble, the West Nova Scotia Regiment’s Lieutenant Colonel M. “Pat” Bogert had thrown his ‘B’ Company out in a right-hand flanking move that pushed the Germans off one hill from which Tweedie had indicated he was taking fire. Captain J.R. Cameron started leading his men towards Monte del Forma but was forced to ground by heavy volumes of machine-gun and mortar fire from its summit. Bogert was sending more West Novas to reinforce Cameron’s company when Penhale signalled that he should pull back and issue the troops dinner, while division put together a more calculated plan for taking the pass. Simonds had abandoned hope of the Canadians gaining Enna before the day was out.52
At 1900 hours, the division’s chief staff officer (II), Major Dick Danby, wrote a quick situational report explaining that 3 CIB was “in touch with the enemy,” who were “making use of delaying action. We are now coming into mountainous country and the fighting is becoming more and more difficult. The Boche is a tough fighter at all times and add to that the hazards and hardships of mountain warfare and one can see that the days ahead of us will be difficult ones.”53
PART THREE
BATTLE FOR THE SICILIAN HILLS
[12]
Long and Savage Minutes
AT 1700 HOURS on July 17, during an ‘O’ Group with his brigade commanders, Major General Guy Simonds announced for the first time in Sicily that 1st Canadian Infantry Division would launch a two-brigade attack with all six battalions committed. The Three Rivers Tank Regiment and the divisional artillery would support the infantry. Simonds ordered Brigadier Howard Penhale, a portly Great War veteran artilleryman turned infantry commander, to punch 3rd Canadian Infantry Brigade through Portella Grottacalda and continue along Highway 117 to Enna. Simultaneously, Brigadier Howard Graham would outflank the Germans blocking the pass and road junction by striking cross-country towards Valguarnera with 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade.1 The two brigades, Simonds said, would carry out “a well supported attack in strength.”2
Although the divisional plan described the attack as committing two brigades, they did not go together at the same time. Instead, 3 CIB advanced at 2000 hours when Penhale passed the Royal 22e Régiment through the Carleton and York Regiment’s position a mile short of the entrance to the pass.3 The French-Canadian Permanent Force regiment moved towards combat well before 1 CIB’s battalions even cleared Piazza Armerina. In this brigade’s van was the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment, and its troops would not be positioned to begin their attack until 2130 hours.4
In his instructions to Lieutenant Colonel Paul Bernatchez, Penhale emphasized the need for a rapid advance to keep the Van Doos in contact with the Germans. To that end, the battalion would go forward aboard Bren carriers and trucks. During his ‘O’ Group with the battalion company and platoon commanders, Bernatchez made no attempt to hide the fact he “did not much like this idea of going to meet the enemy in trucks.” But as Lieutenant Pierre-Ferdinand Potvin noted with a Gallic shrug, “Those are the orders.”
Bernatchez put Major Gilles Turcot’s ‘B’ Company out front with one section of Potvin’s No. 11 Platoon loaded on carriers, under command of Lieutenant Guy Vaugeois. All the other men in Turcot’s company would be in trucks, as would those of the other three rifle companies. The formation behind ‘B’ Company consisted of ‘A’ Company, the battalion headquarters with its support platoons, ‘C’ Company, and finally ‘D’ Company.5 It was a risky move, for the vehicles would be driving without headlights, relying on moonlight to illuminate the way. That same moonlight would also light them up for the Germans, while the sounds of the carriers and trucks must carry well ahead of their advance.6
The Van Doos had stripped the tarpaulins off the trucks before setting off. Kneeling in the truck beds, the men scanned the darkness. Bren gunners trained their automatic weapons towards either side of the road. Advancing at six or seven miles per hour, the column crept warily towards the pass.
