Ghosts of Ortona, page 44
2 “During the course of the day, when 11 Platoon of B Company and its flank comrades of A Company came under heavy fire Sergt. J.E.W. Dick crossed an alley, shinned up an outside waterpipe and pinpointed the positions of the enemy. He was spotted and made his way back to his platoon under fire; fetching two sections who also used the waterpipe to clamber to a point of vantage they silenced both machine guns and snipers.” (Stevens, A City Goes to War, 277.)
3 Measuring forty-eight feet wide by eight feet high, the Battle of Ortona mural was created in 1945 by Ottawa artist Gerald Trottier on commission from 26 Central Ordnance Depot, a Canadian Army supply unit. In 1961, it was donated to the Loyal Edmonton Regiment and installed in the Prince of Wales Armouries, which later became the Prince of Wales Armouries Heritage Centre. (Loyal Edmonton Regiment Military Museum, “About the Battle of Ortona Painting.”)
4 “On approaching the Piazza Municipale, D Company was halted by intense fire, for the entrance to the square was covered by no less than five machine guns, three in a building on the left side of the street. Pte. C.G. Rattray with two comrades crawled over a rubble pile; disdaining snipers and grenade throwers, they reached the entrance to the building which housed the machine guns. Leaving his comrades to clear the ground floor, Rattray continued to the upper storeys and single-handed captured five paratroopers, three machine-guns, four rifles and three pistols.” (Stevens, A City Goes to War, 274-5.)
5 Rollie was referring to the Castello Aragonese. During the time that the 1st Canadian Division stayed in Ortona as a rest area (January–May 1944) the castle was used as a military prison (see Galloway, A Regiment at War, 130). When I was in Ortona, some residents (Tommaso and Angelo—see Chapter 9) told me they recalled watching the imprisoned Canadians being made to carry rocks from the base of the escarpment up the winding path to the castle.
6 Private Garrett Holder was killed in action on December 20, 1943.
7 Battle exhaustion was a deliberately vague diagnostic category used by the Canadian Army during World War II to describe a wide range of war-related neuroses, replacing the earlier term, shell shock. The rebranding was motivated partly by advances in psychiatric understanding, and partly by concerns about how soldiers interpreted the labels, which could affect their attitudes to recovery and their ability to return to combat. As military and medical historian Adam Montgomery explains, the term exhaustion carried no stigma and “allowed a soldier honourable escape from the battlefield while also suggesting that his condition was transient instead of permanent, since ‘exhaustion’ implied a state of weariness reversible by rest” (The Invisible Injured, 65-66).
Only one psychiatrist was attached to the Canadian division in Italy. While the preferred approach to battle exhaustion was early intervention close to the front, during the Ortona battle the divisional psychiatrist, Major A.M. Doyle, reported he could not “keep up with the deluge” and had to evacuate all but the “most hopeful” cases further south to a British field hospital (ibid., 66.).
Many Canadian Army officers remained skeptical of the legitimacy of psychological injuries. Furthermore, after the war, veterans who were unable to work due to such conditions were often denied pensions by the Department of Veterans Affairs. The department—relying on its own psychiatric consultants—often ruled that long-term conditions were pre-existing, and therefore not attributable to war service, or argued that the possibility of financial compensation might be unconsciously prolonging the veterans’ symptoms (ibid., 70-71). These factors, combined with the broader social stigma of mental illness, probably explain Mel’s ambiguity when he spoke to me about his breakdown and how he was treated for it. He strongly preferred to attribute his condition to a stomach ulcer. Sensing his unease, I was reluctant to press him for more details.
Tellingly, however, Mel became passionate when recounting the story of how US General George Patton, during the Sicily Campaign, had abused two soldiers receiving treatment in a field hospital for combat stress. Patton had slapped the men and shamed them as cowards, prompting General Eisenhower to order him to apologize (Atkinson, The Day of Battle, 147-49, 170-71). For Mel, that punishment wasn’t nearly enough: “He should have been fired.”
