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On August 14, 1944, a Canadian sergeant with a broken tank, a dead radio, and two jammed machine guns captured 352 German soldiers single-handedly. But the strangest part of that day wasn't the capture — it was what happened to those men overnight.
The German major leading the group had been burning his own documents when the Canadian found him. Not because he feared interrogation. Because he didn't expect to survive the next sixty seconds. His own army had told him that Canadians don't take prisoners. Two months earlier, in the garden of a stone abbey outside Caen, something had happened that gave the Canadians every reason to prove him right.
They didn't.
What followed — the search, the wire, the questions before dawn — was part of a system planned before D-Day ever happened. And the men it broke fastest weren't the privates or the conscripts. They were the officers. Men who had survived the Eastern Front, survived the bombing, survived four years of war — undone by a single night they never saw coming.
What the Canadian Army built in those twelve hours, and what it cost
On August 14, 1944, a Canadian sergeant with a broken tank, a dead radio, and two jammed machine guns captured 352 German soldiers single-handedly. But the strangest part of that day wasn't the capture — it was what happened to those men overnight.
The German major leading the group had been burning his own documents when the Canadian found him. Not because he feared interrogation. Because he didn't expect to survive the next sixty seconds. His own army had told him that Canadians don't take prisoners. Two months earlier, in the garden of a stone abbey outside Caen, something had happened that gave the Canadians every reason to prove him right.
They didn't.
What followed — the search, the wire, the questions before dawn — was part of a system planned before D-Day ever happened. And the men it broke fastest weren't the privates or the conscripts. They were the officers. Men who had survived the Eastern Front, survived the bombing, survived four years of war — undone by a single night they never saw coming.
What the Canadian Army built in those twelve hours, and what it cost
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LearningTranscript
00:00August 14, 1944. A copse of trees on the east side of Rouvre in Normandy, a handful of miles
00:08short of Falaise. A Canadian Sherman comes around the tree line at speed, and almost everything on
00:14it is broken. The wireless receives, but will not transmit. Both machine guns have jammed from heat.
00:22The firing mechanism on the 75 has failed. The commander has lost his troop leader,
00:28lost his squadron, and has been fighting alone for four hours. Then he sees men at the far end of
00:35the cops. With one working weapon and no radio, he does the only thing available to him. He charges
00:43them. The Germans come out with their hands up, and the first man forward is a major, and the major
00:49is doing something that tells you exactly what he expects to happen in the next 60 seconds. He is
00:56burning his papers, maps, diagrams, sketches with notes written in the margins. A man does not destroy
01:05his own documents because he is afraid of being questioned. He destroys them because he does not
01:11expect to be alive long enough for anyone to ask him a question. Now watch what the Canadian does,
01:16because everything that follows in this story comes out of this one small decision.
01:22He stops the burning. Then he climbs down out of the turret, alone, on the ground, inside arm's reach of
01:30an enemy officer, and searches the man personally, while his crew hold the 75 on the group behind him.
01:37He takes the papers unburned. Before the night is over, they will be in the hands of a Canadian
01:42brigade intelligence officer. Then he asks the major a question. Are there more of you?
01:50There are. If these stories matter to you, a subscribe helps them reach more people,
01:55and it keeps work like this going. The sergeant climbs back into the tank and tells the major
02:00to order the rest out of the trees, or he will put high explosive into the cops. The major shouts.
02:07Two men come out. He shouts again, louder,
02:11all surrender, and the Canadian fires one round into the trees to help him make the point.
02:1824 more come out, four of them lieutenants. Most are wearing spurs and smell strongly of horses,
02:25so he takes the tank into the cops to look. He finds eight guns, 75s and 88s, limbered up in
02:33a line,
02:34laid directly along the axis of the Canadian advance. And then the prisoners keep coming.
02:40Out of hedges, out of ditches, out of orchards, in twos and threes and tens. Within minutes,
02:48there are 110 German soldiers standing around one damaged tank with a dead radio and a crew of five.
02:56Remember that number. It is about to become absurd.
03:00He puts the senior German officer beside him and has him form the men up in fours in front of
03:05the tank.
03:07He explains, through the officer, that they will march ahead of the tank and that if anyone makes a
03:12movement his crew reads as hostile, the crew will fire on all of them. Then he starts walking them
03:19north. By the time he nears the village of Mézières, the count is over 200. And then, just short of
03:27the
03:27village, someone opens fire on the column. Not on the tank, on the prisoners.
