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Eleven minutes into captivity, a German sergeant was doing his job: identify the enemy officer. He stood in a vineyard above the Moro River with eight Canadians around him, and he could not work out which one of them was in command.
December 1943, Italy. In his own army you can find the officer in a rubble field, in the dark, in three seconds. There is a word that goes in front of every sentence and is never left out. Here there was nothing. No salutes, no titles, no visible line between the men giving orders and the men taking them. German intelligence had a name for that: indiscipline. An armed crowd of colonials who would break the first time something serious happened.
Nineteen days later the same men walked into the worst urban fighting of the Italian campaign, against German paratroopers. They did not break.
What Canadians said to their officers in front of enemy prisoners sounded like nothing. It took eleven months and a captured German general to explain what it meant.
#canadianwarstories #ww2 #canadianarmy #militaryhistory #canadianhistory #worldwar2
Eleven minutes into captivity, a German sergeant was doing his job: identify the enemy officer. He stood in a vineyard above the Moro River with eight Canadians around him, and he could not work out which one of them was in command.
December 1943, Italy. In his own army you can find the officer in a rubble field, in the dark, in three seconds. There is a word that goes in front of every sentence and is never left out. Here there was nothing. No salutes, no titles, no visible line between the men giving orders and the men taking them. German intelligence had a name for that: indiscipline. An armed crowd of colonials who would break the first time something serious happened.
Nineteen days later the same men walked into the worst urban fighting of the Italian campaign, against German paratroopers. They did not break.
What Canadians said to their officers in front of enemy prisoners sounded like nothing. It took eleven months and a captured German general to explain what it meant.
#canadianwarstories #ww2 #canadianarmy #militaryhistory #canadianhistory #worldwar2
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LearningTranscript
00:00December 9th, 1943.
00:02A vineyard on the north bank of the Moro River in Italy, four miles south of a town called Ortona.
00:10A German sergeant is standing with his palms flat against a wet stone wall and his boots spread wide,
00:16and he is doing exactly what he was trained to do.
00:19He is not thinking about the war, he is thinking about the next four minutes.
00:25Behind him, men of the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada are going through his pockets.
00:30Paybook, letters, a folding knife, half a bar of chocolate.
00:35He has been a prisoner about 11 minutes, and under his own army's standing instructions,
00:41a captured non-commissioned officer has one task left in him.
00:45Find the officer. Speak only to the officer. Name, rank, number, and nothing else.
00:52So he turns his head, slowly, and he starts hunting.
00:56He knows exactly what he is looking for.
00:59In his own army, you can find the officer in a rubble field, in the dark, in three seconds, without
01:05a light.
01:05There is a way men stand when an officer speaks.
01:09There is a word that arrives in front of every sentence and is never left out.
01:14Herr. Herr Leutnant. Herr Hauptmann.
01:17It is a hinge, and every sentence in the German army swings on it.
01:23He looks down the line of Canadians, and he cannot find the hinge.
01:27There are eight men in front of him.
01:30One is carrying a map case, which ought to settle the question,
01:33except the man with the map case is on his knees in the mud,
01:37working a jammed magazine out of a Bren gun.
01:40And while he does it, a private is standing over him, saying something.
01:44And the private is not standing at attention.
01:47And the man with the map case is laughing.
01:49He picks the tallest one.
01:52Big, mud to the eyebrows.
01:54No insignia visible, because every man in that vineyard has blackened or stripped his.
01:59And he addresses him properly, exactly as the regulation requires.
02:04Rank.
02:05Name.
02:06Serial number.
02:07The tall Canadian looks at him for a moment.
02:10Then he turns his head and shouts something back toward the vines.
02:14A voice answers out of the mud somewhere.
02:17The sergeant hears the whole sentence, and one word inside it goes into him like a splinter,
02:22and stays there for the rest of his war.
02:25It was a first name.
02:26Not a rank, not a title.
02:28A short, ordinary, first name, called across a vineyard by an enlisted man to the man who commanded him.
02:35Nobody flinched.
02:37Nobody corrected it.
02:38And the man it belonged to answered to it.
02:41Hold on to that.
02:42We are coming back to it.
02:43And when we do, it is not going to mean what it means to you right now.
02:47If these stories matter to you, a subscribe helps them reach more people.
02:51I'd be glad to have you along.
02:52Now understand what that sergeant was doing on the wall.
02:56It was not confusion, and it was not curiosity.
02:59It was intelligence work, and he was good at it.
03:02Identify the enemy's command structure.
03:04Find where the orders come from.
03:06Because if you know where an army's orders come from, you know where to cut.
03:10But the framework he was using was not stupid.
03:13It was the one his entire army was built on.
03:16The German army of that war was a European army in the old mold, and it ran on visible structure.
03:23Officers and enlisted men worked apart and lived apart.
03:27Formal etiquette was not a courtesy.
03:29It was an obligation, with penalties attached.
03:32Rank was a wall, deliberately built and maintained, because the belief underneath it was simple and,
03:38for most of military history, correct.
03:40Take away the wall, and the army loosens.
03:43Loosen the army, and it will not hold when the shelling starts.
03:47So when a German professional watched Canadians, he was not seeing charm.
03:51He was reading evidence.
03:53No wall.
03:54Therefore, no discipline.
03:56Therefore, an armed crowd of colonials in good boots who would break the first time something serious happened to them.
04:02And here is the part worth sitting with.
04:05That reading was not one sergeant's.
04:07It was the standing assumption about Canadians for most of the first four years of the war.
04:13Held by Germans, and quietly held by a good many British staff officers, too.