8 Associazione Archeologica Frentana, Ottobre 1943—Giugno 1944. Nove mesi di martirio. Immagini. Ortona: Soc. Coop. Iniziativa Cristiana—Libreria Europa, 1993. This book is a collection of photos of the battle and its aftermath that the editors retrieved from archives of the Imperial War Museum (UK), Library and Archives Canada, Bundesarchiv-Militararchiv (Freiburg, Germany), and archives of the city of Ortona and its regional capital, Chieti. Copies of this book were given to all of the Canadian and German veterans who participated in the 1998 Christmas dinner of reconciliation (see Chapter 6). I also had a copy and sometimes used it as a prompt during my interviews with veterans (including Bill—Chapter 5).
9 German MP 40 machine gun. The Canadians called it a “Schmeisser” after the name of its designer Hugo Schmeisser.
10 The PIAT (Projector, Infantry, Anti-Tank) was a British-manufactured anti-tank weapon used by British and Commonwealth armies in WWII.
11 “Tommy gun” is a nickname for the US-manufactured Thompson submachine gun that was widely used by Allied troops in WWII.
12 As Thomas King pointed out in his Massey Lectures (The Truth About Stories), while Indigenous people of North America encompass a wide range of social groups and identities, “the Indian” is an imaginative construct of white colonial culture. The colonial symbolic discourse of the Indian has sometimes been hostile towards Indigenous people, and sometimes romanticized them, but at all times it’s been an oppressive barrier that works against their full acceptance as equals. Mel’s romantic image of the Indian may have been influenced by Grey Owl, who was very popular across Canada in Mel’s youth. Grey Owl was really a white Englishman (Archibald Belaney) pretending to be Indigenous. Belaney promoted wilderness conservation through his Indian “Grey Owl” persona which drew upon and further entrenched white Canadian (as well as British and American) stereotypes of Indigenous North Americans as “creatures of the wilderness who possessed innate knowledge of wild ways” (Francis, The Imaginary Indian, 178). This is not to say that Mel was necessarily mistaken if he imagined that hunting was somehow spiritually important to Norman; it may well have been so. But the fact that Mel placed so much emphasis on Norman’s “Indianness” suggests that Mel was thinking of him in strongly symbolic terms. Norman’s story may also have fascinated Mel because it fulfilled the colonial wish for an “Indian who was a friend to the White man, who was strong, brave, honest, and noble” (King, The Truth About Stories, 105). Finally, the fact that Norman “lost himself” in the war and didn’t make it home is resonant with the tragic image of “Indians” as noble savages unable to survive the forces of modernity.
CHAPTER FOUR
This chapter quotes extensively from the War Diary, Seaforth Highlanders of Canada. Library and Archives Canada. RG 24, vol.15256 (1943/12 to 1944/07). All other documentary sources quoted in this chapter were found in the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada Archives, Box 998.135.118.
1 This description of the room is drawn entirely from my memory; I didn’t think to describe it in my fieldnotes at the time. My mind has probably warped and woven the room’s elements in ways that are meaningful to me but are not how it really was. Maybe it wasn’t an attic, but it felt that way; maybe the stag head was in an adjoining room, but I felt it watching me the whole time. I’m as certain of these things as the veterans were certain of their stories—and as likely as them to be mistaken.
2 The interviewer was Robert L. McDougall, who was a former Seaforth and World War II veteran. After the war, McDougall became an English literature professor and founded the Institute of Canadian Studies at Carleton University. In 1960, he was asked to write the official history of the Seaforth Highlanders. He gave up the project in 1963 after the death of his wife. The work was handed over to Reginald Roy, a history professor at the University of Victoria who had served in the war with the Cape Breton Highlanders. Later in his life, McDougall returned to the material he had collected for the regimental history and published it as the book, A Narrative of War (which includes the story of how his work on the official history was cut short).
3 Zuehlke relates this story in his book Ortona based on his interview with Ernest “June” Thomas and his correspondence with the tank commander’s family: “Thomas ran over to the tank and pointed the target out to its commander. ‘As much as I hate blasting the tower of that church,’ Thomas said, ‘I want you to get him out of there.’ The ‘A’ Squadron tank commander was Gord Turnbull. Turnbull said, ‘It’s Christmas Eve and that’s God’s house.’ Thomas insisted and Turnbull knew the officer was right” (Zuehlke, Ortona, 311). Another detailed account of the incident, told by Thomas, is quoted in Geroux, “The Urban Battle of Ortona,” 112-3.
