Tug of War

by Shelfold Bidwell

  It was not until the late afternoon of the 2nd that the 4th Hussars, the armoured reconnaissance regiment of the division, was ordered forward in advance of the main body of the division, which had not yet reached the Metauro, over twenty miles behind the Conca. The 4th Hussars drove all night over treacherous tracks under the impression that they were to find crossings over the Conca and then lead an advance through and beyond Coriano. Next morning they were bogged behind Clemente where they found the infantry of the 46th Division dug in.10 On the night of the 3rd/4th the Hampshires of the 46th Division attacked but were halted by fire from S. Savino. In the morning they were shelled from the hills on their left flank and rear where Croce and Gemmano were firmly held by the Germans. During the 4th General Hawkesworth was still assuring General Hull that he was holding “the gate” open for him and one of Leese’s liaison officers reported that Hawkesworth had the enemy on the run. All this, the 4th Hussars discovered, was fantasy, but could not pass the truth back to HQ 1st Armoured Division. (Presumably because the radio distance was too great.)

  For the state of affairs in front of Clemente the 46th Division was not altogether to blame. The 5th Corps terrain was difficult and Leese had underestimated the effect of the high ground on the left of the funnel into which he had committed it. When the 46th Division had been drawn along in the slip-stream of the 5th Armoured, a gap occurred on their left. Keightley filled it with the 56th Division and urged it to cross the Conca quickly. Its commander, Major-General John Whitfield, understood that he was not to be distracted by high ground on his flanks and ordered his leading brigade to push on, leaving a battalion following behind to occupy M. Gemmano. By the time the battalion arrived and climbed the steep hill to the fortified village of that name on top, it found the 100th Mountain Regiment already in occupation and could not dislodge it. Gemmano was the hinge of the Second Green Line and as long as it was in their hands the Germans could hinder an advance on Croce and narrow the corps front to virtually that on which the 46th Division was halted. The general form that the battle on the left had taken could have been anticipated from Leese’s plan, given the terrain, even if it could not have been avoided. What was incomprehensible was the failure to bring the 1st Armoured Division to a point close behind the front from which it could exploit the opportunity on September 1 for which Leese had been hoping.

  A number of circumstances contributed to the situation. In the first place Leese had been surprised by the speed of the Canadian penetration. Second, he had deliberately kept the 1st Armoured well back to avoid blocking the roads forward. Had he been prepared to commit it to the Canadian Corps that would not have been a problem, for there was plenty of room immediately behind them. Third, Leese’s mind worked at infantry pace. At Alamein he had commanded the 30th Corps which had done most of the infantry work to crack the line, for the armour had at first refused to fight its way through the German positions, insisting that its task was to go through “the gap” and “pursue” the enemy. The 1st Armoured Division still held that outdated notion — shared, apparently, by Leese. It was looking for a gap.

  Hull could reasonably complain about the way his division had been prepared for battle, particularly of the lack of time to weld the brigades together, but a more alert commander might at least have insisted that his division was positioned closer to the front. How had the 1st Division been briefed for its mission? What did it expect? Keightley emphasised a pursuit. Driving off from one visit with a flourish he called out, “Meet you on the Po,” and left the expectation of a “sure-thing gallop”. Richard Goodbody, who commanded the armoured brigade, had run a training programme in June to practise the tactics used by the Canadians in the Green Line but for OLIVE he had been briefed for a task which called for the armoured brigade to work alone except for its motor battalion. He and Hull told the officers they would “pass through the Rimini gap after the infantry had broken through the Gothic Line defences and then to go on, and on and on, day and night, until we are too exhausted to see the target”.

  The plan was to concentrate the division on the Foglia only on the morning of the 3rd. At dawn on the 2nd it was still at Senigallia about forty miles away. The leading elements reached the Metauro in the evening. Driving through the night the wheeled vehicle column reached the Foglia by appallingly difficult tracks on the morning of the 3rd; the drivers exhausted, the columns having been on the move for fifty hours. The tanks had an even worse journey. After a scant two-hour halt at the Metauro they moved on:

  The dust flung up by the sliding, churning tank tracks of the Shermans was so thick that drivers in the rear of the column could not see at all, but drove by listening above the roar of their engines to the bellowing of the tanks in front. Sometimes a tank would slew to the side of the road, one of its tracks ripped from the bogies by some too-exacting strain. Here and there a tank attempted an impossible gradient to try to get round some obstacle while its bruised and shaken crew clung hard to the ammunition racks inside the turret.

