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In December 1943, Canadian infantry discovered a ravine south of Ortona that wasn't on any of their maps. German paratroopers had dug into the banks — in ground no artillery shell could physically reach. Battalion after battalion went at it. Battalion after battalion failed.
So a Canadian general ordered every mortar he could find to fire straight down into that dead ground. The bombs landed exactly where they were supposed to. And the position held anyway.
Fourteen months later, German infantry facing the First Canadian Army discovered that dead ground — the foundation of their entire defensive doctrine — had stopped working. Not reduced. Gone. The mortar hadn't changed. The bomb hadn't changed.
What changed had nothing to do with the weapon. It had to do with a question nobody had thought to ask — and an answer that came from the last place anyone expected.
#canadianwarstories #ww2 #canadianarmy #militaryhistory #canadianhistory #worldwar2
In December 1943, Canadian infantry discovered a ravine south of Ortona that wasn't on any of their maps. German paratroopers had dug into the banks — in ground no artillery shell could physically reach. Battalion after battalion went at it. Battalion after battalion failed.
So a Canadian general ordered every mortar he could find to fire straight down into that dead ground. The bombs landed exactly where they were supposed to. And the position held anyway.
Fourteen months later, German infantry facing the First Canadian Army discovered that dead ground — the foundation of their entire defensive doctrine — had stopped working. Not reduced. Gone. The mortar hadn't changed. The bomb hadn't changed.
What changed had nothing to do with the weapon. It had to do with a question nobody had thought to ask — and an answer that came from the last place anyone expected.
#canadianwarstories #ww2 #canadianarmy #militaryhistory #canadianhistory #worldwar2
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LearningTranscript
00:00December 12th, 1943. A ravine called the Fosso Saraceni, two miles south of the Adriatic town
00:08of Ortona, in a cold Italian rain that had not stopped in three days. In a hole cut sideways
00:15into the southern bank of that ravine, a German paratrooper of the 1st Parachute Division sat
00:21with his knees against his chest and counted. He was good at this. Every man in his section
00:28was good at this. The Canadian guns had been working the ground above him since first light,
00:34and he knew the arithmetic of it the way a farmer knows weather.
00:38Shells arrive on a flat path. A flat path needs a line of sight. And the bank he was sitting
00:45inside
00:45had no line of sight to anything. It was a fold in the earth, a crease, a place the trajectory
00:52could
00:52not physically reach. The shells went over. They always went over. Then they stopped, and he climbed
01:00out with his rifle, and the Canadians who had walked forward believing the ground was empty
01:05discovered that it was not. That was the trade. Endure the noise. Survive it in a hole no gun
01:13could touch. Come out first. At about eleven o'clock that morning, the sound changed. It did not get
01:21louder. It got closer to vertical. Something was arriving above him at an angle no field gun could
01:28produce, dropping into the crease, into the very ground that was supposed to be immune, and bursting
01:36on the mud eight meters from his hole. Then another. Then eleven more in under a minute, walking along the
01:44bank, into every fold and hollow the position had been chosen for. He did what he had been trained
01:50to do. He waited for the gap between salvos, the pause when the loaders reset and a man can move.
01:58He put his hand on the lip of the trench, ready to go. The gap did not come. He dropped
02:05back down.
02:06And somewhere in the next few seconds, a 22 year old professional soldier of the finest light
02:12infantry division in the German army had to accept a fact that his entire tactical education said was
02:18impossible. There was nowhere in this ravine that was safe. If stories like this matter to you,
02:26a subscribe helps them reach the people who still remember the men who fought them. Now, hold on to
02:32that ravine, because we are going to come back to it, and the second time you see it, you are
02:37going to
02:37understand something you cannot understand yet. What that German soldier was sitting in has a name.
02:44Soldiers call it dead ground. It is any piece of terrain that a flat shooting weapon cannot reach.
02:50The far side of a ridge, the bottom of a gully, a drainage ditch, a cellar, the lee of a
02:57stone wall.
02:57And I want you to understand how central this was, because it was not a convenience.
03:03It was the load-bearing wall of the entire German defensive method in the Second World War.
03:09The German army did not hold the tops of hills. It held the backs of them.
03:13Their doctrine put the infantry on the reverse slope, out of sight, out of reach,
03:18and left the forward slope empty for the enemy's guns to pulverize.
03:22Their manuals treated the survival of the riflemen through the bombardment as the whole point.
03:27Take away the shelling, put the man back on the crest with his machine gun ten seconds before the
03:32attackers arrive, and no amount of Allied firepower mattered, because the firepower had landed on
03:37ground he was not standing on. They were extraordinary at it. A Canadian intelligence report
03:43written that same December, after roughly 50 captured German paratroopers had been interrogated,
03:48listed the qualities that made these men so hard to kill.
03:52Stubbornness, economy of manpower, a sense of exactly when to withdraw, and, at the top of the
03:58list, skill in concealment. That is the enemy. Now look at the ground. The Faso Saraceni is not a
04:06famous feature. It is not casino. It is a small creek that had worn itself a U-shaped valley into
04:13the
04:13farmland, and it was so unremarkable that it barely registered on the maps the Canadians were using.
04:20Intelligence officers had not flagged it. The men reading the aerial photographs had missed it.
04:26The 1st Canadian Infantry Division walked north on the 10th of December towards a crossroads on the
04:32Ortona Road, and discovered a ravine that was not supposed to be there, held by an enemy who could
04:39not be shot at. The Canadians called it, simply, the Gully. And for six days it did to them exactly
04:47what it
04:48was designed to do. Battalion after battalion went at it. The loyal Edmonton Regiment, the Princess
04:55Patricias, the Seaforth Highlanders, whose commanding officer was carried out wounded, and later described
05:02a forward aid post crowded with broken and shocked men, and a medical officer too exhausted to stand,
05:09who never once stopped working. The West Nova Scotias tried at dusk on the 11th and got nowhere.
