The ship carrying our motor transport had been torpedoed off Malta, and so there was no alternative for us except foot-slogging. We marched along the verges, where there was no grass, only more of the eternal dust. Occasional Sherman tanks rumbled past, obliterating whole companies in a hanging shroud. Nevertheless, the attenuated brigade column, strung out over many miles, slowly worked its way upward into the hills.
There were occasional brief halts during which we could look back at the broad blue sweep of Pachino Bay dotted with minute ship models. But most of us just stared down at our steaming feet as we dragged at the incomparably bad issue cigarettes whose smoke was bitter and acrid in our parched mouths. Evening brought surcease from the heat but none from dust and thirst. The roads became steeper and exhaustion took its toll. Men began to drop out and were left behind. Other men slept on the move—a trick learned on English training schemes—and were guided by comrades who were themselves staggering with fatigue.
At midnight we passed through our first Italian town, but I have no memory of it except that there was a well in its central square—a well which had been sucked dry by the time we reached it. A few miles beyond this place, and some twenty miles from the starting point of the march, the Regiment finally halted. We staggered into the stony fields and collapsed. We were beyond caring about food. We died on the hard ground... and three hours later were goaded to our feet and set upon the road once more.
It was noon of July 12 before we halted again. By then we had marched nearly fifty miles and it was not within our strength to do more. Nevertheless, the pursuit of the retreating enemy could not wait and so a squadron of Shermans lumbered up; and like a group of somnambulists, we of Able Company clambered aboard the monsters to become the vanguard of the advance. To us those tanks were as heavenly chariots. On we rolled, passing through the deserted, stinking streets of the town of Giarratana until at midnight we came to a halt on the lip of a high plateau.
The agonizing march was at an end, but our ordeal was not. Before we could surrender to the stupor of exhaustion, we had to establish a defence perimeter by scraping rudimentary weapon pits in the rock-hard soil. We could hardly have cared less if we had been told to dig our own graves.
I have few coherent memories of that horrendous march... only hazed images, obscured as if by the perpetual dust itself.
...sprawling on my stomach during a too-brief pause on a bald hillside that shimmered under a destroying sun... Alex limping toward me, looming like a white rhinoceros, his voice cracking with drought... “What the blazes are you lying about for, Mowat? Look to your men’s feet!”
...seeing Corporal Mitchuk, that unamiable man, already burdened with his section’s Bren gun, wordlessly slip an anti-tank projector from the sagging shoulders of an unidentifiable ghost and stagger on with both weapons slung across his sweat-soaked back.
...sitting, head bowed, on a rock so hot it scalded my backside, dully watching a tarantula which, disturbed by our invasion, was cautiously seeking safer shelter. Then a hand on my shoulder and something thrust into my face... a water bottle containing an ounce or two of tepid, stinking fluid that I sucked in as greedily as ever a baby did its mother’s milk... and Sergeant Bates’s gravelly voice: “Take it easy, for Christ’s sake, that’s all there is!”
...the certain knowledge that I could go no farther and the equally certain knowledge that I must. Slyly slipping my officers’ escape kit (to be opened only if one was captured) out of my pocket, unscrewing the top of a tiny phial of Benzedrine and forcing the tablets down the dry gulch of my throat.
...clinging to the smoke projector on a tank turret, the metal so hot it seared my hand, and hearing the scream of horror from a man in Eight Platoon as he lost his grip on the sloping front of the following tank, and slid into the roaring vortex of dust between its churning treads.
...thinking of being a fighter pilot, wheeling high and free in the cool mercy of some northern sky... and a sudden flaming rage against my father for having inveigled me into the clutches of the infantry—“The Queen of Battle!”
THAT WISTFUL DESIRE to be a pilot instead of a foot-slogger was short-lived. Soon after dawn next day two Messerschmitts came screaming at us out of nowhere. They sprayed the road that ran through Able Company’s position with a clattering flail of tracer... then flew straight into the massed fire of a light anti-aircraft battery hidden in a roadside hollow. One of the German planes went into a hill behind us at three hundred miles an hour. The other staggered into an abrupt turn and scrambled desperately to gain altitude, but as it slid out of sight over a distant ridge it was trailing a long plume of greasy black smoke.
