Green Devils on the Adriatic: The German Defense and the Fall of Rimini
September 5, 1944
Leaving the suburban town of Riccione on the Adriatic coast and heading northwest into Rimini, Highway 16 turns to the right a few hundred yards short of the southern boundary of Miramare airfield. The road curves to swing around the eastern boundary of the airstrip, which is the side lying closest to the sea. Just before it turns, this main road intersects with two others, Via Vittorio Veneto, which joins it from the left, and Via Flaminia. Overlooking this junction, and commanding the approaches to it, the airfield, and the outskirts of Rimini, is a small church. There have been buildings on the site of San Lorenzo in Strada for at least seventeen hundred years—Roman remains dating back to the fourth century A.D. were excavated in fields behind it in the 1930s.
The 1st Battalion of the 3rd Fallschirmjäger Regiment had prepared the position well. In open country to the side of Via Flaminia, a Panther turret with a 75mm gun was dug into a field with a concrete revetment. It was almost invisible. Helmut Bücher and his fellow paratroopers knew it was there only because they had paced out the distance to it across the fields, and because the crew of the gun had been coming over to the church in preceding days to join the paratroopers for meals. There were mortars and machine guns in the houses behind the church. Another Panther turret was in a stand of fig trees, behind them and to the right, aiming straight down the road approaching the church. It could hit any Allied armor at distances of around a mile. The three 88mm antiaircraft guns positioned around the church and the road junction were aimed south and west, and as seventy-seven British Shermans were discovering elsewhere on that same September day, they were capable of busting through the frontal armor of any Allied tank at 1,000 yards. The arcs of fire and ranges of the entire defensive company battle group had been worked out up to a half mile in front of and to the side of the San Lorenzo crossroads. The German airborne soldiers had the land marked out south, west toward Coriano, and east up to Rimini and the sea. They had dug a small fortress. The far eastern end of the Gothic Line was located only miles away, at the port of Pesaro. The Germans knew how crucial it was to hold the southern approaches to Rimini and the coastal plain west and north of it: the key defensive points were the San Fortunato and Coriano Ridges, and in the south the approach road to Rimini, which went straight through San Lorenzo in Strada.1
Before dawn had broken on September 3, Canada’s 1st Infantry Division and 5th Armoured Division had crossed the Conca River southwest of Rimini. The tempestuous rain that had suddenly poured out of the sky had stopped almost as soon as it had begun. The sun was now shining. The Royal Canadian Regiment, an infantry unit from the country’s eastern provinces, was moving up Highway 16, the southern approach road. They were in the same Universal Bren Carriers as the Westminsters, whom they had just replaced. They’d fought their way up through the suburb of Riccione, sidetracked under fire through defended houses near the beach, and then their progress was held up by a blown bridge. Pinned down by MG-42s situated in houses near the sea, they moved inland across irrigation ditches and through orchards of lemon trees, trying to outflank them. They’d moved farther away from the beach, and become caught up in a complex multibattalion firefight on the lower slopes of the Misano Ridge, and then stopped. They’d moved too far west of their axis of advance, which was meant to go straight up Highway 16. So during the night of September 4, they trudged back toward the tarmac of the road that approached the airport, reaching it just after first light. The men were exhausted. By the morning of September 5, the Germans had inflicted 300 casualties on this and the two other infantry battalions in their brigade.
Luckily, the weather was holding. Their company and platoon commanders organized them into the tactical formations that would advance up the road toward San Lorenzo in Strada and Rimini airfield. Early on the morning of the 5th, they set off. The first troops the Royal Canadian Regiment met as they pushed up Highway 16 were Turkoman troops from the German 162nd Division. These were mostly Red Army conscripts who had decided to join the German army after being captured during Operation Barbarossa in 1941. It was preferable to facing a certain death from starvation in a POW stockade. The Turkomans surrendered quickly, their machine-gun positions left lying empty in the lanky bamboolike shrubs at the side of the road. The RCR squads were relieved; this was going to be easier than they thought. They walked forward in long single lines on both sides of the road, the Bren carriers in the middle of the tarmac. Up ahead in the distance, their NCOs said there was a road junction. A lieutenant from the battalion’s B Company and one of his section corporals were in the lead of the column.
