Attacking Germans in Defensive Positions: “a most unpleasant and hazardous operation”
Turin, Italy, June 2015
I was six, I remember, when my father first gave me advice on the best way to attach two loaded thirty-round magazines on a .45 Thompson submachine gun. We were sitting in a railway carriage together in West Sussex, in the south of England, on the way to join my mother and my siblings for a day’s outing by the sea. I remember three things very distinctly about that moment: First, my father was smoking, through his war-wounded fingers, a Player’s No. 6 filterless. Second, the blue cigarette smoke in the railway carriage batted and swirled in the warm air, buffering against the dust motes raised from the hot Southern Region Railways upholstery on which we were sitting. Third, it was 1968, and I had recently been reading an article in a Sunday newsmagazine about the war in Vietnam, containing striking images of U.S. Marines fighting in the citadel of Hue, taken by the photographer Don McCullin. What, I asked my eternally patient father, would he have taken to Hue if he had had to go that day? A Tommy Gun or a Sten? And why was the former so much better?
Drawing on his cigarette, my father talked me through the benefits of the Thompson. Attaching two magazines together was easy, he said, and gave you double the amount of available ammunition. You took a strong rubber band, he said, and attached the clips together with one of them upside down. It was a technique, he said, that he and his men had been taught by American paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division, with whom his wartime British cavalry unit, the 15th/19th King’s Royal Hussars, had operated in Holland in autumn 1944.1 My father liked the .45 Thompson that he had kept in the turret of his Cromwell tank, a heavy but reliable weapon, without the shoddy faults of the British Sten gun, which he said jammed repeatedly and was cheaply made. He also liked the American paras from the 101st, men whom he remembered as very young, very brave, and irreverent wisecrackers, smoking Lucky Strikes, carrying “a lot of weapons” as they rode into battle on the back of his fellow Hussars’ tanks. It was a reciprocal relationship, and one that years later would see the light of day in film, in an episode of the television series Band of Brothers, a dramatization of Stephen Ambrose’s account of the men of Easy Company, from the 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne, at war in Europe.2 The 15th/19th and the 101st had briefly fought together in the autumn of 1944 during and after Operation Market Garden outside Eindhoven in Holland, where my father had learned his skills with rubber bands and submachine-gun magazines.
Like so many of his generation, my father didn’t talk very much about the operational specifics of the war. His tank unit had arrived in Normandy in August 1944, as armored reinforcements for British cavalry units decimated in the fighting around the town of Caen. His regiment’s enemy was a mixture of panzergrenadiers and SS tank units in Tigers and Panthers, an enemy that he found brave, arrogant, ruthless, and tactically brilliant.
As children, we had heard about the physical exhaustion of the tank advance from Normandy to the Seine, and across Belgium into Holland. He told of being so exhausted after a day in combat in France that he fell asleep in the pouring rain, lying facedown in a waterlogged plowed field, bivouacked next to his tank. He told the ubiquitous and probably apocryphal story of the young British cavalry subaltern, an Oxford graduate, who had disembarked from his tank in a Normandy orchard, exhausted after an afternoon of combat against the SS. The young officer, face stained with smoke and oil, had loosened on his battle dress blouse the khaki ties that officers wore in those days, often even in battle. A wry comment had come from across the orchard from an aristocratic squadron commander, admonishing the subaltern for this atrocious display of sartorial laxity. “Christ Church? Never a very dressy college, clearly.”
My father had told of using the horns of a Friesian cow, killed by shellfire in a Dutch orchard, as props on which to rest his binoculars during a reconnaissance mission of a German position, and of watching Typhoon fighter-bombers strafing German tanks. His tank had been the first in the regiment to knock out a German King Tiger, my father directing fire by lying on the outside of the tank, on the engine cowling. His binoculars observed the fall of the twelve shells fired at it, of which three hit the armored giant, setting it on fire. The moments of tragedy were many. In late August, his unit engaged some three hundred Germans, dug in behind stooks of corn. Half of them turned out to be Poles, conscripted on the German side. The enemy surrendered and white flags went up, but in the dying, confused moments of the firefight, moving forward to help a wounded colleague, a close friend of my father’s was mortally wounded and died that evening.