05:16They tried again the next morning in driving rain, and got nowhere again.
05:22Which brings us back to 11 o'clock on the 12th of December, and to a decision made by the
05:27divisional
05:27commander, Major General Chris Vokes. Vokes had run out of ideas that involved guns, so he ordered
05:34something else. He ordered every mortar he could reach, every 3-inch tube in the infantry battalions,
05:41every 4.2-inch mortar in the divisional support battalion, to fire high angle, into the reverse slope
05:47itself, while the artillery worked on everything else. That was the moment the man in the bank heard the
05:53sound change. And here is the part I need you to sit with, because it is the reason this story
05:58is worth 40
05:59minutes of your life. It did not work. The Carleton and York regiment went in behind that mortar fire.
06:06They had some early success. Then machine guns and mortars from inside and beyond the gully tore into them,
06:14and the battalion came out with 52 casualties and 28 men taken prisoner when a platoon was cut off and
06:22surrounded. So the weapon was not the answer. On the 12th of December, 1943, the Canadians dropped bombs
06:30straight down into dead ground, and the Germans held anyway. 14 months later, on a flooded plain 400
06:38miles to the north, German infantry facing the 1st Canadian Army would find that dead ground had stopped
06:46working entirely. Not reduced. Gone. The mortar did not change between those two days. Something else did.
06:55To understand what changed, you have to know what the Canadians were actually holding in their hands.
07:01And I am going to tell you this the way the men learned it, which is not the way a
07:05manual teaches it.
07:07Start with the object itself. A 3-inch mortar is a steel tube about 4 feet long, a bipod, and
07:14a base plate.
07:15The whole thing weighs 115 pounds, and comes apart into 3 loads a man can carry on his back.
07:23The bomb is 10 pounds. You drop it down the tube, tail first, and gravity does the firing.
07:30The propellant charge strikes a pin at the bottom, and the bomb leaves at 650 feet per second,
07:37going up at somewhere between 45 and 80 degrees. That last number is the whole story.
07:43A field gun shoots along the ground. A mortar shoots over it and comes down almost on top of the
07:50target.
07:51There is no crest it cannot clear, and no fold of earth it cannot enter.
07:56The heavier weapon is the 4.2-inch. That one is not portable in any meaningful sense.
08:02The barrel alone is 92 pounds, the base plate 120, and the tripod another 112.
08:09It throws a bomb of 19 pounds 13 ounces out to something over 2 miles.
08:15A trained crew can put 20 of those in the air in the first minute.
08:18Now hold that number, because I am going to need it in a moment.
08:22Two things about these weapons mattered enormously to the men on the receiving end,
08:26and neither of them appears in the technical tables. The first is that a mortar does not flash.
08:32A gun announces itself. Muzzle flash, smoke, a bark you can take a bearing on.
08:37A mortar dug into a hole behind a hedge produces almost nothing. It is, in the words of one Canadian
08:43regimental history, a stealthy weapon, and that is not a figure of speech. It is invisible to the men
08:49it is killing. The second is worse. The bomb makes very little noise in flight. A shell screams.
08:56Every soldier of that generation could read a shell. The pitch told you whether to run or lie flat,
09:03and the interval between the sound and the impact gave you a fraction of a second that was sometimes
09:08the difference between a man walking home in 1945 and a name carved in Ortona. A mortar bomb gives you
09:15none of that. It arrives. Put those two together and you have the thing that broke German nerve across
09:21three years and two continents. Fire that comes from nowhere you can see, into ground you thought
09:27was safe, with no warning you can act on. And the Canadians knew all of this intimately, because for
09:33the first half of the war it had been done to them. Let me give you the figure I want
09:38you to carry
09:38through the rest of this story. By late July of 1944, seventy percent of every British and Canadian
09:45casualty in Normandy was being inflicted by German mortars and their multi-barreled rocket projectors.
09:52Seventy percent. Not tanks. Not the 88. Not the sniper in the church tower that fills the films.
10:00Seven out of every ten men carried off a Norman field on a stretcher had been hit by a bomb
10:05dropped on
10:06him from above by a crew he never saw. We know that number precisely because of a 23-year-old
10:14zoologist.
10:15His name was Michael Swan. He had an abbreviated wartime degree in biology, a commission in the
10:22engineering corps, and no business whatsoever being anywhere near a battlefield. He belonged to number
10:29two operational research section, the small team of scientists Montgomery had agreed to attach to his
10:35army group on the theory that people who measure things for a living might be useful in a war that
10:41was mostly about things nobody was measuring. Swan did something nobody in either army had thought to
10:48do. He went to the medical officers of four separate divisions and asked them, one at a time, what was
10:55actually killing their men. Every single one of them gave him the same answer. Above seventy percent.
11:04Then he went looking for the weapons and discovered that the divisions facing them were systematically
11:09underestimating how many there were. A German infantry division could field as many as 57 81-millimeter
11:17mortars, plus 12 to 20 of the heavy 120-millimeter type. On top of that, Normandy had been given an
11:25entire
11:25regiment of 54 six-barreled rocket launchers, allotted at one per division. Allied troops called those
11:33moaning minis. Six shells in 10 seconds, and the noise of them broke men who had survived everything else.
11:41And where were the German mortars firing from? Swan's report is blunt about it, almost always from reverse
11:48slopes. Flash spotting, the technique that had worked beautifully in the North African desert, men in towers
11:55watching for the wink of a gun, was close to useless in Normandy, because there was never any flash to
12:01see,
12:01and never any line of sight to see it along. Do you see what has happened here? Turn the picture
12:07around.