4 Many veterans spoke ironically about their appropriations or thefts of Italian property as if these were acts of “liberating” the goods. This might have been motivated by the ambivalence that some of them felt towards Italians, mindful that the people who were welcoming them as “liberators” had only recently been their enemies, and so their sentiments might be insincere. Alternatively, it might have derived from the Canadians’ ironic awareness that their mission in Italy was not really to liberate the country but rather just to take it from the Germans. In Wilf’s use of the word, however, I didn’t detect any ironic intention. I think the word had become so commonly used by the Canadians that the original sarcastic thought behind it was sometimes forgotten. The varied and ambiguous meanings of “liberation” are further discussed in Chapter 9.
5 Denis was referring to the birth of Jesus by recalling the Bible words from Isaiah (9:6) which are also heard in the rousing twelfth-movement chorus of Handel’s Messiah that is performed every Christmas: “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.”
CHAPTER FIVE
This chapter quotes a number of passages from the War Diary, Seaforth Highlanders of Canada. Library and Archives Canada. RG 24, vol.15256 (1943/12 to 1944/07).
…but the only one that mentioned it Roy, The Seaforth Highlanders, 270.
Ellaschuk still had his Interview by Dr. R.L. McDougall with Don Harley and Clifford Wood, Toronto, June 7, 1961. Seaforth Highlanders of Canada Archives. Box 998.135.118.
5 — Weds. [January 1944] Diary of Major Roy C.H. Durnford, Chaplain (P). Seaforth Highlanders of Canada Archives. Box 998.135.118.
15 Canadian Captives of Germans Douglas Amaron, “15 Canadian Captives of Germans in Peril as Own Men Raid House,” Montreal Gazette, January 11, 1944, p.16.
7 — Fri. 14 Diary of Major Roy C.H. Durnford, Chaplain (P). Seaforth Highlanders of Canada Archives. Box 998.135.118.
Early on Boxing Day Roy, The Seaforth Highlanders, 270.
1 Bill’s fragmented storytelling and open debate with himself recall Neimeyer’s observation that trauma narratives are often marked by a “ruminative struggle with radically contradictory images and emotions,” as the traumatic experience has disrupted “the thematic assumptions on the basis of which the person has lived” (Neimeyer, “Fostering Posttraumatic Growth,” 55). When it is hard for the interviewer to follow the story, this is sometimes because “critical aspects of the plot structure of the traumatic narrative…remain hidden, unintegrated, and without social validation and support” (ibid., 56). The unfolding of Bill’s story also evokes Kirmayer’s view that “traumatic experience is not a story but a cascade of experiences, eruptions, crevasses, a sliding of tectonic plates that undergird the self” (Kirmayer, “Landscapes of Memory,” 181). Bill’s account mirrors this metaphor; the articulation of one remembered fragment seemed to draw forth another in quick succession, forming a kind of involuntary cascade.
2 The term for this rhetorical structure is chiasmus. A famous literary example of its use in dissolving distinctions between apparent moral opposites is the line in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.”
3 Evidence that Padre Durnford was opposed to ruthless treatment of the Germans was his disturbed reaction to a “blood-thirsty” speech by Major-General Chris Vokes—see Chapter 10.
4 Indeed, the Seaforths’ commander in Ortona, Lieutenant Colonel Syd Thomson, seems to have heard a very different version of the story. In an interview with regimental historian R.L. McDougall, the transcript of which is found in the Seaforth Archives, Thomson said:
Also in the WD [War Diary] it doesn’t give the picture of SGT Elaschuk… he was actually taken prisoner, and the Germans couldn’t get him out; so they let him go, but he had to promise that he wouldn’t come back during the war… my understanding is that he never did.
