The Liri Valley

by Mark Zuehlke

  With the first objective secured at 1200 hours, ‘C’ Squadron attacked in support of the 3rd Punjabi Regiment toward a road junction 200 yards northwest of the village. The tankers and infantry were soon slogging their way forward in the face of intense opposition from German machine guns and antitank fire. Despite heavy casualties, the infantry pressed on, with the tanks following warily because of the antitank opposition. When the tanks were approaching the road junction, two German self-propelled guns were spotted and quickly knocked out by the advancing Shermans. Seconds later, another self-propelled gun moved into the open and struck Lieutenant Al Abram’s tank with an armour-piercing round that killed Abram and one of his crewmen. Return fire from the Canadian tanks destroyed this gun before it could bear on a new target.28 After one hour of fierce fighting, the road junction was secure. From the ridge-line, the tankers could see that the road they were on ran back into the German lines as far as Pignataro, no more than two miles away. Streaming out of this village was a long line of German transport vehicles heading west up the Liri Valley.29

  At 1730 hours, two troops of ‘B’ squadron and two RFFR companies attacked Panaccioni immediately on the heels of a ten-minute artillery concentration. Initial stiff resistance from sniper and machine-gun positions on the edge of town was swept aside. When the infantry and tanks entered the village, opposition unexpectedly collapsed. The 2nd Battalion, 576th Panzer Grenadier Regiment headquarters was captured en masse. In all, about 130 prisoners were taken. At the end of the day, the Calgary Regiment’s war diarist happily recorded that “it was estimated almost the complete second battalion of 576 Regiment was wiped out.”30

  As the XIII Corps infantry battalions and attached squadrons of the Calgary and Ontario regiments consolidated their gains in the closing darkness of May 13, it was evident that Eighth Army’s grip on the western shore of the Gari River was solidifying. The bridgehead had been extended to an average depth of 500 yards and was held continuously for a length of 3,000 yards. Although the Germans continued to shell the bridges crossing the river, their accuracy was poor because the previous excellent observation points they had enjoyed on the overlooking ridgeline had all been captured. A good stream of supplies was brought over the bridges to resupply the forward units. Throughout 1st Canadian Armoured Brigade, morale ran high.31

  Because of the persistent German harassing fire, however, supplies were being brought up to the forward tank formations by open-topped Stuart tanks whose side armour offered some protection to the resupply crews. A shortage of space inside the Stuarts meant that ammunition and fuel had priority. Consumption of both by the tankers engaged in combat was heavy. A report to 1st Canadian Armoured Brigade filed at 1800 hours on May 13 stated that the two tank regiments had expended 1,555 high-explosive rounds and 50 armour-piercing rounds during the day. On the night of May 12–13, the Stuarts resupplying the Ontario Tank Regiment brought up more than 1,200 gallons of gas, 900 75-millimetre shells, and 20,000 rounds for the .30-calibre Brownings. The Calgary Tank Regiment received 500 gallons of fuel, 900 main-gun rounds, and 50,000 Browning rounds. Ammunition and fuel was being consumed almost as quickly as it could be moved across the river, so stockpiles were not increasing.

  Soon concern was being expressed by staff at 1 CAB headquarters that available reserves could not compensate for the loss of both tanks and crews. The Three Rivers Regiment’s Stuart tank that had been destroyed early on May 12 when it bottomed on an antitank mine could be neither replaced nor repaired. There were no fresh Stuarts in the reserve unit’s holding area and no parts for these tanks would be available until the end of June. For now, it was also impossible to provide sufficient Shermans to enable each squadron to retain its full strength of fourteen tanks. This owed not to tanks’s being destroyed or damaged by enemy fire, but rather to the number of Shermans bogged down on the west side of the Gari River that could not be reached because of the threat enemy fire posed to recovery crews. Until these tanks could be recovered, they had to be replaced by Shermans held in the reinforcement pool, and there was now a danger that too few tanks remained to make up for losses in the heavy fighting expected over the next few days.

  No complete tank crews were to be found in the reinforcement pool either. There remained only nine gunners and nine co-drivers, so any casualties to other members of the crews could not be covered. This shortage again resulted from losses of tanks to the mud, as the crews were required to remain with the bogged-down Shermans in order to protect them if necessary and to work at getting them unstuck. Headquarters staff of 1 CAB put out a desperate plea for more personnel, and soon seven officers and eighty-seven other ranks had been rounded up from rear-area units, sufficient to fully crew eighteen tanks. A recovery team was also dispatched from the Brigade Workshop to help with repairing and freeing the disabled tanks.

