Ghosts of Ortona, page 36
I didn’t believe it so I wanted to make sure so I climbed up to the ceiling of the church and I saw: a soldier with a saucepan and khaki uniform. It’s them.
When I came down they [the refugees in the church] were all hanging on my every word. I didn’t know what to say because a lump of tears was tightening in my throat. I hugged my mother tightly.
Everyone understood and rushed out waving handkerchiefs and rags at the CANADIANS who were coming to liberate us while I finally let out the tears that had been in my throat for days.
After putting Canadians in all caps, Guido wrote no more about them.
It was probably hard for him to reconcile his feelings. In his own words, the Canadians had “liberated” him.
But, like the “English,” they had also recently been his enemies—part of the same Allied force that had nearly killed him twice: first when they sank his ship, and again when they came to his hometown and turned it (needlessly, in Guido’s view) into a little Stalingrad.
The next thing Guido wrote in his diary was that he finally got to smoke a cigarette. Notably, he didn’t mention that he got it from a Canadian. That detail comes from his nephew Tonino’s memoir, written about fifty years later.
How different they are from Germans! They also look around warily, but they don’t kick or shout orders, and their weapons are levelled but not at us.
Some of them get a pat on the back, some of us get a cigarette.
‘You English?’ asks Grampa Rocco.
‘No, Canadian’ is the answer, while they point to a badge that is sewn on the sleeves of their jackets.
When Tonino gave me a copy of his memoir, he signed the title page: “To Ian Cosh, and for him and all Canadians with gratitude and appreciation.”
Me: What did you write for the twenty-eighth?
Adriano: The twenty-eighth?
Me: That day.
Adriano: (reading from his book) We wake up. The Germans are gone. Later, the Canadian patrols arrive. They were Canadian. One helps—(suddenly he stands up from his chair, shaking and sobbing)
Me: Yes, it remains a moment.
Luisa: They are terrible moments. People don’t believe it.
Adriano: (gradually composing himself) Because, in that, in that moment, we were saved. Because if it goes on any longer, they would have wiped everything out with the artillery. They would have retreated, the troops, to bomb the last part of Ortona.11 And we would all have died, the twenty-eighth December. And then I describe the twenty-eighth December, as I saw it, how I— (still standing, he picks up his book)
Me: And you, you saw from the window? How—
Adriano: When they arrived?
Me: Because you were in a house full of people?
Adriano: No, a house, the ground floor, I, the ground floor, no? Because then, there were others who, you couldn’t hear a thing, and now, facing the door next to us, who’s there?
Luisa: The Germans.
Adriano: The Germans. But instead, on that morning, there was no one. And so they went towards the Orientale, that part by the sea, there. Went there, oh, they said, they came back, the Canadians are on the Orientale! How are they coming? Here, they’re arriving. And here we went in front of the door to see how they were arriving. In front of the door.
Me: And when they arrived, was it quiet?
Adriano: Yes, silence.
Luisa: Indeed, they showed you that finger.
Adriano: Yes, because there was someone who started to applaud, to this one. But he made this—(puts his index finger to his lips)—to be quiet, because they were afraid that there were still Germans up at the castle. So, right in front of us, for a little while, with the rifles. When they, then the signaller arrived. The signaller announced that, uh—
Luisa: That Ortona was taken.
Adriano: (sitting down and reading from his book) But here they come, a patrol in single file coming down the steps of Vicolo San Domenico advancing slowly along the wall until reaching our door in sight of the castle. Some refugees begin to applaud but are silenced for fear that the Germans might still be in the vicinity. The Canadians themselves wave their hands to keep quiet. Still in single file, they stop now in front of us holding rifles in their arms, they smile at us, we look at them, we almost want to touch them—(he breaks down in tears and stops reading)
In his memoir, Tonino described how he and the other refugees left the cemetery church:
The Canadians make us exit through a window at the back of the building under which they have placed a chair to make it easier for old people to exit…
What we thought was the sound made by the waves against the rocks down by the sea, is nothing other than the quiet hum of the engines of a column of tanks stationed along the road…Soldiers emerge from the open hatches with radio headphones on their ears and look at us with a look full of compassion. Unknown hands emerge from the portholes and offer us chocolate bars, biscuits, cigarettes and a few packets of bandages for dressings.