03:34The Canadian orders the Germans to sit down where they stand and takes the senior officer forward to
03:40find where the shooting is coming from. The German tells him, four SS men in a bush to the left.
03:46They are firing on the prisoners. Hold on to that for the rest of this film.
03:52On the 14th of August, 1944, in an open field in Normandy, German soldiers were being shot by other
03:59German soldiers to stop them reaching Canadian hands alive.
04:03The sergeant dismounts one of the dead machine guns, sets it on a tripod, and puts two of his
04:09crew behind it, knowing the gun does not work, knowing the prisoners do not know that.
04:14Then he takes the tank forward 400 yards and puts two rounds of high explosive into the bush.
04:20Then he collects his prisoners and carries on. At Mézières, the infantry hand him 25 more. At Houve,
04:29he picks up the rest. The final count is 352 men and eight guns, taken by one crippled tank and
04:38five
04:38tired Canadians. There is no prisoner cage anywhere near. A captain of the Algonquin regiment radios his
04:46brigade and comes back with a map reference, Covicor. It is a long way back. So he marches them the
04:54entire
04:54distance, tank behind the column, and walks the whole route on foot at the front, with the senior
05:00German officer at his side. Two men walking together through the dust, one of them armed, both of them
05:06beyond exhausted, in a country where neither of them was born. They reach Covicor at dark, around 10 o'clock
05:13at night. And there the Canadian hands 352 men to an interrogation officer, and walks away. And every
05:22version of this story you will ever read ends right there. It does not end there for the Major.
05:30Because what happened to that man over the next 12 hours—the search, the wire, the questions, the light
05:37coming up over a field in Normandy on the morning of the 15th of August—did something to him that four
05:43years of war had not. The sergeant's name was Leo Guerriapi, 6th Canadian Armored Regiment, the 1st Hussars.
05:5331 years old, from Laval, Quebec, eldest of 12 children. On the 6th of June, he had come ashore at
06:00Juneau Beach in a tank that swam. And what makes that afternoon remarkable is not the 352 prisoners.
06:07Men had taken prisoners before. It is that the German Major had every reason to believe that
06:13surrendering to Canadians was a death sentence. His own army had told him so. And two months earlier,
06:2060 miles north of that field, in the garden of a stone abbey outside Caen, something had happened
06:26that gave the Canadians every excuse to make it true. Twenty Canadian prisoners were taken into that
06:33garden. None of them walked out. June 7, 1944. The village of Othie, four miles inland from Juneau
06:41Beach. Day two of the Canadian War in France. Sea Company of the North Nova Scotia Highlanders is in
06:48the houses on the edge of the village when the counterattack comes in. The 3rd Battalion of the 25th
06:53SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment. Teenagers led by veterans, moving fast through the wheat.
07:00The Canadian tanks that came up with them are burning. The company is cut off. Ammunition is
07:05gone. Men start putting their hands up, which is what soldiers have done at the end of a lost fight
07:10for a very long time. A private named Lorne Brown stands up to surrender. He is bayoneted where he stands.
07:18That is the first one. It is the afternoon of the second day,
07:22and the Canadian army has been in France for 31 hours.
07:26What happens over the next 10 days is the reason a German major in a Cops near Houvre was burning
07:32his
07:33maps two months later. So stay with me through this, because you cannot understand what shook those
07:39officers without knowing what the Canadians had every right to do to them. The men taken at Othie and
07:46Buchon are stripped of everything worth having. Watches, rings, photographs, cigarettes. One Canadian
07:53is shot for carrying a grenade in his pocket. Canadian witnesses said afterward it was a tin of
07:59chocolate. As the column is marched to the rear, a truck painted with red crosses swerves deliberately
08:05into the prisoners. Two are killed. Another is crushed and left. The survivors are marched to
08:13a stone building outside the village of Saint-Germain-la-Blanche-Herbe. It is a medieval abbey with towers,
08:19walls, and a walled garden. The Abbey d'Ardennes. Kurt Meyer has made it his regimental headquarters.
08:28On the evening of the 7th of June, 11 of them are taken into the garden and shot in the
08:33back of
08:33the head. The next day, seven more arrive. We know what happened to those seven because a 19-year-old
08:40Polish conscript named Jan Jesionek was standing in the courtyard.
08:46Jesionek had been pulled into the SS the way tens of thousands of poles were. No volunteering involved.
08:53Two troopers came in with the prisoners and asked for the regimental commander.