12:08The same principle that put a German paratrooper safely inside the bank of the gully was putting
12:14German mortar crews safely out of Canadian reach in Normandy. Dead ground was not a German trick the
12:20Canadians were fighting. It was the shared physics both armies lived inside. Which is why the ordinary
12:27Canadian infantryman's relationship with the mortar in the summer of 1944 was not admiration. It was
12:34hatred. He knew what it did. It had done it to him, in an orchard outside Caen, for eleven hours
12:41at a
12:41stretch, while he lay in a slit trench and listened to men he had trained with for four years being
12:47killed
12:47by an enemy he could not shoot back at. Swan's report said something about that too, in the flat language
12:53scientists use, that the strain of holding a position and being mortared for days on end is intense.
13:00He did not need to write more than that. Every man reading it in 1944 knew exactly what those words
13:07covered. So here is where we stand. The Canadians had the weapon. They had, by 1944, the finest artillery
13:16organization in the Western alliance sitting right beside it. They had learned the lesson the hard way,
13:22from the receiving end, in blood, on a scale nobody has ever properly explained to the public.
13:29And they were still losing men on ground exactly like the gully. Because owning a mortar and knowing
13:35what a mortar does are not the same thing as being able to put one where it needs to be,
13:40when it needs
13:41to be there. And in February of 1944, somebody sat down and formally tested how good the Canadian army
13:49actually was at that. The results were not good. In fact, of the nine infantry battalions in one entire
13:58Canadian division, exactly one passed. February 1944, England. Somewhere in the paperwork of the 2nd
14:08Canadian Infantry Division, an inspecting officer worked his way through the mortar platoons of all
14:14nine infantry battalions and wrote down what he found. One platoon, one out of nine, was rated well
14:23trained in every respect. That was the Calgary Highlanders. The Black Watch of Canada, a regiment
14:31with a reputation that went back to the 1860s, was graded fair. The rest of them did worse than that.
14:39I want you to hold that report against everything you have ever been told about Allied firepower in 1944.
14:47Five years into the war, four months before D-Day, and eight out of nine Canadian mortar platoons in
14:55a division about to land in Normandy were not, in the judgment of their own army, good enough.
15:02That is not a story of incompetence. It is a story about how new all of this was, and about
15:09a problem
15:09that no amount of drill on Salisbury Plain was going to fix. Go back with me to the spring of
15:151943,
15:16and you will see where the Canadians started. Until that year, the Saskatoon Light Infantry had been a
15:22machine gun battalion, 48 water-cooled Vickers guns, the men called them the peanut artillery, and nothing
15:29heavier. In the first days of May, the unit was reorganized on paper into a support battalion,
15:35and handed weapons most of them had never touched, 20mm anti-aircraft guns, and 4.2-inch mortars.
15:43Almost immediately, they were mobilized for war. They had a few weeks in Scotland, around Dune and
15:50Calendar, to learn them. Training ran 16 hours a day. Then, they sailed for Sicily, and on the way,
15:56an enemy submarine sank one of the ships carrying the heavy mortar company's vehicles. Five carriers,
16:02and most of a platoon's equipment went to the bottom of the Mediterranean. No lives were lost,
16:08but the crews were stranded in North Africa, and the mortars they were meant to be firing were
16:14somewhere else entirely. There was one saving grace, and it is the sort of detail that decides
16:22campaigns. Somebody had thought to carry spare mortars on the troop ship, so on the 10th of July, 1943,
16:31at dawn, 4.2-inch mortars came ashore on Pacino Beach in amphibious trucks and went into action standing
16:39on the sand. One platoon was thrown to the left flank, where a British commando brigade had been pinned
16:46down by an Italian mortar position firing very effectively into them. A commando officer directed
16:53the Canadian fire himself. The Italian mortars stopped. Later reports confirmed the crews had been
17:00wiped out. First morning, first shoot. Counter mortar work, done by improvisation, by a man from another army,
17:09pointing at a map. That is the pattern of the next four months. Everything is learned in contact,
17:16and half of it is learned by failing. At Leonforte, on the 25th of July,
17:22an attack was thrown back by the Hermann-Goring division. A larger attack went in the next day,
17:29and before the infantry moved, the mortars tried to set the town alight with large quantities of
17:35phosphorus smoke bombs. It did not work. The town had to be taken the hard way, house by house,
17:42and it was. At Nisoria, every mortar and every machine gun in the group fired to cover the advance,
17:50and the barrage the mortars put on the town is remembered in the battalion's own history as the
17:56heaviest thing it had done to that point. At Aguirre, the fighting ran three days. At Regalbuto,
18:03on the 3rd of August, a mortar platoon commander named Lieutenant Newberry went forward on a
18:09reconnaissance and did not come back. Pay attention to how he was lost, because it is not incidental.
18:16A mortar crew fires at what it cannot see. Somebody has to go forward and be its eyes,
18:22and that somebody is an officer or a sergeant crawling into ground where the infantry has not yet been.
18:29In the Salsow Valley, in 10 days of small attacks under Mount Etna, the machine gunners were using
18:34mules to get their weapons up the slopes, and a corporal named Taget earned the military medal for
18:40gallantry. Then, on the 17th of October, in the hills near Spinete, a mortar platoon commander named
18:46Captain McKenzie was out on a reconnaissance with his driver and two artillery officers when all four
18:52were captured. They were being marched to the German rear. Somewhere on that road, the three officers
18:58decided they were not going. They turned on their guards, killed them, and walked back to their own
19:03lines. I tell you that story for one reason. These were not men sitting safely two miles behind the
19:09war dropping bombs down a tube. The whole system depended on the man in front, and the man in front
19:15was as exposed as any rifleman in the division. And now, the thing that was actually wrong.
19:22By the end of 1943, the mortars of the 1st Canadian Division were not organized as mortars. They were
19:30parceled out. Three brigade support groups, each with its own mortar company, each belonging to its
19:36own brigade. If your brigade was attacking, you had your mortars. The mortars of the other two brigades
19:42were somewhere else, answering to somebody else, on a different radio net, 16 or 20 tubes at a time.