At 22
00 hours, still well short of it, Vaugeois signalled a halt and reported that a large crater blocked the road. On one side of the road was a steep mountainside and on the other, a sheer cliff fell into a narrow ravine. Potvin and his platoon clawed their way up the mountainside and established a covering position beyond the crater, to cover the engineers called forward to repair the road. A platoon from the 4th Canadian Field Regiment, RCE was soon led to the scene by Lieutenant Henri Chassé. The Van Doo officer insisted on inspecting the ground for booby traps or mines before giving permission for the engineers to begin work. As engineers and infantry worked shoulder to shoulder filling in the crater, the Germans blasted the area with a continuous bombardment that clearly indicated they were alert to the Canadian mechanized advance. A half-hour later the job was finished, but the enemy shelling had taken its toll on the engineers. Both the platoon commander, Lieutenant Hugh Carey, and the regimental commander, Major Jim Blair, were hit by shrapnel, along with several other engineers. Blair was evacuated to the nearest casualty clearing station with severe wounds, but Carey died on the spot.7
The convoy carried on along the road, which was still bordered by the mountain to the right and the ravine to the left as it snaked towards the valley bottom, where a bridge crossed a dry streambed before climbing towards the pass. Beyond the bridge, several half-constructed houses stood alongside the road. While the road remained above ground for the ascent into the pass, a paralleling railway track bored through the facing mountain via a narrow tunnel. In the moonlight, the Van Doos could see Monte della Forma looming over the valley to their right. They felt dangerously exposed.8 At the column’s head, the carriers had just crossed the bridge and started climbing when several machine guns erupted with heavy bursts of fire from either side of the road. Frantically, the carrier drivers tried to turn about, only to find the road too narrow and the houses hemming them in. At first the men in the carriers remained aboard, firing their Bren guns and rifles point-blank at the Germans. But the incoming fire was so intense that Vaugeois soon shouted for everyone to bail out and find cover.
In the trucks behind, the other Van Doos had already tumbled out to gain the roadside ditches. Seconds later, one truck was hit by an anti-tank shell and exploded in a fireball. There was little cover, and some men dove behind rocks or isolated clumps of low shrubbery, while others hunkered as low as they could in the ditches. Unable to get into the houses, the men who had jumped off the carriers squeezed up against the sides of the vehicles or underneath them for protection. From these exposed positions, the Van Doos began throwing a fierce rate of fire back at the Germans.
Up by the carriers, ‘B’ Company’s Potvin realized his No. 11 Platoon either got on the offensive or died. The rifle section with the carriers was pinned down, the men there unable to crawl out of the German trap. That left him with two sections of six men, his seven-man platoon command post, and a three-man Bren gun team. Potvin ordered one rifle section to work their way up onto a low shoulder of ground and provide covering fire, while he led the other section directly up a near-vertical slope to attack the nearest machine-gun position, which was about 150 feet above the road and firing directly down on his men.9
While Potvin had been casting together his hurried plan, ‘B’ Company commander Major Turcot had directed Nos. 10 and 12 platoons far enough out on either side of the road that they were able to support Potvin’s move with covering fire. Farther back, ‘A’ Company’s Captain Léo Bouchard led his men up the steep slope to the right in order to close on ‘B’ Company’s exposed flank.
Potvin’s little team cautiously climbed towards the German machine-gun position. As they closed in, Potvin made out four men manning the machine gun. They were intent on firing at the Van Doos by the road, obviously thinking their position impervious to attack. At his signal, the riflemen struck the Germans with a volley of fire that killed two of them. When the other two broke and ran, a couple of Van Doos went after them in close pursuit and cut both down. Quickly establishing themselves in and around the machine-gun nest, Potvin and his men began bringing German positions lower down under fire. This took the worst of the pressure off ‘B’ Company and allowed some men in the carrier section to jump back into their vehicles to bring the mounted machine guns into action.
Looking towards the houses, Potvin spotted a German self-propelled gun jockeying to fire on the carriers and pointed it out to his 2-inch mortar team. Private Cloutier, who his mates boasted could “put a mortar bomb into a jam jar from a thousand feet,” started pumping out the 2.5-pound bombs at a rate of four rounds a minute. Using the mortar fire to cover his movement, Potvin led three men in an attack on the house where the SPG had been sighted. Finding the German armoured vehicle had fled, the men threw a No. 36 fragmentation grenade into the building and killed the German infantrymen inside with a fierce volley of gunfire. When the firing abated, Potvin discovered he and his men had only a single Bren gun magazine and two fifty-round belts of ammunition left. It was time to fall back on the mortar position.