08:59Jesionek walked them over to Meyer. Meyer looked at the seven Canadians and asked,
09:04in front of everyone, what was to be done with prisoners who only ate up the rations.
09:10Then he turned to one of his officers and said something quietly so the men around him could
09:15not hear it. Then he said, out loud, that in future no more prisoners were to be taken.
09:22The seven were called out one at a time by name. Here is the detail from Jesionek's testimony that has
09:30stayed with every Canadian who has ever read it.
09:33Each man, before he walked out into the garden, shook hands with the men he was leaving behind.
09:39They knew. By the 17th of June, 20 Canadians had died in that garden.
09:45Across the Norman countryside, at the Chateau d'Audrieux, at Les Menilles Patries, in ditches and
09:52orchards and farmyards, in ones and twos and in groups of 45, as many as 156 Canadian prisoners were
10:00murdered by the 12th SS in 10 days. Now, hold that number and turn it around,
10:07because this is where the story stops being simple. Word of what was happening in the Canadian sector
10:13traveled, and it traveled in both directions. Rumors went through the 12th SS that the invaders
10:20were killing Germans who tried to surrender. Some of those rumors were false. Some of them were not.
10:26Historians have found evidence that certain allied units, Canadian and American both, went ashore on
10:33the 6th of June under orders to take no prisoners in the first hours. There are British eyewitness accounts
10:40of Canadian soldiers killing German prisoners in Normandy. There is nothing on the Canadian side
10:46remotely approaching 156 murders. But there is enough that no honest account can pretend the
10:52Canadians came to this with clean hands and a clear conscience. And there is Dieppe. 19th of August 1942.
11:021900 Canadians into German captivity in a single day, and a propaganda war afterward in which Berlin told
11:09its own soldiers that Canadians tied prisoners' hands and killed the wounded. So put yourself in the
11:15cops near Houvre on the 14th of August. You are a German major. You have been told by your own
11:22high
11:22command that the Canadians are colonial troops who do not take prisoners. You have heard it in the mess.
11:28You have heard it from men coming back from the line. If you are anywhere near the 12th SS, you
11:34also know,
11:35because everybody in Normandy knew, what your own side had been doing in that sector in June.
11:40And you know what soldiers do about that. You have eight guns pointing at their line of advance,
11:46and a tank 30 yards away, with a sergeant standing on the ground in front of you. You reach for
11:53your
11:53matches. That is not cowardice. That is arithmetic. Every piece of information available to that man
12:01said the same thing. The next few minutes will be the last few minutes. And on the 8th of July,
12:07five weeks before he did that arithmetic, Canadian infantry and the tanks of the first hussars fought
12:14their way into the grounds of the Abbey d'Ardennes, and Canadian soldiers walked into the walled garden
12:20and started digging. What they found there, and what they did in the days immediately afterward,
12:26is the hinge of this entire story. Because within a week of pulling their own dead out of that ground,
12:32those same Canadians had hundreds of 12th SS prisoners standing in a wire enclosure in front of them.
12:39Nobody in the world would have been surprised by what happened next.
12:43Something else happened instead. July 8th, 1944. Cussy, on the western edge of Caen. Operation
12:51Charnwood. The objectives handed to the Regina Rifles and the tanks of the first hussars that morning
12:57are two names on a map. Take the village of Cussy. Then take the Abbey behind it. The Abbey is
13:04the Abbey d'Ardennes.
13:05Pay attention to which regiment that is, because it is the same one you met in the Copse near Rouve.
13:14The men in those Shermans grinding up the slope toward the Abbey towers on the 8th of July are the
13:19men who, five weeks later, will be marching German prisoners back to the cage at Covicor.
13:25The fight for Cussy costs the Regina's dearly. The Abbey walls are thick enough to shrug off anything
13:31but a direct hit, and the 12th SS holds the ground until the position becomes hopeless, then pulls out east
13:37across the Orne. By evening, the towers belong to the Canadians. And then the local people come out.
13:44They had been living beside that Abbey for a month. They had heard what happened in the garden. They told
13:51the Canadians, and Canadian soldiers went into the walled garden and found the ground in the far corner
13:56disturbed and started to dig. They came up out of that soil in ones and twos. Some of them still
14:03had their
14:03identity discs. Every one of them had been shot through the head. 19 years old. 20. 22. Men from Nova
14:14Scotia
14:15mining towns and Quebec parishes, from the North Novas and the Sherbrooke Fusiliers, who had been alive and
14:21unwounded and holding their hands in the air a month earlier. Now I want you to do something with the
14:28next fact, and I want you to sit with it before I tell you what came of it. Within a
14:33week of that
14:34garden, in the same sector, in the same weather, with the news moving through the battalions at the
14:40speed news moves in an army, which is faster than any signals net, Canadian troops had 12th SS prisoners
14:47standing in front of them behind wire. There is a photograph of it.