  By the time that the fighting echelons of the division reached the Foglia on the 3rd men were stupid with exhaustion, and tanks were scattered down the line of march being recovered and repaired. Brigadier Richard Goodbody’s own armoured command vehicle overturned with him in it. He was unhurt but far from fresh when he gave out his orders at about midnight on the 3rd. His 2nd Armoured Brigade would concentrate north of the Conca at S. Savino by first light on the 4th, after yet another night march. They would pass through the 46th Division and advance to the Marano and beyond. They were to start at 2.30 a.m. There was a delay to allow stragglers to catch up and to net radio sets. When the column started the regimental net of the Queen’s Bays was superimposed on a BBC channel. Throughout the night the voice of Alvar Liddell reading the news was heard every half hour. Brass bands playing stirring marches cut into every message passed over the net. It was another one of those unsettling and ominous signs that the regiment was engaged in what was called “a nonsense”. By 8 a.m. little more than six miles had been covered because of a late start and negotiating diversions around broken bridges and culverts.

  At about noon on the 4th the main body of the 2nd Armoured Brigade was across the Conca and Goodbody was still being told that Coriano was “expected to fall soon”. He was to attack through the 46th Division even though the infantry brigades in the lorries were far behind. But his leading regiment, the 10th Hussars, with a company of the 1st King’s Royal Rifle Corps (the motor battalion) had gone over the S. Clemente ridge and met the Canadians on the Besanigo ridge, where they were told the real situation. The Germans held Coriano and the ridge in front in strength, Croce on their flank, and the hill-fortress Gemmano which overlooked their right rear. Keightley was misinformed and so were they as a result. The 46th Division’s attack on the night of the 3rd/4th failed. The battle had slipped out of Keightley’s hands, and the front was stalled.

  There followed a classical situation in which a commander of a lower formation could not tell his superiors that they were talking through their hats. Goodbody had to change his plan and make what was to have been his jump-off line his objective. The artillery fire-plan was dislocated and the attack delayed. What ensued was the inevitable conclusion to three days and nights of marches and committing semi-trained units to an improvised plan without a proper reconnaissance. The history of the British Army, like others, is marred by such lapses. It was sad, though, that a débâcle like this should have occurred so late in the war.

  The 2nd Armoured Brigade — without infantry, which was still south of the Conca — attacked with great courage into a setting sun against an enemy whose location had not been determined across an unsecured start line. It smacked of the Western Desert and what most soldiers then hoped were the bad old days. The attack failed, of course, and at great cost. The Queen’s Bays had only nineteen out of fifty-two tanks running at the end of the battle, the 10th Hussars thirty and the 9th Lancers thirty-two. Many of the casualties were recovered, it is true, but the b
rigade had been thoroughly discomfited. As Kesselring had once caustically observed, “The first battles of green formations are nothing great.” (Of the 5th Canadian Armoured Division on the Arielli at the end of 1943.)

