Stalingrad Of The Adriatic: Death On The Moro (Part 2)

Al Murray (0:12)

It rained hard and then cleared up, leaving the night bright with the full moon. We showed up the ash and olive wooded slopes, and caused the swollen sand grow and the snow upon the blue dark apennines to glisten like silver. Bob Heels and I saw a strange sight when a patch of snow-white mist crossed over the face of the moon and produced a halo coloured red, violet and green that lasted several minutes.

Underneath this beautiful phenomenon, the German artillery was constantly shelling the New Zealand front. The rumble of the guns echoed along the mountain range like the noise of a great wind howling into the mouth of a giant cave. That was Harry Wilson's diary from Tuesday, the 7th of December, 1943 And who's Harry Wilson, Jim? He's a signals officer, isn't he?

James Holland (0:59)

Yeah, he's a signals officer, Cipher clerk at 8th Indian Division headquarters. He's a corporal and wrote this just brilliant, brilliant diary. He's so entertaining. He's so funny. But also, you know, he's quite the wordsmith, isn't he?

Is that little sequence reveals? I mean, very evocative, I think.

Al Murray (1:19)

Where did you find his diary?

James Holland (1:20)

It's in the Imperial War Museum and yeah, I photographed it all, got it bound, got it printed. I mean, I can send you the whole thing if you like. It's really, really, really totally brilliant. And actually, I think there's a very good case of reading the whole thing. Maybe not in Irish, but reading it and putting it on the page because it's so good. Yeah. And it's just really funny what he gets up to. And, you know, later on, he fancies this Italian girl that he lives with. He's just, you know, for like a week, all he can think about and write about is Darius is an Italian girl and obviously it doesn't go very well and so on.

It's just really funny. He's very, very human, I think. I'm very wondering. And he spends a lot of his time feeling scared and well, he might.

Al Murray (2:01)

Understandably so. Well, welcome, everyone, to WWW To Make You Talk with me, Al Murray and James Holland for our second episode of The Stalingrad Of The Adriatic. As we've, you know, we're not underselling this story, are we?

James Holland (2:12)

No, no, no. We're selling it as it is.

Al Murray (2:14)

Yeah. We went our way.

James Holland (2:16)

Episode one was the Sangro and now we're the Moro.

Al Murray (2:18)

Yeah. Yeah. So not unlike 8th Army, we're wending our way to Ortona, essentially.

James Holland (2:23)

Eventually.

Al Murray (2:24)

Eventually. Eventually. Well, we've got to, you've got to get there river by river, valley by valley, ridge by ridge.

And that's exactly what we're doing with these episodes. So Harry and the 8th Indian Division headquarters, they cross the Sangro on the 4th of December. And, you know, we're a long way from Rome here in a Rome by Christmas scenario, aren't we?

James Holland (2:46)

Yeah, they really are.

Al Murray (2:47)

They really are a long way from Rome on the 4th of December.

And this is, they do this on a Bailey Bridge, Corps of Engineers, hurrah for the CRE, yet again spanning yet another river in yet another valley in Italy. You know, just that you could write a history of this purely as a sappering effort, couldn't you? And it would be, it would be an epic, an epic struggle. And as they go over, the water runs deep and fast because the weather, as we outlined in the previous episode, is awful. It's not stopped raining. The days it doesn't rain, of course, the Allies are able to bring all of their assets to bear and really, really pummel the Germans and defeat them. But that's the rare days where it doesn't rain. So there's wrecked vehicles, there's tanks and guns and the blackened remains of innumerable mules and horses because after all this terrain, you can only get so far with mechanisation and they need mules and they need horses.

James Holland (3:44)

And you can just imagine it, you know, these roads are strata bianca. So these are metal roads in so much that they're properly laid and everything, but they're not tarmacked and just, you know, they're just simply not designed for this volume of traffic and this weight of traffic. And so they get churned up really, really quickly. And there's, you know, if you look at photographs of this Eighth Army pushing up through here, it's just it's just endless people pushing guns out of mud and people kind of up to their up to their knees in it. And I think there's a very strong image here of the rain coming down, everything's wet, sort of soggy rotting corpses all over the place, the detritus of war and battle in a kind of sort of butchered, scarred landscape of smashed villages, smashed towns, olive groves sort of truncated and splintered. It's not hard to picture it. And Wilson is a great chronicler of this, you know?