14:53Early July, 1944. A temporary prisoner of war cage somewhere in the Norman fields. Soldiers of the 12th
15:02SS Panzer Division sitting and standing in the grass inside a wire enclosure. And on the outside of the
15:08wire, two men of the Canadian Provost Corps. That is a 1944 photograph of the most explosive situation two
15:16armies can create. And what it records is nothing happening. So the obvious explanation offers itself,
15:23and it is the wrong one. The obvious explanation is that Canadians were simply decent men who would
15:29not do such a thing. That explanation is comfortable, it is flattering, and it does not survive five minutes
15:36of contact with the evidence. Because Canadians in Normandy did kill prisoners, in the heat, in the first
15:42minutes, in the places where the system had not yet reached the man with the rifle. Here is the real
15:48answer, and it is far more interesting than decency. That prisoner behind the wire in early July was not
15:56standing in front of the men who had dug up the garden. He was standing in front of two provost
16:00corporals,
16:01who had never met him, in a field several miles behind the fighting, hours after his capture, under orders
16:08written before any of it happened. Because that cage was not improvised. Go back to the invasion plan
16:15itself, the administrative orders written in England in the spring, before a single Canadian had seen
16:21Juneau Beach. Buried in the Canadian Provost's instructions for the landing is a paragraph nobody reads.
16:28Two sections of a military police company were to be placed under command of the 3rd Canadian Infantry
16:33Division for one specific purpose. To establish a prisoner of war cage in the beach maintenance area.
16:40They would stay under divisional command until corps headquarters resumed control,
16:45at which point they would revert to corps and go on running the cage. Read that again and let the
16:51date land.
16:53Before the ramps went down, the Canadian Army had already decided which men would build the enclosure that
16:59held German prisoners, where it would stand, and who would take it over afterward. There is a photograph
17:06from the 6th of June, taken on the beachhead, of a Canadian Provost soldier guarding the first Germans
17:12captured that day. Day one. The machine was already running. And that is what makes the whole thing work,
17:20because it removes the decision from the man least able to make it. Follow a prisoner through it.
17:27He surrenders to an infantry section that has lost friends that morning. Within minutes,
17:33he is handed off to somebody who did not watch those friends die. Within an hour,
17:39he is walking rearward with an escort who was not in the fight at all. By evening, he is behind
17:46wire,
17:46guarded by military policemen who were not within 4 miles of the ground he was taken on,
17:51and being processed by an intelligence officer whose entire professional interest is in keeping him
17:57healthy and talking. Every stage of that chain puts distance – physical, temporal, human – between
18:06the prisoner and the moment of hatred. The Canadian Army did not ask its soldiers to be saints under the
18:13worst provocation imaginable. It took the choice off them within about 90 minutes.
18:19Now here is the thing that turns this from an administrative curiosity into the actual subject
18:24of this film. The Canadians did not build that machine to be merciful. They built it because they
18:31wanted something. And what they wanted could only be got from a German soldier who was alive,
18:37unharmed, and somewhere he did not expect to be. Everything that happened inside that wire in the
18:43first 12 hours was aimed at extracting it. And the men it worked on best, better than on any private,
18:49better than on any conscript, were the officers. Men like the Major from the cops.
18:5510 o'clock at night, the 14th of August, in a field outside Covico. 352 German soldiers stop walking.
19:04The Major has been on his feet for 6 miles with a Canadian sergeant beside him.
19:09He is about to enter a system, and I want you to walk through it with him,
19:13because the next 12 hours are the whole point of this film.
19:17The first thing that happens is the search, and it is the first thing that does not make sense to
19:22him.
19:23He has already been searched once, at the cops, by the sergeant personally.
19:28That search took his maps, his diagrams, his sketches, his sidearm.
19:33Those papers went to a brigade intelligence officer before dark.
19:36But look at what the search did not take. It did not take his watch.
19:41It did not take his wedding ring, his photographs, his tunic buttons, his boots.
19:48Two months earlier, 60 miles north, Canadian prisoners on the road out of Bihom were stripped
19:53of every one of those things before they reached the abbey.