04:18Now look at who was actually standing over him.
04:21The Seaforth Highlanders of Canada came out of Vancouver.
04:25The Loyal Edmonton Regiment, a mile up the coast, came out of Alberta.
04:30Every man in both battalions had volunteered.
04:33Not one had been compelled to be there.
04:36They were bank clerks and section hands and prairie farm boys, and a great many of them had known their
04:42own officers in civilian life, in towns small enough that the man now giving the order had once sold you
04:49a car or coached your brother.
04:51That is what the sergeant.
04:53That is what the sergeant could not see, and what his framework had no space for.
04:57He was looking for the wall.
04:58The Canadians had built something else instead, and it did not look like an army to him at all.
05:04Over the next 19 days, those two battalions would walk into the most concentrated urban fighting of the Italian campaign,
05:12against two battalions of German paratroopers from the 1st Parachute Division, some of the finest defensive infantry Germany ever put
05:20in a town.
05:21In December alone, the Canadian division would take nearly 2,400 casualties.
05:27To put that in proportion, that is roughly a full infantry battalion erased in 31 days over ground you can
05:34walk across in an afternoon.
05:36They would not break.
05:38They would invent a tactic that is still taught.
05:40Two weeks after that vineyard, Canadian intelligence officers would sit down with about 50 captured German paratroopers and write a
05:49report.
05:50One passage in it accidentally explains the whole thing.
05:54Because in that room, the Germans described their own army out loud and did not hear what they were saying.
06:01But the sergeant on the wall did not need two weeks.
06:04He needed one more minute in that vineyard, because the next thing he heard was not a name.
06:10What he heard next was the private finishing his sentence.
06:14The man on his knees in the mud, the one with the map case, had asked something.
06:19The private answered him.
06:21Not a report, not a formal reply, just a man telling another man what he had seen on the far
06:29side of the vines.
06:30And then the man with the map case stood up, wiped his hands on his trousers, and gave an order.
06:37The order was the private's idea.
06:39That is the moment.
06:41Not the first name.
06:42The first name was only the sound the thing made.
06:46What the German sergeant was actually watching was information traveling upward without asking permission,
06:52and a decision coming back down about 11 seconds later.
06:56In his own army, information traveled upward too.
07:00It just had to stop at every landing on the way, and identify itself, and wait.
07:06So the question in front of us is not really about manners.
07:10Manners are the surface.
07:12The question is, where authority actually lived in a Canadian battalion,
07:17because it plainly did not live where the sergeant had been trained to look for it.
07:22And to find it, you have to go back three days.
07:26Night, December 5th into December 6th, 1943.
07:31Villa Rogati, a farming hamlet on the far bank of the Morro.
07:35The Princess Patricia's Canadian light infantry crossed the river in darkness,
07:40and took the place off the Germans holding it.
07:43And in one of the houses, a Canadian rifle section found something that had not been part of anybody's plan.
07:49German cooks had been up early.
07:52There was breakfast.
07:53Cooked, hot, laid out, meant for the men who had just been driven out of the village.
07:59Nobody sent up a request.
08:01A section of Canadians sat down in the enemy's kitchen, in the enemy's village,
08:0640 minutes after taking it, and ate the enemy's breakfast while it was still warm.
08:11That story survives because Canadians told it on themselves, laughing, for the next 50 years.
08:18Hear it properly, though, and it is not a joke about appetite.
08:22It is a photograph of an army in which men several ranks below anyone important
08:28expected to make their own decisions and expected not to be punished for it.
08:33Now, that habit had to come from somewhere, and this is where I want your full attention,
08:37because the fact I am about to give you is the load-bearing fact of this entire story.
08:43Consider a man in the Loyal Edmonton Regiment named James Riley Stone.
08:486'2", black mustache, 35 years old that December.
08:53Before the war, he had worked in forestry, in mining, and on cattle ranches in western Canada.
08:59In September 1939, Stone walked into a recruiting office and enlisted as a private soldier.
09:05Four years later, he was a major commanding a rifle company in Ortona.
09:10In October of 1944, five years and one month after signing his name as a private,
09:16he took command of the battalion.
09:19Private to lieutenant colonel.
09:2161 months.
09:23Let me put that beside something for you.
09:25In most European armies of that period, a man who began the war in the ranks
09:29could reasonably expect to end it in the ranks,
09:32and a battalion command was the property of a caste he had never been invited to join.
09:37Stone did not climb through a loophole.
09:39He climbed through the front door,
09:40because in the Canadian army, the door was where the door was supposed to be,
09:44and the men in his company knew all of it.
09:46They knew he had carried a rifle.
09:48They knew he had done the digging, the carrying, the standing in the rain.
09:51Which meant that when Major Stone told a private to go somewhere unpleasant,
09:55the private was not receiving an instruction from another species.
09:59Now, and I want you to watch this next turn carefully,
10:01because it is where most people get this story wrong,
10:04you might reasonably conclude that this is the whole answer.
10:07Canadian army promotes from the ranks, German army does not.
10:10Therefore, Canadians trust their officers, case closed.
10:14It is not the answer.
10:15And the reason it is not the answer is that the Germans did the same thing.
10:19From the autumn of 1942, the German army opened officer commissions
10:24to proven soldiers on nothing more than their commander's recommendation.
10:28Leadership, character, performance at the front.
10:32No aristocratic requirement.
10:34No purchase of position.
10:36Over the course of the war,
10:37tens of thousands of German non-commissioned officers and enlisted men
10:41were commissioned exactly that way.