Guido wrote:
Along the streets of Ortona it’s a massacre, everywhere there are dead Canadians, dead Germans still with weapons in their hands; civilian dead with bundles of rags in their shriveled arms.
THE ORTONESI HAD VIVID memories of the end of the battle. The Canadian veterans whom I interviewed barely remembered the end.
“How did you feel when the battle was over?”
Bill thought for a moment.
“Well, of course I had to feel better all right.”
Bill’s answer seemed like no more than a guess. Denis made it clear that he was only guessing.
“Do you remember what happened when the battle was finished and how you heard the news?”
“No I don’t. Not specifically. No. I guess we did. I guess we did. We knew the town was taken. So it was a case of uh, counting up the losses, and consolidating, and finding out what uh, the equipment you needed …”
As David said, “We were so frazzled at the end of the battle, from overtiredness.” And the immediate “rest” period for the Canadians was taken up with gathering, transporting, and burying the dead—their own, the civilians, and the Germans. Jack remembered this detail about the work.
“When we were getting the bodies all ready, you took a fifteen hundred weight. And we’re putting the guys on, and they kept slippin’ off. So some young farm kid said, ‘You know when I was putting bundles on the rack,’ he said, ‘we put three that way and three this way and three that way.’ And we did this. And here the guys are standing back patting themselves on the back and sayin’ oh we did a really good—you know? These are bodies you’re working with. That’s how you can become, you know? That uh, they’re congratulating themselves on how do you stack bodies on the car, that they won’t fall off, you know?”
In addition to whatever state the Canadians’ minds were in after seven days of continuous fighting and little sleep, this work on the dead might explain why the veterans had so little to say about the end. More detail on the battle’s immediate aftermath is found in testimonies from soldiers who arrived in Ortona with fresh eyes and minds.
A. Staples, letter to Reginald Roy, August 10th, 1967
I arrived in Ortona, as a reinforcement to the Seaforths from the Canadian Scottish, just as the Germans were pulling out and my two most vivid memories are being scared silly by my first taste of shelling and appalled by the civilian dead and the devastation of this once beautiful city…Thinking back over those days I can still remember the overwhelming sense of sadness at the short burial service a day or two after the battle. The service was held on a small level patch of ground high above the Adriatic and the lament fading slowly over the water emphasized the finality of it all.
Charles Monroe Johnson, Action With the Seaforths
It was the last day of 1943 when we marched into Ortona…After putting my junk in the old room where we were to sleep, I went out with Fein to find mattresses…
We stepped over the body of a male Italian whose body had been flattened like a pancake by the track of a heavy tank. Just inside the main hospital door, which had been strongly sandbagged, lay two Jerries, one with his head blown off, the other minus an arm and shoulder. Evidently one of our tanks had beaten the bazooka-men to the draw. Drawn snugly against the wall of the hospital was a German Panther tank, a gaping hole in its turret…One German must have foreseen the end, for his blasted body was sprawled half out of the turret opening. Blood had dripped and frozen in his matted blond hair. I walked down an inside corridor, we saw more Jerry bodies in the enclosed garden …
Entering a large, dim room we managed to see two mattresses among the mass of junk…Fein and I picked up two mattresses, put our backs to them, and began to drag them into the corridor…Fein, who had preceded me, dropped his mattress in the hallway and shouted, ‘What’ve you got there?’ ‘What do you think it is?’ I sarcastically retorted…‘No, look on the mattress.’ Looking, I saw a gnarled old woman, whose bare legs showed gangrenous sores. A shiver ran up my spine. I began spitting. ‘Let’s get out of here. I’ll find a mattress somewhere else.’
