大象传媒

5.5 Crossing the Po

The Po river crossing became the next task for 5 Corps R.E. Troops. At the point where the South African Engineers subsequently threw over a massive Bailey bridge, and slightly upstream of the demolished bridge, we put over the assault pontoon bridge and I was designated Bridge Officer. To be honest I never discovered what this designation meant or implied but in the hard way I found that if anyone was to take the can for anything it was the Bridge Officer. At the site the river was about 900 ft wide and running at 17 knots; a unique task which I am sure had not been attempted elsewhere. 大象传媒 started immediately after the infantry had made a crossing and had established a bridgehead on the north bank. Two R.E. Field Companies built the pontoons along a five-mile stretch of the south bank and my Company handled the assembly on the site. Building the pontoons had begun the day before and at dawn I was dispatched with 4 DUKs (amphibious trucks) as tugs to bring them to the site. First one DUK struck a submerged tree and sank, then another caught on fire as the driver had put his wet overalls against the exhaust to dry them, and the third just gave up the ghost. With the fourth I managed to reach the first group of pontoons when it also packed in. Fortunately I was ferrying some small outboard motors and made up a tug of one pontoon unit and so collected a convoy of pontoon units to try and get them downstream to the bridge site; under the flow of the river this was an almost impossible task with an underpowered unwieldy tug, but fortunately the C.R.E., who had got hold of a small motor boat, came upstream to find out what the hell had happened to his pontoons and with his assistance we guided the units down to the site. By 17:00 hrs we had completed the crossing with a well-anchored floating bridge and the army units surged across.

Then someone decided that the enemy, with the help of their Fascist Italian friends, would float mines downstream to blow up our bridge and I was again dispatched upstream to put a floating mine barrier across the river. In due course I set off with the motorboat and a pontoon unit loaded with coils of steel wire rope, floats, anchors, and any thing else we thought we might require, to place some 1200 ft of barrier across the river. In the meantime they had stationed the troops up the south bank to shoot anything they might see floating down, with rifles closest to the barrier, then heavy machine guns, then antitank guns, whilst the enemy still had control of most of the north bank!! We made it safely to our anchorage point on the north bank and put down a substantial anchor.

Then when we started heading out to the south bank it soon became clear that we were in for trouble; the motorboat could not cope with the load of the loaded pontoon even with the floating cable being fed out as this only increased the load. We had to resort to heading upstream time and time again with the motor boat and dropping an anchor to which all on board would hand haul the pontoon, then anchoring the pontoon and repeating the procedure. This went on all night with the knowledge that any slip up would result in our floating downstream into the barrage awaiting us; in fact they kept us fully aware of our potential fate by firing off at any thing they saw or imagined floating downstream!! Eventually my team and I completed the task at dawn and were able to return to the bridge in daylight; we had been working from about 30 hours non-stop under somewhat difficult conditions and were almost dead to the world, soaking wet and cold. When we got back it was to find that our company had been relieved by the South African Corps Troops and sent forward, after being given a rum issue for their efforts, which we had missed. When we landed, a South African Lieutenant Colonel proceeded to berate me as Bridge Officer for allowing the traffic to pass over the bridge at a rate faster than that permitted in the Manual; I just missed being court martialled for saying things to him that a junior Officer should not say to such a senior Officer, and I think it was only the ribbon I was wearing that saved me!!

The Po river crossing was the virtual end of active involvement for us. We located at a small village just short of Venice, and were near Venice when Popsky's Private Army, an independent recce unit which did amazing visits deep into enemy occupied Italy right from the beginning of the Italian show, astounded the inhabitants by landing at the Piazza Del Marco Polo and driving around the city in their jeeps, the first and probably only motor vehicles ever to do this.

At a later stage when we were in Austria I had a set to with Popsky as his men had raided my platoon's stables and pinched our horses. I got them back.

The next exercise for my platoon was to go to a small village called Pino Data high up in the Italian dolomites, at the start of the Glocken Pass into Austria.

Our task was to open the pass to traffic should it have been damaged. Fortunately it had not been damaged to any real extent. I found billets in a large house in the village, which I found, belonged to an Italian gentleman who before the war had been the Provincial Roads Engineer, and awarded an English M.C. during the First World War. He was only too glad to gather together a bunch of his former workmen who under his direction did the necessary, and we could enjoy a holiday. I experienced shooting parties for turkey buzzards way up above the snow line, which required leaving at about 4 am and climbing till dawn; we never brought anything back.

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