🎧 Now on Spotify! Listen here: https://open.spotify.com/show/033A4VW0KKqFz6hF9IvDUO?si=54ea0b45f8af4001
The German army called every enemy on the Adriatic coast "the English." By the end of December 1943, they stopped.
On December 5th, the 1st Canadian Infantry Division relieved the British 78th Division on a fifteen-kilometre strip of Italian coastline. Same ridges. Same river. Same German corps watching from the same positions. Only the army attacking them changed.
What happened over the next twenty-three days forced the German command to rethink everything it believed about the troops facing them. The Canadians failed first — badly, for ten straight days, against a ravine they couldn't crack. Then they walked into a town called Ortona, where a hundred elite paratroopers held two full battalions to a crawl using methods perfected in Stalingrad.
No training manual covered what the Canadians did next. No order came down from above. And what started inside one house on a Thursday morning changed the way armies fight in cities — permanently.
The answer wasn't more men. It wasn't more guns. Both sides had plenty of those.
#canadianwarstories #ww2 #canadianarmy #militaryhistory
The German army called every enemy on the Adriatic coast "the English." By the end of December 1943, they stopped.
On December 5th, the 1st Canadian Infantry Division relieved the British 78th Division on a fifteen-kilometre strip of Italian coastline. Same ridges. Same river. Same German corps watching from the same positions. Only the army attacking them changed.
What happened over the next twenty-three days forced the German command to rethink everything it believed about the troops facing them. The Canadians failed first — badly, for ten straight days, against a ravine they couldn't crack. Then they walked into a town called Ortona, where a hundred elite paratroopers held two full battalions to a crawl using methods perfected in Stalingrad.
No training manual covered what the Canadians did next. No order came down from above. And what started inside one house on a Thursday morning changed the way armies fight in cities — permanently.
The answer wasn't more men. It wasn't more guns. Both sides had plenty of those.
#canadianwarstories #ww2 #canadianarmy #militaryhistory
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00On the afternoon of December 5th, 1943, a Canadian lieutenant walked forward through the rain
00:06to look at a river he had never seen, and met the British Army coming the other way.
00:11His name was Farley Mowat. He was 22 years old, and he was the intelligence officer of the
00:17Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment, the Hasty Peas, farm boys and small-town clerks out of
00:23eastern Ontario. His job that afternoon was simple and unpleasant. Go forward. Look at the
00:31Moro River. Come back and say what was waiting on the other side. Walking beside him was his
00:38opposite number from the 1st Battalion, the Royal Irish Fusiliers, the Faws. They had held this
00:46ground, and now they were handing it over, and their men were coming down the track in the rain,
00:50one soaked file after another, moving south while the Canadians moved north.
00:57The two intelligence officers went up to the lip of the valley together, went flat in the mud,
01:02and looked. There was almost nothing to see. That was the problem. The far bank was a gray blur of
01:11olive terraces and vine rows and stone farmhouses, and it looked like farmland, because it was
01:17his farmland. Every gun on it was dug in, roofed over, and covered with cut branches.
01:24The Germans on the north side of the Moro had been preparing that slope for days, and they had
01:29prepared it to look like nothing at all. Major Burt Kennedy was waiting for him. Kennedy was
01:36commanding the Hasty Peas that week, and he was in a foul temper. And he had a reason. The order
01:42that had come down was this. Cross the Moro. Now. No preparation time. No artillery program.
01:51Go tonight.
01:53What have you found? Kennedy asked him.
01:57Moet told him the truth. From the ridge you could see nothing, and nothing was exactly what worried him.
02:04Kennedy did not argue and did not delay. That night his companies went down the slope in the dark,
02:10into a river running fast and cold with December rain, and up the far bank into ground nobody had
02:17been able to see. Now hold on to one thing, because the whole story turns on it. The strip of
02:23coast those
02:24men crossed into did not change hands between armies that week. The ridges stayed the same.
02:30The river stayed the same. The German troops dug in above it stayed exactly where they were.
02:36Same corps headquarters, same divisions, same officers keeping the same daily records.
02:42Only the army attacking them changed. If these stories matter to you, a subscribe helps them reach
02:48more people. It's the whole reason this channel can keep digging.
02:52So let's be precise about what had just happened on that hillside, because the Germans certainly were.
02:58The men walking south past Farley-Mowat that afternoon were not beaten men.
03:03The 78th British Infantry Division was one of the hardest formations in Italy.
03:08They had come through Tunisia, through Sicily, through the Volturno, through the Sangro.
03:14And they had done it the hard way, on foot, uphill, in winter. And it had cost them.
03:21In something under six months of fighting, the 78th had taken more than 7,000 casualties.
03:287,000. Think about what that number actually means at the sharp end.
03:34A division on paper is around 18,000 men. But only a fraction of those men are riflemen and forward
03:41companies. And it is the riflemen who die. Take 7,000 casualties out of a division, and you have
03:47not thinned it evenly. You have hollowed out the small handful of companies who do the actual fighting,
03:53twice over. That is why they came out. Not disgrace. Arithmetic.
04:00And into that gap on the Adriatic coast came the 1st Canadian Infantry Division,
04:05under Major General Christopher Vokes. Fresh, in the sense that mattered, rested, up to strength,
04:12and full of men who had fought in Sicily and wanted to prove something in Italy.
04:16Now look at the same 15 kilometers from the German side, because this is where our real question
04:22starts. Facing that coast was the 76th Panzer Corps, commanded by General Traugat Herr, part of the 10th
04:30Army. These were not second-line troops holding a quiet flank. On the coast itself sat the 1st
04:37Parachute Division, under General Richard Heydrich, Luftwaffe paratroopers, veterans of Crete and of Russia,
04:44and by common consent of both sides, some of the finest defensive infantry in the German army.