10:43Some of the paratroopers about to fight the Canadians in Ortona
10:46were led by men who had started the war as privates, the same as Stone.
10:51So the latter was not the difference.
10:53Both armies had one.
10:54The difference was what happened to a man on the day he reached the top of it.
10:59In one army, a former private who became an officer was absorbed.
11:03He acquired the wall.
11:04He was addressed differently.
11:06He ate elsewhere.
11:08He was expected to become the thing the rank required.
11:12And if he did not, the system corrected him.
11:16In the other army, nothing changed at all.
11:19He kept his name.
11:20He kept the men who had known him before.
11:23And the authority he had built by carrying a rifle in the rain came with him,
11:28in his pocket, and was worth more than the crown on his shoulder.
11:33That is the mechanism.
11:35That is what the sergeant at the Moro could not read.
11:38Because there was no line in his framework for an army where rank was something you carried
11:44rather than something you wore.
11:46But this is where it stops being a theory, because within two weeks, a group of Germans was going
11:51to describe the difference themselves, out loud, on the record, in a Canadian interrogation
11:56room while believing they were saying something else entirely.
12:00Fifty of them.
12:01The best troops Germany had in Italy.
12:03And what they volunteered about their own comrades is one of the strangest things in the whole Ortona file.
12:09December 22nd, 1943.
12:12A farm building behind the Canadian line somewhere south of Ortona, with a table, a lamp, and
12:17a man who has not slept properly in six days.
12:20He is an intelligence officer of the 1st Canadian Infantry Division, and he is writing a summary
12:25of everything his section has learned since the 16th.
12:28In those six days, they have put roughly 50 German paratroopers through that room.
12:33Men taken out of the 1st, 3rd, and 4th parachute regiments.
12:37Watch what he writes first.
12:38Before the order of battle, before the map references, before anything useful to his own
12:43side, he writes an assessment of the men who have been sitting in that chair.
12:47And the assessment is that these are the hardest opponents the division has met so far,
12:51and the most careful about giving anything away.
12:53Read that again in your head.
12:55A Canadian officer, in the middle of the worst month his division would ever have, opens his
13:02report by telling his superiors that the enemy is excellent.
13:06That is not humility.
13:08That is a professional refusing to lie to the men who will act on his paper.
13:13And you are going to want to remember it, because in about 10 months, a German general is going
13:18to sit in front of a Canadian general and do the precise opposite, and it will cost him everything.
13:24Now to what the Germans actually did in that chair.
13:28The Canadians noticed immediately that the prisoners sorted themselves into two grades.
13:33There were the hard cases, the ones who had been in it since Crete or Russia, and those
13:38men gave nothing.
13:39Name, rank, and silence.
13:42And then there were the others.
13:44Young men who had volunteered for the parachute arm because it was the glamorous, dangerous,
13:49adventurous thing to do.
13:52Boys who had gone through a parachute training battalion in France for a few months, training
13:57that, in some cases, had not included a single jump from an aircraft, and had then been shipped
14:04straight to Italy to be shot at by Canadians.
14:07Those ones talked.
14:09And here is the part that matters.
14:11What they wanted the Canadians to understand was not tactical.
14:15It was social.
14:17They wanted their captors to know that they were paratroopers, and that the ordinary German
14:22infantry were not.
14:23They volunteered, unprompted, to the enemy, while prisoners, that the regular infantry were
14:30forever making a mess of things, and that it was they, the parachutists, who had to keep
14:35coming along behind and putting it right.
14:37Sit with that for a moment.
14:39A nineteen-year-old in a foreign farmhouse, in enemy hands, with his war finished and his
14:46life balanced on somebody else's decency, and what he needs the men across the table
14:51to know is that he is a better class of German soldier than the ones down the road.
14:56The Canadians wrote it down and moved on.
14:59I do not think they understood what they had.
15:04Because that is the wall again, not between officer and man this time, between unit and
15:11unit.
15:12The whole architecture that sergeant at the Morro had been searching for, the visible
15:17ranking of who stands above whom, ran all the way down through that army and out into
15:23the field.
15:24It carved the fighting line itself into grades, and an army graded that way has a structural
15:33problem it usually does not notice until it is too late.
15:37If the thing holding your regiment together is that you are better than the men beside
15:42you, then the men beside you are not a resource.
15:46They are the proof.
15:47You cannot borrow from them without admitting something.
15:51You cannot learn from them at all.
15:53Now hold that against what was happening four miles away, in the same week, in the streets
15:59of Ortona.
16:00The loyal Edmonton regiment worked out a way of getting through a defended town without
16:06walking on the streets.
16:08Blow a hole through the wall your building shares with the next one.
16:12Go through the hole.
16:14Clear downward instead of upward.
16:16Repeat.
16:17It was crude.
16:19It was violent.
16:20And it saved an enormous number of Canadian lives.
16:23The Seaforth Highlanders were a separate battalion, with a separate history, a separate cap
16:29badge, and the ordinary regimental pride that goes with both.
16:33They copied it within days.
16:35No study period.
16:37No staff process.
16:39No question about whose idea it was, and whether adopting it implied that somebody else had been
16:45cleverer.
16:46One battalion of Canadians watched another battalion of Canadians do something that worked, and
16:52simply started doing it.
16:54While under fire, in the middle of the fight.
16:57That is not a small thing.
16:59That is the practical, cash value of an army with no interior walls, and it is the reason
17:06the two of them got through Ortona at all.
17:09So we now have two of the three layers.
17:13We know rank in a Canadian battalion was carried rather than worn.
