Mark Zuehlke is one of Canada’s leading military historians and has written extensively about Canada’s experiences of war, including Ortonoa: Canada’s Epic World War II Battle; The Liri Valley: Canada’s World War II Breakthrough to Rome; The Gothic Line: Canada’s Month of Hell in World War II Italy; Holding Juno: Canada’s Heroic Defense of the D-Day Beaches; The Canadian Military Atlas: The Nation’s Battlefields fro the French and Indian Wars to Kosovo; The Gallant Cause: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939; and Scoundrels, Dreamers and Second Sons: British Remittance Men in the Canadian West.
The Longest Campaign
By Mark Zuehlke
It was the invasion Canada could have sat out. Indeed, neither the British nor the Americans had requested Canadian participation. Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King and Lieutenant General Andrew McNaughton, who commanded the Canadian army overseas, both opposed any break up of the quarter-million-strong contingent poised in Britain like “a dagger pointed at the heart of Berlin.” First Canadian Army was only to be unsheathed as part of the Northwest Europe invasion.
King became more convinced of the sense of this course after the Dieppe disaster. Of the 6,000-man attacking force, 4,963 had been Canadians. Only 2,210 Canadians returned to Britain and 28 of these died of wounds. Of the rest, 807 were killed in battle and 82 of the 1,946 taken prisoner of war perished in captivity. It would have been better, King wrote, “to conserve that especially trained life for the decisive moment.”
There was no questioning that the Canadians were trained. The 1st Canadian Infantry Division had sailed for Britain in December 1939 and had since been engaged in countless training exercises. As the Canadian forces in Britain grew to five divisions and two independent tank brigades, the schemes became more gruelling and supposedly realistic.
But increasingly, Canadian public opinion chaffed at the restraints imposed by McNaughton and King. Montreal Gazette correspondent Lionel Shapiro depicted the Canadian army as “the first formation in the history of war in which the birthrate is higher than the deathrate.” In November 1942, the Winnipeg Free Press deemed it “sensible to send a full division to some theatre of war.”
In early 1943 King finally caved to the mounting pressure in early 1943 and asked British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to consider “employment of Canadian troops in North Africa.” The British responded on April 23 by requesting that McNaughton commit “one Canadian infantry division and one tank brigade” to “certain operations based on Tunisia.”
Canadian government approval followed just two days later and McNaughton received an immediate three-day briefing on Operation Husky—the forthcoming invasion of Sicily. Setting aside his reservations, McNaughton told Ottawa that Husky appeared militarily sound and committing Canadian troops was practical. McNaughton imposed one proviso. Once Sicily was won, the Canadians should return to Britain, where their battle experience could enhance the fighting skills of the entire army.
So it was that two months before Operation Husky’s July 10 launch, 1st Canadian Infantry Division and 1st Canadian Army Tank Brigade started frantic preparations to embark for the Mediterranean. On June 28, the Fast Assault Convoy bearing the Canadian landing force departed Scotland’s River Clyde. Three slower convoys bearing follow on elements were already at sea, with another scheduled to depart on July 1. The troops learned about Operation Husky only after the ships were at sea. Operational plans, maps, and aerial photographs of Sicily were broken out for study. Their first objective would be the town of Pachino and its vital airfield.
On July 4, three ships in one of the slow-moving convoys were torpedoed and sunk with a loss of 58 men, 500 vehicles, and 40 guns. Two days later a U-boat was sunk by escort destroyers when it attacked the Fast Assault Convoy. Mid-day, July 9, the Canadian convoys linked up south of Malta and then joined the thousands of ships steaming toward Sicily.
Italian defensive works guarding the Canadian landing beaches on the Pachino Peninsula were thought to number fifteen pillboxes and slightly more machine-gun posts. There were also four 147-millimetre guns about a mile and a half inland, and three miles away at the airport were four 6-inch howitzers. Should the Italians offer a determined fight, this was sufficient firepower to inflict heavy casualties. One staff scenario gloomily predicted that an entire brigade could be lost before the Canadians even got ashore.
The Canadians would land on two sandy beaches situated in a wide, curving bay. First ashore on the right-hand beach would be 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade’s Royal Canadian Regiment and Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment, while 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade’s Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry and the Seaforth Highlanders Canada would land on the left.
As the Canadian soldiers clambered aboard British landing craft, four Royal Canadian Navy flotillas were boarding British troops for landings at other beaches. Among the aircraft operating overhead were the Royal Canadian Air Force’s 417 (City of Windsor) Squadron’s Spitfires.