04:50Beside them, the 90th Panzer Grenadier Division had just arrived in the sector. Arrived, in fact,
04:57days before the Canadians did, with orders that told every man what kind of battle this was going to be.
05:03The watchword handed down was simple. Get into the ground.
05:08So here is the situation on the 5th of December, and I want you to fix it in your mind,
05:12because we are
05:13going to come back to it again and again. One coastline. One German Corps. Sitting still. Watching.
05:23In front of them, for months, the British 8th Army, and in German reports, in German orders,
05:29in German telephone logs, the enemy on this front had one name. Not the Allies. Not the Commonwealth.
05:36The English. Remember that word. English. It is going to matter enormously in about 20 minutes.
05:44Because 23 days after Farley Mowat lay in the mud on that ridge, the same German command would be
05:51pulling its paratroopers out of a burning town eight kilometers to the north, at night, in silence,
05:57having lost a battle it had been ordered by Adolf Hitler personally to win.
06:02And in the weeks that followed, the way German commanders wrote about the troops on this sector
06:08had changed. Not in volume, but in kind. They stopped describing an enemy and started describing
06:14a problem. What happened in those 23 days is the subject of this entire investigation. And I'm going
06:21to warn you now, the obvious answers are wrong. It was not that the Canadians were fresher.
06:29It was not that they had more guns. Both of those things were true. And neither of them explains what
06:34the Germans saw. The Canadians were about to fail on this ground. Badly. Expensively. For 10 straight
06:41days. Against a position they could not crack. And what they did in the days after that failure
06:47is the reason German generals started treating Canadian divisions as a different category of threat entirely.
06:53By first light on December 6th, 1943, the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry were on the
07:00wrong side of the Moro River. And they intended to stay there. They had gone across in the dark at
07:06Villa Rogati, on the inland flank, up a slope of terraced vineyards. And by dawn they were in the village
07:12itself, with German Panzergrenadiers 300 meters away and closing. What followed was the thing the Germans
07:20had not budgeted for. The Patricias did not consolidate and wait. They held the village through
07:26repeated counterattacks, including tanks, on a bridgehead so shallow that the men in the forward
07:32houses could hear German commands being shouted between engine bursts. Downstream, at the coast,
07:38the hasty peas were doing the same thing on worse ground. And in the middle, at San Leonardo,
07:44the Royal Canadian Regiment was walking into the hardest fight of the three. Here is what I want
07:50you to notice about those first 48 hours, because the German staff certainly noticed it.
07:56The Canadians did not attack the Moro Line at one place. They attacked it at three places,
08:03at once, and refused to be shifted off any of them. Now to the man this part belongs to.
08:11On the night of December 8th, D Company of the Royal Canadian Regiment was pushing towards the road
08:16near San Leonardo, when the fire came down on them in the dark. Machine guns on fixed lines, mortars,
08:24and no way to tell how many. The battalion took it in the face. Word went out to pull back.
08:31Lieutenant Mitchell Sterlin never got the word. Sterlin was 24, from Montreal, and he commanded 16 platoon.
08:40When the withdrawal order went round, he and 10 of his men were already too far forward
08:46and too heavily engaged to be reached. So Sterlin did the only thing left to him.
08:52He looked at the ground, picked a two-story stone farmhouse standing on its own near San Donato,
08:58put his men inside it, and decided that this was where they were going to spend the night.
09:04Eleven men. One building. In front of the German main line.
09:11They were attacked in the dark, and they held. They were attacked at dawn, and they held.
09:19Sterlin moved his men between windows, shifted the bren from floor to floor so the volume of fire never
09:25came from the same place twice, and made a single stone house sound like a position.
09:32The Penza grenadiers came at it again through the morning, and again through the afternoon,
09:37and when they finally broke off, they left their dead lying in the open around the walls.
09:43The men who came up afterwards took one look at that building and gave it a name.
09:48Sterlin Castle. It is still called that today.
09:53I want you to hold on to Lieutenant Sterlin, because we are going to meet him one more time,
09:57eleven days from now, and it will not go the way you want it to.
10:03Meanwhile, four kilometers away, the engineers were winning the battle.
10:08Through the night of December 8th, the Royal Canadian Engineers worked in the riverbed,
10:12under fire, and by the morning of the 9th, they had a bridge across the morrow.
10:18That is the unglamorous sentence that decided the whole thing.
10:22Because the moment that bridge was in, the tanks of the King's Own Calgary Regiment started rolling,
10:28carrying Seaforth Highlanders forward on their decks, and by mid-morning,
10:33San Leonardo was being cleared house by house, with armor standing in the street.
10:39The 90th Panzergrenadier Division counter-attacked the bridgehead with its 200th Regiment and got nowhere.
10:46By the end of the 9th, the Germans on this coast made a decision.
10:50They gave up the morrow line.
10:52They pulled back roughly five kilometers to ground they had already prepared,
10:57and they went into it exactly as they had been told to.
11:00Into the earth.
11:03So, five days.
11:05Four if you count from the first crossing.
11:08A river line that the German command had expected to hold for considerably longer.
11:12Gone.
11:14And now we arrive at the first explanation.
11:17This matters, so stay with me.
11:19The German assessment of what had just happened was not stupid, and it was not arrogant.
11:24It was arithmetic.
11:26And it went like this.
11:28Until the 4th of December, they had been facing a British division that had been fighting continuously since Tunisia,
11:34and had bled out more than 7,000 men.
11:37Now they were facing a division that had been out of the line, that was up to establishment,
11:42that had a full complement of officers and section commanders who knew each other's names.
11:48Fresh troops push harder.
