Ortona (68 page)

In San Leonardo, I pause for food at a small grocery. A woman prepares a sandwich. In my poor Italian I explain my purpose in tramping across country seldom visited by foreigners on foot.
Il Guerra
. As matter-of-factly as she cuts prosciutto and cheese, the woman says her parents died in the bombardment of San Leonardo. Sisters, brothers, all killed. The village ruined. She left an orphan.

Near her store is the monument to civilian dead. Such monuments are to be found in every village and hamlet near Ortona. This one is an abstracted image of a person with arms extended toward heaven, lips open, beseechingly. A plea for mercy? A cry to the heavens for a reason for their suffering?

Estimates of the number of civilians killed during the Battle of Ortona vary. Many Canadians question the accuracy of Italian figures. Statistics are numerous, contradictory. The most accurately detailed figure appears to be 1,314. A toll that links each numerical casualty to a name. But even this is complicated by a question of timelines. Canadians see the battle as spanning a time frame of December 5 to January 4. In the Italian mind, the battle lasted until the Allies left Ortona in the late spring of 1944. Not until the Allies were far enough north that the town and countryside were no longer subject to artillery fire or aerial bombardment did the battle end for them. Then there are the civilians killed even later by exploding shells and mines. Have they been counted?

Antonio D'Intino buried several close friends and relatives in the months after the battle. He also eventually married Anna Tucci, the young woman from San Donato. They live today much as Antonio lived in 1943, on the land across the ravine from Ortona. Their house is the same as the one in which his father died of pneumonia in the spring of 1944. It is still heated by nothing more than a small wood-burning brazier in the corner of the kitchen. When I visit them one late afternoon, they are in bed to keep warm from the unexpectedly chill December weather. They rise, wrap themselves in sweaters and scarves, and put blankets over their laps, open wine, and light a small fire. We sit for hours at the kitchen table, while they tell their stories. My hands grow numb taking notes in a cold the wine and the meagre fire do little to abate.

Antonio tells me of a time in the early spring of 1944 when seven teenage boys tilled a nearby field. They moved in line, working shoulder to shoulder. One boy struck the detonating pin of a Teller antitank mine. All seven were killed. Casualties of the battle? Or victims of the larger frame that was World War II?

Armies sweep into a landscape and fight their battles. Then they leave. The civilians are left to clean up the detritus. Between San Leonardo and The Gully to the south of Cider Crossroads, I see few signs of war's passage. Only the occasional stone building with its roof collapsed in a manner I now know is caused by the impact of an artillery shell. Those same buildings are usually deeply pocked by the strike of small-arms fire. As I walk along, I finger a fragment of shrapnel given to me the day before by a member of the Berardi family. Michael thinks, because of the width of its curving arc, it is a piece of casing from a 105-millimetre artillery round.

Casa Berardi still stands, little changed from when the battle raged around it. The Royal 22e Regiment erected a small memorial next to the building in honour of the heroism of Captain Paul Triquet and the other Van Doos who succeeded in capturing this objective against great odds and at the loss of many lives. There is also a plaque, installed by the Royal Canadian Regiment, on the side of Sterlin Castle, where Mitch Sterlin's small platoon held off successive waves of Panzer Grenadiers.

Walking through the Ortona countryside, lulled by the softly
repetitive scenery of olive groves, vineyards, and farmhouses, I ponder the point of the battle. Historians and veterans alike remain conflicted. Should the battle have been fought? Michael and I worried this question at length while standing on ridges or sharing
vino rosso
and
grappa
at Ortona's Ristorante Miramere. At one point, we stood on a promontory looking north up the coastal highway. It may or may not have been Point 59, where the battle ended. We were unsure and there was no tower in sight.

Michael said, “Your job is to help defeat Germany by diverting divisions from northern Europe and from the Russian front. You are confined to a narrow band of ground between the Apennines and the Adriatic. There is no operational ground in the mountains. This road hugs the coast all the way to northern Italy, and from there you might get into Austria and even beyond that to Germany. There are the rivers, of course. Always another after the last one. To advance, you have to win the rivers. One at a time. Delay a month because of the weather and you achieve nothing. The Germans can move divisions freely while you sit and do nothing. So you cross the Sangro River and that brings you to the Moro River. The weather is closing in. But you have a fresh division. So you go one river farther. It would have been difficult to predict the cost.”