As the Canadian landing fleet hove to off shore shortly after midnight on July 10, bombs could be seen exploding on the Pachino airfield. At 0245 hours, 2 CIB’s assault battalions headed toward the beach under cover of a fierce naval bombardment. Landing on schedule and in the right location, the PPCLI easily swept aside a few disoriented machine-gunners. The Seaforths, however, were disembarked on the wrong side of the PPCLI. They splashed ashore regardless with bagpipes skirling. The Pioneer platoon’s Corporal Harry Rankin staggered up the beach with a bangalore torpedo and orders to clear a gap through the barbed wire. He found only a few rusty strands easily kicked aside. A few Italians were stumbling around trying to surrender. By 0400 hours 2 CIB had cleared its beach objective and was marching inland.
Meanwhile, 1 CIB’s attacking battalions were just heading shoreward after a delay caused by the discovery that a sandbar in front of their beach blocked access for the infantry landing craft. Because the soldiers had to be transferred to a different type of craft, the Hasty P’s did not reach shore until 0445 hours. The RCR arrived about an hour later, several minutes after sunrise. Although there was only light resistance, Hasty P’s Company Sergeant Major Chuck Nutley was fatally wounded by a bullet through the neck—probably the first Canadian to perish in the Italian campaign.
The Canadians were soon expanding the beachhead at a rapid pace, hampered more by the scorching heat than Italian resistance. In the mid-morning, the RCR closed on the airfield and ‘A’ Company became embroiled in a firefight with about 130 Italians guarding one of the howitzer batteries. Private G. C. Hefford was killed, but the Italian position was overrun by a spontaneous charge conducted by six other privates. Private Joseph Grigas won the Distinguished Conduct Medal and Private Jack Gardner the Military Medal for this action.
By nightfall, most of the Canadian force was ashore and either on or past every initial objective. Only seven men died securing the Sicilian beachhead and 25 others were wounded. In slit trenches across the breadth of the front, soldiers speculated about whether they would face tougher fighting ahead or just a hard, dusty slog under a hot sun. In the end, it would prove a bit of both.
At first, the Canadians were delayed by thousands of Italian troops wanting to surrender. One thirty-man platoon of the Loyal Edmonton Regiment, for example, rounded up 1,100 prisoners on July 12 alone. Then there was the march in the blistering heat. They followed an inland route that guarded the left flank of the British Eighth Army’s drive up the eastern coastline toward Catania and the ultimate objective of the Strait of Messina. On the Canadian left, the U.S. Seventh Army was conducting a multi-pronged sweep that would clear the western coast, seize Palermo, and then follow the northern coastline to Messina.
The rapid collapse of the Italian army led to giddy predictions that Sicily would be quickly won, but even as the Allies started moving out from the beaches, several German divisions were establishing a series of defensive lines out to their front. The Hasty P’s supported by the Three Rivers Regiment rolled straight into the first German ambush at 0900 on July 15 two miles west of the hilltop town of Grammichele. Anti-tank guns knocked out one tank, three carriers, and several trucks before the Canadians managed to rally and launch an attack that carried them into the town. The Germans immediately broke off the attack and withdrew, but the engagement had cost 25 Canadian casualties.
It soon became clear that the German tactic was to establish a well-entrenched defence using ridges, mountains, and river crossings to block the Allied advance and force a full deployment. As soon as the line was breached, the Germans quickly withdrew to yet another defensive position and the process was renewed. The German command knew its forces were too weak to hurl the Allies back into the sea, so sought only to delay the inevitable fall of Sicily for as long as possible.
At Valguarnera on July 18, the RCR met the fiercest resistance yet offered. To take pressure off the beleaguered battalion, the 48th Highlanders of Canada moved to seize a ridge south of the village. Corporal W. F. Kay won a DCM when his five-man section captured a machine-gun post manned by 15 Germans. Shortly after nightfall patrols of both battalions entered the village to find it had been abandoned. Canadian casualties were 145, including 40 dead, while 250 Germans were captured and an estimated 180 to 240 killed or wounded. Field Marshall Albert Kesselring advised Berlin that his men were battling highly trained mountain troops. “They are called ‘Mountain Boys,’ he said, “and probably belong to the 1st Canadian Division.” The German respect for the Canadian soldier was beginning.
For the next seventeen days, the Canadians were hotly engaged. At Leonforte, 2 CIB spent a night of tough house-to-house fighting. Agira fell only when the Eddies and Seaforths scaled the peaks overlooking the town. The fight for Agira cost 462 casualties—the most for any single Sicilian campaign engagement.