19:56The man being searched at Covico does not know that.
20:00What he knows is that his pockets have been emptied of anything with military value,
20:04and nothing else, by men who are unhurried and unexcited about it.
20:08Which is not how looting looks.
20:11Then he is separated from his own soldiers.
20:14Officers to one place, other ranks to another.
20:17He has been trained to expect that this is where it turns.
20:20Separation is what you do to men before you do something to them.
20:24In fact, he is watching a clause of the 1929 Geneva Convention being carried out by a corporal
20:29from Ontario who has probably never heard the word Geneva in his life,
20:33because he does not need to have heard it.
20:35It is in the standing orders.
20:38Officers are held apart from other ranks.
20:40That is all.
20:42The same convention contains one line about prisoners that the Canadian Army took entirely literally.
20:48Measures of reprisal against them are forbidden.
20:52Now think about what that sentence was competing with in Normandy in August of 1944,
20:58and think about the fact that it won.
21:00Then he is fed.
21:02This is the moment that appears again and again in German accounts of falling into Western Allied hands,
21:07and it has almost nothing to do with gratitude.
21:10It is arithmetic again.
21:12A German officer in 1944 knew exactly what his own supply situation looked like.
21:18He knew what his men had eaten that week.
21:21He knew that the divisional transport was moving at night because of the fighter bombers,
21:25and that fuel was rationed by the leader.
21:28And on the walk to Kovicor, he had spent several hours looking at the roads.
21:33Here is a German officer's real work as a prisoner, and nobody has to order him to do it.
21:38He counts.
21:40He counts trucks parked in the fields.
21:43He counts vehicle cereals he does not recognize.
21:46He counts petrol tins, ration crates, ambulances, tanks on transporters going forward.
21:54He is a professional soldier, and he cannot make himself stop.
21:58What breaks him is not cruelty.
22:01It is a supply dump.
22:03Because the arithmetic he has been doing all summer, that the Allies are extended,
22:08that their logistics must be near collapse, that one more good defensive stand tips it,
22:14dies somewhere on the road between Rouve and Kovicor, in the dark, while he walks.
22:20And at the end of that road there is wire, and a hot meal, and a Canadian who takes his
22:25details.
22:26There is one more thing he sees, and for an officer it is the hardest of all to explain away.
22:32The wounded from his own column do not go into a separate line.
22:36A German with a shattered arm goes into the same Canadian aid post as a Canadian with a shattered arm,
22:42and an orderly decides the order of treatment by looking at the wounds, not at the uniform.
22:48Watch a professional soldier absorb that, having spent five years inside an army built on the
22:53proposition that some men are worth more than others by category.
22:57Some of them never got over it. A few of them wrote about it thirty years later.
23:03Now, remember the man who brought him there. Because there is a detail in Leo Garriapé's own
23:08report that says more about the Canadian army than any of this.
23:12At Kovicor, the interrogation officer tells Garriapé to stand by.
23:16He wants the prisoners moved on again that night, to the corps cage at Yves, a dozen miles further north.
23:23Garriapé explains that it is impossible to escort prisoners with one tank.
23:28The officer says he sympathizes, but it cannot be helped.
23:32Then Garriapé goes and looks at his crew. Five men. Nothing to eat since early morning.
23:39Four hours of fighting at a disadvantage. Six miles of hurting several hundred enemy soldiers on foot.
23:45It is ten at night. He refuses. He takes his leave of the interrogation officer quietly,
23:52pulls the tank into a yard under cover, and makes his crew sleep.
23:57He wrote it down himself afterward, in his report, in plain language, with no apology in it.
24:03Hold that image beside the rest of this. The Canadian army fed the prisoners, and then a sergeant
24:09had to disobey an officer to get food and sleep for his own men. That is not a story about
24:15kindness.
24:16That is a story about a machine that had been built to keep prisoners moving rearward,
24:21alive and processed. And that was so relentless, it ran the crew down as well.
24:27And every stage of it cost something. It cost men to guard. It cost trucks and roads and rations
24:34at a moment when the Fallez pocket was closing and every vehicle was needed forward.
24:39It cost officers who could have been running battles, and were instead sitting at tables with
24:44hurricane lamps, writing down what a German lieutenant had let slip about his regiment's establishment.
24:50And five days later, 20 miles to the southeast, in a village on the river Dive,
24:56it cost the Canadian army the life of a battalion commander. He was killed in the middle of a
25:01conversation. He was talking to a German doctor about German wounded. August 19, 1944.