19:49On the 8th of December, at San Leonardo, a single Canadian mortar platoon fired 400 bombs in an hour
19:56and a half, while the machine gunners beside it put 70,000 rounds downrange. That is what one platoon
20:03could do. The next day, that same mortar position was found by German dive bombers, and three men were
20:10killed and five wounded where they stood. Four hundred bombs. Enormous effort, enormous courage,
20:17enormous cost, and the position in front of them held, because the weight that arrived was the weight
20:23of a fragment of a division, not the weight of a division. Vokes had already sensed the shape of
20:29the answer on the 12th of December, when he ordered every mortar he could reach onto the reverse slope of
20:34the gully. It had failed. But it had failed for a reason he could name, and two days later he
20:40let
20:40one officer try it again, properly this time, with every single mortar in the brigade placed under one
20:46man's control for one attack. That attack was going to end with a Canadian major, 20 men and five tanks
20:53holding a farmhouse against an army. December 14th, 1943. First light west of the gully.
21:00The Royal 22nd Regiment, the Vendus, the French-speaking battalion of the 1st Canadian Division,
21:06was the last uncommitted infantry battalion Vokes had. Everything else had been fed into the ravine
21:12and chewed. Their orders were to attack northeast toward Cider Crossroads with a squadron of Ontario
21:19Regiment Shermans, and to do it behind a divisional artillery program. Something had changed in how that
21:26program was built, and it is worth 30 seconds of your attention because it is the seed of everything
21:32that follows. Brigadier Bruce Matthews commanded the divisional artillery, and Matthews had a problem
21:38he could measure. The maps were wrong. Predicted fire, the kind you calculate from a grid reference
21:45without seeing the target, had been landing in the wrong places for a week because the base maps
21:50everyone was working from did not match the ground. So instead of trusting the arithmetic,
21:56Matthews had his forward observation officers physically register the guns on a series of target
22:01areas and give each one a code name. Fire around. Watch where it lands. Correct. Write it down. Give it
22:10a name.
22:11The result was that on the morning of the 14th, a Canadian officer with a radio could say one word,
22:17and put the concentrated fire of the division on a specific piece of Italian farmland,
22:23accurately, in minutes, because somebody had already paid for that accuracy in advance.
22:29Hold that idea. One word, named ground. Fire arrives. And on that same morning, every mortar in the 3rd
22:38brigade was placed under the command of one officer, Major Drayton Walker, to support the Van
22:44Duce going forward. Walker is a name you have not heard and should have. He was not a professional soldier.
22:52He had run the very first course the Saskatoon Light Infantry ever held back in November of 39,
22:59three weeks of instruction for about 90 junior officers and NCOs in a stadium in Saskatchewan,
23:06when the battalion had no uniforms and no equipment. One of the men on that course wrote afterwards
23:12that few men had a greater influence on the battalion in the whole war. What Walker taught them,
23:19in the judgment of the man who sat through it, was not really machine gunnery. It was an attitude towards
23:25the job. Now, four years later, he had every mortar of a brigade on one net and a French Canadian
23:32company
23:33walking into the worst ground in Italy. The attack did not go the way the plan said. It never does.
23:40The 60-minute opening barrage was largely wasted because the first task turned out to be recovering
23:46the lateral road rather than advancing along it. The right-hand company turned aside to avoid fire,
23:53got lost inside the gully itself, and had to come back to the start line. Men stalked a German tank
24:00hidden inside a house and killed it with a handheld anti-tank projector at a range where you can hear
24:06the
24:07crew talking. And the paratroopers were dug in among the ruins and the craters, with tanks and self-propelled
24:14guns beside them, ready to call down artillery and mortars of their own, which left C Company and a major
24:21named Paul Triquet, working forward with the Ontario Regiment's Shermans. You know the end of this story
24:28even if you have never heard the beginning. Triquet reached the farm buildings of Casa Berardi with
24:34fewer than twenty men still on their feet and five surviving tanks. He and Major Smith of the
24:40Ontario's decided that instead of withdrawing, they would take the place and hold it. The words Triquet used
24:47that day, the order that they shall not pass, are in every Canadian history book. He was given the
24:54Victoria Cross, and no one has ever suggested he did not earn it. What is not in most of the
25:01books is
25:01that the fire that shot him onto that objective, the registered concentrations, the tank guns, and every
25:07single mortar the brigade possessed, worked by one headquarters, was as much a part of the arithmetic
25:13as the courage. Casa Berardi held. D Company of the Vandus made a night march and reached the house
25:20shortly before midnight. Now watch what the men who fought there did with that experience. Because
25:26here is what should have happened next, and did not. In most armies, in most wars, a battle like the
25:32Gully produces a medal, a communique, and no change whatsoever. The Gully cost the 1st Canadian Division
25:39of the division. Ortona, when the division fought its way into the town street by street over the
25:45following fortnight, cost 275 casualties inside the town alone, 104 of them killed. And across the whole
25:55of that bloody December, close to 4,800 men of the division had to be evacuated as casualties,
26:03or for battle exhaustion, or sick. The mortars had been in it from beginning to end. On the 18th of
26:10December, the commanding officer of the support battalion personally controlled the mortars of all
26:15three groups for the attack on the Ortona crossroads. On the 20th, he did it again, every mortar in the
26:22division, firing the barrages that prepared the assault into the town. The moment the infantry had a
26:29foothold in the streets, mortar crews moved up behind them and put an observation post in the
26:35tallest building in Ortona, looking out over the whole town and the ground beyond it. The battalion's
26:41own account calls that observation post precarious, which is a very Canadian word for a man standing in
26:48a window in a town where snipers were the daily currency. By the 4th of January, south of a piece
26:55of
26:55high ground on the map marked 0.59, a Canadian mortar company had its heaviest day of the entire
27:02Italian campaign, supporting an attack by the Carleton and York regiment. I want to give you that
27:09figure carefully because it is the kind of number people assume is a misprint, approximately 1,000
27:16rounds per mortar. Think about what that means with your hands. A 19 pound bomb, lifted, dropped down a
27:24tube, one at a time, by men standing in the open in an Italian January, a thousand times over, on
27:32every
27:32tube on the position. Barrels too hot to touch. Ears gone. Ammunition parties walking up under shellfire
27:41all day long to feed it. And when that fortnight of fighting ended, Chris Vokes did something almost no
27:49wartime commander does. He looked at the weapon that had just been worked to the edge of destruction
27:56and concluded that the problem was not the crews. It was the wiring diagram.
