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Ortona Street Fight by Mark Zuehlke (Orca $9.95)
Lieutenant John Dougan figured he'd be dead in just a few moments. Since dawn, over forty of his comrades had been killed or wounded by enemy fire in two valiant, yet foolhardy charges.
Beyond the hundred yards of abandoned vegetable gardens and olive trees, "so torn by shellfire that they looked like twisted fence posts,"; a row of two-and three-storey buildings concealed German snipers.
The snipers hid behind broken windows and on rooftops. More were dug in at the base of the buildings. And still more paratroopers crouched behind machine guns, waiting for yet another futile rush from the Canadians.
Dougan and the company commander agreed a third charge across open ground was madness but the battalion commander at the other end of the radio handset ordered them "to get on with it."; Even if they blinded the enemy with smoke bombs, Dougan knew he and the six men going with him would be cut down in seconds.
Then he noticed the ditch. Across from a much deeper ditch where he and his men were huddled, there was a shallower ditch, barely three feet deep. It ran straight through the deadly hundred yards to an apartment building.
The Germans expected a logical assault from the Allied troops. A rifle company should predictably advance across open ground "in sections spread out over a wide front"; creating too many individual targets for the defender to effectively eliminate. Some men were bound to survive and continue onwards to storm the defensive positions.
That predictable tactic had devastated the company already, slicing them down to a mere 17 men. And so Dougan gambled. He decided his Canadians would attack by scuttling through a narrow ditch like field mice.
"Hell, we're all going to die anyway,"; he said to himself. "Might as well give it a go.";
Minute by minute, yard by yard. This is how Ortona Street Fight by military historian Mark Zuehlke chronicles the bloody week of December 21 to December 28, 1943 when the 1st Canadian Infantry Division wrested the port town of Ortona, Italy, defeating crack German paratroopers who had been ordered to hold the "pearl of the Adriatic"; at all costs.
Ortona's location, on the eastern coast of Italy, directly parallel to Rome, and protected by cliffs on the north and east, and by a deep ravine on the west, had forced the Canadians to attack from the south.
Under heavy and constant shelling, infantrymen from the Loyal Edmonton Regiment and the Seaforth Highlanders, with tank support from the Three Rivers Regiment, fought their way across gullies, mud-choked vineyards, decimated olive groves and, finally, into the narrow, medieval streets.
Ortona was nicknamed "Little Stalingrad.";
Gleaned from hundreds of interview hours with an ever-dwindling number of surviving WW II veterans, Zuehlke uses his trademark soldier's-eye view to bring men like the daring and resourceful Dougan back to life.
Many of the soldiers could have been mistaken for boys, such as 26-year-old Private Gordon Currie-Smith, whose small stature (he was under five feet tall and barely weighed a hundred pounds) saved him when a booby-trapped Ortona school exploded and buried him up to his neck in rubble.
Sergeant Harry Rankin was a "tough little guy from the wrong side of the Vancouver tracks."; His forte was "destruction on demand."; Armed with a recovered stash of German Teller mines, devices shaped like a covered frying pan, and packed with enough explosives to disable a tank, Rankin devised an effective strategy for mouse-holing, the practice of blasting a route through the interior walls of closely packed houses and buildings to avoid movement through the even more dangerous and exposed streets.
Jabbing the wall with a bayonet, with a Teller mine dangling from it, Rankin would slip a short fuse to the built-in detonator, light it, and run "like hell."; It's the same Harry Rankin (1920-2002) who notoriously gave hell to right-wing Vancouver city councillors and mayors for more than 25 years as an alderman and councillor who fre-quently topped the polls.
Ortona Street Fight differs from Zuehlke's more extensive Ortona (D&M) because it is the latest in the Raven Books Rapid Reads series for adult readers. Building on Orca Books' Soundings and Currents series of high interest/low reading skill books for reluctant young readers, the new Rapid Reads series features both compelling non-fiction and contemporary fiction with a straight-forward narrative. These titles, such as Ortona Street Fight, target adult literacy as well as offering a condensed one-sitting read of lengthier tomes.
Other Rapid Reads include Generation Us: The Challenge of Global Warming by University of Victoria climatologist Andrew Weaver and mysteries such as The Spider Bites by Medora Sale and Love You to Death by Gail Bowen.