  With the priority for resupply going to ammunition and fuel, steps were taken to ensure the tank squadrons were also adequately supplied with food. Major Roberts of the brigade’s Army Service Corps company decided the best way to prevent shortages was to adopt a new practice of issuing a full compo-ration every three days rather than daily. The previous daily ration issue had resulted in the packs’s being broken into equal amounts that were shared between a squadron troop’s three tanks. Now each tank crew would receive an entire compo-ration from which it could draw meals for three days. Roberts also told 1 CAB staff that he would try to arrange regular direct draws of fresh meat from the refrigerator cars, for the increasingly warm weather was causing much spoilage.32

  In the front lines, not everyone was thrilled to receive a full compo-ration kit, and fresh meat remained an extraordinarily rare sight when the regiments were engaged in a prolonged battle. Kanik continually groused about the standardized compo-ration, which consisted of a bar of concentrated chocolate; portions of tea, sugar, and condensed milk; hardtack biscuits; a package of boiled sweets; ten cigarettes; tins of corned beef (bully beef); tins of meat and vegetable stew; two small tins of fruit; and a box of matches. The kit came with a cooker stand that would hold a mess tin of water or a can of stew. A cake composed of methyl alcohol was placed under the tin and then ignited. The heat source would quickly bring the contents in the mess tin to a boil. Six heat cakes were included in the ration box.33

  To Kanik, drawing from the compo-ration meant an endlessly repetitive diet of tired and stringy tinned mutton and limp, flavourless vegetables. Only the bully beef ration had any bite to it. He never understood why Canada, with about 300,000 men in khaki, couldn’t come up with its own ration kits that contained food Canadians would want to eat. He thought a lot about food like bacon, eggs, salmon, and sardines. Kanik loved sardines, which he hadn’t tasted since going overseas.

  After months of the same dull food, Canadian tankers were highly adept at scrounging around the countryside at every opportunity for non-regulation food. Each tank tended to have one man who was a particularly good scrounger. Kanik was the star scrounger in his crew. Part of the reason for this was that he received a monthly supply of about a thousand cigarettes from the women’s auxiliary of his Saskatchewan hometown. Not a smoker, he sold the cigarettes each month for about $18. This meant that he always had cash and never even tapped into his soldier’s pay. That all went home and into a bank account, so he would have a decent grubstake when the war ended. The cash from the cigarettes was useful for buying eggs, fruit, and vegetables from Italian farmers. And, of course, food was often found in abandoned fields and inside empty or destroyed farmhouses and other homes, where no one was around to accept his money. Wine was plentiful and most tanks carried a good supply squirrelled away carefully in the extremely cramped quarters.

  In addition to the seventy-six shells for the .75-millimetre gun and boxes containing thousands of rounds of .30-calibre for the Browning machine guns, every corner of available space was normally filled to the brim. Rations, personal kit, water, a supply of tools and odd bits and pieces of parts to replace the things that most comm
only broke down on the tank were stored in whatever manner best suited a particular crew. There was also a mandatory supply of bulky smoke bombs for the external launcher that almost nobody ever used, because doing so exposed the person manning the launcher to enemy fire. Every man also had to find room for his personal weapons. Kanik carried a .38-calibre revolver and a Thompson submachine gun. Unless he was well to the rear, the Thompson and the revolver went with him whenever he was outside the tank, even when doing maintenance or small repairs.

  As well, each tank carried a Bren light machine gun with several boxes of .303 ammunition. This was for anti-aircraft use and replaced the .50-calibre machine gun that had been originally mounted on the turret and was to have been manned by the tank commander. Within the first days of moving off the beaches in Sicily, these guns were constantly becoming entangled in the wires used in vineyards to support grapes, so had been removed. It was rare to see a tank anywhere in the Eighth Army equipped with its regulation .50-calibre.34

  Tank crews were endlessly ingenious at figuring out new ways to squeeze more stuff into the narrowly limited amount of space. They were also adept at developing means to up the armour-protection quotient of the Shermans, such as by draping spare tracks over the tank’s front glacis. Although the Sherman M4 was the standard tank used by Canadian and American forces, as well as by most British armoured regiments, it was not a popular machine with tank crews. It was undergunned compared with most of the German tanks it had to fight, and with a frontal thickness of 75 millimetres was more thinly armoured.

