As a result battalions lost their way, the drivers of the engineer vehicles carrying the vital bridging material missed their routes, halted and were set on fire, and confusion reigned from one end of the 13th Corps front to the other. The opening barrage had been timed to dwell for a given length of time on the forward posts of the Gustav Line so as to give time for the assault troops to close up and eliminate them, but they arrived too late and the barrage, its timings rigidly dictated, began to creep forward before the attackers could reach them. The German garrisons, emboldened, poked their heads up, manned their weapons and brought a murderous fire of mortars and machine guns down on the crossing places. The misadventures of D Company, the 1st Battalion, 5th Royal Gurkha Rifles on the night and day of the 12th provide an epitome of infantry fighting in a night attack.
The 1st/5th were the reserve battalion of the 17th Indian Infantry Brigade, which was to land astride S. Angelo, that village of ill-omen, with the British 1st Royal Fusiliers to the right of it and the Indian 12th Frontier Force to the left. (The reader is reminded that the Indian infantry divisions were organised in the proportion of two Indian and one British battalion.) As soon as the Frontier Force had cleared the “bank”, the raised embankment carrying the road between S. Apollinare and S. Angelo, the 1st/5th were to cross, D Company working with boats and acting as ferrymen, and follow A, B and C Companies when they had completed their task. Its commander, Major Maynard Pockson, had dispersed his men in cover in the vicinity of forward or “tactical” brigade HQ, sited in a convenient building, and went inside to await the radio message calling him forward. When it came he went outside, to be astonished by the fog and darkness. He “could not see his hand in front of his face” and could not find his men until his company runner fell into a slit trench occupied by two riflemen. All the paraphernalia used for a night advance, the white tapes, the hooded lamps, landmarks carefully noted by day, even the bursts of antiaircraft tracer shell fired on a fixed bearing to indicate direction, were invisible. Pockson formed his hundred-odd men into a long snake, each holding on to the back of the belt of the man in front of him, placed himself at its head and peering at the tiny phosphorescent numerals in his pocket compass led them down to the river. To his great relief he hit the exact spot where he was to meet the second-in-command of the 12th Frontier Force, who told him that there were only twelve boats left. (In spite of all the rehearsals the current of the Gari proved so fast that boats in both divisions were swept downstream, made unmanageable by the casualties among the crews. Many more boats were damaged by enemy fire.) He worked all night until he was down to two, the return traffic bringing numerous wounded men, “whose moans and cries were not exactly a morale booster”.
Nor were the still unburied bodies of the Americans and Germans, victims of the “Bloody River” affair. At dawn Pockson took his own company across, and on the far bank fell into the slit trench occupied by his commanding officer. “I thought you’d be forward under the ‘Bank’ sir!” he exclaimed, perhaps rather tactlessly. “What’s happened?” “We can’t get the tanks across, and everybody’s held up,” was the reply, and he was curtly told to go and disperse himself “over there”, that being near the bridging site where the Indian Sappers and Miners were striving to build a bridge under a hot fire punctuated from time to time by large shells landing in the river and sending pillars of water fifty feet up in the air, and in full view of the windows of S. Angelo, bastion of the Gustav Line. A perfectly hellish day was spent by D Company in slit trenches that filled with water when dug down more than three feet, losing men one by one to a continual hail of shells and mortar bombs. Two attacks were arranged and then cancelled.