978-1554693986
[BCBW 2011]
Beyond the hundred yards of abandoned vegetable gardens and olive trees, "so torn by shellfire that they looked like twisted fence posts,"; a row of two-and three-storey buildings concealed German snipers.
The snipers hid behind broken windows and on rooftops. More were dug in at the base of the buildings. And still more paratroopers crouched behind machine guns, waiting for yet another futile rush from the Canadians.
Dougan and the company commander agreed a third charge across open ground was madness but the battalion commander at the other end of the radio handset ordered them "to get on with it."; Even if they blinded the enemy with smoke bombs, Dougan knew he and the six men going with him would be cut down in seconds.
Then he noticed the ditch. Across from a much deeper ditch where he and his men were huddled, there was a shallower ditch, barely three feet deep. It ran straight through the deadly hundred yards to an apartment building.
The Germans expected a logical assault from the Allied troops. A rifle company should predictably advance across open ground "in sections spread out over a wide front"; creating too many individual targets for the defender to effectively eliminate. Some men were bound to survive and continue onwards to storm the defensive positions.
That predictable tactic had devastated the company already, slicing them down to a mere 17 men. And so Dougan gambled. He decided his Canadians would attack by scuttling through a narrow ditch like field mice.
"Hell, we're all going to die anyway,"; he said to himself. "Might as well give it a go.";
Minute by minute, yard by yard. This is how Ortona Street Fight by military historian Mark Zuehlke chronicles the bloody week of December 21 to December 28, 1943 when the 1st Canadian Infantry Division wrested the port town of Ortona, Italy, defeating crack German paratroopers who had been ordered to hold the "pearl of the Adriatic"; at all costs.
Ortona's location, on the eastern coast of Italy, directly parallel to Rome, and protected by cliffs on the north and east, and by a deep ravine on the west, had forced the Canadians to attack from the south.
Under heavy and constant shelling, infantrymen from the Loyal Edmonton Regiment and the Seaforth Highlanders, with tank support from the Three Rivers Regiment, fought their way across gullies, mud-choked vineyards, decimated olive groves and, finally, into the narrow, medieval streets.
Ortona was nicknamed "Little Stalingrad.";
Gleaned from hundreds of interview hours with an ever-dwindling number of surviving WW II veterans, Zuehlke uses his trademark soldier's-eye view to bring men like the daring and resourceful Dougan back to life.
Many of the soldiers could have been mistaken for boys, such as 26-year-old Private Gordon Currie-Smith, whose small stature (he was under five feet tall and barely weighed a hundred pounds) saved him when a booby-trapped Ortona school exploded and buried him up to his neck in rubble.
Sergeant Harry Rankin was a "tough little guy from the wrong side of the Vancouver tracks."; His forte was "destruction on demand."; Armed with a recovered stash of German Teller mines, devices shaped like a covered frying pan, and packed with enough explosives to disable a tank, Rankin devised an effective strategy for mouse-holing, the practice of blasting a route through the interior walls of closely packed houses and buildings to avoid movement through the even more dangerous and exposed streets.
Jabbing the wall with a bayonet, with a Teller mine dangling from it, Rankin would slip a short fuse to the built-in detonator, light it, and run "like hell."; It's the same Harry Rankin (1920-2002) who notoriously gave hell to right-wing Vancouver city councillors and mayors for more than 25 years as an alderman and councillor who fre-quently topped the polls.
Ortona Street Fight differs from Zuehlke's more extensive Ortona (D&M) because it is the latest in the Raven Books Rapid Reads series for adult readers. Building on Orca Books' Soundings and Currents series of high interest/low reading skill books for reluctant young readers, the new Rapid Reads series features both compelling non-fiction and contemporary fiction with a straight-forward narrative. These titles, such as Ortona Street Fight, target adult literacy as well as offering a condensed one-sitting read of lengthier tomes.
Other Rapid Reads include Generation Us: The Challenge of Global Warming by University of Victoria climatologist Andrew Weaver and mysteries such as The Spider Bites by Medora Sale and Love You to Death by Gail Bowen.
978-1554693986
[BCBW 2011]
Submitted on March 4, 2011 in By David.