But our father never really talked about his time in combat. We all knew he’d been in the wars, as they say, from his badly burned face and head, to his disfigured hands clasped in an eternal clench where the tendons had retracted when he was burned. It made it easier, he said later, rather drily, to roll up his own cigarettes. We’d seen his Military Cross, but we never knew what exactly had happened that day in Holland in October 1944. It was something he kept to himself and a few former colleagues. A fellow Hussars officer who had fought with him in Holland said fifty years afterward that what my father had done had completely changed the course of that day’s battle.
We grew up in the 1960s. Half the adults around us seemed to have fought in the Second World War. A bearded ex–Royal Navy lieutenant commander taught us mathematics at prep school; he could always be relied upon to be diverted from quadratic equations and Pythagoras by myself or a classmate asking him to recount, just once more, the events of the night his Motor Torpedo Boat had taken on a German E-boat in the English Channel. The story always ended the same way, with the description of a German Kriegsmarine bosun being riddled with British 20mm cannon fire at close range, the drum of heavy automatic fire hammered out for us on the school desk by the lieutenant commander with the blackboard eraser. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to him, one of our classmates was covertly looking up the answers to that day’s mathematics test questions in a textbook hidden under a sweater on his lap.
Then there were my mother’s male friends who had, in the vernacular, “a good war.” First among these was Lewis “Bobby” Hodges, an RAF bomber pilot who went on to fly Special Operations Executive agents in and out of occupied France in a Lysander. Hodges ended the war in one piece, as a squadron leader with a Distinguished Service Order and bar to his name, a brace of Distinguished Flying Crosses, and the French Croix de Guerre and Legion d’Honneur. The latter was awarded for his bravery and flying skill in whisking two future presidents of France, Vincent Auriol and François Mitterand, out of the country to attend a meeting with De Gaulle in London. As children, we were encouraged by our mother to eat as many carrots as possible—hadn’t that made the eyesight of Group Captain John “Cat’s Eyes” Cunningham so acute? Enabling the British RAF night-fighter ace to shoot down twenty German aircraft? It was, of course, radar, but we didn’t know then, so we ate carrots at any given opportunity.
Then there was my paternal grandfather, who’d gone over the top on the Somme in 1916 with the Leicestershire Regiment, survived, become a staff officer, and then spent part of 1918 as a prisoner of the Germans. He wrote in his war diary that during his time as a POW he met the Kaiser. His wife’s two brothers—my great-uncles—had been at Gallipoli and on the Western Front in the Royal Flying Corps respectively. The latter had been a pilot, shot down in 1918. The former a sixteen year-old in charge of a Royal Navy landing craft, who later went on to become part of the team that developed ASDIC, the British sonar radar system used to track submarines. My mother’s brother, my uncle John, had served with the Norfolk Regiment in India in 1945 and then during the partition of the country. My father’s sister Elizabeth, ever mindful of the dictates of wartime secrecy, had waited until she was ninety to tell me she’d worked at the code-breaking establishment at Bletchley Park in southern England. Her husband, Peter, had served in France. And on the American side of the family—my aunt Anne had married an American—my uncle John had served as an engineer officer in Normandy with the U.S. Army. Both world wars were therefore present in our childhood and family history.
But it was to be only a year or two before his death in 2002, age eighty-two, that my father stood in the kitchen of our house in rural Herefordshire, in the west of England, and told me what had happened that day in Holland in 1944. I think he knew that his days were coming to an end, and he’d realized by then that as a foreign correspondent who’d reported from Rwanda and Somalia and Kosovo, I’d probably seen my own share of battle and bullet, and might know what he was talking about. So that day, he leaned against my mother’s ancient stove, fiddled with his regimental tie, and outlined how best to address the difficult and thorny problem of attacking German soldiers dug in to good defensive positions.
“If you can’t outflank them, go straight at them,” he said. “Move very fast, and not hang around. No shilly-shallying” (one of his favorite condemnatory phrases, meaning “to dawdle.”).
“It’ll cost you casualties, but it’ll take half an hour, not three days, and it will save countless lives later.”