As soon as they learned the battle was over, the family of five-year-old Professor Falcone came back into Ortona from the countryside. He remembered seeing an eyeball stuck to a wall. He couldn’t even say if it had frightened him; as he’d told me earlier, it all felt strangely unreal, like scenes from a film. But he did know for sure that he was hungry. He saw two Canadian soldiers eating. One of them noticed him watching them. That one reached into his jacket pocket, removed something, and gave it to the boy. Professor Falcone didn’t know at the time what it was, but now he figured it must have been chocolate.
Nicola Del Ciotto told a similar story.
“By the side of the house, there was a Sherman, a tank, a tank that had cut down all of our houses that were before it, reduced them all to pieces. Eh, war is war. And I was a little boy. There was a soldier who, the first thing he does on seeing me, he says ‘Hello boy,’ and he gives me some kind of a brick, shaped like this. And, what, I look to my mother, ‘Ma?’ Little boy, eh. ‘Ma, that man there gave me this, what is it?’ And my mother says ‘Eat! Eat! It’s good!’ It was a chocolate bar.… And it left me, it left me perplexed. But these, being used to seeing that other kind of warrior [the Germans], these [Canadians] were people who, you say, how do they fight, really? So relaxed. They were playing cards, in a normal way…They fought the war, but they weren’t warriors. They fought war because they had to do it…There wasn’t that cruelty.”
Viviana: And you never talked to the Canadians?
Rosilda: No, no, no. However, Papa talked a bit, you know.
Viviana: You kept yourselves hidden.
Rosilda: Eh, hidden.
Me: Because you were also afraid of the Canadians?
Rosilda: Eh, the Canadians, yes, but there was never any, uh—
Tecla: But the Canadians, it’s not that they ever did, uh, almost nothing really.
Rosilda: Yes. They had fun, they—
Tecla: They took liberties, certainly. However—
Viviana: What did they do?
Rosilda: What, what, there were Canadians, and also a few girls, who then, I didn’t see any more, I don’t know.
Viviana: They had fun.
Rosilda: Eh, there was the, the—
Tecla: Eh, there was—
Rosilda: There was—
Tecla: However out of hunger, in order to eat—
Viviana: But still they wanted to do it, it’s not that—
Rosilda: No, no, polite enough, they were polite, it’s not that, it’s not that that happened to us.
Viviana: Who knows. They were polite.
Rosilda: Yes, yes, yes. No. That’s war…
Viviana: But they stole a lot.
Tecla: Eh.
Rosilda: Eh, I know.
(Rosilda and Tecla discuss something in dialect.)
Tecla: (switching back to Standard Italian) A suitcase of gold.
Viviana: Who had a suitcase of gold?
Tecla: Eh, a case full of gold!
Viviana: But who took it, soldiers?
Tecla: Eh, they stole it. What do I know?
Rosilda: They say, they say.
Tecla: The people who were in Ortona say that they stole a lot. Of things, you understand? Because, no one saw, no one heard, uh—
Viviana: But, this, we don’t know, was it the soldiers, or—
Tecla: Eh, we don’t know if it was the soldiers or the civilians.
Viviana: Or the Ortonesi who had remained here.
Tecla: There were also civilians.
Rosilda: Eh. The soldier, who knows, maybe he was looking for money.
At the Salesian compound, I got two opposing points of view on the Canadians’ behaviour after battle. One was from an older priest. One day, while we were chatting on a bench outside the youth centre, he told me that the Canadians were worse than the Germans. He hadn’t experienced it; his opinion came from his uncle, who had said he had to beat Canadian soldiers away to protect his daughters. According to him, the Germans never threatened any women or stole anything.
That priest’s story echoed many remarks that I heard from Ortonesi about Canadians getting drunk and unruly. Once, while chatting with Maria, the lead cook in the Salesian kitchen, I brought up the topic.