28:02January 1944. The Adriatic front has gone static. Ortona is a shell. The division is sitting in the mud in
28:11front of it.
28:12And Chris Vokes, who had just spent a month having his infantry killed by an enemy sitting in ground he
28:18could not reach, orders an experiment. Here is the order, and I want you to notice how boring it sounds.
28:26The mortar companies are to be taken away from the brigade support groups. They will be formed into a
28:32single divisional mortar group. Major Walker will command it, with Major Mitchell as his second,
28:38and three company commanders under them. That group headquarters will control the fire of every mortar
28:45in the division in support of any brigade. And it will coordinate that fire with the artillery through
28:52representatives sitting at brigade headquarters. That is it. That is the whole thing. Nobody invented a
28:58weapon. Nobody built a factory. A Canadian general moved some boxes on an organization chart in a farmhouse in
29:05Italy. And it is the single most important sentence in this entire story. Let me show you what it actually
29:14does, because on paper it is administration, and on the ground it is the end of the world for the
29:20man in the hole.
29:22Before, a German company commander holds a reverse slope facing a Canadian brigade. He knows the arithmetic.
29:30That brigade owns three infantry battalions, and each battalion owns six 3-inch mortars. 18 tubes,
29:38plus whatever heavy mortars are attached to that brigade today. He can survive 18 tubes. He has survived 18
29:46tubes since Sicily. You dig deep, you accept losses, you come out. After. That same German company commander is
29:55being watched by one Canadian officer with a radio, and that officer is speaking to a headquarters that
30:01owns every mortar in the division. Nine battalions of 3-inch mortars, 54 tubes, plus a full company of 4
30:10.2
30:10inch heavy mortars, not 18, somewhere north of 70. And they are not spread across a divisional front
30:18anymore, waiting for their own brigade to need them. They can all be pointed at one field.
30:25Now put the numbers together. A 4.2 crew can fire 20 bombs in the first minute. 20 rounds a
30:34minute,
30:34from every tube that will bear, into a piece of ground the size of a farmyard, arriving at 70 degrees,
30:42with no flash to see and no scream to warn you. Remember what that paratrooper in the gully was
30:50doing on the 12th of December? He was waiting for the gap. The pause between salvos when the loaders
30:57reset and a man can run 20 meters to a better hole. Centralize the tubes and the gap disappears. Not
31:06because any single crew fires faster, because there are now so many crews that somebody is
31:12always firing. That is the difference between being shelled and being sealed in. And there is a second
31:19half to the order that most people skip over, and it is the half that makes it Canadian rather than
31:26merely large. The mortar group coordinated its fire with the artillery through representatives at brigade
31:32headquarters. Which means the mortars stopped being a separate war. They were plugged into the
31:38same system Bruce Matthews had been building at the gully. Registered targets, code names, forward
31:44observers, one word on a radio. Think about what those two things do when you put them together.
31:50The artillery could reach anywhere except dead ground. The mortars could reach dead ground and almost
31:55nothing else. Wire them into one nervous system, and there is no longer any piece of earth on the
32:01German side of the line that cannot be hit within minutes by somebody. On the 5th of January, the
32:06new group demonstrated exactly what it was for. It controlled the mortars of the Princess Louise
32:11Fusiliers as well, firing in support of an entirely different formation, the 11th Brigade. Not their
32:18brigade. Not their divisions brigade. It did not matter anymore. The tubes belonged to the fire plan,
32:25not to the cap badge. The battalion's own account records the verdict in four words. The experiment was
32:34a success. At the end of January, the divisional commander ordered the whole battalion reorganized
32:41on the same principle. The brigade support groups were finished. Three machine gun companies under one
32:47headquarters. Three mortar companies under another. And the third piece, the piece that turns a hammer into a
32:54machine, arrived at the same time. The counter mortar organization became a separate unit inside the
33:01mortar group. Stop and appreciate the elegance of that, because I do not think it was an accident.
33:07The men who spent their days working out how to put bombs into ground the enemy thought was safe,
33:13were now sitting in the same headquarters as the men whose entire job was finding German mortars doing
33:19exactly the same thing to Canadians. Same problem, both directions, one roof.
33:26The hunters and the hunted, comparing notes across a table. The man who took over that battalion a year
33:32later, Drayton Walker himself, wrote down what he expected of it in four short principles.
33:38Three of them are about being better tomorrow than today. The fourth is five words long, and if you
33:45remember nothing else from this part of the story, remember these. We will not be neutralized.
33:52That is not a slogan, that is an instruction with a specific meaning. It means, whatever the enemy
33:58does to our positions—shelling, counter-battery, dive bombers, anything—our fire does not stop.