It was pretty much the first time he had spoken of that day when, as an acting captain in Holland on October 17, 1944, he had put this operational stratagem to the test. We talked for much of the afternoon, as outside the kitchen window one of my mother’s cats positioned itself atop a fence post on pigeon watch. My father talked of unsung and undersung heroes, of medals given and not given, of friends who had died in Burma and Italy, of men whose bravery had changed the course of a dozen small battles in the war. He talked of a Cambridge University friend who’d disappeared at the hands of the Japanese, and he talked a lot about Italy, a lamentably forgotten war, he said, where a friend serving in the Welsh Guards had won the second two of his three Military Crosses. My father was to die himself the following year, from a heart that had never really recovered from his wartime wounds. At his funeral, six of his sons carried his coffin, as a party of veterans from the Royal British Legion marched in front of it. Two of his favorite hymns were played, “Abide with Me” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” I remembered, standing that afternoon in the chilly British village church, that the latter was something he had once hummed, a mischievous smile on his burned face, when stoking a garden bonfire. The smell of smoke, he said, reminded him of Normandy and Holland, of going into battle with the 101st Airborne. It was to be six years later that one of my brothers recovered from London’s National Archives the original citation of his Military Cross.
The signature scrawled across the bottom of it is easy to read, nearly seventy years after it was written in an operational headquarters somewhere in Holland. “B. L. Montgomery,” it says, with a stamp below it reading: “Field Marshal, Commander in Chief, 21st Army Group.” The prose is the dry, clipped, and understated wording of the World War II gallantry citation. My father had, on October 17, 1944, led four Cromwell tanks of the 15th/19th King’s Royal Hussars in an attack on a heavily defended Dutch village of IJsselstein. It lay on the axis of the Allied advance toward the town of Overloon, in eastern Holland. My father’s attack was just one very small part of Operation Aintree, the British assault to take the Venlo salient in eastern Holland. The four tanks of B Squadron were supporting two companies of 1st Battalion, the Herefordshire Regiment, which had been tasked with advancing up the road leading to the village: the boggy ground on either side of this access route was not just flooded but also mined. Steep banks made any tanks driving down the road highly visible targets. Intelligence said that German 88mm guns and mortars were covering the road. They didn’t know the strength of the Germans defending it. Within minutes of the advance beginning up the road, the Herefords started taking heavy incoming mortar and artillery fire, and took cover behind a road bridge. The citation describes it crisply and with admirable understatement: “There were a number of officer casualties and very little progress was being made. Enemy fire was extremely heavy and others were hanging back. Captain Jennings’ troop was therefore ordered to advance up the road unsupported by infantry, owing to the conditions mentioned above, a most unpleasant and hazardous operation.”
“Hanging back.” Clearly shilly-shallying was going on. Within minutes of his Cromwell tanks pushing ahead of the pinned-down infantry, my father’s tank was hit and immobilized. He radioed back to his squadron commander that he had driven over a mine. By this time the four tanks, exposed on the road that ran like a spine through the soggy fields, were coming under heavy and accurate machine-gun and antitank fire. IJsselstein and its outskirts were occupied by a German battle group of SS soldiers and regular army panzergrenadiers, supported by the 88mm antitank weapons, capable of busting through the armor of any known Allied tank at distances up to a thousand yards. Along the side of the roads, in the edge of the surrounding pine forests, were dug in 75mm PaK antitank guns and MG-42 machine-gun nests. A German officer present that day in the village estimated there were around 400 panzergrenadiers, many of them with substantial experience fighting in Russia, dug in around and in IJsselstein. They also had tanks. Against them on the approach road? My father, with four Cromwells, one of them immobilized, and 15 men. An unpleasant and hazardous operation indeed.
Climbing out of the second tank in the line (the citation describes him as “completely unperturbed”), my father, in a sodden overcoat and battle dress, poured himself into the turret of the first tank and roared off up the road. The 7.92mm Besa machine gun in the hull was firing left and right into the fields. Within minutes, the tank was hit by an enormous jarring smash as an antitank round went through the engine compartment, the Cromwell crunching to a halt. My father radioed back that he was engaging the antitank guns dug into the tree line and was firing at the infantry supporting them. A sitting duck, he continued to fire on the Germans with the tank’s 75mm gun and its machine gun. Then the tank was hit again. Twice. One of their own phosphorus shells inside their hull ignited, the German antitank round blasted “metal splash” off the inside of the turret, and my father was hurled out of the turret, into the air, and onto the metaled road by what he later described as a “Pentecostal wind.”
His gunner and signaler, both wounded, took cover on different sides of the road’s embankment. The driver was stuck inside the blazing hull. Rifle, bazooka, and machine-gun fire from the German infantry whizzed and sang over their heads, into the soggy ground, and ricocheted off the tarmac. My father’s greatcoat was on fire; he’d been hit in the foot and was very seriously burned, with his ears, mouth, and nostrils half scorched away. His goggles had, luckily, protected his eyes. His gunner ran across the road and stamped out the flames on his coat. My father looked down at his hands and described the skin on them “peeling off like a pair of white gloves.” Nevertheless, he climbed back onto the blazing hull of the tank to try to get his driver out to safety. But he was dead.
