It was getting dark when the artillery began with a roar. “Time 20:45”, noted Jack Ward, Regimental Sergeant-Major of the 56th Heavy Regiment, Royal Artillery, “and the battle for the Volturno is on”.
It was October 12, 1943, and Regimental HQ was based in a large, grand country villa, a summer palace, rumour had it, belonging to the Italian King Vittorio Emanuele III.
It stood two-and-a-half miles south of the River Volturno near the coast and had barracks attached as well as thick stone walls; Ward thought it an ideal place. “From an OP [observation post] on top of the house,” wrote Ward. “I can see what looks like a sea of fire reaching for miles. What a do!”
This was the opening artillery barrage by the massed guns of the Fifth Army – immense firepower that was both fearful and astonishing to behold.
Jack Ward was a regular Army gunner who had joined the Royal Artillery back in 1920 when he was just 18. At the time he’d been a fitter in Eastbourne on the south coast of England, where he lived with his parents and siblings. The Army had offered a career, but also the possibility of adventure.
Now, aged 42, he was only a month short of 23 years in the army and, as very much the old man of the regiment, something of a figurehead to the men.
Even so, for all his years of service through the 1920s and 1930s, his time in Tunisia in the first months of the year – and where he’d been lightly wounded – had been his first taste of frontline combat.
A long summer training and refitting in Tunisia and Algeria was followed by their landing at Salerno, south of Naples, in the third week of September.
Since then, he and the rest of the regiment had been on the move constantly, first through the intense late summer heat and now, since the start of October, battling against not only the Germans in Italy but also torrential rain.
The 56th Heavy Regiment was equipped with the big BL 7.2-inch howitzer, a beast of a gun that could lob a 202lb shell the best part of ten miles.
Since landing they had been on the move constantly – pushing forward, unhitching the big guns, firing, packing up again and moving forward.
Ward kept a daily note of these moves and what he witnessed in some detail in a hardback notebook. His writing was pretty neat and for the most part, remains legible.
His entries were jotted down partly for something to do, but mainly as a record of what he’d been up to for his wife to read if and when he ever made it home again.
That I now have this diary is down to an extraordinary piece of chance.
Al Murray, my fellow presenter on the podcast We Have Ways Of Making You Talk, noticed a tweet about the notebook being for sale
at Blackwell’s Rare Books in Oxford and tipped me off. They wanted quite a lot for it, but I took a deep breath and handed over my card details. A few days later, it arrived in the post, smothered in bubble wrap.
I was nervous about opening it, as I had no idea whether it was going to tell me much.
Although they were not supposed to, many frontline soldiers did keep diaries during the war. But having looked through hundreds over the years, I knew that while some are utterly fascinating, others can be no more than half a sentence per day and say very little.
So, I opened it and started to read with a bit of apprehension.
It’s always amazing to handle something that was so personal to someone, many years before, and particularly when written during the war.
Jack Ward’s diary covers every day from the start of 1943 through to the end of 1944. It travelled with him to North Africa, across the Mediterranean, and up through Italy. It was witness to battles, to storms, to landings, to dark moments, funny moments, and to the fortunes of one man as he fought his way through two years of the Second World War.
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Some of it is written in fountain pen, other parts in pencil, but I need never have worried about the content because it’s pure gold.
Ward saw and took part in incredible events, but what really makes it so extraordinary is that his personality leaps off every
single page. He’s a man who has long since passed away, but from his words, flesh is put back onto those bones.
In his diary, he’s very much alive: a gentle man, often lugubrious, but decent and humane, and also so very identifiable.
The novelist L. P. Hartley once wrote that the past is a foreign country. He may have been right but Ward, despite writing his diary 80 years ago, is an extremely recognisable fellow – full of worries, hopes, anxieties, fears, with likes and dislikes that seem entirely familiar to anyone reading his words today.
And that means that through his entries, those of us who want to understand a little bit more about just what it was like to live through the war, can get that much closer.
Ward is just one of a number of very real people I have followed for a new account of the brutal and bitter war in Italy in 1943.
I travelled the world 20 years ago interviewing veterans of the Second World War.
I’ve spoken to Maori from New Zealand, ex-Italian partisans, former SS and many other Germans.