As Potvin went up the hill, he could see more Panzer Grenadiers forming up next to the house they had just cleared. The lieutenant ordered Cloutier to bring them under fire, and after a few rounds the Germans withdrew. Having eliminated most of the German positions immediately threatening the front of the column, Potvin was able to consolidate his platoon around the carriers. They dug in, ready to meet any renewed attacks. For his actions in leading his platoon’s fight out of the ambush, Potvin was awarded the Military Cross.10 Four other Van Doos would also earn decorations this night, with Lieutenants Bouchard and Maurice Trudeau receiving Military Crosses and Lance Sergeant René Beauregard and Corporal Georges-Edmond Patenaude receiving Military Medals.11
While Potvin had been creating havoc on the right, Major Turcot had regrouped the rest of ‘B’ Company. He sent Lieutenant Roger des Rivières’s No. 10 Platoon out to the right and had Lieutenant Joseph Laliberté dig in his No. 12 Platoon immediately south of the bridge. With both platoons having the road at their back, they were able to fend off attempts by German infantry to overrun their positions.
At the same time ‘A’ Company, which had moved to protect ‘B’ Company’s right flank, got into a tight spot when Captain Bouchard realized a group of Germans were trying to get behind his men to cut them off from the rest of the battalion. Bouchard ordered everyone into a defensive circle, and they opened fire on the enemy. With the situation now reversed, the Germans broke off the action and withdrew. Several Panzer Grenadiers were cut down before the rest “vanished into the night.”12
Although the Van Doos had managed to stabilize their situation, they were still in serious trouble, unable to either advance or pull back from their extended position along the road. Lieutenant Colonel Bernatchez had managed to organize the companies so they were each clustered on ground that provided relatively good cover and from which each could support the other with fire. But his wireless set had been knocked out, so he had no means to call in artillery fire. What he did have, however, was a 2nd Light Anti-Aircraft Battery team with its 40-millimetre Bofors anti-aircraft gun. Setting up on a low hill, the gun crew opened fire on the buildings still occupied by the Germans. Seconds later, a covey of Panzer Grenadiers were observed scrambling out of two houses “while tracer shells were coming in the doors and windows.”13 The gunners were credited with knocking out four machine-gun positions.14
The companies, meanwhile, were sending men out to try to rescue the battalion’s anti-tank guns, which had been left tethered to their trucks when the troops went to ground. Sergeant F. McMahon was in the process of dragging one of the guns into his company perimeter when a German shell exploded nearby and shrapnel fractured his right ankle. Despite the wound, McMahon continued helping three of his men until they safely extracted the gun.
At the same time, Corporal Georges-Edmond Patenaude was accomplishing a feat that won him a Military Medal. Seeing stranded on the road several men who had been wounded by fire coming from a
concrete blockhouse, he jumped into a carrier and provided covering fire with its mounted machine gun until they crawled to safety. Picking up a PIAT gun, Patenaude then charged the blockhouse and killed the Germans inside with several anti-tank bombs.
Other soldiers, including Major Turcot, exposed themselves to the shelling and machine-gun fire that continued to rake the road in order to move trucks into covered positions. As the night wore on, the Germans abandoned trying to overrun the Van Doos and confined themselves to harassing fire. “From time to time, a bullet would hit its target, a mortar bomb would destroy a vehicle. Ammunition, rations, emergency rations, weapons, and baggage went up in flames. Lieutenant Potvin’s men, who had left all their gear behind to move more freely, had to eat with fingers for two long weeks and borrow razors from their friends,” the regimental historian later wrote.15
At sunrise the “Battle of the Horseshoe,” as the Van Doos dubbed this action, was still under way. The Germans remained ensconced around Portella Grottacalda, and the French Canadians lacked the firepower to force their passage. All they could do was hold in place until divisional and brigade headquarters decided what to do next.
ABOUT THIRTY MINUTES before the Van Doos had tripped the ambush at 2200 hours on July 17, 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade’s Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment had started cross-country towards Valguarnera. Departing Highway 117 two miles north of Piazza Armerina, the battalion had ‘A’ Company leading, followed in order by ‘C’ Company, Lieutenant Colonel Bruce Sutcliffe and his headquarters, ‘B’ Company, ‘D’ Company, and then the carrier, anti-tank, and mortar platoons. Carrying sixty- to one-hundred-pound packs jammed with ammunition, grenades, and emergency rations, the infantry moved in a long single file into the mountainous countryside “interspersed with deep ravines and dried up water courses.”16