34:05When the infantry calls, somebody answers. Always. And Walker's men had earned the right to write that
34:12sentence, because on the 9th of December, a mortar platoon had been caught by dive bombers, and lost
34:18three killed and five wounded, and had gone on firing. So, by the end of January 1944, the 1st Canadian
34:26Infantry Division possessed something no formation on either side of that front possessed. Not a better
34:31mortar, the tube was the same British tube everyone had. A better answer to the question of, who owns
34:36it? Four months later, that answer went into the Hitler line, and it met, for the first time, an
34:42enemy who had worked out a counter-move of his own. A counter-move so simple, and so cold, that
34:48it very
34:48nearly broke the whole system on its first proper test. The German paratroopers had decided to stop firing.
34:54May 22nd, 1944. The Leary Valley, south of Rome. The 1st Canadian Division is in front of the Hitler
35:03Line, a belt of concrete, wire, and dug-in guns that the Germans have had months to prepare. And this
35:12morning, the entire divisional mortar group fires under one command for the first time in a set-piece
35:18battle. The program supports the 1st Brigade attacking the left hinge of the line at Pontecorvo.
35:26Every platoon fires 200 rounds per mortar, and the targets are exactly what you would now expect,
35:34hostile mortar positions, and infantry strong points. Read that target list again, hostile mortar
35:41positions. The Canadians are no longer only breaking into dead ground, they are hunting the men who are
35:48using it against them, and they are doing it with the same weapon, from the same headquarters, in the same
35:55fire plan. The German return fire that morning was heavy. Three Canadian mortarmen were killed. Two officers
36:04and 15 other ranks were wounded. A breach was made in the defenses, a slight one, and Pontecorvo still
36:12dominated the ground. That night, the platoons regrouped to support the 2nd and 3rd Brigades going in against
36:20the center and the right the following morning. And now, the counter move. The 2nd Brigade's boundary
36:28happened to line up almost exactly with the German divisional boundary, which meant the Canadians who
36:34crossed it on the 23rd of May walked directly into their old enemies from Ortona, the paratroopers.
36:41The paratroopers had learned something in five months. When a Canadian counter mortar staff
36:47builds a fire plan, it builds it from a list. Every German mortar position that has been located by
36:54sound, by air photograph, by a man watching a hillside. If a mortar has fired, it is on the list.
37:02If it is on the list, it will be smothered the moment the attack begins. So the paratroopers' mortars had
37:08not
37:08fired. They had sat silent through the preparation, through the registration, through everything the
37:14Canadians did to draw them out. And they had stayed off the list. And when the Canadian infantry came
37:21forward on the morning of the 23rd, those silent tubes opened up all at once, from positions nobody
37:27had accounted for, into men crossing open ground. The battalion's own history describes that fire in
37:34one word, vicious. At the 2nd Brigade headquarters sat a Canadian captain named Howard Mitchell,
37:40the mortar group's representative, the human wire between the infantry and 70 tubes. And what Mitchell
37:47had that morning, in his own account of it, was a frantic time, trying to answer the brigade's pleas to
37:52silence the German mortars. Sit inside that for a moment. This is the whole story compressed into
37:58one man at one map table. A brigade is being killed by weapons in ground he cannot see, fired by
38:05an enemy
38:05who has just beaten his system by the simplest method available, patience. And Mitchell has to find them,
38:12in minutes, while the infantry dies, using nothing but bearings, reports, and whatever the forward
38:19observers can give him. The line broke that day. The Carleton and York regiment got through,
38:25the Van Duos passed through them and consolidated, and each Canadian mortar fired approximately 300
38:31rounds doing it. Casualties were heavy. And when it was over, the divisional commander and the brigade
38:38commanders went out of their way to record their satisfaction with one specific thing. The counter-mortar
38:45organization, the new separate unit inside the mortar group. Four months old, and it had just been
38:52tested by the best light infantry in the German army using the best trick they had, and it had held.
38:59That is the Italian half of the answer. Now go north, to Normandy, where the Canadians were relearning
39:05the same lesson at a far higher price, and where the second half of the answer was being built by
39:11people
39:12who had never fired a mortar in their lives.
39:15Remember Michael Swan, the 23-year-old zoologist with the clipboard? By late June, his section had
39:22begun going forward into the battle area to see, as he put it, what fighting actually looked like.
39:28He was caught up in the defense of a newly captured village during a German counter-attack. The bridgehead
39:34was so small in those days that his team could drive to the fighting in half an hour, spend the
39:40day
39:40there and be back in the evening to bathe in the river and argue about the problem.
39:45The problem was mortars, and the report Swan's section wrote about it is one of the most quietly
39:50devastating documents of the campaign. It stated flatly that the German mortar was as much a weapon
39:57to be defeated as his tanks, and that casualties from mortars had contributed as much as anything else
40:03to making the Allied advance slow and costly. Then it went through every method of finding them,
40:10and destroyed each one in turn. Flash spotting. Useless. The Germans fire from reverse slopes.
40:17Sound ranging. The discharge is too quiet and the rocket launchers fire in ripples.
40:24Air observation. Aircraft simply could not see mortars. Crater examination. The technique taught at the
40:34artillery school. Swan noted, with the driest sentence in the whole report, that crawling about
40:42inside a fresh mortar crater could not realistically be recommended. That left radar. Mortar bombs had
40:50already been detected on anti-aircraft sets at 7,000 yards and rocket clusters at 11,000, and the trials
40:59had been noticed, filed, and dropped. Swan's report reached the counter-mortar committee of the British
41:06Second Army in early August. And here is the line in it that ought to be better known in Canada.
41:13There was no official counter-mortar organization in the British Army at all.
41:19Every division was doing whatever its commander had thought of. And when the committee looked around
41:25for a working model to copy, the model it adopted was the one the Canadians had already built.
41:31They had added the men to run dedicated counter-mortar listening posts. And British Second Army took the
41:38Canadian system as its own. Out of that meeting came a decision to raise radar batteries. One of them was
41:46the first Canadian radar battery. By late September, it was formed, and its crews were on a 10-day course
41:53learning the theory and drill of finding mortars. Then it went to the Nijmegen area, and somebody
42:00devised a scheme with a beautiful name, Operation Trojan, whose entire purpose was to provoke the
42:07Germans into shooting. They shot. In three hours, the Canadian radar sections pinpointed 19 positions.