11:50Fresh troops accept casualties that tired troops flinch from.
11:54Nothing mysterious about it.
11:56Give them a few weeks, ran the logic, and this new division would look like every other division that had
12:02gone through the Italian winter.
12:04That explanation is not wrong.
12:07It is simply not big enough, and the men who wrote it were about to be handed proof, on ground
12:12of their own choosing.
12:13Because 5 kilometers north of the Morro, running east to west across the entire Canadian axis of advance,
12:19there was something that appeared on no Allied map as an obstacle at all.
12:24On the aerial photographs, it read as a shadow.
12:28On the ground, it was a ravine, 200 feet deep and 3 miles long, with sides so steep a man
12:34had to use his hands,
12:36running all the way from the Ortona or Sonia Road to the cliffs above the Adriatic.
12:42Anyone advancing north had to go into it and come out the other side,
12:46and every meter of that crossing was watched.
12:50The Canadians called it the Gully.
12:52The name is almost insultingly plain for what it did to them.
12:56The Germans had gun pits cut into its reverse slope, shelters roofed over with timber and earth,
13:02machine guns sighted so that their fire crossed in the bottom,
13:06and paratroopers of the 1st Parachute Division moving down from the coast to take the eastern end of it.
13:12Volks looked at his maps, saw a division that had just cracked a river line in four days, and ordered
13:18a direct attack.
13:20What happened over the next 10 days on that ravine is the part of this story Canadians rarely talk about.
13:26And it is the part without which nothing the Germans later wrote makes any sense at all.
13:32On the morning of December 10th, three Canadian battalions walked into the gully.
13:36And the gully did to them exactly what it had been built to do.
13:41Picture one section commander of the loyal Edmonton regiment going forward that morning.
13:45He is 23, he has a Sten gun and eight men, and he is crossing an open field of wet
13:52olive terraces
13:53towards a line of scrub that marks the lip of the ravine.
13:57He cannot see a single German position. There is nothing to shoot at.
14:02The scrub simply opens up from three directions at once, and the field he is standing in becomes the only
14:08fact in the world.
14:10That happened to company after company for 10 days.
14:15They took Vino Ridge on the 10th. They could not clear the ravine.
14:21They went again on the 11th, and the Edmontons were cut to pieces for a foothold they were then forced
14:26to give back.
14:28They went again on the 13th. Two battalions, same ground, same result.
14:34Now I have to be honest with you about something, because this channel does not do hero polish.
14:40Canadian patrols had crawled to the lip of that ravine and reported precisely what was down there.
14:46A superb defensive position, thickly held.
14:50That report reached divisional headquarters, and Major General Chris Vokes ordered another frontal attack anyway.
14:58Then, another.
15:01He was a man under enormous pressure from an army commander who wanted Pescara,
15:06and the pressure traveled downhill in the form of infantry going straight at machine guns across open ground.
15:1310 days. Battalions burning down to shadows of themselves.
15:19This is the low point of the entire story, and it is not a footnote. It is load-bearing.
15:25Remember it, because in 9 days' time, these same battered units are going to do something the German paratroopers opposite
15:32them will not be able to answer.
15:34And the distance between those two facts is the whole question of this video.
15:40The first sign of what was coming appeared on December 14th, and it came from a company of French Canadians.
15:47Casa Berardi was a cluster of farm buildings on the western flank, sitting above the gully,
15:52and whoever held it dominated the road junction behind it.
15:56Captain Paul Triquet, of the Royal 22nd Regiment, the Vandus, was given the job, with a squadron of Ontario regiment
16:04tanks in support.
16:06Triquet was 33, from Cabano, Quebec.
16:10On the 14th of December, he took his company across ground swept by fire towards the farm, and the company
16:16came apart around him.
16:18Every other officer went down. By the time he reached the buildings, he had roughly 15 men left and four
16:25tanks.
16:27Fifteen men. Two hundred meters from a position held by Panzergrenadiers with armor in support.
16:35Triquet did not go firm and call for help.
16:38He counted what he had, saw that the Germans were in front of him and behind him and on both
16:43flanks,
16:44and told his men the only safe place left in the world was on the objective.
16:50Then he took it.
16:51He put his handful of survivors and his four tanks into an all-round defense in the farmyard,
16:56and held it through the night against counterattacks, calling artillery down close enough to shake his own walls,
17:02until the Vandus reached him the next morning.
17:05That action broke the western hinge of the gully.
17:08It also produced the first Victoria Cross awarded to a Canadian in this war.
17:13But watch what the Canadians actually learned.
17:16Because this is the part that matters more than the metal.
17:19The gully was not taken by the method they had been using for ten days.
17:23It was taken when infantry and tanks worked as one organism on a flank.
17:27West Nova Scotia's and Ontario Regiment armor hooking left,
17:32tanks moving with rifle sections rather than ahead of them, a maneuver rather than a charge.
17:38By the 18th of December, with the Royal Canadian Regiment fighting for the crossroads the troops called Cider,
17:44the German position was untenable.
17:47They gave up the gully and fell back into the town.
17:50And on the 19th, at that crossroads, a German sniper found Lieutenant Mitchell Sterlin.
17:56The man who had held a stone house against a division's worth of attention, with ten men and a Bren
18:02gun,
18:02was killed by a single round, eleven days later, in a battle his side was winning.
18:09Before the end of the month, the telegram reached his family's house in Montreal,
18:13where the door was opened by his brother Martin, who was 18 years old.
18:18I told you it would not go the way you wanted.
18:21So, the gully cost the Canadians ten days and an appalling number of men.
18:26And they took it.
18:28Now here is what the German command made of that.
18:31And this is the second explanation, the one that sounds much more sophisticated than the first.
