Sicily was in Allied hands by summer 1943, but stretched resources and fierce German resistance saw the march to Rome become a grim, bloody slog up the Italian peninsula
On 20 December 1943, the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment, known more informally as the ‘Hasty Ps’, were part of yet another attack on the Adriatic Coast aiming to try and break through to the small coastal town of Ortona – part of the German Bernhardt Line defensive position across the leg of Italy. The Hasty Ps had been part of the first attack more than two weeks earlier and had been in action almost constantly since then, save four days out of the front line when even then they were still within range of enemy shellfire. When Eighth Army, to which the Canadian 1st Division was attached, had launched its assault across the River Sangro a little under a month earlier, it had been expected they would be in Pescara, 15 miles (24km) north of Ortona, within a matter of days.
Brutal weather, mud, the terrain and dogged defence had crushed such ambitions.
The Hasty Ps attacked early that morning, the infantry advancing Passchendaele-style behind another massive artillery barrage, the reverberations of which seemed to be pounding as rhythmically as the increasingly heavily thumping heart of the battalion’s intelligence officer, Lieutenant Farley Mowat. They were advancing in open country, Ortona away to their right, the landscape dotted with farm buildings but also drainage ditches. Later in the afternoon, Lieutenant Colonel Burt Kennedy, the Hasty Ps’ commanding officer, sent Mowat to find a squadron of Shermans that was due to be supporting them. He was picking his way through the mud and between the drainage ditches and had just paused by a stone farm building when a salvo of Nebelwerfer mortars screamed in and landed 50 yards away. The blast knocked him off his feet and in through the doorway directly onto a prone figure that gave a loud gurgling belch. There was a sickening stench. Gathering his wits, Mowat realised he’d fallen onto a dead German paratrooper and then saw there were two more sprawled there in the mud and manure, and a fourth, still alive, sitting against the wall.
Mowat stared at the man, convinced he was about to be killed, but the German made no move at all.
“Vasser… haff you… vasser?” he asked.
Slowly Mowat got to his feet then realised the German’s left hand was clutching the stump where his right had been. “Dark gore was still touting between his fingers and spreading in a black pool about his outthrust legs,” wrote Mowat. “Most dreadful was a great gash in his side from which protruded a glistening dark mass which must have been his liver.” He was young, pale-eyed. Plaintively, he asked ag