17:17We know the absence of interior walls let a good idea cross a regimental boundary in
17:23hours instead of months.
17:25What we do not yet have is the hardest part.
17:29What all of this actually sounded like when a Canadian officer opened his mouth to give
17:34orders in the worst place he had ever stood.
17:37And there is a record of it.
17:39An officer from another Canadian unit sat in on the daily orders group of the loyal Edmonton
17:46regiment's commanding officer through the whole battle, and wrote down how the man began.
17:51The first day, he laid out his plan for taking a city further up the coast.
17:56The second day, the objective was Ortona.
17:59The third day, a line halfway through the town.
18:04After that, for more than a week, he opened every single morning with the same sentence.
18:10Nine words.
18:12No threat anywhere in them.
18:14No exhortation.
18:15Nothing a recruiting poster could use.
18:18And it is one of the most quietly extraordinary things any commander said out loud in that war.
18:24Every morning, in the wreckage of a town that was killing his battalion at a rate he could
18:30not sustain, Lieutenant Colonel Jim Jefferson of the loyal Edmonton regiment opened his orders
18:37group by saying, well, we will see what we can do today.
18:41That is the sentence.
18:43That is what a Canadian officer sounded like at the worst moment of his war.
18:48Now think about everything that sentence is not.
18:51It is not a promise.
18:52It is not a demand.
18:54There is no reference to duty, to the honor of the regiment, to what history will say.
19:00There is no threat behind it, and there is no encouragement in front of it.
19:04It does not tell the company commanders in that room what the outcome will be, because
19:09the man saying it does not know, and he is not prepared to pretend that he does.
19:14It is the sentence a foreman says to a work crew on a bad job.
19:19And it was spoken to men who, three years earlier, had been on work crews.
19:24Understand what it does.
19:26A commander who promises victory every morning has spent his credit by Thursday,
19:31because his men can see the street.
19:34Jefferson never spent any.
19:36He told them the truth.
19:38This is going to be hard, and I am going to find out with you.
19:41And the effect of that, day after day, was that when he did say a thing was possible, they
19:47believed him.
19:48Now watch what men who are trusted like that will actually do.
19:52December 23rd, 1943
19:55The northern half of Ortona, where the medieval buildings crowd so close together that they
20:01share their walls, Captain Bill Longhurst commands A Company of the Loyal Eddies.
20:06The problem in front of him is arithmetic, and it is not complicated.
20:11Every street is covered by German machine guns firing down its length.
20:14Every doorway and every ground-floor window has been booby-trapped by paratroopers who
20:20have had days to prepare.
20:22To take the next building, his men must cross open ground and enter through the two places
20:27the enemy is certain they will use.
20:30Longhurst does not ask permission.
20:32He does not send the problem up for a decision.
20:34He orders his pioneers to blow a hole through the top of the wall his building shares with
20:39the next one, and then to go through it on the upper floor and clear the house downward.
20:43Everything about that is backwards.
20:46The manuals they had learned in England said clear a building from the bottom up.
20:50Longhurst inverted it, and the inversion is the whole tactic, because a grenade dropped
20:55down a staircase does the work of a rifle section, and a man coming through a wall at ceiling
20:59height arrives where nobody has laid a mine.
21:02That was the 23rd of December.
21:05Mouseholing is in the manuals of a dozen armies now.
21:07It was invented by a captain who saw a wall and decided.
21:11And the Germans in Ortona were not passive.
21:14Nobody should tell you they were.
21:15These were paratroopers of the 1st Parachute Division, and they answered.
21:19They began collapsing entire buildings onto Canadians who were inside them.
21:24They mined the routes the Canadians were now using.
21:27They pulled back a floor and waited at the bottom of the stairs for the grenade to come
21:32down, then killed the man who followed it.
21:35So the Canadians changed again.
21:38The tanks of the Three Rivers Regiment came up into the streets and worked out a two-round
21:43method.
21:44First an armor-piercing shell into the wall to open the hole and kill whoever stood behind
21:50it.
21:51Then a second, different round fired straight through the opening they had just made, to finish
21:57the room, move, counter-move, move.
22:02That is what those eight days actually were, and the side that could change fastest was going
22:08to own the town.
22:09And the changing was being done, over and over, by captains and sergeants who did not stop
22:16to ask.
22:17You want to know what that cost the man giving the orders?
22:20Here is one answer.
22:22Somewhere in that week, Major Jim Stone, the Private of 1939, found his company stopped by
22:30a German anti-tank gun sighted to sweep the street.
22:34A major commanding a rifle company has perhaps 120 men and a radio, and every reason in the
22:41world to send somebody else.
22:44Stone threw a smoke grenade.
22:45Then, he went up the street himself, alone, on foot, into the smoke, and dropped a fragmentation
22:52grenade over the top of the gun's armored shield.
22:56They gave him the military cross for it.
22:58What his company took from it was simpler and more durable.
23:02The man who had been telling them to go into buildings had just gone first.
23:07By the 28th of December, the paratroopers pulled out of Ortona in the dark, and the town
23:13was Canadian.
23:14The loyal Edmonton regiment had 172 casualties there, 63 of them dead.
23:21The seaforths, 103, 41 dead.
23:25Set that beside the ground.
23:27Those numbers came out of an area you could walk across in 20 minutes, in 8 days.
23:33A veteran of another Canadian battalion, Harry Fox of the Hastings and Prince Edward regiment,
23:38put the whole thing into one flat prairie sentence years later.
23:42They had faced the best troops Germany had.
23:45And, as he saw it, we could beat the best of the German army.