18:37It was material.
18:39Look at what the Canadians brought to that ravine.
18:41Tank support so plentiful that armor could be spent supporting a single infantry company on a flank.
18:48Artillery ammunition expended at rates the 10th Army could not dream of matching in December of 1943.
18:56Engineers with bridging equipment ready before the river was even crossed.
19:00A supply line that put fresh battalions and full ammunition scales into a sector
19:05where German battalions were being fed forward in pieces.
19:09That is the explanation a professional staff arrives at.
19:13And again, it is not wrong.
19:15The Canadians did have more of nearly everything.
19:20But hold that thought against one number, because the number is going to break it.
19:25Eight days after the gully fell, in the town of Ortona,
19:29the entire German defense at any given moment would be conducted by something in the region of 100 paratroopers.
19:36One hundred men.
19:39Against two Canadian battalions with tanks, anti-tank guns, and the artillery of a division behind them.
19:46And those hundred men would hold for a week.
19:50Whatever it was that made German commanders start writing about Canadians differently,
19:54it was not weight of metal.
19:56Metal was already there at the gully, and at the gully it had bought 10 days of failure.
20:01What changed was about to happen three kilometers north, inside a town of 10,000 people,
20:07where the 1st Parachute Division had spent a fortnight preparing something the Canadian
20:11Army had never seen before, and had never once, trained for.
20:15At two o'clock in the afternoon, on December 20, 1943, B Company of the Loyal Edmonton Regiment
20:22walked into Ortona, expecting to find it empty.
20:25That was not stupidity.
20:27That was the intelligence picture.
20:30Ortona was a small port of 10,000 people on a shelf of rock above the Adriatic,
20:35and every rule of German practice in Italy said they would fight a delaying action at the edge of it,
20:41and then slip away north during the night, as they had done at a dozen towns already.
20:478th Army Headquarters expected the place to fall in a day or two.
20:51Major Jim Stone's company got as far as the Piazza Vittoria, at the southern entrance to the town,
20:57before the world came apart.
21:00Ahead of them ran the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, the main street, and the only street in Ortona
21:07wide enough for a tank.
21:08It ran north through the whole town to the Cathedral Square.
21:12It looked like the way in.
21:15It was the way in.
21:17That was the point.
21:19Because the Germans had not left.
21:22The 2nd Battalion of the 3rd Parachute Regiment had spent eight days getting ready,
21:26and what they had built along that street was not a delaying position.
21:30It was an architecture.
21:33Watch what a Canadian section actually meets that afternoon,
21:37because you cannot understand the rest of this story from a map.
21:41They come up a side street towards an intersection.
21:44Both blocks of buildings on the corners ahead have been demolished, deliberately, with explosives,
21:49and the rubble has been pushed into the crossing to make a wall a man cannot climb quickly.
21:55So the section cannot get across, and cannot see past.
21:59What they also cannot see is that two or three anti-tank guns are sighted in the lateral streets,
22:05covering that rubble, and that machine guns are looking down at it from the 2nd and 3rd floors
22:10of the buildings still standing on either side.
22:13The rubble itself has mines in it.
22:16Some of those mines have cord attached to the detonator, running back to a paratrooper in a cellar,
22:21and he will pull it when the men are on top of the pile.
22:24The section is standing in a killing ground, designed by professionals.
22:28And from where they stand, it looks like a heap of broken masonry.
22:32And the guns are not always where guns can be.
22:36In two separate cases, the Canadians found that the paratroopers had taken 88mm anti-tank guns apart,
22:43carried the pieces up inside a building,
22:45and reassembled them on an upper floor to fire down the street.
22:50The mines in the rubble were often Italian, made of wood, invisible to every metal detector the
22:55Canadians had. Now they try the obvious thing. They go for a house, kick the door in, get inside,
23:03get off the street. The door is wired. So is the staircase. And if they get up the stairs,
23:10the room at the top has a machine gun set at the back of it, covering the doorway. And the
23:15paratrooper
23:16behind that gun has been trained not to fire at movement, not to fire at noise, but to wait until
23:22a Canadian is actually inside the room. Even after a grenade goes off, any German still alive in there
23:29will hold his fire until men come through the door. A Canadian report written after the battle put the
23:35arithmetic without decoration. Clearing a house from the ground floor upwards costs them one of their own
23:41men for every German killed on the staircase. That is what the loyal Edmontons and the Seaforth
23:47Highlanders were walking into on the 20th and 21st of December. And I want you to sit with the scale
23:54of it for a second, because this is the number that makes the whole thing absurd. On the German side
24:00of
24:00that fight, at any given moment, there were roughly 100 paratroopers in the town. The rest were asleep in
24:07cellars or moving through the railway tunnels. One hundred men were holding two Canadian battalions,
24:13a squadron of Three Rivers Regiment Shermans, six-pounder and 17-pounder anti-tank guns,
24:19and the massed artillery of a division. They were doing it because they had turned a town into a
24:25machine, and because the Canadians were feeding themselves into it exactly the way the machine
24:29was built to receive them. The Germans had done something else, too, and the Canadians did not
24:35discover it for days. Between the cellars of adjoining houses, and between rooms,
24:40the paratroopers had cut small holes, just wide enough for a man to crawl through, and hidden some
24:46of them behind furniture. Through those holes they moved ammunition, relieved each other, and reoccupied
24:53buildings the Canadians had already cleared and left behind them. Think about that from inside a rifle
24:58section. You take a house. You lose men taking it. You move on.
25:05And that night, the house you took is firing into your back.