It was with a “feeling almost of joy” that the company was at last ordered to advance to the “Bank” at 5.40p.m., assemble under its cover, and clear the enemy from a low bump or knoll in the plain some way to the right, commanding the rear of S. Angelo. On arrival Pockson became aware of a curious and unpleasant phenomenon. The “Bank” was so steep that it promised perfect cover from artillery, but a series of missiles rained down on the riflemen with an apparently vertical trajectory. “What can this be? Where is this fire coming from?” Pockson asked his second-in-command, his subedar, or Gurkha captain. He, a man of few words, pointed with the toe of his boot at a short wooden haft, the handle of a stick-grenade. The top of the bank had not been fully cleared by the Frontier Force, who had disappeared somewhere up the valley with their customary elan, and the men of the German 576th Grenadier Regiment were still in position and busy living up to their title of “grenadier”, tossing an inexhaustible supply of them over the brink. This was too much to bear. “Immediately the leading sections were over the top with kukris* drawn. The occupants of the German posts…did not wait to greet Johnny Gurkha in person …[and] their booted heels were helped over the horizon with bursts of tommy-gun fire…”
Pockson now could turn his attention to the business of clearing the knoll, much encouraged by the arrival of three tanks of the 12th Ontario Armoured Regiment, however all became bogged in the marshy ground by the river before they could fire a shot. The Gurkhas went in alone and unsupported and soon “…the knoll could be seen swarming with Gurkhas throwing grenades and firing their tommy-guns into the mouths of the German bunkers. It was not long before the remains of the German defenders surrendered and some dozen or so enormous Germans – they always looked enormous with their large steel helmets and black knee boots beside their diminutive Gurkha escorts – were brought into my HQ.” Pockson’s next task was to tackle S. Angelo itself but “… before embarking on this adventure I felt I should take stock of my situation. Company HQ was becoming congested. The dead [Gurkhas] had been brought there, the wounded were waiting for stretcher-bearers and the German prisoners standing about in embarrassed silence. A quick check revealed that I had forty-five all ranks left, hardly enough to take on the village …” He reported to his CO, who told him to call off his attack, but to harry the garrison of S. Angelo all night and keep them jittery. (The place fell on the following day to a full-scale battalion attack made by the other three companies with tank and artillery support.)
However, Pockson’s troubles were not yet over. His forward platoons complained that they were being sniped from S. Angelo. He and his subedar turned their binoculars on to the village and agreed that one at least was ensconced in “the end house, left corner of the right hand bottom window. Yes, there it was, a distinct flash followed by a distant crack. My eyes turned to the FOO (the artillery forward observing officer attached to his company)… but my subedar read my thought: ‘A tank would be better, saheb,’ he said, pointing to one that was still sitting in the water meadows near the river.” The question was who to send there across the open, fire-swept ground, and how to communicate with the crew. His subedar looked at him and said pointedly: “You speak English.”* This, Pockson felt, was perhaps not the only language qualification required, for when training with the Canadians he had discovered that some of the crews spoke only French and among them were real “Red” Indians. (As exotic an addition to the Italian scene as his Mongolians from Nepal.) There was, however, no mistaking his subedar’s meaning. Gurkhas were willing subordinates but also hard task masters. “‘All right, Subedar saheb,’ I said, adding rather dramatically, ‘Remember if anything goes wrong you command the company’ … ‘I know.’” Pockson, running and dodging, survived some bursts of Spandau fire, stopped on the safe side of the tank and hammered the armour with his kukri to attract the crew’s attention, trying at the same time to construct a French sentence containing “bottom right hand corner”. There was no reply. The tank, he now saw, was bogged up to the top of its tracks and empty, the crew having long since deserted it. Pockson, chagrined at having risked his life for nothing, made his way back safely to his company and broke the news to his subedar who, laconic to the last replied, “A pity, saheb.”5
When Kirkman assessed his situation on the 12th he could well have repeated to hi
mself the words of an equally phlegmatic corps commander, Douglas Haig, when he heard that his line had been broken at the First Battle of Ypres thirty years before: “Things are never as bad or as good as they appear in the first reports.” Although in the 17th Brigade sector the 1st/5th were held up, the British battalion, the 1st Royal Fusiliers, was stuck for the time in a minefield upstream of S. Angelo and relentless enemy fire had prevented the Indian Sappers and Miners from completing the bridge above S. Angelo, elsewhere things had gone better. Russell was able to tell Kirkman when he arrived at his HQ that he had two other bridges working and five squadrons of Canadian tanks over the river. One bridge had been built by his Sappers and Miners in the orthodox way, the other laid by an ingenious method invented by Captain H. A Kingsmill of the Royal Canadian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, attached to the Calgary Regiment. He had adapted a Sherman tank to carry a 100-foot span of Class 40 Bailey Bridge (strong enough to carry a tank) on rollers on its deck, its rear end coupled to another tank. The two tanks drove down to the river with Kingsmill walking alongside carrying a telephone connected to the driver of the leading tank, which he positioned exactly on to its near-bank seat. The driver carried on boldly down the bank and into the middle of the river, baling out as his tank went under water, and the rear tank pushed the bridge forward until the front end rested on the far bank, disconnected and withdrew. (Kingsmill was awarded the Military Cross.)
