Ortona (52 page)

The Seaforths added their own distinctive stamp to the mouse-holing method, and many of their pioneers denied that mouse-holing was an innovation they learned from the Edmontons. Sergeant Harry Rankin of the Seaforths' Pioneer Company argued that it was simply the logical thing to do, once the hazard of moving in the street was
realized. Rankin's platoon was recovering hordes of Teller antitank mines, which were perfect for the task of mouse-holing. He would jam a bayonet in the wall, hang a Teller on it, slip a short time fuse to the built-in detonator, light it, and run like hell. Usually the result would be a nice hole in the wall through which the infantry could move. Sometimes the charge would fail to open a hole; other times it would bring the entire house crashing down. “We aren't exactly practising scientific demolitions here,” Rankin would say, when an officer complained that the house he was planning to capture had instead been demolished.

Rankin never gave a thought to the destruction he was wreaking on Ortona with his explosives. There was a job to do, so he did it. If a tank was having trouble getting around a corner because the street was too narrow, he would set some plastic explosive charges and blow the obstructing walls out of the way. Destruction on demand, with nothing sophisticated about the methods. All a Seaforth had to do was send the word back, and Rankin and his team would appear to work their explosive magic.
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In this manner, the Canadians slowly bludgeoned their way through the streets of Ortona. Germans and Canadians alike laid waste to the town. The air was choked with smoke and dust. Fires burned in the wreckage of buildings. Hour after remorseless hour witnessed the constant din of explosions, machine guns rattling, rifles cracking, and masonry collapsing.

Even from a distance, the savagery of the battle for Ortona was apparent. About two miles south of Ortona, war artist Captain Charles Comfort was based in a rear-area camp among the trees of a pretty orange grove located about a mile north of San Vito Chietino. “The very smell of death and destruction,” he wrote in his diary, “reached us. . . . A holocaust of red glowed in the sky, revealing a ragged skyline as tongues of flames leapt into the night. We peered through the trembling darkness . . . overlooking the awesome scene. Downwind from the action the frightful intimate sounds of battle were all too clear, bursts of automatic fire, the Bren and the Schmeisser answering one another, each with its own distinctive accent. A dozen concurrent dialogues penetrated the blunter, duller, but more
profound thunder of the gunning. From the intervening vineyards rose a ghostly vapour, like a shroud winding itself around the town. The most boisterous and profane among us became silent in face of what we witnessed. The morbid fascination of destruction held us in its grip as life and its monuments dissolved before our eyes. Over all, the deafening voice of guns beat a massive dirge like all the unmuffled drums of hell.”
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The tent camp from which Comfort observed the battle was close to fifteen-year-old Anna Tucci's home in the ruins of what had been San Donato. So few buildings remained standing that it was hard to remember a tiny hamlet had existed here only weeks before. The pretty little white church where Anna and her neighbours had gone to pray and attend mass was demolished, just so many bits of rubble.

Although German artillery still occasionally searched for targets around the area, life was slowly returning to normal. Anna's father worked in the mud to repair the damage to the olive trees and vineyards. It would be a long process, he said, but eventually the farm would again prosper. Meanwhile, Anna washed clothes for the Canadians in exchange for rations. The food became a mainstay for the entire family. Anna's father spoke a small amount of English and this led to his befriending two Canadian soldiers. They came most evenings to the battered Tucci home for a visit. The men always brought food for the family and cigarettes for Anna's father. There was still much
vino rosso
in the family wine cellar, so the soldiers never left the house with empty hands.

The noise of the fighting in Ortona carried constantly on the wind, and Anna sometimes feared the war would never end. Her father had thought that when the Germans left their positions on the Moro River, the battle would soon be over and they would be free to rebuild and enjoy a life of peace. But the battle had not ended. The war continued to threaten their lives. For those civilians in Ortona, they thought, it must be like living in hell.
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The Canadians saw little of the civilians hiding in Ortona. Most were in the tunnels in the northern sector of the town, an area soundly controlled by the Germans. There were a few, however, in the basements of the houses they captured. Captain June Thomas, commander
of the Seaforths' ‘A' Company, was on the ground floor of a house when an elderly woman dressed all in black, as was usual for Italian civilians, poked her head out of a cellar door and beckoned him to follow her into its depths. Somewhat warily, he descended the stairs and found himself in a dark, dank room lit only by candlelight. To his surprise and delight, the woman offered him a cup filled with steaming hot tea. In the shadows, he saw several children staring at him with big eyes. Thomas figured he must present a scary sight. There was something curiously restful about the whole scene in the cellar. The candles, the children, the warming tea, and the wrinkled smile of the old woman.

