Death Comes to Ortona

Like death's shroud, snow fell on Ortona. Over the town's rubble and corpses a chill Apennine wind keened. Ortona, for centuries alive and pleasant on a rocky shelf above the slate-colored Adriatic, now lay dead and hideous. The battle had surged on.

For more than a week Canadians and Germans had grappled for every building stone in Ortona. Never before had the Wehrmacht chosen to slug it out for a town in the path of the British Eighth Army's long march up Italy's Adriatic shore. Most of Ortona's 9,000 folk fled as the Germans mined the approaches, built barricades in the streets, burrowed tanks into the cellars, brought up flame throwers, posted suicide rear guards.

Into the Gully. The death struggle began on the town's outskirts. Some hundreds of British guns, firing an average of 450 shells each, loosed two two-hour barrages on the last gully and ridgetop before Ortona. The first barrage covered one battalion advancing at the rate of 100 yards every five minutes into the gully. The second barrage sprayed the ridgetop, where a lateral road linked with a crossroads on the way into the town.

The bombardment turned the terrain into a shambles, crushed houses into the earth, splintered olive trees, killed white oxen on the roads. The earth was pocked so that a man could not lie spread-eagled on it without his hands and feet touching shell holes. The Germans who died were piled like cordwood. Those who lived came out of their trenches to machine-gun the Canadian infantry. For three days the Canadians attacked and were counterattacked before the Germans gave up the gully, the ridgetop and finally the crossroads.

Toward the Piazza. The next day at dawn, the Canadians spilled into the town's edge, found the Germans dug in. Usually Jerry held on to a position as long as possible, then withdrew after blowing up bridges, demolishing buildings, mining and booby trapping. This time, fresh troops of the First Paratroop Division, under the command of heavy-jowled, cigar-smoking Major General Richard Heidrich, had orders to fight to the last man and the last round.

In the first day of street fighting in the town, death lay around every corner. Smoke shells from mortars painted ribbons above the rooftops. Machine guns stuttered viciously from every house. When the Canadians came close through the nightmare flame and explosion, the Nazis taunted them in English: "Will you give up now?" The Canadians' answer was a Hemingway phrase ending with the word "bastard."

On the second day the Canadians edged in farther. Jerry showered the streets with fragments from airbursts. On the third day Canadian tanks, emblazoned with the Maple Leaf, poked up to one side of the piazza, where half the cathedral's dome stood up on the sky line like a cracked egg. Allied Kittyhawks bombed and strafed the German lines north of the town, Allied artillery crumped around them.

Beyond the Town. The German resistance was skillful, fanatic. But the Canadians went ahead relentlessly, day after day, house after house. They defied the Nazi flame throwers, bayoneted the enemy shock troops in the basement dugouts. Last week they drove the last German from a town where every building lay leveled or gutted.

By week's end the victors had pushed two miles above Ortona, were ten miles below Pescara, Adriatic terminus of the shortest transpeninsular rail-and-highway to Rome. Theirs had been the most notable gain in another week of hill-by-hill advance up the Italian boot. Through dead Ortona, the Canadians trudged after the retreating, fighting Germans.

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