The Canadian war monument in the heart of Ortona, the Italian city on the Adriatic coast, does not paint a picture of glory. It depicts a Canadian infantryman on his knees comforting a fallen comrade who lies before him, dying. The monument, installed in Ortona in 1999 by the battle’s Canadian veterans, is called the Price of Peace.
Friday, Dec. 28, marks the 75th anniversary of the Canadian victory at the Battle of Ortona, one of the fiercest battles of the Second World War and the only example of house-to-house urban combat in the war’s Western European theatre. Known as “Little Stalingrad,” Ortona was Canada’s first big stand-alone victory of the war but it came at a huge cost.
The total casualties of the Canadian 1st Infantry Division – dead, wounded and missing – in the battles in and around Ortona in the month of December, including the savage Moro River campaign immediately south of Ortona, totalled 2,339 men, of whom 502 were killed. The Canadian war cemetery just outside Ortona holds the graves of 1,375 Canadians who were killed in the region. It is the biggest Canadian military cemetery in Italy and one of the biggest in Europe.
The German casualties were also atrocious but they were fewer than the Canadian losses. According to military historian Mark Zuehlke’s gripping book Ortona: Canada’s Epic World War II Battle, the German 1st Parachute Division, the elite soldiers who defended Ortona itself between Dec. 20 and Dec. 28, officially reported 455 casualties (the figure excludes the heavy Moro River losses taken by another German fighting unit, the 90th Panzergrenadier Division). The Germans didn’t consider Ortona a defeat. There was no mass surrender. The paratroopers vanished like ghosts three days after Christmas, leaving the utterly destroyed city to the Canadians.
Today, only a few Canadian veterans survive, each of them well into their 90s. One of them is Edmund (Ted) Griffiths, who was a Sherman tank commander in the Three Rivers Regiment in the Moro River and Ortona battles. Stoutly built, with a white beard, he is 96 and lives in the Perley and Rideau Veterans’ Health Centre in Ottawa, where he gets around in a wheelchair. He was born in London, Ont., is the son of a First World War veteran and worked for many years as an executive assistant to John Turner, the former Liberal Party leader and prime minister.
Interviewed by The Globe and Mail just before Christmas, Mr. Griffiths said he landed with the Allies in Sicily in July, 1943, and fought his way up Italy’s eastern coast with the 1st Canadian Division, which was part of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s British 8th Army. At first, in Sicily, the Canadians were met with little resistance. “Only met Italians in the beginning and they wanted to make love, not war,” he said.
The fighting intensified the farther north they went and became brutal by the time they reached the Moro River in early December as the Germans dug in along the Gustav Line, which stretched across the Italian peninsula, preventing the Allies from reaching Rome.
He remembers the Germans having filled the narrow streets of Ortona with enormous piles of rubble from demolished buildings. Prevented from moving forward in the clogged streets, the Canadians were in effect funnelled into the few unclogged streets – a trap – where they were mowed down with MG42 machine guns, capable of firing 1,200 bullets a minute, or blown up in booby-trapped buildings. To avoid the streets, the Canadians pioneered "mouse-holing,” which saw them blast holes through the walls of adjoining houses so they could flush out the Germans and keep moving through the town.
At one point after the famous Christmas Eve dinner, where the Canadian soldiers rotated in and out of a church courtyard for their first warm meal in weeks, Mr. Griffiths got lost in the alleyways and ran into a lone German soldier. In his memoirs, he wrote: “Lunging forward I drove a knife in deeply just above the belt buckle then swiftly drew it upward, effectively gutting him before he could utter a sound.”
Mr. Griffiths returned the next day and, after going through the dead German’s pockets, learned that his victim had yet to reach his 17th birthday.
Then there were the sticky bombs. “They had a bomb that they could slap against the tank and it would stick and explode a moment later." Mr. Griffiths said the Germans "used to go up into the second story of a building and as you moved along, they would lean out and drop these sticky bombs which glommed onto the top of the tank, which was the weakest point of the tank. And it would blow in and kill the crew.”
By Dec. 26, six days after the battle for Ortona started, the Canadians had advanced only 400 metres into the city. At one point, Maj.-Gen. Vokes, the Canadian commander, considered calling off his apparently futile frontal assault.
But Gen. Montgomery had ordered Ortona to be taken and Adolf Hitler had ordered the city to be defended. An Italian documentary about Ortona called Bloody Christmas, which made its debut on the 65th anniversary of the battle, confirmed the battle’s political nature by revealing that Joseph Stalin had taken a keen interest in Ortona. He sent observers to the site. They returned to the Soviet Union well aware that the Allies were fighting hard in Europe, not just drinking beer while the Soviets took horrendous losses against the Germans on the Eastern front. Remember, this was six months before D-Day.
Mr. Griffiths said he felt no sense of victory on Dec. 28. “I don’t think we thought about that,” he said.
Perhaps the Canadians were simply too exhausted and had suffered too many losses to relish their hard-fought win. But Mr. Griffiths said the British 8th Army commanders were impressed by the Canadians’ determination. “The British took the Canadians for granted and we had to teach them a little respect,” he said. “It was an important battle in the sense that it was longer and bloodier than some of the ones that preceded it and some of the ones after it.”
The Battle of Ortona was largely forgotten after the war, even if it was big news during the war – the CBC war correspondents Matthew Halton and Peter Stursberg had risked their lives covering Ortona. The 1st Canadian Division received more glory for its role in the liberation of the Netherlands in 1945. Gen. Montgomery did not even mention the battle in his memoirs.
On the 75th anniversary of the Canadian victory, ceremonies, including an oratorio written by former poet laureate George Elliott Clarke, are being held at Ortona. But the federal government is not sending a minister. The Ortona literature is limited to a small number of books whose authors tried to determine why the Allies considered the minor port town such a crucial target, and why the Germans chose to defend it. The debate continues to this day.
The oldest residents of Ortona have not forgotten the battle. Absolutely every family was effected in some way by the fighting, some tragically so – more than 1,300 civilians died in the onslaught. The grandmother of Leo Castiglione, the current Mayor of Ortona, was killed in the battle and his father, then a child, was wounded. Not all the stories are grim. As in all wars, there are incidents of epic bravery and small miracles.
Tommaso Cespa, 85, a former metal worker, was 10 years old during the battle. On Dec. 21, 1943, he and his parents fled Ortona with members of another family, not all of whom could escape – a few were trapped in the city without food or water as buildings around them were blown apart in German and Canadian attacks. The other family’s small back dog, Bric, was with the group that had escaped. They wrote a message to the effect of “We will come soon to bring you food – don’t give up hope.” The message was tied to the dog’s neck and he was told to “go home.”
Bric scurried off through the battle and found the family. Two days later, a relief party bearing food made it to the hungry family members. “They were safe,” Mr. Cespa said. “I’ll never forget that dog. It was a hero.”
With the help of the Canadian veterans and a local British guide and translator, Angela Arnone, Ortona has built a small museum devoted to the battle and is trying to raise funds to enlarge it. Some still visit the vast and heart-rending Canadian war cemetery, where one of the graves belongs to Gordon Ott, of Brantford, Ont., who was a private in the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment, known as the Hasty Ps. He was just 16 years old.