23:49But there is one more thing that happened inside those 8 days.
23:53And it is the reason this story is not simply about tactics.
23:57Three days before the Germans withdrew, while the shooting was still going on a few hundred
24:01yards away, the seaforth Highlanders did something with their officers that no German unit in
24:06that town could have done, and that no German officer watching would have been able to explain.
24:11If you had shown it to that sergeant from the Morrow River, he would have said it was the final
24:16proof
24:16that this was not a real army.
24:18He would have been looking straight at the answer.
24:20December 24, 1943.
24:23Ortona.
24:24Captain D.B. Cameron, quartermaster of the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada, makes a decision that
24:30is, by any reasonable military standard, indefensible.
24:34A quartermaster in a street battle has one job, and it is a brutal one.
24:38Ammunition forward.
24:40Water forward.
24:41Rations forward.
24:42Wounded back.
24:44Every vehicle he owns, every hour of his men's time, every yard of road under mortar fire,
24:50is accounted for by that.
24:52Cameron takes some of it and spends it on tablecloths.
24:55He and his people go out and they find things.
24:58White cloths for the tables.
25:00Real china, not mess tins.
25:03Roast pork.
25:04Applesauce.
25:05Cauliflower.
25:06Mashed potatoes and gravy.
25:08Soup.
25:09Christmas pudding.
25:10Oranges.
25:11Nuts.
25:12Candy.
25:12Chocolate bars.
25:13Cigarettes.
25:14And one bottle of beer for every man in the battalion.
25:18The venue is the church of Santa Maria di Constantinopoli, in the southeastern part of Ortona.
25:24The seaforths had taken it and were using it as their headquarters.
25:27Three days earlier, at half past ten in the morning, German mortar bombs had come down on
25:32that church, one of them through the roof, and set seaforth vehicles burning outside the
25:37door.
25:39That is where the tables go.
25:40Under the hole.
25:42And on Christmas day, the rifle companies of the seaforth highlanders come out of the
25:46fighting in shifts to eat.
25:49Not the battalion.
25:50It could not be the battalion, because the battalion is in contact with German paratroopers
25:55a few hundred yards up the street, and somebody has to stay in the buildings.
26:00So they rotate.
26:01A company walks back out of the mouse holes, sits down at a table with a cloth on it, is
26:06served a hot dinner on a plate, has two hours, and then gets up and walks back into it, so
26:13the next company can come out and do the same.
26:15Their commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Sid Thompson, had a battalion in contact with
26:21the enemy, and a church full of his men eating pork off china plates.
26:25He let it run all day.
26:29Somebody had found an organ, or what was left of one.
26:33It was played.
26:35One of the things played was Silent Night.
26:38Lieutenant Wilf Gildersleeve, the battalion's signals officer, sat in that church on Christmas
26:45day, 1943, and tried to find something in it that felt like Christmas.
26:51Now, I want to be careful here, because it would be very easy to hand you this as a sentimental
26:57story, and it is not one.
27:00It is evidence.
27:01Ask the practical question, where were the officers?
27:05In an army built on the wall, and remember, that is the army holding the other end of the
27:11street, this event is structurally impossible.
27:17A formal army separates the messes, because that is what the separation is for.
27:23The officers eat as officers, the men eat as men, and the whole point of the arrangement
27:29is that the distance is visible and permanent, especially on a feast day, when hierarchy is
27:36on parade.
27:37In Ortona, the entire logistical machinery of a Canadian infantry battalion, in the middle
27:44of the hardest week of its existence, was bent toward one object, putting the private soldier
27:51at a table with a cloth on it, and putting a plate in front of him.
27:56The Seaforth Highlanders have recreated that dinner every December since.
28:01Officers serve the men.
28:03That is the ritual, and it has run for more than 80 years, which tells you exactly how
28:09the regiment itself understood what happened in that church.
28:14So look again at what the German sergeant at the Moro was trying to find.
28:18He was hunting for the marker that showed where the officers ended and the men began.
28:24He never found it, and he wrote that down as an army with no discipline.
28:30And here is that same army, 19 days later, spending its transport on China in a shelled
28:37church, which would have confirmed everything he believed.
28:41Except that this is the reason the town fell.
28:44Because the men eating at those tables were about to be asked that same afternoon to go
28:50back through a hole in a wall, into a room where somebody was waiting for them.
28:54And they went.
28:56Not one of the Seaforth companies failed to go back in.
29:00An army holds together on one of two things.
29:03Either the men fear what happens to them if they refuse, or they cannot stand the thought
29:08of letting down the men beside them and the man in front of them.
29:12Both work.
29:14Only one of them survives the twelfth day.
29:17Understand what it cost.
29:20Some of the men who sat at Cameron's tables on Christmas morning were dead before the
29:24light went.
29:26Over that Christmas period, Canada lost 213 men.
29:30Put that in scale for a moment.
29:32That is a rifle company and a half, gone, in the days most families measure by who came
29:38home for dinner.
29:38And a few hundred yards north, the paratroopers holding the other half of Ortona were doing
29:44something quite different.
29:45Because Hitler had personally ordered the town held at any cost.
29:49Their own senior commanders in Italy thought the place was not worth it.
29:53One of them said plainly that the price in blood could not be justified.
29:57And they were made to hold it anyway.
29:59Two armies in one small town on the same night.
30:02In one of them, a captain was requisitioning tablecloths.
30:05In the other, men were dying for a fixed point on a map because a man in East Prussia had
30:10said so.
30:12Ortona ended on the 28th of December.
