INDEPTH: ORTONA
The Courtyard of Hell
CBC News Online | January 1999 | Updated September 21, 2004
Matthew Halton reports for CBC News
Two reporters, father and son, in Ortona.
The CBC's Senior Washington Correspondent David Halton reflects on following his father's footsteps
Reporters like myself are used to covering grim and often tawdry
news. So I jumped at the opportunity to cover a very different
kind of story -- an uplifting one of reconciliation between
the German and Canadian veterans who fought the battle of Ortona
in 1943.
For many of the vets, the reunion over Christmas week was a
healing experience. It opened up a flood of haunting memories
but also enabled the old soldiers to ease some of the lingering
pain of killing each other in Ortona fifty-five years ago.
I had a special reason to covet this assignment. My father,
Matthew Halton, was the CBC war correspondent whose
reporting in and around Ortona won him national fame
in Canada. He was close to the front line in early December,
1943, when the First Canadian Infantry Division began their attack
over the Moro River towards Ortona. His broadcast was the first
of many that riveted Canadians on the home front with its richly
descriptive words:
"Soaking wet, in a morass of mud, against an enemy fighting
harder than he has fought before, the Canadians attack, attack
and attack ... the hillsides and farmlands and orchards are a
ghastly brew of fire ...listen to the echo of those shells!"
And then you hear the boom of the heavy guns and the bursts of
machine-gun fire &;— actuality sound that we have long since
taken for granted in war reporting. At the time though, my
father and his CBC sound engineer, Art Holmes, were pioneers
in the art of recording the sounds of war. In the absence of tape
machines, they had to use bulky phonographs to record actuality
on old 78-rpm disks. The quality was so impressive
that the broadcasts were replayed on the BBC and American radio
networks.
As I retraced my father's steps into Ortona last month, I found
myself imagining Canadians at home, huddled around those old
RCA-Victor consoles as they listened anxiously for news of their
family members on the Italian front. The words
..."This is Matthew Halton speaking from Italy"... were the
prelude to a series of almost daily broadcasts about
what was to become Canada's first major victory of the
war.
War correspondents were reporting under tight censorship at the
time. They were not allowed to mention specific regiments or
locales. Nor could they mention Allied casualty figures.
But no one listening to my father's broadcasts could have any
doubt about the bloodshed in Ortona when they heard
descriptions like these:
"It wasn't hell. It was the courtyard of hell. It was a maelstrom
of noise and hot, splitting steel...the rattling of machine guns
never stops ... wounded men refuse to leave, and the men don't
want to be relieved after seven days and seven nights... the
battlefield is still an appalling thing to see, in its mud, ruin,
dead, and its blight and desolation."
Before arriving in Ortona, I waded through military histories
about the battle but found nothing to match the graphic
descriptions of the battle written by my father. His voice
echoed through my mind as I walked the streets of the town,
sometimes with Canadian veterans who had met him during that
grim December.
His was a very different genre of war reporting than any I, or
any other reporter, would do in the post-Vietnam era. There was an
element of cheerleading to it that wouldn't be acceptable today.
While frequently acknowledging the courage of German soldiers,
there were unabashed references to the "enemy"
and, in one broadcast, to the "sullen young zealots" of Germany's
First Parachute Regiment. My father had reported throughout the
1930's on the growing danger of Nazism, and for him the Second
World War was nothing less than a holy crusade.
After covering the Italian campaign, my father followed Canadian
troops in almost all their major battles: the Normandy
invasion, the liberation of Holland, and the drive into the
German heartland. By the end of the war, Matthew Halton was a
household name in Canada...a voice that had become a vital link
between the home and the fighting fronts. He enjoyed the fame but
once told me, not long before he died in 1956, that he felt a
little uncomfortable with a fame more properly deserved by the
young Canadians volunteers who fought so bravely.
That pride in the achievements of Canada's soldiers echoes like a
beacon in my father's final broadcast from Ortona. The Germans
had finally been forced to retreat, and the town lay in
smouldering ruins:
"With the fall of Ortona, the battle of the Moro river is over,
and there is a new name to add to the list of great deeds of the
war...neither in this war nor in any other has there been
anything more bitter and intense. The Canadians beat two of the
finest German divisions that ever marched in a long fury of fire
and death ending in the appalling week of Ortona."
Wow! I thought as I began working on our CBC documentary on the
veterans' reconciliation. How do you match a description like
that?
Listen to Matthew Halton's reports for CBC News
 |
Canadians attack Ortona
Real Audio
Originally broadcast December 28, 1943
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The Fall of Ortona
Real Audio
Originally broadcast January 4, 1944
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Canadians land in Normandy on D-Day.
Real Audio
Originally broadcast June 8, 1944
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The Liberation of Paris
Real Audio
Originally broadcast August 26, 1944
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