25:09So by the evening of December 21st, here is the honest position. The Canadians hold the southern edge
25:15of Ortona. They are advancing at the rate of a few buildings a day. Their casualties are running at a
25:21level that will strip both battalions inside a week. They are being outfought, in the technical sense of
25:27the word, by an enemy who has trained for this, and who is inventing nothing. The paratroopers are
25:32executing a doctrine, and executing it beautifully. Everything the German command had been telling
25:38itself for two weeks is holding up. Fresh troops. Plenty of guns. Neither one is worth a damn on the
25:45Corso Vittorio Emanuele. And that is the moment I need you to remember, because it is the hinge of this
25:51entire investigation. Not the morrow, not the gully. Here, in a street 200 meters long, with the Canadian
25:59army doing everything by the book, and dying for it. There was no manual for this. The Canadians had
26:07never been trained for street fighting in any serious way. A company commander of the Edmontons
26:12said afterwards that, whatever the battle schools had taught them about it, the men had long since
26:16forgotten. There was no tactical doctrine coming down from 8th Army. There was nobody to ask.
26:23On the morning of the 23rd of December, a captain in A Company of the Loyal Edmonton Regiment stopped
26:28looking at the street. He looked at the wall. Captain Bill Longhurst commanded A Company of the
26:34Loyal Edmonton Regiment, and on the 23rd of December, he was looking at a problem that had a shape.
26:40The shape was this. Every route between his men and the next German position ran outside. Down a
26:48staircase, out a door, across a street covered by machine guns and a sniper on a roof. The Germans
26:55owned the outside. The Germans had spent a fortnight making sure they owned the outside. But the buildings
27:03of Ortona stood shoulder to shoulder, wall against wall, all the way up the block. And a wall is only
27:09outside if you go around it. Longhurst called for two of the battalion's assault pioneers and told
27:16them what he wanted. They took plastic explosive and lashed the charges together into a bundle the
27:22men called a beehive. Then, with the company waiting on the floor below, a pioneer went up to the top
27:29story of the house they held, placed the beehive flat against the party wall shared with the house next
27:34door, and set it. The wall blew inwards, and Longhurst's men went up the stairs and threw the hole at
27:42a run,
27:42throwing grenades ahead of them and firing as they came. Into the top floor of a building the Germans held,
27:49from a direction the Germans did not cover. That is mouseholing.
27:55And I want to be very careful here, because it is easy to tell this as a cute story about
28:00Canadian
28:01ingenuity. And it is much more interesting than that. Look at what it did to the German defense,
28:08from inside. A paratrooper in Ortona has his machine guns set at the back of a ground floor room,
28:15aimed at the doorway. Upstairs, his comrades hold the staircase, because the staircase is where attackers
28:22die. Every element of his position assumes the enemy comes in at street level and works upward.
28:29That assumption is not an accident. It is the accumulated experience of Stalingrad and Leningrad,
28:35brought to Italy by men who had fought in both. Now he hears an explosion.
28:42He has heard a thousand explosions this week. This one sounds like another mortar bomb landing on the roof.
28:48And he does not move. Then the grenades come down the stairs at him. From above. That is the whole
28:55battle in one sentence. The Canadians did not outshoot the 1st Parachute Division. They inverted it.
29:01They turned a defense built to be attacked from below into a defense being attacked from above. And
29:08every strength in that system instantly became a weakness. The covered staircase now separated the
29:14Germans from their own exits. The machine gun at the back of the room was pointing the wrong way.
29:19And the fire discipline that made them so lethal against men coming through a door meant they were
29:25waiting on a door that nobody was going to use. The Canadians worked downwards after that. Grenade first,
29:32room second. Where the stairs looked wrong, they blew a hole in the floor and dropped grenades through it
29:38into the room below. Now here is the thing that matters more than the tactic. And it is the reason
29:44this video exists. Nobody ordered it. Longhurst was a company commander. He did not send a proposal up to
29:53brigade. He did not wait for divisional approval or an 8th Army pamphlet. He worked it out on a Thursday
29:59morning
30:00in a house he was pinned down in. And within a day, the neighboring companies were doing it. And within
30:05two days, the Seaforth Highlanders on the other side of town were doing it. And nobody at any level
30:11tried to stop any of it. And the moment it spread, the whole shape of the battle changed.
30:17The Seaforths, who at the start of the week had been measuring their progress in meters of street,
30:22began measuring it in rooms taken and buildings cleared. The rest of the Canadian adaptation followed
30:28within days, and it is worth listening to because it is all of a piece. They stopped kicking doors in
30:35because doors were wired. They started leaving their packs at the company firm base because a lightly
30:41loaded man fights better in a room. They noticed that the paratroopers heard them coming. Not the
30:47explosives, not the shouting, but the boots. So they went into houses in rubber soles and gym shoes.
30:55They wore the leather jerkin with the webbing belt outside it, which let a man carry six to eight
31:00grenades without the pins working loose. And the grenade became, in the flat language of their own
31:05report, the basis of the whole attack. They manhandled six-pounder anti-tank guns forward,
31:12street by street, and later 17-pounders, and used them not against tanks but to fire armor-piercing rounds
31:20through walls to blast entry holes for the assault sections. They used the PIAT, a weapon of dubious
31:27reputation in its actual job, to punch into houses and blow apart rubble piles, and pronounced it
31:34invaluable. The Three River Shermans stopped trying to lead and stood off as mobile pillboxes,
31:40with tank commanders reporting in to infantry checkpoints for orders from men on foot.
31:46They also learned to hunt for the Germans' own crawl holes. Once a block was taken, the leading
31:52platoon stayed in it, turned it into a strongpoint, checked for delayed action charges, and searched
31:58the walls for the hidden openings the paratroopers had been using to slip back in behind them.