Suddenly, eleven huge thumping blasts roared from every point of the compass in front of them, and the almost instantaneous screeching whistle of incoming artillery, mortar, antitank, and tank shells. The air around them, the sky, the road, and the line of advance disintegrated. The incoming shells blasted chunks out of the trees and the tarmac, and blew the flimsy carriers into the air and onto their backs, burning instantly. Most of the men in range of the blasts were shredded like liver kicked through a colander, or hit by viperous scythes of shrapnel. The Royal Canadian Regiment had been on the line long enough to know instantly what was happening: they had walked straight into a massive ambush. Then the German MG-42 machine guns opened up, and it was as though the air in front of the Canadians was being torn apart in a series of high-speed ripping noises, bodies of soldiers blasted backward and sideways into the ditch or onto the surface of the road. The advance came to a sudden halt.
The German MG-42 belt-fed machine gun had one major flaw. Its rate of fire was so high that its barrel had a tendency to overheat after firing two to three hundred rounds and would start to glow red-hot. So the soldier firing it had to change the barrel, and this meant leaning forward, unlocking a retaining lever ahead of the cartridge ejection vent on the right of the weapon, sliding the hot barrel backward and out of its sleeve, and pushing in another one. In the hands of an experienced user, this series of small actions would take about twenty seconds; with a platoon of Russian soldiers charging at you, it could be done in fewer than ten. But it still meant that the soldiers being shot at by the machine gun, if experienced, had a tiny period of respite when they knew they weren’t going to get hit. By September 1944, the Allies had been on the receiving end of the MG-42 all the way up Italy and knew what they were up against. So for the men of the Royal Canadian Regiment attacking the church at San Lorenzo in Strada, it was the moment they could stand up and charge forward, or throw a hand grenade. But the sudden wall of enemy fire had taken them by surprise. The battalion hit the ground and stayed there. The Universal Bren Carriers were blown up like small toy cars kicked aside and torn apart by orange fire. The Canadian infantrymen were facedown on the tarmac, in the ditch. or in the field beside it, their faces pressed as far as it was physically possible to press them, without breaking a bone, into the earth or the grass or the gravel. The air continued to be torn apart.
A thousand yards away, Jäger Helmut Bücher was inside the church, his Mauser K98 rifle kicking into his shoulder with every shot he fired. But he knew that he was at the maximum extent of his weapon’s range, so after one magazine of five shells was used up, he held his fire. The paratroopers had pushed the pews inside the church up against the walls as added protection against tank fire. Most of the company was outside. There were 61 men in and around the church. A semicircle of deep foxholes had been dug around the front of the building, each one holding a dugout into which the soldiers could dive when incoming artillery shells, mortar fire, or aircraft ranged in. The paras had dug a tunnel from the kitchen of a building behind the church to the altar itself, where they had placed an MG-42 firing straight out of the wooden front doors. There were foxholes in the orchards and fields across the road, the two Panther turrets firing from left and right flanks, the 88mms from just behind and above them, the mortars coughing their thumping retort as they pushed 81mm rounds into the air. As the Canadians went to ground, the MG-42s ceased fire immediately. The sudden silence inside and in front of the church was palpable; on the floor of the church a last spray of ejected brass cartridge cases and black metal belt-retaining clips bounced and tinkled across the tiles. The air was hot and full of cordite and smoke from the antiaircraft guns. Men swigged water. When the German officers looked through their binoculars at the Canadian advance a half mile away, it was a bull’s-eye of orange flame and black smoke in the center of their lenses. Men flicked left and right like flitting ants. The German guns ceased fire. The fallschirmjäger knew from experience all the way up Italy exactly what the Allied soldiers would do next. First would come smoke shells to cover their position as they reorganized. Then there would be mortar bombs. Then four, maybe eight tanks would emerge from the smoke and drive straight at the entrenched positions, with two platoons or a company of infantry behind them.
And so it proved. The Canadians attacked twice that afternoon of the 5th. Then as the sun started to go down in the sky over Rimini, fighter-bombers from the Allied Desert Air Force roared in over the trees behind the Canadians, hitting the church and the positions in front of it with 20mm cannon fire and rockets. At dusk, the Royal Canadian Regiment attacked again. To their horror, as the platoons advanced up the road, the Germans paratroopers seemed to reappear from the very rocket craters the fighter-bombers had blown in the ground. The fallschirmjäger had learned their techniques at Cassino, under the weight of thousands of pounds of bombs dropped by American and British aircraft. If anybody knew how to fortify themselves in dug-in positions, it was them.