A lucky hit by an enemy shell soon reduced the strength of Kings-mill’s bridge, but not before a troop of four Calgary tanks had crossed. Its commander, unable to locate the infantry he was to support, with praiseworthy enterprise advanced 1,000 yards into the Gustav Line, and shot up any targets he could find. Five more squadrons of the 1st Canadian Armoured Brigade crossed by the other bridge. It was some of these trying to work up the river bank that had become bogged trying to support the 1st/5th, but the rest found firmer ground away from the river astride the S. Angelo–S. Apollinare road, and by 2.00 p.m. the Ontarios who had stuck when moving up to support Major Pockson had been dragged out of the mud by Canadian recovery vehicles and were once more operational. The combination of Indian infantry and Canadian tanks proved too good for the 576th Grenadier Regiment, as confirmed by the German staff report. Russell was poised for a considerable victory. In the next forty-eight hours he was to clear the “Horseshoe”, the half-circle of foothills looking down on his crossing places where the depth positions of the Gustav Line were sited, and the way was clear for the Canadian Corps to enter the battle.
It was the performance of the 4th Infantry Division that gave Kirkman real cause for anxiety. He had already noted that one of its brigades was not properly trained, and he knew that the whole division had been left too long unemployed in North Africa after the end of the Tunisian campaign and had suffered what was all too often the fate of units in such a position; being treated as a pool for casual labour, reinforcements and men for “extra regimental employment”.* Dudley Ward, its newly appointed and dynamic commander, had not had enough time to restore the division to its former efficiency. The temporary disarray into which it fell on the night of the 11th/12th has been well described by General Sir William Jackson, who was present as an engineer officer. “It was,” he says, “impossible to stifle the desperate feeling that the whole affair had grossly miscarried or, in soldier’s language, it was ‘an unholy balls up’.” The causes were the same as had impeded the 8th Indian Division, fog, late arrival of the assault battalions, losing the barrage, and intense enemy fire as the enemy posts on the far bank came to life. The 10th Brigade, which successfully crossed on the right, had the added disadvantage of being pitted against the parachute machine-gunners, who were fully as aggressive as their infantry, and the 1st/115th Panzer Grenadiers. Many boats were lost in the unexpectedly fast current, some because of poor watermanship, some because the paddlers were hit, some cap-sized by the “passengers” jumping in down the steep bank in their haste to avoid the murderous Spandau fire sweeping the crossing places. In the 28th Brigade sector the leading battalion, the 1st King’s Regiment, arrived thirty-five minutes late and had a bad time crossing, delaying the 2nd Somerset Light Infantry, who had to sit in the cleared lanes through the minefield on the near bank unable to disperse or take cover and losing men at a rapid rate to the incessant enemy fire; the morale was not improved by “stragglers and wounded from the King’s [who] repeated and embellished wild rumours that the battalion had been virtually wiped out”.