By the first week of August, the Germans were being pressed toward the northeastern coast of Sicily in such a way that the Americans, British, and Canadians were starting to trip over each other. The Canadians drove toward the town of Adrano on the western flank of Mount Etna, but so, too, did the British 78th Division. A race ensued, which was called off when the Canadians were ordered to stand down on the outskirts on August 6 to allow the British unrestricted access to the town. On August 17, the Germans evacuated Sicily. By then, the Canadians had marched 130 miles and suffered 2,310 casualties, including 562 dead.
Although Sicily presented an obvious jumping-off point for an invasion of Italy from the south, the Allied attempt to capture the island had not been based on this intent. Indeed, there had been no initial agreement that after Sicily there would follow further operations in the region at all. Invasions of southern France and Greece were also considered. On August 16, however, the Allied high command reached an agreement that Italy should be the next target and that such an invasion must come quickly before a massive German buildup of forces in Italy was completed. Given the urgency, no thought was given to releasing the Canadians from Eighth Army for a return to First Canadian Army in Britain.
Indeed, General Bernard Montgomery wanted them in the vanguard of the invading force. McNaughton put up no serious resistance and Ottawa quickly offered its approval. The decision meant that there was scant likelihood that 1st Infantry Division or 1st Armoured Brigade would return to Britain in time for any Northwest Europe invasion. Their fate was to undertake a long, arduous march up the Italian boot that began when the West Nova Scotia and Carleton and York regiments of 3rd Canadian Infantry Brigade landed immediately north of Reggio Calabria on September 3.
Again the opposition was mostly Italians, who eagerly surrendered by the hundreds. Occasional pockets of resistance were encountered, but the march north through Calabria was hindered more by retreating German engineers who left in their wake cleverly concealed minefields, arrays of road-blocking obstacles that were often fitted with booby traps, and demolished bridges. September 8 brought the Italian surrender.
Only token resistance was offered to the Eighth Army’s advance in southern Italy because the Germans had not yet finalized a defensive strategy. They did, however, fiercely oppose the American landings at Salerno on September 9 and nearly succeeded in throwing that invasion back into the sea. When it became obvious that the landings had succeeded, the Germans withdrew northward. The rugged southern countryside proved ideally suited for defence and the Allied advance slowed to a crawl. It took two weeks in October for the Canadians to advance just 25 miles from Lucera to Campobasso. Surprisingly, the Germans chose not to defend the foothill town and it served for several months as a rear-area base for future Canadian operations.
The stubborn fighting withdrawal was bought for the Germans to create a heavily fortified system of defensive lines intended to check the Allies well south of Rome and hold them in place through the winter of 1943–44. Dubbed the Gustav Line, it hinged on Monte Cassino, a 1,700-foot-high mountain looming over the town of Cassino, in the west and the Sangro River in the east. On November 28 the British began forcing a crossing of the Sangro River. Casualties were high; the Germans withdrew only grudgingly to a new line behind the Moro River. The Canadians took over the night of December 5–6.
Heavy rains had turned the landscape into a boggy quagmire and the rugged terrain, thick olive groves, and vineyard wires rendered support of infantry by tanks virtually impossible. The Canadians kicked off on December 6 with an assault across the Moro River on three fronts. Only the PPCLI made any headway, capturing Villa Rogatti. This attack, however, was supposed to have been a diversionary effort and, when the Royal Canadian Engineers determined it would be impossible to construct a bridge across the river below Villa Rogatti, the battalion was withdrawn. A firm bridgehead was finally established across the river at San Leonardo by December 9. A quick advance to the Ortona-Orsogna lateral road, forcing a withdrawal from Ortona was expected, but 1st Division found itself bogged down in front of a deep, narrow defile they respectfully nicknamed The Gully.
Repeated frontal assaults by one battalion after another were cut to pieces. Then on the night of December 14–15 the Royal 22e Regiment managed to outflank The Gully to the west. The eighty-one men of Captain Paul Triquet’s ‘C’ Company and seven tanks of the Ontario Regiment fought their way down the road behind The Gully toward a farmhouse called Casa Berardi. At one point the tiny force was driven to ground by stiff resistance based around a Mark IV tank. Sergeant J. P. Rousseau grabbed a PIAT gun, crept up close to the tank, and fired an anti-tank bomb that pierced the tank’s armour and detonated its ammunition. He won a Military Medal.