32:03Ground taken was not given up again. Six days earlier, these battalions had been walking into
32:09machine guns across open fields at the gully because that was the method. Now, without a single
32:15new piece of equipment, they were fighting a different war. Look at it from the German side,
32:21and the second explanation, the one about material, dies right here. Nothing had arrived. No new tanks,
32:29no new guns, no reinforcement. The same battalions, thinner than they had been a week before,
32:36with the same weapons, were now taking a block a day off the best defensive infantry in the German army.
32:43The paratroopers were not slow, and they were not stupid, and they did not simply absorb this.
32:49They watched what the Canadians were doing, and they answered it. And their answer, when it came on
32:54the 26th of December, was the single most brutal thing that happened in that town.
33:00They stopped defending certain houses altogether. On the evening of December 25th, a platoon of the
33:05loyal Edmonton regiment took a building near the cathedral at the top of the town, found it empty,
33:11and settled in for the night. That is what the Germans wanted. The paratroopers had watched the
33:17Canadians learn to come in through the walls, and they had drawn the correct conclusion. If your enemy will
33:23now enter any building, from any direction, at any hour, then stop defending the building.
33:30Pack the cellar with explosive, leave, and wait. Lieutenant Allen's platoon spent the night in that
33:37house. In the morning, the Germans blew it, and the house came down on top of them. 23 men of
33:44the loyal
33:45Edmonton regiment died under that rubble. One did not. Lance Corporal Roy Boyd was pinned in a pocket of
33:53collapsed masonry, alive, in the dark, while his own regiment fought its way north above him.
33:59He was dug out on the 30th of December, after something on the order of 80 hours.
34:05There is no clean way to say what that did to the men who dug.
34:10The Edmontons had been in Ortona five days by then, and they had just lost an entire platoon to a
34:16house that had been given to them as a gift. And here is what they did with it. Because this
34:22is a race,
34:22and it is the Canadians' move. They stopped clearing certain buildings altogether. Where
34:29a house was too big, too strongly held, or too obviously wrong, the assault sections took the
34:36ground floor, brought pioneers in behind them with explosives packed into captured German water
34:41containers, laid the charges, walked out, and dropped the entire structure into the street.
34:48Then the tanks and the machine guns covered the rubble while the next bound went in.
34:54Look at the exchange that has just taken place. The Germans turned buildings into bombs to punish the
35:01Canadians for entering them. The Canadians answered by refusing to enter, and destroying the buildings
35:07themselves, on their own timetable, with the Germans still inside. Four days earlier, neither side had
35:15done either of those things. That is what an adaptation race looks like when it is running at full speed.
35:21And it is happening between men who have not slept properly in a fortnight.
35:26There was something else inside those buildings besides paratroopers. Ortona had 10,000 residents,
35:32and a great many of them had never left. On Christmas Eve, the fighting around one school
35:38stopped altogether when the Canadians found several hundred civilians sheltering inside it,
35:42families in a cellar, in the middle of a battle being fought room by room above their heads.
35:48The post-battle reports were blunt about it. Their presence could not be allowed to change the plan,
35:53and whatever could be done for them was done.
35:57Now step back for a moment, because in the middle of all this,
36:00something else was happening in that town, and I would not believe it if the war diary
36:05did not record it. Captain D.B. Cameron, the quartermaster of the Seaforth Highlanders,
36:12decided that his regiment was going to have Christmas dinner. Not behind the line. In it.
36:18In the shell-damaged church of Santa Maria di Costantinopoli, in the southeast corner of Ortona,
36:24a few hundred meters from where the fighting was going on.
36:28Table cloths, soup, roast pork, Christmas pudding, a bottle of beer, cigarettes, nuts,
36:35and candy for every man. Lieutenant Colonel Sid Thompson then did the thing that makes it extraordinary.
36:43He rotated his rifle companies through it, one at a time, so that each company came out of the street
36:49fighting, ate a hot dinner while Lieutenant Wilf Gildersleeve played the church organ,
36:54and the Padres' improvised choir sang carols, and then went back in to relieve the next company.
37:01The regimental Padre, Roy Dernford, wrote afterwards about the men coming in, dirty and unshaven and
37:08drawn, and greeted them with the observation that he had finally got them all into church.
37:14For a number of those men, it was the last meal of their lives. And I want you to hold
37:19that scene next
37:20to what was happening in the German command on exactly the same day. Because the contrast is the
37:25whole story. On the 24th of December, Hitler had personally ordered that Ortona be held at all costs.
37:34General Heydrich, watching his one battalion in the town burn down under an attack that got smarter every
37:39day, committed his divisional reserve, the 2nd battalion of the 4th Parachute Regiment, into the
37:46ruins. One side was feeding its last reserve into a town on a direct order from Berlin. The other was
37:53rotating companies through a hot dinner and sending them back to work. The Germans still had one move
38:00left, and they made it on the 26th. While the Edmontons and Seaforths ground north through the buildings,
38:06the 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade was working around the west of the town to cut the coast road behind
38:12the garrison. That morning, at 10 o'clock exactly, the paratroopers came at the 48th Highlanders of
38:19Canada in strength, straight at A Company, to break the encirclement. It went to bayonet range.
38:26Eight Germans reached the entrance of the company headquarters itself, and Company Sergeant Major
38:31Keillor took a handful of men out to meet them and killed all eight, three of them with the bayonet.
38:38The Highlanders held, and then the battalion intelligence officer, Lieutenant John Clarkson,
38:44went back on foot through the mud to fetch armor. He brought a troop of Ontario Regiment tanks forward
38:51himself. Three of the four made it through, arriving just as a company of paratroopers was forming up for
38:57another attempt, and turned a defensive stand into a rout. That was the last German counterattack of the
39:05battle. By then, the paratroopers in Ortona had a supply line under fire, no reserve left, and an
39:12enemy who was now clearing a block a day using methods that had not existed a week earlier.