Pulling himself down, he ran around to the back of the tank, pulled off the first-aid box, and dashed over to one side of the road, as rounds bounced off the tarmac around him. He did his best to help his wounded gunner lying in the ditch, then crossed the road again, under heavy fire, and gave first aid to his signaler. He then ran and stumbled back down the road to the next tank in the troop, and reported the position of the lead German antitank gun to its commander: the gun was immediately knocked out. With his arm then slung around the shoulder of his wounded gunner, who had joined him, he staggered back down the road to report to his squadron commander. His next memory was of waking the following morning in a hospital in Eindhoven. He’d had a tracheotomy during the night, as his scorched windpipe had closed up, and had received the last rites.
When he was eventually to stand in front of King George VI at Buckingham Palace several months later and receive the Military Cross—the gallantry citation signed by Field Marshal Montgomery recommended an immediate MC—my father was lost for words. The king, with his famous stutter, dramatized in the film The King’s Speech, stood in front of my father, and asked “Were you b-b-b-brewed up?”
All my father could say was, “Yes, Your Majesty.”
* * *
Ten years after his death, and after fifteen years of reporting wars and the eternal residues of conflict across the Balkans and central Africa, I moved to Italy, to the heartland of the “forgotten war” that my father had talked about in the Herefordshire kitchen the year before his death. And within days of arriving in Turin, a classical city of history and melancholy tucked up in the northwest near the French Alps, I discovered something very fast. Seventy years on, the Second World War in Italy was not remotely forgotten. Very far from it. On an exploratory walk one winter’s day into the center of the city, I emerged from a side street into the Baroque glory of Piazza Castello. To my left was the Palazzo Reale, former home of the dukes of Savoy. Just behind me was the entry to one of Turin’s many Catholic churches. On the wall outside the church entrance was a huge stone plaque, curlicued and designed like an ancient scroll. In front of it was a small Italian man, smartly dressed, overcoated against the pre-Christmas chill. His homburg hat was clasped in front of him as he stood before the scroll. On it were listed the names of the Italian divisions whose men had fought, and mostly died, on the Russian Front, largely at Stalingrad. There were the names of some of the Alpini mountain divisions—Julia, Tridentina, and Cuneense—and the motorized division, Duca d’Aosta, all from around Turin. I said nothing. Behind me, on his plinth, the statue of a nineteenth-century Italian soldier, saber drawn, stood silently, his form softly flickered by the snow falling across the square.
Reminders of the last war seemed to be everywhere. Walking back from Piazza Castello, I passed the windows of an Italian antiques dealer in a cobbled side street. The shop’s wares were piled dustily on little shelves: a Wehrmacht pay book, a cigarette lighter embossed with Mussolini’s head, a statue of the Virgin Mary that lit from within, and a ham-fisted nineteenth-century oil painting of a mustachioed lord and master interfering with one of his servant girls. Half hidden behind them I saw a silver teaspoon embossed with the twin lightning flashes of the SS, and a cereal bowl, made in Bavaria in 1938, with the same runic device in large black markings on the bottom. Italy had been, it must be remembered, a country very strongly occupied by the Germans. In Turin, reminders of dead Italian partisans surprised one on random buildings.
Outside a popular supermarket, a small brass square, three inches by three, was set into the pavement. It announced that this was the spot at which an Italian man had lived, before he was deported in 1944 to Mauthausen concentration camp, where he was executed in March 1945. On the wall of the main train station at Porta Nuova, an engraved carving commemorated the Italian Jews who were put onto cattle trucks there. When I went out running, the route I took led me past at least four different plaques set into the walls on street corners, where Italian partisans had breathed their last during street fighting to liberate the city in April 1945. One park I ran through was named after a partisan leader killed in Auschwitz. To get down to the towpath by the sluggish, green waters of the wide River Po, I took a curved and steep little alleyway, named for all those who died in German concentration camps.