30:14And here is where this story turns hard.
30:17Because everything I have shown you so far has a bill attached.
30:21And it had not yet come in.
30:24Six months later, the Canadians landed in Normandy.
30:27And inside five weeks, the true price of officers who go through the wall first was written into
30:34a casualty return in a way that no army can absorb for long.
30:38Two hundred and twenty of them.
30:40And the figure that follows it is worse.
30:43June 7th, 1944.
30:46Inland from Sword Beach, in the Normandy hedgerows, 24 hours after the landings.
30:51Two platoons are stopped in front of a German pillbox.
30:54The officer commanding one of them is Captain James McGregor, Mac, to everybody who has ever
30:59worked with him.
31:00And what he does next is the thing this whole story has been building toward.
31:04He does not call for artillery.
31:06He does not send a section forward to try the entrance.
31:09He walks up to the pillbox himself and calls on the men inside to surrender.
31:14They cut him down at the doorway with a burst of automatic fire, into the chest and stomach,
31:19and he was dead before the lieutenant in the next platoon could reach him.
31:23Now here is the thing you need to know about Captain Mac McGregor.
31:27He was not commanding Canadians.
31:29There was not a single Canadian in either of those platoons.
31:32Every man watching him walk up to that pillbox was a Yorkshireman, and McGregor had known
31:37them for a matter of weeks.
31:38Hold that, because we are coming back to it, and it is the hinge of the entire argument.
31:45First, the number I promised you.
31:47Before Normandy, Canadian planners worked out what the campaign would cost.
31:52Their projection to the 10th of July was 132 infantry officers and around 2,150 other
32:01ranks.
32:01The actual figure was 220 infantry officers and 3,885 other ranks.
32:10Very nearly 79% of every Canadian casualty in Normandy came out of the infantry alone.
32:18Let me make the officer figure real for you.
32:20A Canadian infantry battalion carried somewhere around 35 officers.
32:26220 dead and wounded officers in 5 weeks is the officer strength of 6 battalions taken off
32:33the board, and the men who replaced them were, on average, younger, greener, and still expected
32:40to do exactly what their predecessors had done, which was go first.
32:44That is the invoice for leadership by trust.
32:47Not a metaphor.
32:48A payroll.
32:50Which brings us back to McGregor, and to something almost nobody outside Canada has heard of.
32:54By late 1943, the British Army had run short of junior officers.
33:00Canada at that moment had a surplus.
33:03So Ottawa and London made a bargain, and in the spring of 1944, 673 Canadian officers volunteered
33:10to be handed over to the British Army outright.
33:13Not attached.
33:14Not liaison.
33:15Absorbed.
33:16Posted into British battalions, commanding British soldiers, in British regiments, with British
33:22sergeants who had never seen a Canadian in their lives.
33:25They were given individual numbers with the letters CDN in front, and a small Canada flash
33:31on the shoulder of a British battle dress.
33:33The program was called Canlone.
33:36And gentlemen, whether anyone intended it or not, that is a controlled experiment.
33:41Because here is the obvious objection to everything I have told you.
33:45Perhaps the Canadian way of commanding worked only because both ends of it were Canadian.
33:50Perhaps it was a folk habit that functioned in a battalion from Edmonton and would collapse
33:55the moment you moved it.
33:57Canlone moved it.
34:00623 infantry officers of it into the British Army with no cultural cushion at all.
34:06Some of their new superiors called them colonials to their faces, and they did not care for
34:11it.
34:12So watch what happened.
34:14Lieutenant Leonard Robertson, CDN 192, went in on Sword Beach on the morning of the 6th.
34:21The ramp dropped early.
34:22He went off it into water deeper than he expected.
34:25And when one of his privates was hit in the surf, Robertson took hold of the man and dragged
34:30him the rest of the way ashore with bullets coming across the water.
34:34The man was hit again.
34:36Robertson got his platoon off the beach and inland.
34:39Lieutenant Roger McClellan, CDN 554, of New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, was commanding a platoon
34:46of Scots in the Glasgow Highlanders.
34:48By September, his sections had learned to read him without radio.
34:52He would raise his left arm, shout two words, follow me, and they would move.
34:57On the 10th of September, near Ghent, that platoon was pinned in a street by machine gun and
35:02rifle fire and an 88.
35:05McClellan organized the withdrawal of his wounded, covered it with two men, and came out last
35:09through the smoke, carrying a Sten and a Bren.
35:11They gave him the military cross.
35:14Between D-Day and the end of August, 77 of those Canadian officers were killed or died
35:19of wounds in British uniforms.
35:21By the end, the Canloan casualty rate was 75 percent, 128 dead, 310 wounded, 27 taken prisoner.
35:30Between them, they were awarded 41 military crosses.
35:35And now, the moment that settles it.
35:37Later in the campaign, Robertson, by then a military cross himself, had a vacancy in his
35:43company, and the unusual decency to ask his British soldiers which they would rather have.
35:47A British replacement officer from their own army, their own county, their own accent.
35:52Or another Canadian.
35:54The answer came back unanimous.
35:56Bring us the goddamned Canadian.
35:58Those men had no national reason to say that.
36:01They had every reason to want one of their own.
36:03They chose the Canadian because of how a Canadian officer behaved in a British platoon.
36:08He used their names, he took their information, and when the moment came, he was the one who
36:12stood up in front of the wall.
36:14So it was not culture, it was method.
36:16And it traveled.
36:17Which means the question has changed under us.
36:20It is no longer why the Canadians did it.