Still the battle raged and when the rapidly dwindling ranks of ‘C’ Company wavered Triquet urged them on. “The safest place for us is the objective,” he declared. At 1430 hours the Van Doos cleared the house. Triquet had just fourteen men left and only four tanks remained operational. But The Gully was turned and Triquet was the first Canadian in Italy to win a Victoria Cross. It took another four days, however, for the badly depleted Canadian battalions to finally seize the vital Cider Crossroads junction, after which the Germans withdrew from The Gully into the streets of Ortona.
Finally, on December 20, the Loyal Edmontons and Seaforth Highlanders fought their way into the outskirts of Ortona and became locked in a vicious house-to-house battle the German 1st Parachute Division refused to break off. The Canadians passed a grim Christmas in and around Ortona with no pause in the fighting. Somehow in the midst of the carnage, the Seaforth’s quartermaster and headquarters staff organized a sumptuous dinner for the line troops that was served in a church on the town’s southern edge. One by one the companies were withdrawn to the church, served dinner, and then returned to the battle lines. The Edmontons had no such reprieve. Private Melville McPhee did receive two bottles of beer and a few slices of cold pork. He drank the beer slowly, not knowing when another such pleasure might be his.
Not until the night of December 28 did the fight for Ortona end when the Germans quietly slipped away. The December fighting cost 2,605 Canadian casualties, including 502 killed. There were also 3,956 evacuations for battle exhaustion and 1,617 for sickness, out of a total Canadian strength at the beginning of December of about 20,000. First Canadian Infantry Division required a long period of rebuilding after Ortona. It had, however, mauled two German divisions—90th Panzer Grenadiers and 1st Parachute Division—and achieved its objective.
The New Year found the Canadians mired in mud and facing the Germans across the Arielli River just north of Ortona. No longer, however, was the Canadian contingent just one infantry division and an armoured brigade. For 5th Canadian Armoured Division had been shipped to Italy in early November and Major General Tommy Burns had assumed overall command of the newly-formed I Canadian Corps. The new division was blooded on January 17, 1944 when the Perth and Cape Breton Highlander regiments were thrown into a poorly conceived attack on the stout German defences behind the river. It was a disaster that achieved nothing but 185 men killed or wounded.
Allied attempts to break free of the Gustav Line continued to be frustrated throughout the rest of the winter. It was finally decided that a breakout could only be achieved if the U.S. Fifth Army and most of the Eighth Army undertook a joint offensive on the Monte Cassino front. Accordingly, the Canadians moved there in late April.
First into action on May 11 was 1st Canadian Armoured Brigade in support of 8th Indian Division’s attack on the Gustav Line. The Calgary Tank Regiment established a tenuous bridgehead by crossing the Rapido River on a Canadian-designed and -built Bailey Bridge secured to the base of a Sherman tank, then driven into the river to position the bridge firmly on both banks. This innovative bridge was later named after its creator, Captain Tony Kingsmill of the Royal Canadian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. Despite heavy infantry losses, 8th Indian Division succeeded in breaking the Gustav Line, opening the way for a new attack against the next line of defence, known as the Hitler Line. Like the Gustav Line, the Hitler Line was a formidable defensive system bristling with pillboxes, tank turrets mounted on concrete emplacements, and vast concentrations of barbed wire and minefields that fronted the entire line.
The job of cracking the Hitler Line fell to 1st Canadian Corps. Movement toward the line began on May 18. Knowing a set-piece attack against the fortified line was likely to result in heavy casualties, 1st Division’s Major General Chris Vokes made several attempts to pierce the line with impromptu attacks by individual battalions. When these were stopped cold, he implemented Operation Chesterfield.
On May 23, 1st Canadian Infantry Division attacked on the heels of a massive artillery barrage. All three battalions of 2 CIB attacking on the division’s right flank were soon tangled in the German defences and shredded by enemy fire. The supporting British tanks, the North Irish Horse Regiment, proved easy prey for the tank guns. In this single day of fighting, the brigade lost 162 men killed, 306 wounded, and 75 taken prisoner — the single highest loss rate suffered by any brigade in a day’s fighting in Italy. On the left flank, however, 3 CIB’s Carleton & York Regiment pierced the line. The brigade’s remaining two regiments and the Three Rivers Regiment’s tanks rushed into the narrow gap. Soon they widened this sufficiently to enable 5th Canadian Armoured Division to advance tank regiments with supporting infantry past the Hitler Line.