42:15The Germans understood immediately what had happened to them, and their answer was to stop
42:21being findable. Long silences between rounds, a few bombs, and then move. It worked, in the narrow sense that
42:31locations became harder to get. But escaping detection was never the job those crews had been given. And in
42:38February of 1945, on the flooded plain west of the Rhine, that distinction was going to matter more than
42:46anything either army had learned so far. Before the Rhineland, one small scene from Normandy. Because
42:53everything I have told you about headquarters and radar and organization charts only matters if you
42:58can see what it looked like at ground level, on a summer evening, with the sun still up.
43:03July 8th, 1944. 5.40 in the afternoon, on the road between Buron and Othie, outside Caen. The Canadian
43:12Scottish Regiment is attacking the villages of Cussey and Beto, behind a barrage from two field regiments,
43:19and their commanding officer has told the leading companies to cross the start line as the barrage
43:23opens, and go straight through without stopping, because stopping is what kills you. C Company storms
43:30into Cussey, and going forward with them, out in the open, are two sections of the battalion's own
43:35three-inch mortar platoon, not behind, with them. They ran across the fields in front of Beto,
43:42set two mortars up in the open ground, and fired onto the Germans ahead of the infantry until the
43:49ammunition was down to a reserve of twenty bombs. The emergency stock you keep back in case of
43:55counter-attack, and nothing else. Then, Sergeant Kent and his crew put down the bombs, picked up rifles
44:02and Bren guns, and fought as infantry until more ammunition could be carried up to them. That is a
44:08mortar platoon, not a rear area function. Men who will run into a village with a hundred pounds of
44:15steel on their backs, fire it dry, and then take up rifles. Now, February 8th, 1945. The Rhineland.
44:25Operation Veritable is 1st Canadian Army attacking southeast from Nijmegen into Germany,
44:32and the fire plan built for it is the largest the Canadians ever fired. Seven divisional artilleries,
44:39five army groups of royal artillery, two anti-aircraft brigades, a total of 1,034 guns.
44:48And that figure of 1,034 does not include the mortars. Because the mortars were doing something else,
44:57something with the least military name in the English language. They called it the pepper pot.
45:04The idea was this. Alongside the artillery program, everything else that could throw a projectile would
45:11be used at once on selected targets as harassing fire. Anti-tank guns, 40mm anti-aircraft guns firing at
45:21the ground, tank guns, medium machine guns, and mortars. All known enemy localities, headquarters,
45:30and communication sites were targeted. An estimated six tons of shells fell on each target.
45:37Ammunition for the pepper pot was dumped by the division load. Look at what has happened to the
45:43mortar in this story. On the 12th of December 1943, it was the desperate measure a general reached for
45:51when nothing else could touch a ravine. 14 months later, it is a standing component of the largest fire
45:58plan a Canadian army ever wrote, sitting beside a thousand guns. The preparation opened at 5 in the
46:06morning and ran until quarter to 10. The barrage that followed was 500 yards deep, lifting 300 yards
46:15every 12 minutes to match the pace of the infantry. And out on the flanks, the radar batteries were doing
46:21the other half of the job. The first Canadian radar battery, and its British counterpart, were both
46:28deployed for Veritable. And the result, recorded in the battery's own war diary, is one of those flat
46:35sentences that takes a moment to detonate. The attacking infantry reached their initial objectives,
46:41consolidated, and moved forward to the next phase without any interference from enemy mortars.
46:47None. For eight months, 70% of British and Canadian casualties had come from German mortars and rocket
46:56projectors. And on the opening day of the Rhineland battle, Canadian and British infantry walked onto
47:02their objectives and were not mortared at all. The German mortars were located as they fired and killed
47:09or driven off their positions faster than they could do their work. The war diary of the Royal Canadian
47:15artillery records the same thing from the other end. The effectiveness of the counter-battery and
47:21counter-mortar programs was visible in the almost complete absence of German shelling and mortaring.
47:27Most of the relatively light allied casualties that day came from mines, not from artillery,
47:34not from mortars, not from small arms. Now stand where the German infantryman is standing,
47:40and understand what has been done to him. He is in a slit trench on a reverse slope,
47:45which is where his army has told him to be since 1940. Behind him, the mortars that are supposed to
47:51protect him, the weapons that have been the backbone of his defense for four years, are being found within
47:58minutes of firing and destroyed by a machine he has never seen and does not understand. In front of him,
48:06coming over the crest that used to be his roof, is fire from seventy-plus mortar tubes controlled by a
48:13single headquarters and wired into a thousand guns. The ground behind the hill no longer protects him.
48:21The ground behind the hill is now the most dangerous place he can be, because it is precisely where the
48:27mortars are aimed. He cannot go forward, that is the barrage. He cannot go back, that is the pepperpot,
48:35working the headquarters and the communications and the reserve positions. He cannot stay. The bombs
48:42come in at seventy degrees into the hole he is standing in. And he cannot be helped, because the
48:48weapon that would have made the Canadians keep their heads down has been switched off. That is what it
48:54means to have nowhere to hide. Not one clever bomb, a geometry closed on every side.
49:02The advance ran south into the flooded Rhineland, and the ten-ton radar sets, never designed for a
49:08battlefield of dikes and mud, had to be dragged forward behind the infantry to keep the cover
49:14unbroken. One section working with the 2nd Canadian Division was caught in heavy shell fire. Two men were
49:21killed. The set was not damaged, and it went on reporting German mortar positions, with two of its
49:27crew dead on the ground beside it. There were no fanfares for that. Nobody wrote a poem about a radar
49:34section in a flooded field. But I want you to hold those two men in your mind for the next
49:39few minutes,
49:40because we are almost at the end now, and there is one question left, the one that has been sitting
49:45under this whole story since the first minute. Every army in that war had mortars. The Germans had
49:52more of them, and heavier ones, and they used them better than anyone for the first four years.