36:23It is why the German army, which was not stupid and which had watched this happen for two years,
36:30never adopted it.
36:31There is an answer.
36:33And in November of 1944, a German general in Canadian hands gave it.
36:38In one word, to a Canadian general's face, believing he was delivering an insult.
36:44November 1, 1944.
36:47A golf course on the Belgian coast, just outside the resort town of Knocke, in flat, grey weather,
36:53with the sea somewhere off to the right.
36:56Infantrymen of the North Nova Scotia Highlanders are clearing concrete.
37:00It is slow, filthy work.
37:02Approach the pillbox, cover the aperture, open it, deal with whatever is inside.
37:08They open one of them, and inside is a major general.
37:11Knut Eberding, commanding the German 64th Infantry Division, surrenders on the spot, without
37:17a fight, and comes out carrying a leather suitcase.
37:20Remember that suitcase.
37:22It is going to be the last thing in this story that behaves the way the German army expected.
37:27Now understand who the Canadians had spent four weeks fighting, because I will not hand
37:31you a cardboard enemy.
37:33Eberding's division had been left behind on the south bank of the Scheldt Estuary to
37:37deny the Allies the port of Antwerp for as long as humanly possible.
37:42It was a scratch formation.
37:44Men scraped together off leave from the Eastern Front, from Italy, from Norway.
37:48Veterans who had never worked with each other before.
37:51He took that, and he made it into one of the hardest defensive problems the Canadians
37:56ever faced.
37:57He breached the dikes and let the sea into the polders, which meant Canadian infantry could
38:02only advance along raised roads, in the open, exactly where his guns already were.
38:08He built strongpoints out of villages.
38:10He put every cook and clerk and driver he had into the line.
38:14The 1st Canadian Army's own intelligence people, writing afterwards, called the 64th the
38:20best infantry division they ever met.
38:22That is, the Canadians talking about the men who had just killed their friends.
38:27But now look at how Eberding held his division together.
38:31Men who pulled back without orders were shot.
38:33As the pocket closed and the situation became hopeless, the number of Germans executed by
38:38their own side for desertion went up, not down, because more and more of them would rather
38:43take their chances surrendering than die for a flooded field.
38:47And Eberding made it known that if a man deserted, his family back in Germany would be imprisoned
38:52for it.
38:53That is the wall in its final form, not tablecloths in a church, not a colonel saying, we will
38:59see what we can do today, a commander reaching 400 miles behind the front to put his hand
39:04on a soldier's mother.
39:06Facing him was Major General Dan Spry, commanding the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division.
39:12Spry had already tried it the fast way.
39:14Two aggressive operations inside five days had cost him roughly 700 men killed.
39:19So he changed.
39:21He slowed the division down, brought up every gun and aircraft he could get, and ground
39:26forward methodically, spending shells instead of soldiers.
39:30That decision was not free either.
39:32On the 24th of October, Field Marshal Montgomery came to Spry's headquarters and told him the
39:37advance was too slow and the pocket should have been cleared weeks ago.
39:42Sit with that.
39:43A Canadian divisional commander stood there and absorbed a rebuke from the most famous
39:48soldier in the British Empire rather than by speed with his own infantry.
39:53That is the same contract McGregor kept at a pillbox door.
39:57It just looks different at the top of the chain.
39:59And then, on the 1st of November, the two men met.
40:03Eberding is a prisoner now.
40:05Spry is his captor.
40:07And the German general opens the conversation by criticizing the Canadian's generalship.
40:12He tells Spry he was not aggressive enough.
40:15He tells him he failed to take his opportunities.
40:17He tells him any German general would have moved far more swiftly.
40:22Spry answers him plainly.
40:23He explains that he had lost about 700 men killed in two aggressive operations in five
40:30days and that he had therefore chosen a methodical advance because it preserved the lives of
40:35his men.
40:35And Eberding gives him the word.
40:37He calls it weakness.
40:39He goes further.
40:40He explains to Spry that German generals concern themselves with winning and that they do not
40:45permit concern about casualties to interfere with the pursuit of victory.
40:49There it is.
40:50Eleven months after a German sergeant stood at a wall above the Morrow River trying to
40:55work out where the Canadians kept their authority, a German general finally said the answer out
41:00loud and did not hear himself say it.
41:02Because that is not a criticism of Spry.
41:05That is a confession about the German army.
41:07Everything we have looked at follows from that one sentence.
41:10Why officers and men were kept apart.
41:12Why the paratroopers in the Canadian cage needed their captors to know that the ordinary infantry
41:17were beneath them.
41:18Why a good idea could not cross from one German unit to another the way mouseholing crossed
41:25from the Edmontons to the Seaforths in a day.
41:29And why an army that had every opportunity to copy the Canadian method never did.
41:36You cannot run on trust if you have defined the protection of your own men as a defect.
41:42Everything else follows.
41:44If the soldier is not worth preserving, you do not need his name.
41:49You do not need his judgment.
41:51And you do not need him to want to go back through the wall.
41:55You only need him to be more afraid of you than of the enemy.
41:58So you build the wall.
42:01And the wall works.
42:03Right up until the day the men behind it decide that surrendering to Canadians is the better
42:09arithmetic.
42:09Here is the arithmetic.
42:12In the Breskin's pocket, the Canadians took 2,077 casualties.
42:18The Germans took 12,707.
42:23Six for one.
42:24That was the price of Eberding's aggression and Spry's weakness.
42:28And it was paid almost entirely by German families.
42:34Eberding went into captivity, eventually to a prisoner of war camp in Mississippi.