39:18On the night of the 27th of December, the 1st Parachute Division did what it had been ordered
39:23by the Fuhrer not to do. It left, quietly, in the dark, over rubble, taking its wounded.
39:32The town belonged to the Canadians, and in the weeks that followed, in reports, in headquarters,
39:37in the language of an army that had been calling this enemy the English for four years, something
39:43began to change. In the first days of January 1944, while the ruins of Ortona were still being cleared of
39:49mines, Canadian officers went back into the town with notebooks and started asking questions.
39:55Not of generals, of corporals. What did you do when the door was wired? How did you get across the
40:01first street? What did you carry, and what did you leave behind? How did you clear the room at the
40:08top
40:08of the stairs? What killed your men, and what stopped killing them? That is the answer to the question this
40:15video asked, and I want to give it to you plainly, because we have spent an hour building the weight
40:20it needs. German commanders came to treat Canadian divisions as a different order of problem from
40:26British ones, not because the Canadians were fresher, and not because they had more guns.
40:32They came to it because a Canadian division could change its own method in the middle of a battle,
40:37at the level of a captain in a house, and then turn that change into an instruction that the entire
40:42army could use, inside a fortnight. That is not a national characteristic. It is not courage,
40:50which both sides had in industrial quantities. It is an institutional trait, and it is much rarer
40:57and much more dangerous than either. Look at what came out of those notebooks. Within weeks,
41:03the Canadians had produced a set of reports on the Ortona fighting, deductions from street fighting,
41:08experiences from fighting in Ortona, further notes on house and street fighting. They read like nothing
41:15else in the Allied inventory at that point, because nothing else in the Allied inventory had been
41:20through it. They laid down principles. Divide a town into sectors, and give each sector to accompany
41:27with its supporting arms. Break each sector into specific platoon tasks. Make short, definite bounds,
41:35and consolidate after every one. Clear and secure one sector completely before touching the next.
41:41Never give back ground you have taken. Push ammunition dumps as far forward as men can carry them.
41:48And, above everything else, the warning that runs through all of it. Once you commit to close fighting
41:54in a town, you must accept that you will be slow. Try to hurry, and it will cost you the
42:00battalion.
42:01Then look at where those documents went. They did not stay with the 1st Canadian Division.
42:06They went up through 8th Army and across to training staff throughout the Allied armies.
42:11Because in England, at that exact moment, dozens of untried British, Canadian, and American divisions
42:17were preparing to open the 2nd Front in Europe. And none of them had ever fought a battle like Ortona.
42:23Canadian material became the reference.
42:26A Canadian division that had been dismissed as unproven in November, became the 8th Army's
42:32acknowledged authority on street fighting by January. 14 days. That is the interval between
42:39a battalion of Canadian infantry being outclassed in a street, and the Canadian Army writing the manual
42:45the rest of the alliance would study. Now put yourself behind a German desk and consider what
42:51that looks like. You can fight superior numbers. The Wehrmacht did it for 6 years.
42:57You can fight superior material. You build better positions. You dig deeper. You make every shell count.
43:05What you cannot fight is an opponent whose method on Tuesday is not the method he used on the previous
43:11Thursday, and who distributes the difference to every unit that will ever face you again.
43:17The German advantage in Italy in 1943 was not manpower, and it was not equipment.
43:24It was doctrine. Accumulated, tested, superbly taught.
43:30Ortona was the first place on that front where the doctrinal advantage changed hands inside a single week.
43:36And it changed hands against the hardest opponent available. The 1st Parachute Division was not a
43:42garrison formation padded out with conscripts. Its men had gone into Crete by air, fought in Russia,
43:49and some of them had learned street fighting in the ruins of Stalingrad and Leningrad.
43:54When the Canadians rewrote the rules of urban combat in December of 1943,
43:59they rewrote them on top of the men who had written the previous set.
44:04And the German command knew what the battle had cost them, even as they described the enemy with the
44:09wrong name. Listen to Kesselring, the commander-in-chief in Italy, talking about Ortona while it was being
44:16fought. He had never intended to defend the town decisively, but, he said, the English had made it as
44:24important as Rome, and when things develop that way, there is nothing you can do. His subordinate on the
44:30line, General Lemelson, was blunter. The cost in blood could not be justified. The English.
44:38That word again. The word we planted an hour ago. The men who had just fought them out of that
44:44town
44:45were from Edmonton and Vancouver, from Cabano, Quebec, from Montreal and Eastern Ontario, and the
44:52German high command was still filing them under an English army. That misidentification would not
44:59survive 1944. When German staffs later found Canadian formations opposite them at the Hitler
45:05line, in the Scheldt, in the Rhineland, they had learned to read the presence of a Canadian corps
45:11as a specific and unwelcome piece of information about what was about to happen to their sector.
45:17Montgomery, who was not a generous man about other people's soldiers, wrote that the Canadians had
45:23been quite magnificent, and that they had, in the end, out-fought the Germans. Out-fought. Not
45:31overwhelmed. Not outnumbered. Not out-supplied. Out-fought. Which is a statement about method.
45:40Now the price. Because you have earned the right to it. And because I am not going to end this
45:45without it.
45:46The street fighting inside Ortona itself cost the Canadians around 275 casualties,
45:52of whom 104 were killed. But the town was only the last week of a month. And the month is
45:59the real
46:00number. Across December, the 1st Canadian Infantry Division put roughly 4,800 men through its
46:07casualty and evacuation system. Wounded, killed, sick, and broken by battle exhaustion.
46:14That is close to the fighting strength of the division's infantry, twice over, in 31 days.