Outside, however, the war waited on him. Thomas forcibly gulped the scalding tea and handed the mug back to the woman. Then he ran back up the stairs, firmly closed the door to the cellar, and returned to his men.
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Nearby, journalist Christopher Buckley was also in a cellar. Buckley, along with Ross Munro and Matthew Halton, were the major war correspondents covering the battle. Their reports were drawing extraordinary attention. British, American, and Canadian newspapers carried headline stories comparing the battle in Ortona to that of Stalingrad, both in terms of ferocity and strategic significance. The
New York Times
ran two stories on consecutive days: “For some unknown reason the Germans are staging a miniature Stalingrad in Ortona,” read the first day's report. The second described the fighting in Ortona as identical to “the fury of Stalingrad.”
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In the cellar, Buckley was struck less by the fury of battle than by the stoic ability of humanity to survive all travails with some dignity and grace. “What a strange clutter of humanity it was,” he wrote. “There were some five or six Canadian soldiers, there were old women and there were children innumerable. A painter of genius — Goya, perhaps — might have done justice to the scene. I felt no verbal description could do so. In the half-darkened room the pasta for the midday meal was simmering over the fire in the corner. Haggard, prematurely aged women kept emerging shyly one after another from some inner chamber where an old man, the grandfather of one of the numerous children, was dying. . . . Another old man was uttering maledictions against Mussolini. Then his wife surprisingly produced a jeroboam of Marsala and a half dozen glasses and
moved among the soldiers, filling and re-filling glasses. . . . The children clambered around the Canadian soldiers and clutched at them convulsively every time one of our antitank guns, located only half a dozen paces from the door of the house, fired down the street in the direction of one of the remaining German machine-gun posts. Soon each one of us had a squirming, terrified child in his arms. And the old lady went on distributing Marsala.”
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After visiting the battalion headquarters of the Loyal Edmontons and the Seaforth Highlanders, Brigadier Bert Hoffmeister drove back to San Vito Chietino to check on the many wounded he knew had been evacuated from Ortona during the day. What he saw in the small hospital set up in the school there shocked him. The surgery was operating continuously, the two doctors seeming never to rest. German artillery was falling around the building. To protect one open-windowed wall from penetration by shrapnel, the medical staff had parked a hundredweight truck against the outside wall. The truck had suffered a direct hit and burned fiercely.

Wounded men lay everywhere inside the school. Most were on cots, but some were lying on blankets stretched out on the floor. The place was chock-full of wounded soldiers, many in critical condition. Hoffmeister was deeply disturbed to see that nobody had taken the time to even clean up the wounded men. “They still had the original blood from their wounds on their faces and their hands,” he said later. Hoffmeister knew the male orderlies were doing the best they could for the men, but they were too few and were needed to perform basic first aid or to help out in the surgery. Yet in talking to the wounded, it was clear that the filth and blood covering them chipped away the last vestiges of their morale. Men could die if they lost the spirit to live. Hoffmeister was sure that unless conditions in the hospital were improved, there would be unnecessary deaths.

He managed to discuss the problem with surgeon Dr. Frank Mills. The doctor shared his concern. Hoffmeister suggested that a request be sent back down the medical service chain of command, calling for some of the nursing sisters stationed in a hospital south of the Sangro River to come forward and help out. Officially women were not allowed so close to the battlefield, but the need was urgent.

Mills agreed to forward the call for volunteers. On the morning of Christmas Eve, a small group of mostly British nursing sisters arrived at the hospital. The request had been presented to the women in a group meeting during the night. Every nurse present had volunteered to go forward into the battle zone to offer what succour she could to the wounded Canadians. Hearing the news, Hoffmeister felt overwhelmingly proud of “those girls and their willingness to risk their lives by working under shell fire and within range of long-range German mortars.” They were, he thought, the angels of Ortona.
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A
T
1600 hours on December 23, the 48th Highlanders of Canada left the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment's position on the ridgeline in a single file. About 400 men, they carried only rifles, Bren guns, Thompson submachine guns, ammunition, grenades, and a few rations. Left behind were the mortars, the antitank guns, and the Vickers medium machine-guns and mortars of the Saskatoon Light Infantry support battalion. They trudged past the forward platoons of the Hasty P's and disappeared one after the other into a night drenched by heavy rain.

A mostly friendly rivalry existed between these two regiments of 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade. Both were formed from militias in Ontario. The Hasty P's came out of the province's rural roots: the men were drawn from farms, mines, and small factory towns. The 48th Highlanders hailed from Toronto. To the Highlanders, the Hasty P's were the Plough Jockeys. That regiment retaliated by spurning the Highlanders as the Glamour Boys, soldiers who looked good in their kilts marching down Queen Street but were of little use in a fight.