42:39And six months after that golf course, the entire German command in the Netherlands sat
42:45down in a Dutch hotel to surrender to a Canadian.
42:49And the ceremony had to be postponed, for a reason so ordinary that it is almost unbearable.
42:56May 5, 1945, Hotel de Wereld in the Dutch town of Wageningen, a town so close to the
43:03fighting that its civilians had been evacuated out of it.
43:07Lieutenant General Charles Foulkes of the 1st Canadian Corps has summoned the German commander
43:12in the Netherlands to come and arrange the surrender of every German soldier in the country.
43:18Colonel General Johannes Blazkowicz does not come.
43:21He sends his chief of staff instead.
43:23The Canadians send word back that this is not acceptable, and that Blazkowicz will attend
43:28in person.
43:29At 4 o'clock that afternoon, he does.
43:32So there they are in a small Dutch hotel.
43:35Folk's, Brigadier George Kitching, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, a room full of reporters
43:41and cameramen and two German generals.
43:44Blazkowicz is handed the terms and asks for 24 hours to work out whether he can actually
43:49deliver on them.
43:50And the surrender of the German 25th Army is not signed that day.
43:54Not because of the delay Blazkowicz requested.
43:58Because nobody could find a typewriter.
44:00That is the true, recorded, documented ending of the German occupation of the Netherlands.
44:09The largest formal capitulation the Canadian Army ever accepted postponed one day because
44:16in the whole of Liberated Wageningen there was not a working machine to type it on.
44:22They found one the next morning, in the hall of the agricultural college next door, and
44:28it was signed there.
44:30I want to leave you with that image because it is the exact opposite of everything the
44:36German army had built.
44:38No ceremony, no hinge, no wall.
44:42Just a room full of tired men waiting on a typewriter.
44:47Blaskowicz had spent forty years in an army that got the forms right.
44:52Foulkes had spent five in one that mostly did not.
44:56And it was Foulkes who chose the room, set the terms, and sent back word that a deputy
45:02would not do.
45:04Now go back with me to that vineyard.
45:06December 9th, 1943.
45:09A German sergeant with his hands flat against a wet stone wall above the Moro River, doing
45:15his job, hunting for the officer, and not finding him.
45:19He was looking for the man who would be addressed differently.
45:22He was listening for the word that arrives before every sentence and is never left out.
45:27He never heard it.
45:29What he heard instead was one Canadian shouting another Canadian's first name across a muddy
45:34vineyard, and an officer answering to it without correcting anybody.
45:38That is the answer to the question we started with.
45:41That is what Canadians called their officers in front of German prisoners.
45:44They called them by their names.
45:47And what that sergeant could not hear, what his entire army could not hear, all the way
45:52up to a general in a pillbox on a golf course, is that the name was not the absence of
45:56authority.
45:57The name was the receipt.
46:00It was the proof that the man giving the order had been a private in 1939, or had gone first
46:07through the hole in the wall, or had stood in front of a field marshal and taken a rebuke
46:14rather than spend his infantry.
46:16In one army, you obeyed a man because of what he wore.
46:20In the other, you obeyed him because of what he had done, and you called him by his name
46:25to say so.
46:27Only one of those two armies was still standing in that Dutch hotel in May.
46:32Jim Stone, who walked into a recruiting office as a private in September 1939, took his battalion
46:40through to the end of the war, then took a Canadian battalion to Korea and held a hill
46:45at Kapyong.
46:47He died in 2005, at 97.
46:51Rex Fendick, blown up in his carrier in August 1944, recovered, went back, served in Korea,
46:59and finished as a lieutenant colonel.
47:01Leonard Robertson, whose Yorkshireman asked for another Canadian, was wounded, returned
47:07to his unit, and spent his later years working for the Association of the Men he had served
47:13with.
47:13Roger McClellan, who raised his left arm and said, follow me, went home and became
47:20a research scientist studying agricultural pests, and then went back into uniform to command
47:26a Nova Scotia regiment.
47:29Leo Heaps got out of a moving prison train through a hole cut in the wall of a carriage,
47:34made it back to Allied lines, and spent much of his life afterwards getting refugees out
47:40of other people's wars.
47:41Canute Eberding was released from captivity in 1947 and lived another 31 years in Germany.
47:50And the young paratroopers who sat in that Canadian farmhouse in December 1943, explaining
47:57to their captors that they were a better class of German soldier, most of them lived.
48:02That is the quiet joke at the bottom of this.
48:05The men on the other end of the table did not think a soldier was expendable.
48:10And so they went home.
48:13And every December, in Vancouver, the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada lay white cloths on long
48:20tables and sit down to the Ortona dinner, and the officers of the regiment serve the men.
48:27They have done it for more than 80 years.
48:31Nobody has ever had to explain to a Seaforth why.
48:35That is the whole thing, really.
48:37An army can be held together from above, by fear, by distance, by the certainty that the
48:43man giving the order is a different order of being.
48:46Or, it can be held together sideways, by men who know each other's names and cannot bear
48:53to let each other down.
48:54The first one is easier to build.
48:57The second one is the one that walked into Ortona, and across the Scheldt, and into that
49:03hotel in Wageningen to wait for a typewriter.
49:06Thank you for giving this story your time.
49:09If you think these Canadians deserve to be remembered, a like genuinely helps the story find more
49:15people.
49:15And if you would like to hear more, we are here every week.
49:18And if someone in your own family served, Canadian, American, British, Commonwealth, or
49:24lived under the occupation and remembers who came, I would be honored to hear their name.
49:29Those names are worth saying out loud.
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