The Canadians attacked again that night, and a lieutenant of the Royal Canadian Regiment led his platoon straight through the front door of the church but was killed by a German panzerfaust, a single-shot antitank rocket. One of his section corporals followed behind him, killed four German paratroopers with his Thompson submachine gun, and survived being killed by a fifth paratrooper who ran out of ammunition. Lance Corporal Rodesse Duhaime, one of thirteen children from Espanola in Northern Ontario, was awarded the Military Medal and promoted to sergeant afterward.2 Meanwhile, the German tank turrets and antitank weapons could not fire on the church for fear of hitting their own men. The Canadians were pushed back: the limited space inside the church and at its entrance allowed only five or six men to fight effectively without blocking each other’s field of fire. The antitank guns and the dug-in Panther tanks kept any vehicles from approaching—the Canadians bought up tanks, as the Germans predicted. But none of them got closer than seven hundred yards at any point of the compass. As night fell, five burning Shermans sat in the fields next to the smoldering hulls of the Universal Carriers. The Canadian advance faltered—the platoon commander from B Company personally led two attacks into the church, but the distance between him and his battalion was too great—at least half a mile—and fire support was impossible. By dawn on September 6, the Canadian attack up Highway 16 had ground to a halt.
Rain then started pouring down. It reminded the Allies that the two days of renewed sunshine had been a surprise. There would be more sunshine to come in September. But the downpour that soaked the exhausted Canadians and German paratroopers who were still alive at Lorenzo in Strada on the morning of the 6th reminded them that this was the pattern of things to come until the spring. The church on the crossroads that still held out on the morning after the attack was just one Gothic Line battalion objective, held by half a German company of perhaps 80 or 90 men, three 88mm guns, two Panther turrets, six 81mm mortars, two PaK 75mm antitank guns, and five MG-42s. The surrounding battle for the Coriano and San Fortunato Ridges involved six divisions.
The Germans had pushed back the first Allied attack after the quick-thinking General Wentzell had provided two large battalions of reinforcements to the key points of Gemmano and Coriano. Now Lieutenant General Oliver Leese had to launch another attack on both. Two days before, on the evening of September 4, a British battalion had sent one platoon of 30 men on a reconnaissance of the key position of Gemmano village, which lay on top of a ridge north of Coriano, overlooking the valleys below that led to Rimini.
The platoon moved around, assessed the potential strength of the Germans, reported back to divisional headquarters that there was probably a battalion of Germans there, and left Gemmano to its own devices. Lieutenant General Leese therefore ordered his main British attacking force to proceed toward Coriano and Rimini, ignoring Gemmano. It was to be his second key mistake in the strategic handling of Operation Olive, a clunking, rigid plan that was proving inflexible on the ground. Gemmano was a fortress. It was manned by three capable battalions of the 100th Gebirgsjäger, a regiment of antiaircraft artillery—which meant 88mms—and a regiment of field artillery. There were 4,500 men overlooking the main Allied line of advance. It had to be taken before Coriano itself could fall.
The severity of the fighting was comparable to Monte Cassino—and it was totally unnecessary. The Germans had been given three days to build up their strength on the ridge while the British and Canadians had been failing to take Coriano, five miles farther south, and failing to advance along Highway 16 beyond San Lorenzo in Strada. It took four British attacks, and ten days, to take Gemmano. The Germans lost 900 dead and 1,500 wounded and missing. Every British battalion that attacked the ridge suffered more than 100 casualties. At the center of the village of Gemmano was a stone cross, which was finally captured by a British platoon from the Lincolnshire Regiment. “All around the bullet-chipped cross on Pt.449, the dead, khaki and field-grey, lay heaped, unburied, in score upon score; at their centre a soldier of the Lincolns whose hands were still frozen in death round the cross itself, which he had reached in his battalion’s first attack. Few regiments of 8th Army had ever known fiercer fighting than that of Gemmano.”3 Major General Arthur “Hol” Holworthy, a veteran Gurkha officer who was commanding the 4th Indian Division at that point in Italy, was more brutal and succinct in his diary: “A good show. Gemmano full of dead and smells like another Cassino.”
