When the Company was within five hundred metres of the town, Arlington sent three patrols ahead to reconnoitre. One got to within ten yards of an Etruscan arch at the entrance to the town before it was challenged by a sentry and quickly withdrew. The other two walked into German posts and came under heavy rifle and machine-gun fire. One man was killed, others wounded.
It was two in the morning. Arlington had the company dig in and rest for a couple of hours. Near dawn he invited me to lead a six-man patrol to observe enemy movements.
The mist lay heavy on the road. I sent two men ahead to act as a listening post. When the mist dissolved with the coming of the dawn, I saw the two men were completely overlooked from a church tower to the right and the tower of an old fort to the left. A couple of minutes later the Germans spotted the exposed soldiers and began rapidly firing down on them. The four of us laid down covering fire as the two men made a dash back down the slope, bullets slashing the air around them.
We withdrew. At six in the morning, I commandeered a bench in the station waiting room. I don’t know how long I slept — possibly only minutes — before I was woken by the deafening roar of the Allied artillery opening up on the town. Ten minutes later there was an ear-splitting explosion and I was thrown off my rudimentary bed. The Germans were responding with concentrated Nebelwerfer and mortar fire on the station.
Nebelwerfers were always alarming. The name suggested they fired smoke mortars but the Germans often used them to fire chemical weapons. These seemed to be delivering smoke and low-grade explosives. For the moment.
I gave up any idea of sleep. I withdrew with other soldiers to the shore of Lake Chiusi and waited there, exhausted but awake, whilst the heavy brigade rolled up: the 11th South African Armoured. The tanks of the Natal Mounted Rifles clanked up the road, but within half an hour were bogged down. They were being pounded by heavy artillery, mortars and anti-tank fire — thickened by Nebelwerfers, of course. Individual tanks on reconnaissance stumbled on to well-protected anti-tank posts or were ambushed by heavily armed roving tank-hunting parties. By noon, with a hard rain falling, the South Africans had retreated.
Around eight in the evening, the Allies began pounding the town again. The heavy battery was softening it up for rifle companies from the Cape Town Highlanders. When they arrived, I was sheltering gloomily in the station waiting room. I watched through the open door as they struggled forward on foot over the soggy ground, their progress impeded by shellfire, ditches and canals.
As darkness fell, I saw them, silhouetted by the flash of shells and mortar bombs, scrambling towards the town up the steep slopes broken into terraces and dotted with twisted olive trees. My ears were ringing with the constant bombardment, my body shaking as each explosion set the earth juddering.
At one in the morning of 23rd June, so tired I was beyond tiredness, I set off once again with ‘A’ company in loose formation up the winding road between the terraces. Moore had been mistaken, the deserters accurate. There were estimated to be 300 enemy infantry in town and a battalion of the Hermann Goring Division supported by artillery and tanks.
We reached the Etruscan arch without being challenged. Then the familiar pop of flares sounded and we were caught in their ghastly light. Grenades pattered in the mud. The instant the flares died, we broke for the terraces, scrambling, slipping and sliding into the rude cover of the olive trees.
For a further twenty minutes we were pinned down by the impatient stuttering of machine guns. Two soldiers coated in mud slid down in front of me and lay still. As another flare went off, they looked at me and I looked at them. The same thought occurred in the three of us. My heart leaped and I swung my machine pistol round just as the flare died away. When the next flare went off, the two Germans had gone.
As the firing eased, we lifted each other over on to the next terrace. Someone found a ladder and we swarmed up it on to the terrace above that. From here I could make out the town as a dark mass against the sky. The German fire was now going over our heads. Then it ceased.
We entered a well-tended garden. We crossed into another one, then another. Keeping low, we made our way along cobblestone paths until we were almost in the town. It was eerily quiet. There had been no flares or gunfire for fifteen minutes.
Five minutes later we reached a road that led into a small square. We gathered beside what a sign told us was a winery. Across the square was the Teatro Communale. In front of it I could make out a bulky shape, black in the blackness. Men crept to within fifteen yards of the massive machine and began to roll grenades underneath it.
They scurried back, identifying the tank as a Panzer. The grenades exploded with a dull rattle, doing no damage. Nevertheless, with a low roar, the Panzer’s engine started up and it rumbled out of the square.
We took up positions around the theatre. The rest of ‘A’ Company joined us. We put men into two adjoining houses and the winery. A platoon headed towards the
It was a solidly built theatre, with little in the way of fenestration. We could only watch the square through a couple of windows in the corridor behind the dress circle and from the ground-floor offices and foyer. I positioned myself by an upstairs window. I had a lot of ammunition for my machine pistol and half a dozen grenades on my belt. It was three a.m.
At four a.m. I heard the heavy clang of gears and the screech of metal treads in the square. The Panzer was back, milling around in front of the theatre.
A cold, misty dawn broke thirty minutes later. If everything had gone to plan, ‘B’ and ‘C’ Companies would now be in position in town.
I could see ghostly German soldiers moving through the mist in the square around the tank. I was stiff, cold and tired to the bone. The soldiers on the ground floor of the theatre and in the buildings to either side opened fire. I saw a dozen or so Germans go down. The tank’s motors ground, its turret cranked round and I was looking down the muzzle of its main gun. I thought blankly that I was about to die. I tensed, shut down my emotions, focused on the black maw.
The Panzer fired a 75mm shell point-blank at the theatre.
I fell back a good five yards as part of the front wall gave way in a great billow of dust and smoke. When I scrambled to my feet again, coughing and deafened, I looked into the foyer and saw that at least six men were down. There was another roar, a deafening concussion and more of the wall fell in. The landing on which I was standing lurched away from the wall.
I scrambled off it and halfway down the stairs to the foyer. Another dozen men lay wounded or dead in the rubble and the billowing dust and smoke. Choking, I pulled my neckerchief up round my mouth.
From the foyer I could see the square fill with more tanks: Mark III, Mark IV and Mark IV Special Panzers. They opened fire and the building juddered as shell after shell punched it. The concussion deafened me.
I was scarcely able to breathe because of all the dust and smoke billowing around me. I fired on a German paratrooper who had climbed on to the turret of a tank as it tried to batter down the theatre walls. I couldn’t hear my own gun firing. When Spandau and rifle fire ripped around me, I realized that the wall I had been sheltering behind no longer existed.
I ducked back and returned fire.
At nine in the morning the theatre had somehow withstood the bombardment but there were only a handful of us left alive. We were in the Dress Circle, surrounded by rubble. I was coated in dust and dirt that filled my mouth, my nostrils, my eyes, my every pore.
Then the Germans blew a huge hole in the side wall of the stalls. Soldiers swarmed through it and up the stairs towards us. Not one of them reached the Dress Circle.
They didn’t try that again but the bombardment was relentless. At ten, the roof came down on us. I watched aghast as bricks, slate, plaster and beams crashed on to our heads.
Buried but still alive, I lay blinded as well as deaf. I could smell fire. With a massive effort, I struggled free of the wreckage. I couldn’t see anyone else near me. I had two grenades left in my belt. I stumbled across to the jagged hole in the wall and hurled the grenades through. I followed and fell into a side street.
I tried to suck in air but my nostrils and throat were clogged. I looked down the street. A tank blocked it. I looked the other way. A dozen infantrymen were pointing their rifles at me. I lowered my weapon to the dust.
I was hurried through the streets to a villa near the