25:08St. Lambert-sur-Dive, a village of stone houses along a road beside a small river in Normandy.
25:15A Canadian major named David Curry has been given a job that reads like a misprint. He has a squadron
25:22of
25:22Shermans, a company of Highlanders, and a few self-propelled anti-tank guns. Fewer than 150 men,
25:29altogether. His task is to sit in that village and stop the German 7th Army from getting out of the
25:35Fallez pocket. Not a battalion of it. The army. Curry was a mechanic from Sutherland, Saskatchewan,
25:4332 years old, and everything written about him by the men who were there uses the same word.
25:50Calm. He goes in on the morning of the 19th and fights halfway up the village street by noon.
25:56Then the counterattacks start, and they do not stop for 36 hours. Tanks come at him down the road.
26:04Infantry come at him through the orchards. At one point, his force is down to a dozen tanks and about
26:1160 infantrymen, and it is still there. And while that is happening, something else is happening at the
26:17same time, in the same 300 yards of village. And this is the part of Saint-Lambert that nobody talks
26:23about. The prisoners are accumulating. They come in ones and tens, and then in columns. Men who have
26:32been bombed and strafed on the roads for days, who have abandoned their vehicles, who have decided that
26:37the war is over for them. They come in while the fighting is still going on, and by the time
26:43it finishes,
26:43the soldiers, Curry's 150 Canadians have taken 2,100 prisoners. Do the arithmetic, because it is
26:51genuinely absurd. That is 14 enemy soldiers for every Canadian in the village. If those prisoners
26:58had picked up the weapons lying in the street, the entire position would have been gone in 10 minutes.
27:03Now, in that situation, there is one solution that costs a commander nothing.
27:09It has been used in every war in history. You simply do not accept surrenders. You keep firing.
27:16Nobody two miles away can tell the difference, and no one will ever ask. Curry accepted them.
27:24There is a photograph of the moment, taken on the 19th of August, and it is one of the most
27:29famous images
27:30in Canadian military history. Curry is standing on the left, with a revolver in his hand. A trooper is
27:37reporting to him. And off to the right, the Regimental Sergeant Major, a man named George Mitchell, is
27:43standing in the road having a conversation with a German officer. Not covering him. Talking to him.
27:50In the middle of a battle that is still going on. And in the same village, on the same day,
27:56the Canadian army paid the bill for that photograph. The major commanding the Argyle Company was a man
28:03named Ivan Martin. He was, by the accounts of his own men, exactly the kind of officer you would want
28:10in Saint-Lambert-sur-Div. The one who is where the trouble is. On that day, he was standing with
28:17a German
28:17medical officer, and the two of them were working out the arrangements for German wounded. How they would be
28:23collected, where they would be taken, who would carry them. A shell landed near them. It killed both men.
28:31The Canadian Major and the German doctor, in the same instant, in the middle of a negotiation about
28:38German casualties. Sit with that for a moment before we go on. Because it is the answer to a question
28:45that
28:45people always ask about stories like this one. The question is, was any of this real? Or is it a
28:53nice
28:53story we tell ourselves afterward? Major Ivan Martin is the answer. Nobody dies in the middle of a piece
29:01of public relations. A battalion's worth of infantry lost their commander because he was standing in the
29:07open on the worst day of the campaign, arranging medical care for the enemy at a moment when his
29:12own men were being killed a hundred yards away. When it was over, Curry's 150 men had killed about 300
29:20Germans, wounded 500, and taken 2,100 prisoners. Almost 3,000 casualties inflicted by a force smaller than a
29:31rifle company at full strength. He was given the Victoria Cross for it. Three months later, a CBC
29:37interviewer asked him what he felt when he found out. Listen to the tone of a man who had held
29:43Saint
29:44Lambert. He said he was staggered. He sat down and had a cigarette and thought it over. That is the
29:52Canadian Army in one sentence. Now widen the lens, because Saint Lambert was not an exception. It was a
30:00sample. By the time the pocket closed, the number of German soldiers walking northwest into Canadian
30:06and Allied cages was in the tens of thousands. Every one of them had to be searched, escorted,
30:14counted, fed, watered, sheltered, guarded, and moved rearward by an army that was simultaneously trying to
30:22finish a campaign and that was so short of infantry it would soon tear the Canadian government apart
30:28politically. So we come back to the question this whole film is built on. Not why the Canadians spared
30:36them. You now know that the machine did most of that work. The real question is harder. Why keep pouring
30:44men, trucks, fuel, food, and roads into keeping enemy soldiers alive and comfortable in the middle of the
30:53worst fighting of the war? Sentiment does not survive that kind of pressure. Something else was holding
31:01it up. The Canadians were getting something out of those men. Something they could not get any other
31:07way. And something they wanted badly enough to trade Ivan Martin's life for. It started with what a
31:15frightened man will say at a table with a hurricane lamp on it, in the hour when he realizes he
31:20is not going to
31:21be shot. Sunrise, the 15th of August, 1944. A farm building behind the front, somewhere between
31:29Covicor and Eafs. A Canadian intelligence officer, a captain, sits at a table with a folding chair on
31:36the other side of it. He has a field notebook, a map with a talc overlay, a packet of cigarettes
31:43he did
31:43not buy for himself, and a pile of papers a tank sergeant took off a German major in a copse
31:48yesterday
31:49afternoon. He is not holding a weapon. There is no weapon in the room. The major is brought in.