Following a one-lane road passing under the massive concrete spans near the crossroads that today allow vehicles travelling on the coastal autostrada to whisk effortlessly over the width of The Gully, I decide that Michael's soldierly explanation is the clearest. There are Canadian historians who vie to saddle 1st Canadian Infantry Division Major General Chris Vokes with the blame for an ill-considered battle. Hardly fair. Vokes marched to orders, just as each private did. Bernard Montgomery gave the orders. His “colossal crack” turned out to be a colossal conceit. Michael's assessment regarding the coast highway and the unavoidable strategy of advancing up it to Italy's northern border was only part of Montgomery's reason. Pushing the commander to reckless haste was the desire to beat the Americans to Rome.

A fool's errand. Travelling to Ortona by train through the valley extending from Rome to Pescara was a sobering journey for me. It seemed inconceivable that Montgomery seriously thought the
Eighth Army could win Rome via this route of advance in winter. Defensible positions abound. Hilltop fortress towns provide virtually impregnable bastions upon which to anchor a defensive line. The terrain in that valley is far more hostile to an attacker than any I encounter between the Moro River and The Gully.

Whatever the individual verdict about the larger issue of the battle's purpose, there is another question historians and veterans push around when the subject of Ortona comes up. Was the battle well fought? Nobody questions the accomplishment of the regiments or of individual soldiers. They did their duty and did it well, absorbing casualties that might well have sent many armies fleeing the field. But there is the lingering question of whether Vokes mishandled the battle's execution.

Most veterans who offer an opinion seem to agree that he did. First, there was the opportunity frittered away at Villa Rogatti. An exploitation from there would have bypassed both The Gully and Ortona. But, of course, Vokes was presented with the “impossible bridge.” So perhaps he is not entirely to fault on that miscalculation.

Then there is the issue of whether he should have taken the battle into the streets of Ortona. Certainly this ran against standard military doctrine of the day. Generally, you were to avoid fighting in built-up areas. Of course, nobody in either Vokes's or Eighth Army's intelligence sections expected the Germans to make a stand in Ortona. The same military doctrine argued that they would withdraw the moment the Canadians broke into the outer edge of the town. Once the Canadians and Germans started fighting in the streets of Ortona, it would be impractical for the Canadians to break off the action.

And then, as Albert Kesselring noted, the world press transformed the battle into a matter of Allied versus German prestige. More important to their respective commands, Canadian versus German prestige. It is significant that when the battle was finished, Allied public relations officers were cautioned about their dealings with reporters: “DON'T before Rome is captured claim it as a great military objective. Show that Rome as a town has no military significance.” I think it is armchair hindsight that leads us to fault Vokes for getting drawn into the Ortona street battle.

Where Vokes was in error, where he came close to destroying the
division he commanded, was in his overall execution. Specifically, his insistence on feeding the regiments into individual battles against well-defended objectives. It seems Vokes could not think on a divisional scale or implement a divisional-level offensive. He committed his regiments piecemeal, allowing each to be chewed up before withdrawing it and sending another into the fray. Several opportunities to achieve a breakthrough, particularly at The Gully, were thrown away through this approach simply because there was no regiment in reserve that remained capable of capitalizing on an advantage gained. Had he outflanked The Gully early on, rather than waiting until several regiments had been mauled in head-on attacks, the battle undoubtedly would have been decided sooner. It is also possible that he then would have seen the wisdom of abandoning the direct drive up the Ortona-Orsogna lateral into Ortona in favour of the hook he eventually had 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade and the 3rd brigade's Royal 22e Regiment and Carleton and York Regiment throw toward Torre Mucchia.