  The Germans’ friend, the rain, fell that evening and continued in torrents on the 5th and 6th. The dust, cursed by everyone, became mud, which was worse. Streams, so easily crossed on the 4th, were impassable on the 5th. The 1st Armoured’s infantry did not cross the Conca into action until the 6th, but one factor must be added. The battle was undoubtedly lost because of lack of forethought, bad management, inertia and the passage of no or faulty information and the failure of what throughout the Italian campaign had proved a second-rate infantry division. It was won by rapid reaction and sound judgment of the German commanders who unerringly sent their reserves to the correct places. The 98th Division, partially trained and untried, rushed its 117th Regiment to help the 1st Parachute Division on the evening of the 2nd, and the rest took over from the battered 71st on the 46th Division’s front on the 3rd. A mixed group from the 162nd (Turkoman) Division was thrust into the line opposite the 1st Canadians. The 278th Division appeared in front of the 56th Division to relieve the 5 th Mountain, of which the 100th Regiment remained at Gemmano. What remained of the 71st Division, about three weak battalions, took over a narrow front between the 278th and 98th Divisions. The crisis had been on the 3rd when the 98th Infantry Division, with the assistance of the 26th Panzer, stopped the 46th Division and ensured that the left flank of the Canadians would be exposed. When the 29th Panzer Grenadiers were available on the 4th, they used their flank position to strike at the Besanigo ridge. On the coast the 1st Canadians were held for most of September 4 in the Second Green Line by the parachutists, even though the 5th Division had turned the inland flank. Had the line not held the two Canadian divisions might have been able to by-pass the Coriano ridge on the 4th. On the night of the 3rd Kesselring had returned from a visit to the Fourteenth Army to find Herr and von Vietmghoff considering a further withdrawal. “Prolonged plain speaking crackled over the wires till past midnight, when the more even-tempered von Vietinghoff managed to calm his superior by alluding (among other things) to the German casualties, and declaring that he knew of no man who could better the performance of Herr.” No retirement was ordered.

  On the morning of the 6th Leese, recognising that a set-piece assault was necessary against the Coriano position, ordered the 5th Corps to carry it out while Burns crossed the Marano and exploited to the Marecchia. For this Burns was to be given the British 4th Infantry Division and a Greek brigade. The New Zealand Division, under him from the 4th for liaison purposes, was to be fully under his command on the 13th. The attack was timed for the night of the 12th/13th. After discussion with Keightley, Burns suggested that his 5th Armoured Division should be responsible for taking Coriano itself, leaving the 1st Armoured Division to attack from San Clemente.

  Judging that the pause in operations marked the maximum shift of German divisions to the Adriatic, Alexander gave Clark the order to attack and directed the Desert Air Force to transfer its main effort to his front. As it happened the 1st Parachute Corps was already slowly withdrawing to the main defence zone in its sector, so the Fifth and Eighth Armies’ attack coincided, marking “the beginning of a week of perhaps the heaviest fighting on both fronts that either Army had yet experienced”.

  The action against Coriano was highly successful. While the infantry of the 1st Armoured Division drove off the enemy from Passano and San Savino, the 5th Armoured Division took Coriano. The New Brunswick Hussars supported each battalion of the 11th Brigade, the Perths on the ridge south of the town, the Cape Breton Highlanders to the north and the Irish who cleared the houses one by one. Exploitation was done by the Westminster Regiment (Motor Infantry) and Strathcona’s Horse. The preliminary bombardment was devastating and smoke screens blinded German observers and their anti-tank guns. The air operations of the Desert Air Force were particularly effective and virtually prevented the movement of German reserves, stifling local counter-attacks. In the twenty-four hours ending at sunset on September 13 more than 500 tons of bombs were dropped in 700 sorties against battlefield targets. The town was not finally cleared until the morning of the 14th by which time the 29th Panzer Grenadiers reported “considerable losses” and 14 officers and 775 other ranks were taken by the 1st Armoured Division, which bagged part of the garrison which fled from the Canadians. The 26th Panzer, 98th Infantry and 71st Infantry lost heavily too. It remained only to exploit the victory.

  How shaken the Germans were is evident from a conversation between von Vietinghoff and Kesselring on the evening of the 13th:

  Kesselring: I have just returned and heard the terrible news. Will you please inform me of the situation.

  Von Vietinghoff: The depth of the penetration cannot be ascertained with accuracy as yet … The front has been greatly weakened.

  Kesselring: We must realise that tomorrow will be a day of great crisis.

  Von Vietinghoff: We are certain of that; all day we have been racking our brains about how to help, but we have nothing left …

  All that Kesselring had to offer were three divisions, none of them immediately available, partly due to their having been held up by air force interdiction, but luck was with him. The 1st Armoured Division found the Fornacci stream swollen by rain and their tanks could not cross. The 4th Infantry Division was held up by shelling while passing through the 5th Armoured Division and then by Germans on the Ripabianca Ridge. The Canadians were briefly relieved and did not resume the advance until the 14th. The Germans needed no more time than that to recover. There followed a week of hard fighting first for the Ripabianca Ridge and then for S. Martino and finally S. Fortunato by the 1st Canadians with the 4th Division on their left. The Greek Brigade with the New Zealand Motor Battalion fought its way along the coast. Rimini fell to it on the 21st, and on the same day the 1st Canadian Division crossed the Marecchia into the Romagna.