The most serious failure was in building tank-bearing bridges. By 1.00 a.m. the engineers were well advanced in the work of preparing the bank seats, but as soon as the heavy vehicles carrying the Bailey equipment began to move down to the riverside the noise of the engines attracted “defensive fire of such intensity that the Sappers were driven to cover and many of their vehicles set on fire”. There was every possibility of a repetition of the “Bloody River” débâcle, but greatly to the division’s credit the officers and NCOs pulled the operation together, and those natural leaders who pass unnoticed in barracks or when things are normal began to appear. Jackson gives as but one example the leadership of Lance-Corporal H. Granger, 2nd Battalion, 4th Hampshires. The battalion was, like Pockson’s Gurkhas, acting as ferrymen, and the system adopted in the brigade was the sensible one of fixing lines across the river by which the crews could haul them across. Granger swam the river three times with ropes, and remained naked on the bank for four hours collecting stragglers and guiding them to the crossing points.6 Through the efforts of many other similar but unremarked men of determination rallying their platoons in the bullet-pierced fog and darkness each brigade had by daylight won a foothold on the far bank, the 10th Brigade opposite Trocchio and the 28th about a quarter of a mile north of S. Angelo in the area defended by Bode’s left-hand battalion. They had no tanks or heavy weapons, but with the aid of the artillery and their own rifles and light machine guns beat off a number of disconnected counter-attacks, but Kirkman after he had visited both divisions wrote in his diary: “They [i.e. the 4th Division] are however not in very good shape.” He ordered Ward to commit his reserve brigade and build a bridge that night, “at all costs”.
No sensible commander, and certainly not one so precise and given to understatement as Kirkman, uses such an expression except in the direst emergency and, as Jackson says, “It was meant literally and not as a figure of speech.”7 Accordingly at 5.45 p.m. on the 12th two field squadrons, Royal Engineers of the 4th Division, began work in the left-centre of the 10th Brigade’s bridgehead (as far as was possible from the higher ground on the right), and by 4.00 a.m. on the 13th it was open for Ward’s reserve brigade and the tanks of the 17th/21st Lancers, three squadrons in all, to cross. The price was 80 out of 200 Sappers working on the site. “This,” said Kirkman, “alters the whole situation.” He ordered three more bridges to be built, “gingered up Russell [and told him] to go faster tomorrow”, and warned Keightley to have his leading brigade ready to cross on the 14th, strike north-west between the 4th and 8th Divisions, as already instructed, with the rest of his division to follow and join hands with the Poles on the Via Casilina on the 15th. He noted that the haul of prisoners, always a good indication of how a battle against the Germans was going, might be as much as 600, though the total casualties in the corps to date were 1,000, which was severe. All the same, Kirkman’s final entry was “a most satisfactory day”, but his hopes were soon dashed.
The advance of the 78th Division was held up by bad going, side roads collapsing under the weight of the tanks, clouds of dust reducing visibility almost as much as the fog of the 11th and “terrible traffic hold-ups”. To make matters worse, the forward units of the 4th Division were not as far forward as they claimed to be nor had they mopped up the enemy completely, so the leading troops of the 78th had to fight their way forward to the area as the jump-off point for their attack.
Anders was ready to resume his attack southward to meet the 13th Corps but Kirkman, knowing that the Pol
ish Corps was good for only one more all-out attack, had to ask for it to be postponed twice as Keightley, moving too slowly to suit Kirkman, gradually fought his way forward. Nevertheless, Leese felt that by the 15th his battle was beginning to go the way he wanted and that it should be accelerated. He ordered the 1st Canadian Corps to take over the front of the 8th Indian Division on the 16th. Major-General Chris Vokes, 1st Canadian Infantry Division, had been duly warned to relieve Russell, and had made the preliminary arrangements. The only obstacle to a smooth transfer was Lieutenant-General Burns who, Kirkman found, “lacked confidence in how to do it [i.e., the relief] and was generally suspicious”. He quite firmly laid down that the normal procedure would be followed, which was that Russell would be in command of the sector and the operation until Vokes had his two brigades in action, and when he had his headquarters would take over control. A relief in the presence of the enemy is a complicated procedure, done by night and in complete silence, company by company, platoon by platoon and section by section, but both divisions were well trained and well disciplined and the Germans remained perfectly ignorant of the change, much to Kesselring’s subsequent annoyance. One of the leading actors in the drama was now on stage, the battle had become an army battle, and it is time to look at it from the viewpoint of General Sir Oliver Leese.
* A Kampfgruppe was a mobile, tactically self-contained group of all arms. A Sperrgruppe was only intended to dig in and fight a defensive battle.
* Relatively speaking, compared with tanks or fighter-bombers, depending on purely visual target identification and fire-control.
Tug of War Page 33