46:21Which leaves one question. What happened to the men we have been following through those 31 days?
46:27The captain who looked at the wall? The corporal under the rubble?
46:31The quartermaster with the tablecloths? Go back to the ridge above the morrow, to the afternoon of
46:37December 5th. And the two intelligence officers lying in the mud looking at a slope where there was
46:42nothing to see. The Canadian one was Farley Mowat. And he lived. He came through Ortona and through the
46:50rest of the Italian campaign. And he came home carrying something he spent the next 50 years trying to put
46:56into
46:56words. He became one of the most widely read writers his country has ever produced. And one of the books
47:03he wrote was the history of that regiment. The farm boys and small town clerks who went down into the
47:09river
47:09that night. The others. Captain Bill Longhurst, the man who stopped looking at the street and looked at
47:17the wall, was Wilmot George Longhurst, born in Lethbridge, Alberta, in 1913. Before the war,
47:26he was an accountant. He enlisted as a private soldier the day after Canada declared war on Germany.
47:32And he worked his way up through the orderly room to a rifle company. He did not survive the war.
47:39On the 21st of October, 1944, 10 months after Ortona, Major Longhurst was killed in action crossing the
47:47Savio River, further up the same Adriatic coast. He was 31. He is buried in Chisena War Cemetery in Italy.
47:58Think about what that man left behind him. Not a monument. A method. One that is still taught,
48:05still practiced, still in the manuals of armies that did not exist when he died.
48:12Lieutenant Mitchell Sterlin lies in the Moro River Canadian War Cemetery,
48:17a few kilometers from the stone farmhouse that still carries his name.
48:22In the 1990s, his regiment commissioned a painting of the defense of Sterlin Castle,
48:27and a building at Canadian Forces Base Petawawa was named after him. A 24-year-old lieutenant from
48:34Montreal who missed a withdrawal order and decided to hold anyway.
48:39Lance Corporal Roy Boyd was pulled out of the rubble on the 30th of December, alive, the only man of
48:46his
48:47platoon. The photograph of his own regiment digging him out of that pile of stone is one of the images
48:53from Ortona that has never stopped circulating in Canada. Men who had been fighting for 10 days,
48:59on their knees, moving stone by hand because somebody underneath was still answering.
49:06Captain Paul Traquet survived the war with his Victoria Cross and lived out his life in Quebec.
49:12And the men on the other side of those walls deserve a sentence too.
49:16The first parachute division walked out of Ortona in the dark and went on fighting. Six weeks later,
49:23that same division was at Monte Cassino, where it held the ruins of the Monastery Hill against
49:28everything the Allies could throw at it for four months. Nothing at Ortona was won against second-rate
49:35soldiers, and the Canadians who fought them there never once pretended otherwise. And Major Jim Stone,
49:42whose company walked into the Piazza Vittoria on the 20th of December, expecting an empty town, kept going.
49:49Eight years later, he was a lieutenant colonel commanding the 2nd Battalion of the Princess
49:54Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry in Korea, at a place called Kapyong, where his battalion held a
50:00hill against a Chinese division and earned an American Presidential Unit Citation.
50:06The officer who had learned in Ortona that you fight the ground you actually have,
50:11not the ground in the orders, was still doing it in 1951.
50:16The Seaforth Highlanders of Canada have held the Ortona dinner every year since 1943. Same menu.
50:23Roast pork and Christmas pudding, in memory of the men who ate it in a shattered church between shifts
50:29in the street fighting, and for many of whom, it was the last meal they had.
50:34In Ortona itself, on the ground above the harbor, there is a Canadian war cemetery holding 1,375 graves from
50:43that December. In the year 2000, the Government of Canada put up a plaque in the Piazza Plebiscito,
50:50the square those men fought their way into, room by room, from the top floor down. And in military
50:56academies today, in countries that had nothing to do with this battle, Ortona is a set text.
51:03When staff colleges teach urban warfare, the tempo of it, the impossibility of controlling it above
51:09section level, the necessity of clearing from the top down, they are teaching a syllabus that was
51:15written by Canadian corporals with a notebook held in front of them, in the ruins, in January of 1944.
51:23The Modern War Institute at West Point has published Ortona as a formal urban warfare case study,
51:30an American military academy teaching an eight-day Canadian battle to officers who will one day fight
51:36in cities that have not been built yet. Chris Vokes, who ordered those frontal attacks into the
51:43gully day after day, was not relieved and was not disgraced. He went on commanding,
51:50and the argument in Canada about what those ten days cost has never entirely stopped.
51:56Both things are true at the same time. The division was badly handled at the ravine,
52:01and the same division rewrote urban warfare three kilometers further north.
52:08Armies are not tidy, and neither is honesty about them. So here is the answer, as simply as I can
52:14put it.
52:15German generals came to fear Canadian divisions more than British ones, not because Canadians were
52:22braver or better supplied, but because a Canadian formation could be beaten on Monday,
52:28invent the solution on Thursday, and hand that solution to every other allied army by the end of
52:35the month. Against an army whose greatest advantage was its doctrine, that was the one thing that could not
52:42be defended against. The Germans held the strongest ground on the Adriatic coast, with the best defensive
52:49infantry in their army, under a personal order from Hitler to hold at any cost. They lost it in eight
52:57days to two Canadian battalions, who worked out how, while they were doing it. If this story deserves to be
53:05remembered, a like genuinely helps it find more people. Thank you for giving it your time. It is a
53:12long way from the Moro to the Piazza Plebiscito, and you walked all of it. If you'd like to hear
53:20more
53:20stories like this one, we're here every week. And if anyone in your family served in Italy,
53:25I would be honored to hear about them in the comments.
Comments