31:57He has been awake most of the night. He has been searched, fed, counted, and left alone,
32:03and nothing has happened to him. And now a man about ten years younger than him offers him a cigarette
32:09and asks him, in careful German, how his men are. Understand what that question is. It is not sympathy.
32:18It is the first move of a professional at work. Because here is what almost nobody knows about the
32:24Canadian army. And it is the reason this system existed at all. The Canadians had been doing this
32:30longer, and with more people, than anyone else in the British Empire. The 1st Canadian Division was the
32:37first division in any Empire army to produce a regular intelligence summary. And it started doing
32:42it in 1915. By the Second World War, Canadian formations carried more intelligence officers than
32:49comparable formations of other armies. Every brigade had its own. That is thirty years of institutional
32:56habit standing behind a captain in a farmyard. Now, what does he actually want? Not secrets. This is the
33:06part that surprises people. He is not trying to make the major betray a plan, because a major does not
33:12know the plan, and both of them know it. He wants smaller things than that, and they are worth far
33:18more.
33:19He wants the number on the man's shoulder strap. He wants to know which battalion, which regiment,
33:26which division, and when it arrived in Normandy, and from where.
33:31He wants to know how many men were in his company yesterday morning. He wants to know where the
33:37boundary was between his unit and the one on his left. Because boundaries between units are where
33:44armies break. He wants to know whether the men had eaten. He wants to know whether the guns behind them
33:50had shells. He wants the paybook, the letter from home, the ration card, the map with a pencil line on
33:58it.
34:00None of that is treason. Most of it is not even secret. It is the debris of being a soldier.
34:07And when
34:08you have it from four hundred prisoners on the same morning, you can see the enemy army. You can tell
34:15that a division has been pulled out of the line and replaced. You can tell that a regiment that is
34:21supposed to have two thousand men has four hundred. You can tell where a freshly arrived formation was
34:28stationed a month ago, from the coins and tram tickets and cinema stubs in men's pockets.
34:34You can tell that the men in front of you have not been fed for two days, which tells your
34:40own
34:40commander that the position in front of him is about to fall. That is what the Canadians were buying with
34:46all those trucks and rations and guards. And this is where the method becomes the whole point.
34:52Because you cannot get any of it from a man you have terrified. A frightened prisoner gives you three
34:59things. Name, rank, and number. And then he stops. And every professional interrogator on both sides in
35:07that war knew it. The Allied interrogation system was built deliberately and from the top on the
35:14opposite principle. Make the man comfortable. Feed him. Let him rest. Talk to him like a soldier
35:22rather than an animal. And let his own relief do the work. The man running the British interrogation
35:29effort against captured German officers never used force at all. And he got more out of German generals
35:36than any beating in history ever produced. So look again at what happened to the major from the cops,
35:43and see it for what it is. He was searched and not robbed, because a robbed man is an angry
35:50man.
35:51He was fed, because a hungry man is a stubborn man. He was separated from his soldiers, because in front
36:00of
36:00his own men he must perform, and alone he does not have to. He was left in one piece all
36:08night with
36:08nothing happening to him. Because twelve hours of nothing happening will dismantle a man's defenses
36:15more thoroughly than twelve hours of anything happening. And by morning, the sentence forming in his
36:22head was not, I must resist. It was, these people are not what I was told. That sentence is what
36:31shook
36:32German officers who spent one night as Canadian prisoners. Not the food. Not the cigarette. The
36:40collapse of the story they had been carrying. The discovery, in one night, that everything they had been
36:46told about the enemy was a lie. Which means everything else they had been told was now also in question.