With the Hitler Line breached, Eighth Army could fight its way up the Liri Valley to Rome. It was soon joined by elements of the U.S. Fifth Army that broke through the line elsewhere and out of Anzio beachhead. The Germans continued to offer fierce resistance, frustrating hopes that 5 CAD would be able to achieve a lightning-fast breakthrough in the valley. The advance stalled briefly at the Melfa River in a costly battle by 5th Canadian Armoured Brigade supported by the Westminster Regiment’s mounted infantry for a river crossing. Westminster Major Jack Mahony won a Victoria Cross for his heroism during this engagement, but he was only one of many heroes there. Among these were Private John Culling who single-handedly knocked out a tank with a hand grenade and Sergeant S. R. White who continued to doggedly command his platoon throughout the battle despite being badly wounded. Each earned a Military Medal.
Only after Ceprano fell on May 27 did German resistance crumble. On June 4, Rome fell. Three weeks of action for 1st Canadian Corps brought with it a high price in casualties: about 800 dead, 2,500 wounded, 4,000 sick, and 400 evacuated for battle exhaustion. Two days after Rome fell, the Allies invaded Normandy and Italy became a largely forgotten theatre of war, except to the soldiers fighting there and their loved ones at home. Derided as the D-Day Dodgers, the rank-and-file transformed the epithet into a mark of pride.
The Allied march northward continued, reaching the Gothic Line in August. First Canadian Corps was given the task of breaking the line at Pesaro on the Adriatic coast. On August 25, 1st Infantry Division struck, aiming to open a breach which 5th Armoured Division could exploit. The battle proved costly as the Canadians encountered line after line of heavily defended ground.
At a pivotal moment, on the verge of the Gothic Line proper, 5th Division commander Brigadier Bert Hoffmeister discovered that the massive defensive system was only weakly held. Instead of adhering to the original plan for a slow artillery softening of the defences, the Canadians launched a hasty assault on August 30. The gamble paid off and the line broke. But the fighting that followed was incredibly fierce as one ridge or hill after another had to be taken in a seemingly endless series of frontal assaults. Point 204, Tomba di Pesaro, Monte Luro, Coriano Ridge, and San Martino each extracted their deadly toll. When the final heights of San Fortunato Ridge fell on September 21, the soldiers looked out on the Po River Valley. Behind them, the Canadians left 4,511 casualties, of whom 1,016 were killed.
The Allies hoped that breaking into the Po Valley would allow a rapid advance north into Austria, assisting in the collapse of Germany. By September, however, autumn rains had set in and mud soon mired the region, hindering armoured movement and enabling the Germans to continue their strategy of bitterly contesting each river crossing. Still hoping to turn the German withdrawal into a rout, Eighth Army advanced the very day after the Gothic Line Battle ended, with 5th Armoured Division right out front. It took until October 20 to capture the city of Cesena just twelve miles from the renewed offensive starting point.
Cesena stood against the Savio River, a muddy trough fifteen feet below ground level that was swollen with storm water. Raked by machine guns emplaced on the opposite shore, the western regiments of 1st Infantry Division waded the icy stream and established a toehold. They then threw back repeated counterattacks. At 0230 hours on October 21 four German Panther tanks and two self-propelled guns struck at the Seaforths and were in turn ambushed by a newly formed tank-hunting team. Among the ranks of these sixteen men was Private Ernest Alvia Smith, known as “Smoky.” Standing on a road in clear view of an approaching Panther, Smith blasted it with a PIAT. When Private James Tennant was wounded, Smith took up a position next to the incapacitated man and fought off repeated German attacks with a Thompson machinegun. His valour earned a Victoria Cross.
The Canadians spent November in reserve and then were given the task of capturing Ravenna. That attack began on December 2. Although the city itself was secured two days later, a bloody month-long battle ensued to the northwest for control of the ground between Ravenna and the Senio River. Known as the Battle of the Rivers, this bitter struggle would cost the Canadians 2,581 casualties—just 24 fewer than were suffered at Ortona and the Moro River. Ever-worsening winter weather brought the offensive to a stalemate on the Senio. Although the campaign would be renewed in the spring, the Canadians were not to be part of it. In February 1945, I Canadian Corps was withdrawn from Italy and soon reunited with First Canadian Army in northwest Europe.
Total Canadian casualties in Italy were 408 officers and 4,991 men killed. A further 1,218 officers and 18,268 men were wounded and 62 officers and 942 men were captured. Another 365 died of other causes. Of a total of 92,757 Canadians who served in Italy, fully 26,254 became casualties. Those who waded ashore in Sicily on July 10, 1943 and survived the entire campaign saw twenty months of service in Italy. And their long march was not ended. They were soon to fight their way through Holland and into Germany, remaining in action until the Armistice on May 7, 1945.