  German Panzerkampf-Wagen V Panther and Panzerkampf-Wagen VI Tiger tanks, which had been appearing in the Italian theatre since January 1944, were virtually impervious to Sherman shots that struck the front. The Panther boasted 120-millimetre-thick frontal armour, and the Tiger 100 millimetres. Only a hit against select portions of the side armour or against the rear was generally effective. Meanwhile, a Tiger’s 88-millimetre gun could easily punch through a Sherman’s frontal armour at a range of 3,000 yards, while the Panther’s lighter 75-millimetre gun would penetrate a Sherman’s front at a range of 1,000 yards. The Sherman gunner might, if lucky enough to get that close for the shot, pierce the front of an enemy tank at 500 yards.35

  Another fundamental problem with the Sherman was that most models, including those used by the Canadians, burned gasoline rather than diesel, which the German tanks used. If an enemy shell penetrated a gasoline-fuelled tank’s engine compartment or crew compartment, the tank normally went up in flames so quickly that escape was impossible. Death by burning was all too common. Furthermore, the way the shells were stored on both sides of the tank just inside the armoured skin also posed a grave hazard. When a German shell pierced the compartment, it would often break some of the shell casings open and strew cordite and propellant everywhere, which would ignite in an instant high-temperature flame.36 Both German and Allied soldiers called the Sherman the Ronson Burner, after the cigarette lighter of the same name. The Germans also nicknamed it the Tommy Cooker.

  Canadian Shermans were generally fitted with five eight-cylinder Chrysler engines and had a top speed of about twenty-nine miles per hour. By comparison, the Tiger could muster no more than twenty-three miles per hour and was ponderous in turning, while the Panther had a surprising top speed of thirty-four miles per hour and proved a match for the relatively agile Sherman in cross-country manoeuvrability. This made the Panther a frighteningly effective opponent, while it was sometimes possible to outmanoeuvre the sluggish Tiger. Even the common Panzerkampf-Wagen IV, which Allied forces called the Mark IV, had a slightly more powerful 75-millimetre gun, 80 millimetres of frontal armour, and a top speed of twenty-six miles per hour that made it a good match against the Sherman in a shootout.37

  The only significant advantage that the Sherman crews had going for them was their numerical superiority in almost every battlefield in which they opposed the Germans. In May 1944, Allied forces in Italy had a total of 3,036 tanks at their disposal. Between the armoured brigade of 5th Canadian Armoured Division and the tanks of 25th Army Tank Brigade that were to be tasked with supporting 1st Canadian Infantry Division, the corps’s tank strength was between 350 and 400.38 For its part, 1st Canadian Armoured Brigade, as was true of all Commonwealth tank brigades, mustered 194 Sherman medium tanks and 43 Stuart light tanks. As of April 1944, the total number of German tanks in Italy was 403, of which only 310 were serviceable.39 Few of these tanks were actually deployed on the Gustav Line battle front. On May 5, Ultra intercepts reported that the Tenth and Fourteenth armies had available 18 Mark IIIs mounted with 5-centimetre guns, 47 Mark IIIs with .75-millimetre guns, 160 Mark IVs, 58 Panthers, and 43 Tigers. None of these tanks was at that time deployed on the front line and nearly 100 of these 326 tanks were so far back that they could not be brought forward in time to have any effect on the battle for Rome. Another 50 were with the Hermann Göring Division that was pointlessly guarding the Leghorn coast. Forty more of these tanks were estimated by Ultra staff to be completely out of the line for undetermined reasons, such as needing repair. This left, at most, 136 tanks to cover the entire Gustav Line front.40

