The General and the Nightingale by Dan Davin

Author:Dan Davin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Otago University Press
Published: 2019-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

13

North of the Sangro

This is the first of five stories about the 2NZDiv.’s participation in the Italian campaign that have a focus on the towering figure of General Freyberg, for whom Davin worked as Staff Intelligence Officer (GSO 3 (I)). The military context for this group is the Allies’ plan to seize control of Italy after its surrender in September 1943 and the German takeover with 16 divisions under the command of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring. In November the Div. moved from Maadi, Egypt, to Bari on the Adriatic coast, which became its base throughout the campaign. It was tasked with supporting the Eighth Army’s drive north to help attack the Winter Line, the German defence system that ran across all Italy from the Tyrrhenian Sea below Rome to Cassino, then to Orsogno, then northeast of the Sangro River to just below Ortona on the Adriatic coast. The New Zealanders crossed the Sangro River on 28 November, took Castelfrentano on 2 December, but were unable to break the line after the Germans established positions just north of Orsogna.

This story is set on 23 December 1943, during the stalemate that followed two unsuccessful attacks by the Allies on Orsogna and Sfasciata Ridge to the northeast. The Staff Officer, Intelligence (IO), Con Ganley, surprised by a prisoner of war’s revelations of discontent among the German 65th Infantry Division and considering his General’s obsession with the mounting successes of the Russian campaign a distraction from observing any such shift in enemy morale, fancies that he might singlehandedly break the deadlock with the Germans and capture Orsogna. This madcap scheme to travel to the German line and persuade the troops to surrender to the Allies is given some modicum of credibility by the revelation of growing numbers of deserters from the 65th Division. The IO’s hopes of a German surrender and a non-violent breakthrough was not a complete fantasy.

The story offers a comic contrast in aspiration: between Con Ganley’s botched plan and the General’s ‘titanic trifling’ and ‘gigantic preoccupations’ in his envious response to the grander sphere of war and the vast scale of the advance that led to the destruction of the huge German army on the Russian front.

It was written and revised in 1984, and published in 1985 in Stand 26, no. 4, 42–54.

***

LESS THAN A WEEK TO CHRISTMAS, 1943. No doubt either, that it was going to be a white Christmas. Snow everywhere off the roads and tracks or else, mud. At NZ Divisional HQ1 we were finding that the north side of the Sangro River was just as bleak and dismal as the south side. Our attack towards Orsogna, after taking us to the outskirts, had been knocked back by a counter-attack from 26 Panzer Division and we didn’t have enough reinforcements up forward, especially armour, to deal with the German tanks.2 Orsogna3 was the western bastion of the enemy’s Winter Line4 on the Adriatic Front; just as Ortona was the eastern, where the Canadians had forced an entry but couldn’t claim to have broken through.

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