The eruption of anger against my father had amazed and frightened me, for I had not known that I carried within me any such smouldering resentment. But such is the resiliency of youth, and the perfidy of memory, that it had faded, together with most of the other miseries of our blistering march, into insignificance before we ended the forty-eight hours “at rest.”
“At rest!” Ah, the unconscious humour of the military mind. Here is the way we took our ease.
Through most of the first day all of us—officers and men alike—sweated and swore over the obligatory task of hacking more weapon pits and deeper slit trenches into the flint-hard soil, equipped with nothing but entrenching tools—diminutive spades with foot-long handles that each man carried slung on his web belt. This we were forced to do despite the assurances of an armoured-car squadron, which had thrust fifteen miles beyond our position, that the enemy had abandoned the entire region.
The digging done, my next task was to distribute “compo” rations to my bone-weary, half-starved men who had subsisted up to this time on their emergency rations—the can of bully beef and two or three biscuits which each of us carried in our packs.
Designed by some chairborne genius in England, the compo pack consisted of a wooden crate containing everything fourteen men were supposed to require for twenty-four hours: hard-tack biscuits in lieu of bread; canned yellow wax, misleadingly labelled margarine; tins of M&V (unidentifiable scraps of fat and gristle mushed up with equally unidentifiable vegetables); canned processed cheese which tasted like, and may well have been, casein glue; powdered tea, milk and sugar, all ready mixed; turnip jam (laughingly labelled strawberry or raspberry); eight (count them) tiny hard candies for each man; seven India-made Victory cigarettes which, it was rumoured, were manufactured from the dung of sacred cattle; six squares of toilet paper per man (the surplus, if any, could be used to roll one’s own cigarettes—if one had any tobacco); and one further item which caused more trouble than anything else—a twelve-ounce can of treacle pudding that was an irresistible object of desire to every one of us and the memory of which can still set me to salivating like a Pavlovian dog. Its appeal lay in the fact that it was soaked in molasses, and we were starving for sweet stuffs.
Dividing the contents of two compo packs into scrupulously equal portions for the thirty-three bodies in a full-strength platoon was no task for ordinary men. Because my non-commissioned officers were fully aware of this, it was impossible to pawn the distribution off on Sergeant Bates or even on a committee consisting of my three section corporals. Their sense of self-preservation was too keen. As Bates frankly told me:
“No bloody way you can please all those sons a bitches, and you short one of them on his treacle pudding and he’ll likely shoot you in the back!”
Bates may have thought my back was armour-plated. In any event, dividing up the rations was the job I detested above all others.
On our first day of rest in Sicily I somehow fumbled through the distribution, after which we all slumped in a state of mindless exhaustion beside our slit trenches and glutched down our rations cold. We were not permitted to light even a tea fire in case a twirl of smoke might give away our position to the long-departed enemy.
The meal finished, we “stood-to” through the twilight hours, manning our weapons and ready to repel an enemy attack. After that,
all hands except the guards were permitted to sleep. Despite our fatigue, sleep did not come easily, for we were wearing thin tropical kit (shorts and bush shirts) and had neither coats nor blankets. Since we had by then climbed a couple of thousand feet above sea level, the night was bitter chill. It was short, however, for at 0500 hours we had to stumble to our feet, buckle on our equipment and stand-to again, staring through glazed eyes into the dreary dawn, waiting for an enemy who did not come—could not come and did not want to come, being much too concerned with continuing his retreat.
Stand-to was one of several sacred rites that had been carried over from the First War. Throughout the whole of the Italian campaign, the Canadian fighting troops were required to stand-to at dusk and dawn whenever they were in the line, although never, in my experience, did the enemy prove so foolish as to attack at those times when we were so ritu-ally prepared.