  By the evening of May 13, the situation had improved vastly for XIII Corps. For the past twenty-four hours, Royal Engineers of the British 4th Division had been struggling to get a bridge across in their sector. Although 80 of the 200 sappers were killed or wounded, by nightfall the division’s reserve infantry brigade was crossing the bridge. More important, three squadrons of tanks from the 17th Regiment of the 21st Lancers Brigade got over. This secured XIII Corps’s right flank between Cassino and San Angelo. XIII Corps commander Lieutenant General Sir Sydney Kirkman declared May 13 a “most satisfactory day.” He ordered three more bridges built over the Gari River immediately, and “gingered up Russell to go faster tomorrow.” He also warned the commander of the British 78th Infantry Division, his reserve division, to be prepared to cross the river the next day to strike northwest between the 4th and 8th divisions, with an eye to getting in behind Monte Cassino and threatening that bastion from the rear.41

  On the left flank of the 8th Indian Division, the Corps Expéditionnaire Français had captured the critical Monte Majo in the Aurunci Mountains and had inflicted about 5,000 casualties on the Germans in two days of fighting that had left the 71st Infantry Division badly mauled and disorganized. The 94th Infantry Division, also trying to stave off the French advance, was reportedly starting to fray and might soon break entirely. If these two divisions collapsed, it would open the way for a rapid advance by the French corps along the extreme southern edge of the Liri Valley to the Hitler Line.42

  The progression of the fighting on May 14 would determine whether the Gustav Line shattered quickly or collapsed only after a drawn-out slugging match. What had looked to be an “unholy balls-up” the previous day now offered the promise of an imminent breakthrough. Echoing the words of then British I Corps commander Sir Douglas Haig, when his line had been broken during the First Battle of Ypres in World War I, Kirkman reflected that: “Things are never as bad or as good as they appear in the first reports.”43

  9

  ONE COULD NOT AFFORD TO GRIEVE

  In the last hours of May 13, Lieutenant Colonel L. Fernand Caron held an Orders Group with the officers of the Three Rivers Regiment. Known throughout the regiment by the nickname La Buche, which means either “immovable log” or “blockhead,” Caron had started the war as a sergeant in the Régiment de Châteauguay. By 1940, he was the youngest lieutenant at Officers’ Training school and followed this up by graduating top of his class at the British Defence College course on Tactics. At the age of twenty-five, when Lieutenant Colonel E. Leslie Booth was promoted to brigadier in early 1944 and transferred to command of 4th Armoured Brigade in Britain, Caron took command of the Three Rivers Regiment. He was noted for possessing an uncanny ability to clearly visualize the forward terrain even though he was back at regimental headquarters. Caron had advised many a squadron commander that his repo
rted map grid location was incorrect. The lieutenant colonel was invariably right.1

  During the Orders Group, Caron explained that all three squadrons plus the regimental headquarters unit would cross Oxford Bridge before first light and join the battle action. ‘C’ Squadron was to support a battalion of 21st Indian Brigade in an attack designed to break out from the Gustav Line and cut the road running between Pignataro and Cassino. The start line would be situated halfway between San Angelo and Panaccioni, approximately 1,500 yards west of the Gari River. Once the first wave reached its objective, the remaining squadrons would come forward in support of other 21st Indian Brigade battalions.

  This attack would cut directly through the series of low hills known as the San Angelo Horseshoe. The arms of the Horseshoe terminated at San Angelo and Panaccioni respectively, while the centre of the curve brushed across the Cassino-Pignataro road at a point lying almost precisely between the two villages. Tightly spaced and tall-growing vineyards, broken by dense, scrubby oak groves, dominated the ground. Narrow ravines and sunken roads isolated the hills from each other and these roads formed natural defensive trenches for the Germans. The Horseshoe held what was considered some of the roughest ground in the Liri Valley. It was ideal terrain for defence.2

  The attack plan called for a slow, methodical advance aimed at wearing the Germans down, rather than cracking through their defences to encircle and destroy the forward units. This caution frustrated Three Rivers Lieutenant Horace Dugald Beach, who felt that it typified everything wrong with the offensive against the Gustav Line. The twenty-five-year-old Intelligence Officer from Ernfold, Saskatchewan, had run a farm for three years before entering the University of Saskatchewan in 1940. The following year he had joined the Canadian Officers’ Training Corps, entered active service in 1942, and was shipped overseas that December. Fall of 1943 saw him assigned to the Three Rivers Regiment and in January 1944 he was appointed the regiment’s Intelligence Officer. Beach believed that Eighth Army had a far too ponderous offensive approach and that this resulted from the line troops’ being insufficiently trained in mounting aggressive attacks.