Allied bombers and guns then dropped five hundred tons of bombs and artillery shells on Coriano Ridge on the night of September 12. At five o’clock in the morning, the Westminsters, who had spent six days resting, moved up into the line. They were accompanied by some of the best infantry and cavalry units the Canadian forces had bought to Italy. They included the New Brunswick Hussars, the Perths, the Cape Breton Highlanders, the Irish, the tanks of Lord Strathcona’s Horse, who had been with them at the Melfa River. Nine hundred smoke shells were fired onto the German positions, but the Westminsters came under immediate and heavy shellfire. But with the tanks of the Strathcona’s Horse ahead of them, they pushed forward, using the techniques that they had perfected earlier that month, as well as in the Liri Valley. Sergeant Len Bailey, the sniper who was commanding the scouts and sniper platoon, perfected a method of approaching a German position while accompanied by a tank. On the edge of the Coriano position, a German machine gun was situated in one of the lower rooms of a house, firing out of the window. Bailey “stalked” his way up to the door. Unable to break in because of the machine-gun fire, he radioed a sniper colleague, who contacted their tank support on the radio net: a Sherman of the Strathcona’s simply drove up to the door of the house and fired its 75mm main armament through it.
The next day the weather broke again. The Westminsters were preparing for another week of fighting in sodden ground in wet uniforms, on roads and hillsides that turned to soggy bogs, where streams swelled to rivers overnight, where mud appeared everywhere there had been mere dust the previous day. But suddenly they were drawn out of the line again, sent back to Riccione, and told they were due another period of “rest and recuperation.” It all sounded suspiciously easy. Something was wrong. It was as though the senior command was about to launch them in the vanguard of the last assault on the center of Rimini, defended as it was by the surviving battalions of General Richard Heidrich’s fallschirmjäger. They were, after all, one of the most combat experienced battalions in the Canadian army and thus the logical choice to go into the breach first. But no. They arrived on the soggy, rainy windswept beach at Riccione, south of Rimini. Then they moved inland. A mobile bath unit appeared, which was always a sign that they were going to be out of the line for at least forty-eight hours. Then they began training again—this time with flamethrowers. Things were deceptively peaceful. The regimental diary summed up their one wish: “As long as the Westminsters had been in Italy, there had always been the wistful thought that … if the ‘one more ridge’ directly in front of them could be captured, the regiment would emerge in flat country where the Germans would not be looking down and accurately directing fire at them … At last that ‘one more ridge’ became a reality. It was the San Fortunato, southwest of Rimini, and it commanded the coastal entrance to the plains of Lombardy.”
Two days later, the unit’s commander went forward and stood on the ridge, which had just fallen to the Canadians. He returned smiling, saying that as far as he could see from San Fortunato, “It’s as flat as a pool table.”
Rimini fell on the morning of September 21. Greek, Canadian, and New Zealand units had battled back German paratroopers from both sides of the airfield, swung right, and pushed into the center of the city. The church at San Lorenzo had fallen too, to a concentrated tank assault. The Germans had pulled out, pouring north to avoid being outflanked by the Allied success in—finally—taking San Fortunato Ridge. At 7:45 A.M., the mayor of Rimini officially surrendered to the 3rd Greek Mountain Brigade. Winston Churchill, very mindful of the need to keep Greece onside as an ally just as the Russians were entering Bulgaria, had decided that they should have the privilege of taking the city, to avenge the loss of Athens to the Germans in 1941. It was for this reason that the Westminsters had been halted and taken out of the line. The month-long battle had cost the Allies 14,000 casualties, of whom 4,500 were Canadian, along with 660 tanks. Allied casualties approximated 140 dead and 600 wounded every day in the last week of the battle. The Germans lost 7,000 dead and wounded, and another 7,000 “disappeared” or went missing. Their 10th Army was reduced to a shell—of its nineteen list divisions, by the end of the battle of Rimini and Operation Olive, only ten of them were above half strength, most considerably below.
And the final casualty of the supposedly grand battle of mobile warfare that was meant to be the sweep to the Adriatic? Which had turned out to be a slow, inflexible slugging match after the Allies lost the initiative on Highway 16, at Coriano and San Fortunato? Its very architect, Lieutenant General Oliver Leese. Shortly after the fall of Rimini, he was sent to command 11th Army Group in Southeast Asia. This included the highly individual and capable 14th Army, commanded by the legendary Lieutenant General William “Bill” Slim, the architect of British victory in Burma. On arrival, Slim made note in his diary of Leese’s style of command and management: “He and his staff were rather inclined to thrust Eighth Army down our throats.”