After stand-to on the morning of July 14, we were required to spend an hour cleaning our weapons before being allowed to eat our scanty breakfast. It seemed just possible we might then be allowed to take life easy for awhile, but at 0800 Alex called his platoon commanders together to tell us we were to be honoured by a visit from a VIP.
“Fall in for parade at 0930,” he told us. “Meanwhile, get your men cleaned up. I want every one of them to be a credit to himself and to the Regiment.”
I was frankly afraid to carry this news back to my platoon. In cowardly fashion I passed it on to Bates, who stared at me in outraged incredulity for a moment before letting fly a string of obscenities directed at the high command, for which any court-martial would have awarded him five years in prison. Nevertheless, when parade was finally called I found my men tidied up as well as circumstances would allow.
All save one. Doc Macdonald looked like a dissolute gnome who had spent an unwashed lifetime working in a combined flour mill and blast furnace. When I tasked him with his dreadful appearance, he blew his top.
“What the hell you expect? I got to spend most of my time cleaning up after you, like a dog with a dumb pup, and then you want me to turn out in dancing togs? Screw you and the bloody VIP.”
It seemed best to leave Doc behind to mind the shop while we marched off to join the rest of the Regiment which was assembling in a natural amphitheatre a mile distant. Once there, we stood waiting, as Paddy Ryan put it: “For God to make his appearance out of a fiery cloud.”
It was not God who came; it was his self-anointed deputy. General Bernard Montgomery, fabled commander of the Eighth Army, descended upon us in a long, open Bentley limousine. We came to attention, presented arms, and then were told to “gather round” while the ferret-faced little man in his black beret stood up on the back seat of his car waving an Egyptian flyswatter, and gave us the Word.
We were, he told us, first-rate troops who had done extremely well so far.
“But there’s a big task ahead, my lads. The Eyeties are packing it in but Jerry is determined to hold on to Sicily. Our job is to toss him out! We’ll do it... yes, we’ll do it! See him off, by Heavens! So keep up the good work, lads. I’ll have my eye on you, never fear. Eighth Army always looks after its own!”
Then the unthinkable happened. From a rear rank a deep voice shouted:
“Where the hell’s our beer ration then?”
The flyswatter twirled furiously and Montgomery grinned wolfishly.
“No beer. No room on the ships yet for anything but guns and ammo. First things first, you see? And while I’m on the subject, I strongly advise all of you to leave the Eyetie wine alone. Deadly stuff! Can make you blind, you know.”
Lieutenant Colonel Sutcliffe hurriedly called the battalion to attention and the big staff car started up and drove away.
Although the visit had been an imposition on us, we were nevertheless so proud of being part of Monty’s Eighth that the fulsome entry in that day’s war diary was not entirely a false assessment:
... as a result of this stirring experience, all ranks were imbued with much added enthusiasm and an increased respect for this great commander.
All ranks? Not, I fear, Doc Macdonald.
PERHAPS BECAUSE HIGHER command could think of nothing else with which to plague us, we were allowed the afternoon to ourselves. Corporal Mitchuk and several of his cronies disobeyed a strict injunction to remain inside our defence perimeter and slipped quietly away. They returned an hour or two later to prepare themselves a dinner of “scrounged” chicken and goat, washed down by quantities of acrid red wine of a quality which seemed to confirm General Montgomery’s opinion of Sicilian vino.
I was permitted to share this meal and did so gratefully; nor did I ask any questions about its provenance. Division had ruled that scrounging was a version of looting, and looting was forbidden under penalties of as much as ten years’ imprisonment. This was grossly unfair, for while looting was outright theft, scrounging normally entailed some kind of barter. Sergeant Bates spoke for every fighting man when he proclaimed:
“If they clobber us for scrounging they can kiss their goddamn army by-byes. If we gotta live on the issue crap they feed us, any ten-year-old Wop with his hands tied behind his back’ll be able to kick the living Jesus out of us!”