There have been Canadians, Australians, Indians, Gurkhas and, of course, Britons and Americans. There have been pilots and soldiers, tank men, and bomber men, civilians and partisans, sailors and cipher clerks.
It’s been a privilege but, of course, that greatest generation is now slipping away. It’s sad and I’ve lost many people who had become good friends.
The passing of living witnesses, however, has made me change my approach.
Fortunately, millions of diaries and letters were written during the war and while the majority have been destroyed or lost, a fair number still remain – in archives, in private hands and even occasionally coming up for sale at Blackwell’s Rare Books.
Reading a number of them has made me think very differently about the war because diaries and letters were written at a very
precise moment: at a certain hour, on a certain day. Talking to a veteran 60 or 70 years after the event is fascinating, but there’s no denying that memories get distorted and change over time, and very often lack the detail of something written in the moment.
Jack Ward’s is one, but there have been plenty of others and from both sides and Italian civilians too. One of the most moving has been a series of letters by Laurie Franklyn-Vaile, from Melbourne, Australia, who was married and living in England when war broke out and ended up in Italy with the Royal Irish Fusiliers. His letters to his wife are stunning.
Another is Filippo Caracciolo, an Italian from Naples, whose diary entries are incredibly perceptive and beautifully observed. Franklyn-Vaile was later killed at Cassino in May 1944, while Caracciolo became General Secretary of the Council of Europe.
But what all these documents reveal is that, what is uppermost in the mind of a soldier or civilian in October 1943, might have been completely forgotten decades later.
Jack Ward obsesses about what letters he has received – he notes every single one. “Just received No. 72 and 73 air letters,” he noted on October 18, “the first that took 11 days”.
The following day, Ward crossed the River Volturno on a bridge hastily built by the Royal Engineers. “Jerry, by the way,” he wrote, “is blowing every bridge large and small, besides sowing hundreds of mines and traps.”
He hadn’t been on the far side for more than five minutes before the Germans began shelling them – clearly, they’d been spotted – which brought much cursing from the nearby infantry. Fortunately, neither he nor anyone else was injured on that occasion, despite them landing just “20 to 30 yards away”.
Even in the thick of the action, thoughts of home were never far away, however, in the same entry, he mentioned having
packaged up and posted Christmas presents to his family back in Britain.
“Nice new stockings,” he added, “I hope they arrive okay.”
He was also feeling under the weather. “My cold has gone to my head,” he jotted, “feels like two heads. If I was at home, should be having a hot cup of milk in bed.”
He and the rest of the Fifth Army soon began pushing north, heading to the next main German defensive position, about ten miles south of Cassino, known as the Bernhardt Line.
An enemy bomber crashed in flames not 100 yards from one of their gun batteries and then they reached a town called Sparanise.
“The town is just a mass of bricks and mortar,” he noted, although curiously, the town clock still worked and chimed the hour.
Terrible levels of destruction were part and parcel of fighting in a country of some 40 million people.
Ward never failed to be shocked by the desolation and human suffering of civilians caught in the cross-hairs. “Hard fighting…” he scribbled on October 28, “But we are pushing them back. Wonder when and where another landing will be made, shall have to do something before long. At this rate, it will take until Xmas to get to Rome.”
In fact, it would not be until June 4, 1944, two days before D-Day, that the Allies finally took the Italian capital, and Jack was there every step of the way.
Following his fortunes, and his daily thoughts and jottings, has taken me – and I hope readers – far closer to those first months of the Italian campaign.
After the war, which I believe he survived, Ward disappears from sight entirely.
I’ve been able to find no trace of him or his family following the end of hostilities.
But his and other diaries and letters – from both sides and from civilians caught in the middle – give an extraordinary day-by-day account of how the war in Italy unfolded, not from afar, but there, in the heat of the action, as those tragic events played out.
And reading them and getting to know these men – and women – has been the most extraordinary soap opera.
It has been impossible not to become completely caught up in their lives.
And the last 80 years feel like they have melted away to just yesterday instead.
- The Savage Storm by James Holland (Transworld, £25) is out now. For free UK P&P, visit expressbookshop.com or call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832. Did you know Jack Ward, former Regimental Sergeant-Major of the 56th Heavy Regiment, Royal Artillery, from Eastbourne? Email [email protected]
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