Steel Cavalry: The 8th (New Brunswick) Hussars and the Italian Campaign

By Lee Windsor

Steel Calvary is the story of the transformation from of a horse cavalry unit to one of Canada's most famous armoured regiments.

Twentieth century warfare is epitomized by the image of Allied tanks growling across the countryside, engaging their Nazi counterparts. One of the most storied of such regiments is the 8th (New Brunswick) Hussars. Founded in 1848 as the first volunteer cavalry regiment in British North America, the Hussars began the Second World War as a Motorcycle Regiment before converting to tanks in 1941. First posted to Italy in late 1943, the regiment was introduced to war near Ortona. They formed part of the great drive beyond Monte Cassino to Rome. But their reputation was forged at the Gothic Line and Coriano Ridge during two weeks that marked their fiercest and bloodiest trial of the war.

Steel Cavalry: The 8th (New Brunswick) Hussars and the Second World War is volume 18 in the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
• Release date: Nov 4, 2011
• ISBN: 9780864927095

Lee Windsor

Lee Windsor is deputy director of The Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society at the University of New Brunswick. His research interests focus on the 1953-1945 Italian campaign. Windsor served in the Canadian Forces Reserve for nine years with the Hussars and the West Nova Scotia Regiment. He was one of the principal authors of Kandahar Tour: Turning Point in Canada's Afghan Mission.

Book preview

Steel Cavalry

THE 8TH (NEW BRUNSWICK) HUSSARS AND THE ITALIAN CAMPAIGN

Lee Windsor

GOOSE LANE EDITIONS and

THE NEW BRUNSWICK MILITARY HERITAGE PROJECT

The New Brunswick Military Heritage Series, Volume 18

Copyright © 2011 by Lee Windsor.

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.

Edited by Brent Wilson and Barry Norris.

Front cover illustration Tank Advance, Italy by Lawren P. Harris used by permission of the Canadian War Museum.

Back cover illustration Coriano Ridge Under Bombardment by George Campbell Timming used by permission of the Canadian War Museum (19710261-5447).

Cover design by Jaye Haworth.

Book design by Julie Scriver.

Printed in Canada

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Windsor, Lee A., 1971-

      Steel Cavalry: the 8th (New Brunswick) Hussars and the Italian Campaign / Lee Windsor.

(New Brunswick military heritage series; 18)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Electronic monograph in EPUB format.

ISBN 978-0-86492-709-5

1. Canada. Canadian Army. Canadian Hussars, 8th (Princess Louise’s). 2. Canada. Canadian Army. Canadian Hussars, 8th (Princess Louise’s) — History. 3. World War, 1939-1945 — Regimental histories — Canada. 4. World War, 1939-1945 — Campaigns — Italy. 5. World War, 1939-1945 — Tank warfare. I. Title. II. Series: New Brunswick military heritage series; 18

D768.153.W56 2011      940.54’1271      C2011-901726-1

Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF), and the government of New Brunswick through the Department of Wellness, Culture and Sport.

For the 8th Hussars,

who crewed their steel horses to the end.

They rest, waiting for you to visit

their splendid gardens across Italy.

&

For Major H.R.S. Tim Ellis, D.S.O.

His deeds and memories fill these pages.

His long and full life ended days

after the last was written.

Contents

Introduction

Chapter One Building a Cavalry Regiment

Chapter Two 1939: Learning to Ride Steel Steeds

Chapter Three Italy: The Big Con

Chapter Four The Liri Valley: First Gallop, First Blood

Chapter Five To the Gothic Line

Chapter Six Reckoning at Coriano

Epilogue Princess Louise

Acknowledgements

Selected Bibliography and a Note on Sources

Photo Credits

Index

Introduction

The word arrived just after midnight on August 26, 1939. It reached Lieutenant-Colonel Keltie Kennedy in a Saint John, New Brunswick, hospital room, where he was recovering from surgery for the lingering effects of wounds received fighting the Germans in the Great War. In the twenty years since coming home to Hampton, NB, he had served in the Canadian Active Militia, the last five as commanding officer of the 8th Princess Louise’s (New Brunswick) Hussars. For more than a century, Kennedy’s regiment had built the spirit and substance of a mobile force of cavalry whose purpose was to serve Canada in time of crisis. Now, dark war clouds were gathering over Europe for the second time in a generation.

The message was a historic summons: the Hussars from southern New Brunswick were to muster immediately for emergency guard duty. Kennedy commandeered a hospital telephone and turned the place into a command post to assemble the regiment. Days later, Germany invaded Poland with masses of tanks, the new metal machines of war. Ten days after that, Canada declared war. If Canada and the world were to stop German aggression, they too needed a force of modern tanks and the skill to employ them. In the coming years, as factories in the Western democracies turned out these new machines of modern war, the New Brunswick Hussars’ tradition of a horsed cavalry mobile force would turn to steel.