Standing on the southern edge of The Gully, it is unthinkable to me that Vokes failed to see the folly of frontal assaults. I wonder if he ever came up to the actual front to see where his regiments were dying? There is no record that he did. The Gully is a daunting land feature, readymade for defence. Too many Canadians died there needlessly. I am less convinced they died for no purpose in Ortona itself.

Generals, of course, make plans; soldiers pay the price of execution. It is their voices that murmur in my ear as I join the Ortona-Orsogna lateral road and walk along its verge through the industrial park that stands now on the ground across which the Loyal Edmonton Regiment made its assault on December 20. For every veteran's voice I can hear, there are many more who remain silent. Five out of six declined to be interviewed. Ortona has left its imprint on the hearts and minds of many soldiers in a way other battles perhaps did not. How often I heard, “It's not something to talk about. It should just be forgotten.” These veterans were not talking of the war itself, or of their overall experience. They were speaking of December 1943.

Yet the veterans who were there seem unable themselves to forget. Many who declined an interview remarked that they had gone back to Ortona once, twice, sometimes repeatedly. In December
1998, a few days after I left Ortona for Canada, a group of about fifty veterans arrived. Their visit was a significant affair, but one organized and paid for by a private Canadian benefactor rather than the Canadian government. For the first time, Canadian veterans and German veterans sat down together in the church of Santa Maria di Costantinopoli for a Christmas dinner reminiscent of the one taken by the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada on Christmas Day, 1943. A group of Ortona citizens provided the meal. The dinner was accompanied once again by organ music played by Wilf Gildersleeve. Former enemies emerged as somewhat wary comrades. Many spoke of a healing being achieved.

Ortona itself is physically healed from the battle's destruction. Entering Ortona, as the Edmontons did, along Corso Vittorio Emanuele, I see a town that has risen anew from the rubble. The great dome on Cattedrale San Tomasso has been restored. Holes in the walls of Santa Maria di Costantinopoli were repaired. Many of the old buildings were reconstructed, so parts of the town retain its old-world charm. Elsewhere, the buildings are modern. Ortona has grown, sprawling over to the other side of the western ravine and extending to the edge of The Gully. But today few outsiders think of it as the “Pearl of the Adriatic.” Ortona is a poor town, its economy fragile. There are many government-subsidized housing complexes. Most tourists are Germans, who are more willing than most people to swim in the heavily polluted Adriatic. The old castle is buttressed by a complex steel-scaffolding system. A sign declares that this is part of a restoration project. But the sign is a decade old and the work does not progress.

While Ortona is not prosperous, the countryside always amazes the veterans who return. When they marched over the Moro River, they entered a landscape ravaged by artillery bombardment. Their memories of it are stark. The farmers seemed desperately poor, simple peasants. It was a land remembered in black and white — rather like the old war photos and documentary footage that recorded the two great wars of the twentieth century.

The farms today are relatively thriving. Houses are well cared for. Country folk drive expensive Italian cars and chatter on cell phones in the same way as their city cousins.

In winter, the countryside is a lush collage of colours and thick vegetation. It is more reminiscent of the Quebec townships in early fall than of a land burdened by winter. Temperatures are erratic. In the course of one day, it can be so warm you strip to shirtsleeves, only to be shivering an hour later when a chill wind blows off the Adriatic. One hour more and a heavy, icy squall races over you. The night after my trek from the Moro to Ortona, I strolled after dinner through soft moonlight back to my hotel. The evening was warm. I wore only a blazer, unbuttoned. In the night, I woke to a hush reminiscent of Canada. Sure enough, it was snowing. In the morning, olive trees bowed under the heavy weight and some branches broke.

While Ortona and the surrounding countryside have recovered physically, the battle remains etched in the memory of the people. Remembrance is often paid. The stories of the suffering a family endured are nurtured and kept alive from generation to generation. So inculcated into the community psyche is the battle that merely mentioning that I am
Canadiense
and writing about the battle gains me entry to virtually any home. Despite the fact that the Canadians brought upon Ortona a great deal of destruction and death, there is a great sense of respect for the sacrifice made by the Canadians, who are viewed by all people of this area as liberators.