49:59The Americans had the 4.2. The British had the identical 3-inch tube the Canadians used. Same
50:06factory, same bomb, same range. So why did it happen here? Why did the answer come out of the Canadian
50:13army rather than one of the enormous professional armies fighting on either side of it? Here's the
50:19answer, and it has nothing to do with the tube. Every army in that war owned mortars. The Germans owned
50:25more of them than anyone, and used them better than anyone, for four years. The British 3-inch
50:31and the Canadian 3-inch were the same weapon from the same factory. There was no secret bomb,
50:36no Canadian invention, no clever fuse. What the Canadians did was three things that armies almost
50:42never do. The first was to measure, not to assume, not to remember the last war, to go and count.
50:48A 23-year-old zoologist walked into four divisional medical posts and asked what was actually killing the
50:54men, and came out with a number nobody in the high command wanted. Seventy percent, from a weapon the
51:00planners had barely considered. That number was only findable because somebody had been willing to look
51:05for it, and because an army existed that would let a biologist with no combat experience ask its
51:10doctors an uncomfortable question. The second was to admit it. In February of 1944, an inspecting officer
51:19wrote down that 8 of 9 Canadian mortar platoons in a division about to invade France were not good
51:26enough, and that report was not buried. Four months earlier, a divisional commander had thrown every
51:34mortar he owned into a ravine and watched the attack behind it fail with 52 casualties and 28 men taken
51:42prisoner. And instead of deciding his crews had let him down, he concluded that the way he had organized
51:48them was wrong. And the third was to change the wiring, not the weapon, the ownership of it. Take the
51:56mortars away from the brigades that had always held them. Put every tube in the division under one
52:02headquarters. Wire that headquarters into the artillery system of registered targets and code names. Put the
52:09counter mortar staff in the same room. Then, hand the whole thing to a farmer's son from Saskatchewan
52:16and let him run it. That is what left German infantry with nowhere to hide. Not a bomb. A decision
52:24about
52:24who answers the radio. So let me take you back to that ravine one last time. December 12th, 1943. The
52:32Foso
52:32Saraceni. A German paratrooper sitting in a hole cut into the southern bank in the rain, listening to the
52:39sound change, and then discovering that the pause he had been trained to wait for was not coming.
52:44The first time you saw that man, you thought you were watching a weapon work. You were not. You were
52:50watching a weapon fail. The Canadians dropped bombs straight down into his dead ground that morning,
52:55and the position held, and men of the Carleton and York regiment paid for it in a field they could
53:00not cross. What you were actually watching was the moment a Canadian general got his first look at the
53:06shape of an answer he did not yet have. It took him another month to build it. It took Michael
53:12Swan
53:12another eight months to prove the other half of it with a clipboard and a list of medical officers.
53:18And it took until an ordinary Thursday morning in February of 1945 for the two halves to close on the
53:24same German infantryman at the same time. The ground behind the hill turned from his shelter into the most
53:31dangerous place on the battlefield, and the mortars that would have covered him found and killed within
53:36minutes of opening fire. The war diary recorded it without adjectives. The infantry reached their
53:43objectives, consolidated, and went on to the next phase without any interference from enemy mortars.
53:48Four years of the deadliest weapon in the campaign, and then a morning when it simply was not there.
53:54As for the men, Michael Swan went back to science after the war, and lived long enough to be
54:00interviewed about all of this in the late 1980s as Lord Swan. Basil Shoneland, the South African physicist
54:07who had spent the interwar years studying lightning, and then talked Montgomery into putting scientists
54:12inside an army group, went back to his laboratories. Paul Triquet came home with his Victoria Cross.
54:19Casa Berardi is in every Canadian history book, and it should be. Drayton Walker, who ran that first
54:27three-week course in a Saskatoon stadium in November of 1939, before the battalion had uniforms, finished the
54:36war commanding the unit, and afterwards sat down and wrote its history so that somebody would remember
54:43what they had done. Much of what you have heard tonight exists because of that. And Howard Mitchell,
54:50the man who sat at 2nd Brigade headquarters on the 23rd of May 1944, with a brigade being killed by
54:58mortars he
54:58could not find, went home to Saskatchewan, joined the reserves, and lived a long, ordinary life. In 2008,
55:08his medals were found abandoned in a storage container. Loose. Not mounted. In poor condition. The only reason
55:17anyone was able to work out whose they were is that alongside them, in the same box, were three Royal
55:23Canadian Legion medals with his name engraved on the back. Past president, 50 years of service, 60 years
55:30of service. 60 years he kept turning up, and a man had to go looking through archives to find out
55:37who he was.
55:39That is how this story ends, and it is why I think it is worth telling. The armies of that
55:44war are
55:45remembered for their weapons. The 88, the Tiger, the Spitfire, the Sherman. But the thing that took
55:51away the German infantryman's last piece of safe ground was not a weapon at all. It was a country
55:56that had been at war for four years and was still willing to say out loud that it was doing
56:01something
56:01wrong, and then fix it. The bomb came straight down because that is what mortars do. What made it
56:08inescapable was that the Canadians finally decided who it belonged to. Thank you for staying with this
56:13one to the end. These men do not get much attention. The mortar crews, the counter-mortar staffs,
56:21the radar sections in flooded fields. And there is no monument anywhere to a reorganized order of battle.
56:29If you think this story deserves to be remembered, a like genuinely helps it find more people.
56:36And if you would like to hear more, we are here every week. And if anyone in your family served
56:43in any of these units or any others, I would be honored to hear about it below.
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