The introduction of the tank changed the face of war. Improvements to internal combustion engines, radios, and weapons made the tank the centrepiece of a technologically advanced mode of waging war. Germany prepared for that new age of mechanized warfare for years as Hitler’s regime planned an aggressive war of conquest. In Canada, as in the other democracies, the Great Depression and searing memories of the losses in the Great War had dampened any appetite for building armies and machines of war. Now, with the outbreak of hostilities, there was a rush to create armed forces to match Germany’s military power. The 8th Hussars were part of Canada’s contribution to the international call to arms to stop Nazi Germany, but forming modern armies would take time.

Five years and five days after Keltie Kennedy called out the regiment, its squadrons marshalled behind the Foglia River in northern Italy. The sabres and spurs worn a short decade before had become ornamental: now, the Hussars checked radio frequencies and engine oil temperature, and removed muzzle covers from their 75-mm main guns. Before them lay a great belt of German defences collectively known as the Gothic Line. The regiment’s steel cavalry squadrons were not assembled alone for a massed tank charge — years of Allied experimentation and the Hussars’ own six months of combat experience near Monte Cassino had taught them otherwise. Instead, each of three fighting or sabre squadrons formed a critical part of three combat teams consisting of infantry, field engineers, and artillerymen from across Canada. They had all learned to harmonize their respective abilities and actions as part of the 5th Canadian Armoured Division team and, though no one yet realized it, they had become one of the best armoured divisions in the world. Their reputation was about to be forged in the fiercest and bloodiest two weeks in the regiment’s history. From August 30 to September 14, 1944, the 8th Hussars and the rest of their division attacked deep into the Gothic Line defences and defeated two of the best divisions in the German Army. The Hussars wrecked enemy forces in Italy so badly that they could not escape to interfere with the great Allied drive from the Normandy bridgehead to the German border.

The Hussars’ epic two-week struggle ended at the town of Coriano, atop a ridge of the same name that forms the eastern extension of the mighty Northern Apennines range and that marks the ancient boundary between central Italy and the plains of the Emilia-Romagna region of the Po River valley. The Hussars were thus just a few miles short of Caesar’s Rubicon. At the tip of Coriano Ridge lies a large Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery with the graves of 1,939 men. Close by are three more Commonwealth cemeteries, with 578 graves at Montecchio, 1,191 at Gradara, and 618 below San Marino. Combined, they hold more than the massive Commonwealth cemetery at the foot of the infamous Monte Cassino. The numbers indicate the savage intensity of the unknown battles for the Gothic Line and Coriano. Among the dead are twenty-nine New Brunswick Hussars. The regiment suffered more casualties in those two weeks than in all its other battles of the war combined. It was at Coriano that the mechanics who kept the Hussars’ steel horses running rescued a young, injured foal whose mother had been killed in the battle. The foal grew, like the reputation of the regiment, into a grand horse named Princess Louise. The Hussars who survived Coriano took Princess Louise with them through the last hard winter of war in northern Italy and the spring of liberation in the Netherlands in 1945. Their deeds and honours won were many, but most would tell you that the 8th (New Brunswick) Hussars earned their spurs on the ridge at Coriano.

The myriad books on the rise of armoured forces in the Second World War paint a picture of tank mastery by the Germans. The broad brush of history records that German tanks and the panzer (armoured) divisions they formed were the best of the best. In this view, the Allied armoured forces — including those of the Canadians — pale in comparison: inferior tanks supposedly crewed by insufficiently trained officers and men lacking the motivation, skill, daring, or imagination of their German counterparts. Kenneth Macksey, for example, writes that the panzer divisions stood apart from the rest of the German Armed Forces and superior to most opponents, and that they created a unique brand of armoured warfare that remains, to this day, almost irresistible.

Such sweeping generalizations, however, are based largely on German perspectives and on the most superficial investigation of how Allied tank units formed and then fought the war. Indeed, the story of the 8th (New Brunswick) Hussars does not fit the stereotype of Allied armoured forces. Their training, equipment, and operating procedures differed from those of the Germans, certainly, but their opponents, after all, lost the war. Following the path the Hussars took to Coriano, then, will add much to our knowledge of the men New Brunswick, and Canada, sent off to win the Second World War.

Chapter One

Building a Cavalry Regiment

Canada was not ready for battle when the Second World War broke out in September 1939. The nation possessed a tiny regular army, navy, and air force. Its greatest strength lay in the regiments of Non-Permanent Active Militia, made up of part-time soldiers and a leavening of Great War veterans, found in every major centre from coast to coast. In the early days of the war, civilians flocked to their local armouries to fill militia regiment ranks. But numbers alone did not make them ready; it would take time to build the weapons and machines necessary to equip them fully. The reality of 1940s industry and technology and advances in the nature of modern warfare meant that years of training were needed to master the new machines, weapons, and communications equipment and the methods to employ them well enough to meet the German Army on the battlefield.