In a later book, R.L. McDougall fictionalized Thomson’s story, writing it up as if it were the testimony of a Canadian soldier who was there as a prisoner and who witnessed all that happened. That fictionalized version by McDougall has been unwittingly accepted by some Canadian military historians who have republished it as a real eye-witness account (McAndrew, Canadians and the Italian Campaign, 80; Geroux, “The Urban Battle of Ortona,” 142-3). McDougall’s made-up story is in the form of a letter home by a Seaforth private:
Dear John… I’m an escaped prisoner of war, believe it or not!…We took another house that afternoon… something went wrong, I don’t know what, and the next thing we knew the place was full of German paratroopers, Schmeissers in our faces, and that was that. But it wasn’t to be the end in the way we expected. For some reason they kept us in the house. It was like going backstage, seeing them like that, young fellows, lean-faced, going about their business. Came down, Capt. Harley I guess came to check our position, got fired on, put in an attack with the rest of the company, and we became surplus to the Germans, who needed every man to fight back. So they did a deal with Sgt. Elaschuk, there’s hardly a section in the company doesn’t have at least one many can speak German—said they would let us go if we promised not to fight again. Johnny promised, and we went. I don’t know whether that kind of promise is covered in the rules of war, but while they’re figuring it out we’re going back. Suits me. (McDougall, A Narrative of War, 153-4.)
McDougall explains in his book’s introduction that he has written these fictional letters from a fictional private “to bridge a gap in narrative which I would otherwise be at a loss to know how to span” (11). Clearly, McDougall’s inspiration for this one was the story that Syd Thomson told him. (As for historian Bill McAndrew’s acceptance and republication of the story as a real testimony, McAndrew’s source for that is McDougall’s unpublished draft of his book; perhaps in that draft, McDougall didn’t include the clarifying note about fictionalization.)
Thomson’s source for the story is unknown. I think it belongs to the category of “bullshit stories” that some of the Edmonton veterans told me to beware of—unbelievable tall tales that some of their comrades were notorious for telling (like the one about a German paratrooper who mocked the Canadians in the midst of a firefight by walking fearlessly into the middle of the street and putting down a flower pot, as if to show that the Canadians couldn’t shoot straight). However, in the case of this story about the captives that Thomson heard and repeated to McDougall, this might be more than a mere bullshit story; it might be a fantasy version of events in the house that was made up by some of the men who were there in order to comfort themselves about the violence that actually happened.
Thomson’s credulity is a bit puzzling. As noted earlier, the Seaforth padre evidently heard and recorded a more realistic version that’s a closer fit with what was remembered by Bill and reported by Canadian news correspondent Douglas Amaron. And it’s hard to believe that Thomson, the commanding officer, would have agreed to allow one of his sergeants to opt out of future combat just because of a promise the sergeant had supposedly made to a German. Perhaps Thomson told the story in a playful spirit that was misunderstood by McDougall.
5 Rudolf Hess was a long-time Nazi Party leader and Hitler’s Deputy Führer. In May 1941, sidelined by Hitler and troubled by the plan to invade the Soviet Union before ending the war with Britain, Hess undertook a bold solo mission. Without informing anyone, he flew from Germany to Scotland, landed in a field, and told the farmhand who discovered him that he had an urgent message for the Duke of Hamilton. British officials who interrogated Hess found he had little to offer beyond what Hitler had already conveyed: that Britain could not win the war and should join Germany in its fight against Bolshevism. When Hitler learned of Hess’s unauthorized mission, he was deeply shaken and swiftly disavowed his deputy. A broadcast to the German people declared Hess mentally ill.
In his haste to distance himself, Hitler had failed to consult his chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, who later pointed out the implausibility of the “mental illness” story: “It’s rightly asked how such an idiot could be the second man after the Führer” (Kershaw, Hitler, 613). Many ordinary Germans found the official story hard to believe. Some felt sorry for Hitler. Others mocked the regime. “‘That our government is mad is something we’ve known for a long time,’ Berliners were reported as saying, ‘but that they admit it—that’s something new!’” (Evans, The Third Reich at War, 170.)
As for Churchill’s illness, which the German paratroopers reportedly mentioned to their Canadian captives in the house in Ortona, that was very recent news at the time. On December 14, 1943, while in Carthage to meet General Eisenhower, Churchill became ill and was diagnosed with pneumonia. The following day, he suffered a mild heart attack. His family was summoned; he and his doctor both feared his death might be imminent. On December 16, he began to recover, but still didn’t rise from his sickbed until December 24—just a little more than a day before the Germans brought it up with Bill and his comrades. (Holland, The Savage Storm, 437-38, 442; Atkinson, The Day of Battle, 307-11.)