  In the week the Eighth Army suffered a daily average of 145 killed and 600 wounded. From the beginning of OLIVE the total figure was 14,000 with the Canadians’ share being 4,511, their highest casualties for any period of equal length either before or after the Italian campaign.11 Tanks were replaceable, the men were not. The 1st Armoured Division was disbanded, every UK infantry battalion was cut to only three rifle companies. The Germans were in worse condition. For the period August 26 to September 15 the 76th Panzer Corps reported 14,604 casualties, including 7,000 missing. By the 25th, of the Tenth Army’s 92 infantry battalions only 10 had a strength of over 400 men, 16 were over 300, 26 were over 200 and 38 had less than 200.12

  When the Canadians crossed the Marecchia on the 21st Leese signalled to Burns: “You have won a great victory. By the bitterest fighting since Alamein and Cassino you have beaten eleven German divisions and broken through into the Po Valley. The greater part of the German armies in Italy were massed against us and they have been terribly mauled. I congratulate and thank you all. We must now hit hard day and night and force them back over the Po.” To Burns’ units he signalled: “Well done Canada!”

  It had, indeed, been a great and hard-fought victory. Mauled the enemy might have been, but not destroyed, for prolonged rain on September 20/21 helped the 76th Panzer Corps to withdraw in good order. The song sung by the 1st Canadian Division to the tune of “Lilli Marlene” — “We will debouch into the Valley of the Po” — seemed inappropriate on the 21st, not only because it was to be the New Zealand Division who would “debouch”, but because the “plain” had proved a soggy disappointment. “Half seen through the fine drizzle of September 21st it offered a dreary prospect of flat, watery and characterless land receding monotonously towards a grey horizon” to the platoons of the Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry and the 48th Highlanders as they crossed the Marecchia, walked cautiously over a road on the other side and began to dig in. That was as far as they were to go and they were not at all sorry. Not many of them ma
y have considered it, but their crossing “marked the end of an era … Behind lay the memorials of Eighth Army’s past, San Fortunato and the Gothic Line, Florence and the Paula Line, Cassino and the Gustav and Hitler Lines, Orsogna and Ortona, and farther back still, beyond the many rivers and hills, the toe of Calabria where the army had first touched Italy one year and 18 days before.”

  Of all the divisions fighting in OLIVE, only the 1st Canadians and their old adversaries, the 26th Panzer and 29th Panzer Grenadiers, had been in action from the beginning, although the 46th and 56th Divisions, veterans of Salerno, could claim almost as long a service.

  * 6th British and 6th South African Armoured Divisions; 1st British and 8th Indian Infantry Divisions.

  * One lesson of DIADEM had been that armoured divisions in Italy required extra infantry. Canada could spare none for its 5th Armoured Division, so the requirement was met by converting the 4th Princess Louise Dragoon Guards (an armoured reconnaissance regiment) and the Lanark and Renfrew Infantry (anti-aircraft artillery, reverting to its original role) to form the 12th Canadian Infantry Brigade.

  24

  CLARK AGONISTES

  In many a mountain pass,

  Or meadow green and fresh,

  Mass shall encounter mass

  Of shuddering human flesh;

  Opposing ordnance roar

  Across the swathes of slain,

  And blood in torrents pour

  In vain — always in vain.

  War Song, by John Davidson, 1857–99

  Clark flew back to his HQ on August 10 not satisfied, for he was never to recover from the trauma of being robbed of the better part of his army, but at least in better heart. He had acquired four “British” divisions, a poor exchange for Americans he thought, but better than nothing. He could now continue to play an active and honourable role, and with good fortune debouch into the Emilian plain and take Bologna before the worst of the winter set in. Though he had convinced himself that the “British” were poor fighters and British commanders had no drive, if the 13 th Corps exerted itself it could at least take some of the weight off the US divisions he intended to use as his spearhead.