Commanding Officer – 6th Battalion, Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers.
“We moved forward to a place in amongst some olive trees but, funnily enough, in sight of the monastery which was about 7 or 8 miles away… you could just see it – and the various orders arrived and it looked like we would be moving the coming night and you could see all the soldiers were under the olive trees writing their letters home, because they knew the signs of what was going to happen, and so I got hold of the Pipe Major and I asked him to choose an open space among the olive trees and give the boys a tune and gradually all the soldiers stopped writing their letters and they gathered in a great circle al around the pipers, who played all the tunes they knew. And you see all the soldiers leaning sideways and looking up at the sky and I think it did them a great deal of good.
And then the usual thing happened when we had to go and do something… a motor bike would arrive with a message and we got onto trucks, and we went forward and this was in the night and we finally disembarked about a mile or so short of the River Rapido (Gari), which is the one that really separated the two sides at that time and then the next thing we did was to get across a bridge, which was still standing. You could go across it by foot but it was not fit to be crossed by truck and we got into a position inside a bridgehead which had already been formed by the 4th Infantry Division. They had attacked across the Rapido and had formed a smallish bridgehead from which the Irish Brigade was to be the leading brigade of 78th Division and, for our sins, the Inniskillings were going to be the leading battalion of that brigade.
The Brigadier cheered us up by saying “Well, aren’t you glad by being given the privilege of being the leading battalion?” and we sort of looked at each other and said, “Well, I suppose you could say that but it could have been someone else – why not?”
Inside themselves, the soldiers were extremely proud that that was happening and so we got into a position forward of the bridgehead. The “fog of war” really is a fog of war and it has been probably described best by Russian writers – we didn’t really know where our own troops were, let alone where the enemy were. We gradually found out a certain amount of information and we found out where such troops that we could find of our own telling us that as far as they knew that there was nothing of our own in front of us. Now, there was a bridge built over a little brook called the Piopetto, perhaps more than a brook as it was quite deep. A Bailey Bridge had been built across this very rapidly and it was still being built while we looked at it… and that was the route that we were supposed to take and we got orders that no advance would take place until the following morning.
By this time, it was quite late in the evening and so we decided to bed down quickly wherever we could and a squadron of 16/5 Lancers had arrived and they got into the same leaguer area. And at about midnight, we were just settling down to sleep. Now, I think it was about 1am, and I’ve still got the original message that was brought to me , which indicated that things had changed and it was vital that we should capture the objective that we were supposed to capture by dawn and not to wait until morning.
It suggested that the right way to do it was to have a succession of “company patrols”. Well, one of the things you learn at Sandhurst is that you should never have a night attack unless you’ve done a thorough daylight reconnaissance so that o the rare occasions that I later talked to the staff college, I told them about this to show that, in war time, quite frequently you have to do things that you should never do based on normal military guidance.”