I SPENT MOST of that strangely quiescent afternoon writing letters.
This country is absolutely foul. Dry as a bone, hot as hell during the day, and icy cold at night. The whole place looks like the North Dakota badlands. Towns are few and scruffy, always perched on hills like ravens’ nests, and the stink has been collecting in them since Year One. The civvies are dirt poor and look half starved. The Eyetie soldiers are crack troops though—they crack every time we hit them. We’ve made fantastic progress but may slow down a bit now because the rumour is that Jerry is moving south to meet us, and he is a horse of another colour. But not to worry, we’ll light a rocket under his tail too!
Most of the men dozed the hot afternoon away in the thin shade of the ubiquitous olive trees. For them it was enough simply not to be on the move; but off by himself A.K. Long sat reading, his back to a gnarled tree bole, deep in the world of Herman Melville. I drifted past him, dearly wanting to stop and chat but afraid of a rebuff.
After supper the platoon commanders were called to Company Headquarters, there to find a battle-hungry Alex.
“Fifty-first Div’s bumped the Jerries at Vizzini,” he told us with delight. “Soon as they clear the town the Regiment’s to move through and take the lead. Praise be we’ll get real action now!”
Vizzini was nearly forty miles ahead and we moved up to it on borrowed transport as the German defenders were abandoning the town. At 0600 on July 15 the order came for us to push forward on the German rearguard’s heels.
This was a motorized thrust headed by Baker Company clinging to a squadron of Shermans. Able followed with two platoons jammed into trucks, led by my platoon rumbling along directly behind the tanks in three of the lightly armoured, open-topped tracked vehicles known as Bren carriers. The rest of the battalion, accompanied by more tanks and a squadron of Priests (25-pounder guns mounted on tank chassis) stretched out for more than a mile astern.
It was another glaring day. The arid hills loomed desolate on every side while to the north the white cone of Etna shimmered in distant splendour. The road looped and laboured over a wild landscape. Villages of prehistoric origin hung on their pinnacles of sun-blasted rock. Decaying fortresses—relics of wars that had raged through Sicily for three millennia—looked down upon yet one more invading army. Brown fields burned under the smoking dust stirred by our column, and here and there little groups of desiccated peasants straightened bent backs and stared as impassively at our military might as they probably had at the guns and armour of the retreating Germans short hours earlier.
There was a tingling expectancy upon us, for though none could know where or when the enemy would be encountered, the column was committed to roll ponderously on until it “bumped” the German defences.
The first encounter was anticlim
actic. An approaching pall of dust resolved itself into a small truck of unfamiliar make hurtling out of the north at breakneck speed. It did not slacken pace until it seemed about to collide with the leading Sherman, which had stopped and was tracking the approaching vehicle with its 75-mm cannon. There was a shriek of brakes as the stranger skidded to a halt. Then followed a moment of absolute immobility while we stared at this apparition. Its occupants stared back, dumbfounded, into the muzzles of scores of weapons aimed directly at them. The moment ended when two German privates in the khaki uniforms of the Afrika Korps leapt down to the road, hands thrown high in panic-stricken surrender. Drivers of a ration truck, they had misread their map and lost their way... a thing that was easy enough to do in Sicily.
Having unexpectedly and bloodlessly taken our first German prisoners, we moved on. The lead tanks climbed a high saddle and paused on the crest, appearing to sniff suspiciously as their out-thrust cannon swung slowly back and forth. Below us lay a flat and formless plain stretching to the foot of a massive escarpment some three miles distant upon whose crest rose the crenelated silhouette of a town.
Cautiously the tanks lumbered down the slope to the valley floor. Dust plumes rose high and straight in the still air, proclaiming our approach. Slowly we rumbled across the parched plain and began the ascent of a switchback road that zigzagged up the escarpment. The lead tank, with most of a platoon of Baker aboard, had reached the outskirts of the hillcrest town when the crew of a hidden anti-tank gun sprang the trap the Germans had so carefully contrived for us.