A book on Italian partisans in the Second World War was on the country’s spring best-seller lists. On a Saturday morning in April, the queue outside the Museum of Resistance was made up of ten-year-old children, its noisy line snaking around the block. A huge poster prominently displayed across the city showed one of American photographer Robert Capa’s pictures from Sicily in 1943. In it an American soldier, helmeted, crouching, listens to a Sicilian peasant in clogs and waistcoat who, with a stick, is pointing out the location of nearby German positions. And all of this was before the annual celebrations for Liberation Day on April 25. This commemorated the day in 1945 when Turin and Milan were liberated, and when the National Liberation Committee of Upper Italy announced the end of twenty years of Fascist dictatorship. This led to the liberation of northern Italy, and the death—by shooting and public hanging—of Mussolini three days later. The liberation of Bologna, Venice, and Genoa followed, and resulted, in the eyes of Italians, in the referendum of June 2, 1946, which led to the end of the monarchy and the creation of the Italian Republic.
That day, on April 25, the news on Italian television was filled with pictures from war memorials and cemeteries across the country. Italian generals, soldiers, police officers, carabinieri, air force pilots, naval officials, customs officers—essentially everybody in the country entitled to wear any form of uniform—had put it on that day. And in Italy, where sartorial display is an art form, this was an awful lot of people. Even the staff from Turin’s glistening subway system seemed to have spruced up in a full-dress version of their dark blue costume. But what struck one was the sheer number of cemeteries containing the bodies of Allied servicemen that seemed to feature in the Liberation Day proceedings. Military attachés from several foreign embassies in Rome—including India, Poland, Great Britain, Brazil, New Zealand, South Africa—seemed to be saluting on television everywhere one looked. They were in those war graves around Salerno and Anzio, of course, where the Allies had come ashore on the Italian mainland in autumn 1943 and spring 1944. They were there near the rows of crosses in the graveyards at Monte Cassino, and those near the old defensive lines on Lake Trasimene and the River Arno.
But looking at the hours of television footage, and tracking the locations across the map of northern Italy, you could see that cemetery after cemetery followed a line that stretched diagonally across the north of the country from northwest to east. It went from La Spezia in the west, on the Mediterranean coast of Tuscany, to Rimini on the Adriatic coast. And if you watched the television closely, or visited the cemeteries themselves in the days after April 25, you’d see the piles of wreaths left for the different nationalities of soldiers who had died on or near this line of battles that stretched across the whole of Italy. There were the Americans, of course, GIs from Lieutenant General Mark Clark’s 5th Army, buried at Florence and Nettuno, and the men of the British 8th Army who’d fought under Lieutenant General Oliver Leese, buried at Forli. There were the Canadians buried at Coriano Ridge cemetery outside Rimini, and the South Africans at Castiglione. From then on, the number of nationalities burgeoned, diversified, and branched out to encompass the different continents of the globe. There were Brazilians buried at the Moro River, while elsewhere were interred Jewish volunteers from Palestine, Maoris from New Zealand, Rhodesians, Poles, French, Indians, Gurkhas from Nepal, Greeks, and French colonial troops from Senegal. And in a piazza in Pietrasanta, on the Mediterranean coast, there is a memorial to some of the bravest and most heavily-decorated soldiers who had fought for the Allied and Commonwealth cause. These were the Nisei, the second-generation Japanese Americans who had joined the U.S. Army rather than face internment. Fighting in Italy in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, they were to win so many gallantry awards that they became, for their unit size and length of service, the most highly decorated unit ever in the history of the U.S. military.
The fighting among the Allies, the Germans, and the Italians between 1943 and 1945 was to produce an extraordinary selection of unsung heroes, some decorated, some not, who, like my father in Holland, had believed in taking the initiative against Germans, of unthinkingly turning the course of battle. These were all men who had embarked on the “hazardous and unpleasant operation” of attacking Germans dug in to good defensive positions. Many of them, the Japanese Americans, the African-American “Buffalo Soldiers” of the U.S. 92nd Infantry Division, the Indians, the Brazilians, were from units that didn’t necessarily match the popular stereotype of the Allied soldier, which made their exploits, and the often untold stories of their units, all the more remarkable. Like my father, who with his four tanks had been the tip of 11th Armoured Division’s spear, many of these men and their units’ actions had helped change the course of battle. For the German defensive positions they had attacked in those last two years of the war in Italy had been part of one of the biggest, best-constructed man-made and natural defense positions of the whole Second World War. This was the string of defensive redoubts and positions that followed the Apennines across northern Italy, Field Marshal Kesselring’s last line of defense designed to stop the vast multinational Allied armies breaking through into central Europe. Its name? The Gothic Line.