“I’ve heard that sometimes the Canadians got drunk and made trouble.”
Maria was chopping rapini on the cutting board. She paused to look up at me and shrugged with her hands.
“The Canadians were men. They did things men do.”
She went back to chopping.
“The Germans were evil. There’s no comparison.”
Me: When you walk in the streets of Ortona—
Luisa: Eh, I remember.
Me: Do you still see—
Luisa: For example, I remember here, there was the German who shot Papa. I remember. I see it again. Every time I pass that spot I say an Ave for the martyrs.
Even among the Ortonesi who regarded the Canadians as liberators and the Germans as cruel and evil, there were many who nevertheless had paid their respects to both Canadian and German dead. Stefano Durante told me: “The cemetery of Ortona kept a zone all for the Germans. There was a cemetery for the Germans. However—”
“Oh really! I’ve never heard this.”
“Yes. Then, they came, they came to take them back. Ten years later…But the zone, it was called the German zone, but they came to take them back, the bones, and they took them back to Germany.”12
“And before that, how was the behaviour of the Ortonesi towards this German cemetery?”
“I saw that the Ortonesi certainly uh, the Ortonesi aren’t mean. They hardly speak the language, but they aren’t mean-spirited. I saw that also, on the second of November, the Day of the Dead, on a few Germans there were some flowers.”
I asked Angelo about this. He was strongly antifascist. Didn’t it bother him when those Germans were buried in the people’s cemetery?
“Beh, no, it was, well, they were dead, those, you could hardly say, you are a German, you are a Canadian, I am an Italian, no. The dead are dead, what can you say? You say peace to, to his soul. You say peace to his soul. What can you say? The dead are dead.”
“I remember that mamma used to put flowers,” Tonino told me. “My mother had one or, that is, two or three sons, how is it, uh, adopted sons. Canadians. She used to go and put flowers every, every, before this permanent custodian [of the Moro River Canadian War Cemetery] came, no? And she would go there, and—”
“How come?”
“It was an act of gratitude.”
“These were Canadians that your mother knew before?”
“No, no.”
“How did she choose these three Canadians?”
“Without choosing. By chance. Two or three, I don’t remember very well now. She would go every week, she would take some flowers. And then she’d go also to the cemetery of Ortona, and where out of pity someone would put a flower there too, on the Germans.”
“On the Germans?”
“Yes, yes.”
“Your mother did that?”
“Eh, I think so, my mother, yes. I think that it was done, that it was done also by other women, because, for the dead there’s no uh, you have to respect the dead, regardless. I don’t think there was resentment against these poor souls.”
The dead were dead. But Nicola Bottega insisted that their deaths had very different meanings.
“Here in Ortona there’s a cemetery. You’ve seen it, no? More than 1,500 boys.” He was referring to the Moro River Canadian War Cemetery. “There are some, eighteen, nineteen years old. And they died, for what? Did they not die for us? For what?”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Eh, for us! No, no, no, for us, those boys died to save us!”
In his study, Professor Falcone described his lifelong positive image of Canadians. He had a theory as to how it had been etched in his mind.
“I have always had a very positive memory of the Canadians. Because they helped. Imagine you’re living through so much suffering and destruction. Then it ends—and who do you see? It’s a Canadian. People remember who helps.”
Whenever he visited the Canadian cemetery, he pondered how fate had brought those men to this place. For him, this was home. But what was it to them?
“And now you are here,” he said. “The ancient Greeks might have said you have come back. They were fascinated with the idea of The Return.”
His philosophical attitude gave me the courage to share a thought that had been growing in my mind throughout my time in the town. I hadn’t voiced it to anyone else—not wanting to stir controversy or cause hurt feelings.
“When I talk with a Canadian veteran,” I said, in my uncertain Italian, the singular coming to me more easily in that moment, “I don’t have the impression that he was thinking of liberating anyone. He barely even remembers seeing civilians in Ortona. I don’t think he would recognize himself in the way he is remembered here.”