The Early Years, 1787-1866

A regiment, however, is more than people and equipment. In the Canadian Army system, it is an idea — with a sense of purpose, traditions, and regimental spirit, born in communities across Canada — that takes decades to form. In the counties of southern New Brunswick, one such idea took hold among Loyalist regiments that had been granted tracts of land along the banks of the Saint John and Kennebecasis rivers when the new colony was formed in 1784. One of the new landowners was Colonel John Saunders, who led three troops of Loyalist cavalry that made up the mounted mobile arm of the famous Queen’s Rangers during the American War of Independence. After the war Saunders returned to England to study law, but in 1790 rejoined his former Ranger comrades-in-arms after being appointed a judge of the Supreme Court of New Brunswick.

By the time Saunders returned to the colony, Lieutenant-Governor Thomas Carleton had signed the Militia Act of 1787, authorizing the formation of a provincial militia based on the structure of the Loyalist units that had settled together in the southern counties. At first, the militia was only a paper force that, in theory could call upon all able-bodied men in time of crisis. Britain’s entry into the European war with Napoleon’s France, however, revealed the need to improve militia efficiency. Reductions of the British regular garrison meant New Brunswick increasingly had to rely on itself for local defence in the event of French or American raids. The Chesapeake-Leopard affair¹ of 1807 reminded many of the ever-present risk of war with the new United States, allied to France. In response, a system evolved for the annual muster of infantry battalions in every county, drawing on the experience of former Loyalist officers. In 1808, Saunders himself was appointed colonel in the New Brunswick Militia, beginning a tradition of public and military service by the Saunders family that forged the spirit of New Brunswick’s cavalry. Troops of volunteer cavalry began to be formed to augment the county infantry battalions sometime during the Napoleonic period, but the establishment of volunteer mounted units was formalized only by the Provincial Militia Act of 1825. In the first half of the nineteenth century, troops of volunteer cavalry were raised across the river country of southern New Brunswick. The volunteer nature of their existence made them unique in an era of compulsory militia service for every fit male. The cavalry troops, along with a handful of volunteer artillery batteries and infantry companies, drew upon those with the most interest in military service, and often those willing to pay from their own pocket for the honour of serving. The state of training, equipment, and military readiness in those early troops depended entirely on the resources and will of the men who offered their service. Each was usually responsible for providing his own horse, saddle, uniform, and sword.

From the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 to 1848, the militia fell in and out of favour in the colonial legislature, its fortune tied to times of emergency, such as the Aroostook troubles of 1839.² It remained alive largely through the spirit of the volunteers, perhaps most strongly displayed in the cavalry that, by 1848, numbered eleven widely dispersed troops. On April 4 of that year, the troops united under Militia Order Number 1 as the New Brunswick Regiment of Yeomanry Cavalry, considered by the modern 8th Hussars as the date of their founding. Regimental headquarters was established in Fredericton to command troops from the counties of Charlotte, York, Kings, Carleton, Westmorland, Queens, Sunbury, and Saint John. The roll of officers was a veritable who’s who of old New Brunswick surnames: Hatfield, Jones, Northrup, Gillies, Lyon, Nutter, Drury, McMonagle, Upham.

At the same time, 1848 began a period of sharp militia decline and provincial budget cuts. The appointment of Sir Edmund Head as New Brunswick’s first civilian lieutenant-governor was mainly positive and signalled the arrival of elected responsible government in the province. But most elected representatives had little interest in military expenditures. They found the compulsory militia muster especially loathsome, and in 1851 passed the Suspending Act, putting an end to annual musters and training. For the next twenty years, New Brunswick’s militia ceased to exist except on paper. That the militia did not die was thanks to the tradition of service by volunteers who maintained the spirit and being of many New Brunswick units. In Sussex, in Kings County, a surviving troop of the Yeomanry Cavalry still gathered annually to drill all during the lean years until the official birth, according to today’s Department of National Defence, of the New Brunswick Regiment of Yeomanry Cavalry in 1869.

Keeping the militia idea alive during the 1850s, however, was a struggle even though, by the middle of the decade, the Crimean War and reductions to British regular garrisons caused Britain’s North American colonies to become interested once again in defence and military service. In the Canadas, these developments led in 1855 to a new Militia Act that laid the foundations for a volunteer militia. New Brunswick’s legislature, however, was more reticent, sanctioning military drill only for volunteer units. Despite legislative indifference, the volunteer militia grew in popularity, forcing the province to acknowledge the new movement officially in 1859. The next year, the legislature even voted modest funds for training and equipping seventeen volunteer infantry and artillery companies and a troop of cavalry formed from the existing Regiment of Yeomanry Cavalry.

Appointed to command the newly authorized cavalry troop was John Saunders’s grandson, also called John. He was the third John Saunders to serve the colony of New Brunswick in uniform and in public office. His father, John Simcoe Saunders, commanded a company of the famous 104th (New Brunswick) Regiment of Foot during the War of 1812 and went on to become President of New Brunswick’s Legislative Council at the time of confederation. It was the Saunders family’s tradition of public and military service that forged the spirit of New Brunswick’s cavalry. The grandson, born in 1830, was groomed in the