36:54And a man in that condition talks. Now here is what makes this a race rather than a system.
37:02The Germans noticed. You cannot lose thousands of men into an enemy's hands and have the survivors'
37:10families receive red cross cards from Canada saying they are alive and well fed without that information
37:16traveling back across the front. It traveled through letters. It traveled through the men who escaped.
37:24By the autumn of 1944, on the Scheldt, German soldiers facing the Canadians knew perfectly well
37:30what surrendering to them actually meant. Which created a problem for German commanders that had
37:36nothing to do with the Canadians at all. In the middle of October, in a flooded pocket of Dutch farmland,
37:43one German general decided to solve it. He put his solution in writing and signed it,
37:49and it is one of the coldest documents produced by any commander on the Western Front.
37:55Eighteen days later, that general was a Canadian prisoner.
37:59Mid-October 1944. The Breskens pocket on the south bank of the Scheldt estuary,
38:05where Belgium becomes the Netherlands. Imagine the worst ground you have ever seen,
38:10and then flood it. Reclaimed farmland lying below sea level, squared off into polders by dikes,
38:17and the Germans have shut down the pumps. The water has come up to the surface. The only roads are
38:24on
38:24top of the dikes, which means every road is a firing lane. Artillery shells bury themselves in the mud
38:31before they burst. A slit trench fills with water as fast as you dig it. One British historian called
38:38it the worst terrain any soldier has ever had to fight on. Holding it is the German 64th Infantry
38:44division under Major General Knut Eberding. And you need to know what that division was because it makes
38:51what follows much harder. The 64th was a leave division, assembled out of men caught coming back
38:58from the Eastern Front, from Italy, from Norway. Veterans. Every one of them, who had never worked
39:05together before. First Canadian Army Intelligence, which by then had processed a very large number of
39:12German formations, later assessed the 64th as the finest infantry division the Canadians had faced in
39:18the entire war. They were not conscripts. They were not boys. And by mid-October, in that water, they were
39:26starting to surrender. Eberding knew why. His men had worked out what everyone on that front had worked
39:32out by the autumn of 1944. That walking toward the Canadians with your hands up was survivable,
39:38and that walking back into the polder was not. So on the 14th of October, he issued an order to
39:45stop it.
39:46And here is what it said. Any man who surrendered would be treated as a deserter. His name would be
39:53sent home. It would be given to the civilian population of his own town. And his family, his
39:59parents, his wife, his children, would be regarded as enemies of the German people. Read that twice.
40:08He could not make his men fear the Canadians anymore because they had seen the evidence. So he made them
40:15fear what would happen to their mothers. That is the counter-move. That is what the Canadian prisoner
40:22system had forced a German general to do. Reach past the battlefield entirely, past his own soldiers, and put his
40:30hand on their families. And it worked, in the way such things work. His men fought on, at every dike
40:38and strong point, and the Canadians had to kill or overrun almost all of them. 2,077 Canadian casualties
40:46came out of that pocket. 314 dead. Now watch who finishes it. On the 30th of October, the 9th Canadian
40:56Infantry Brigade is put back into the line for the last push toward the coast. And at the front of
41:02that
41:02brigade is the North Nova Scotia Highlanders. Say that regiment's name again, and go back five months to a
41:10walled garden outside Caen, and to the men who shook hands with each other before walking out of a stable
41:16door. Those were North Novas. The same regiment. Some of the same men. Different country. Different
41:25season. Sixteen months of war between them and the abbey. On the 1st of November 1944, at Hetzaut,
41:33on the edge of Knok, they isolate the German divisional headquarters and go in on it. And Knut Eberding,
41:40the man who had told his soldiers that surrender would be punished on their families, the man who had
41:45ordered them to fight to the death, surrenders without firing a shot. There is one detail from
41:52that morning that says everything. His leather suitcase was packed. Neatly. Ready to go. He had
42:00known this was coming. He had prepared for it personally, while telling 19-year-olds in flooded
42:05trenches that there was no such option. The North Novas took him alive. They had every reason on
42:12earth not to. Nobody would have written a word about it if they had not. And there is not the
42:18slightest
42:19evidence that the thought even slowed them down. Because by November of 1944, the Canadian machine had
42:25been running for five months and it simply processed him like everybody else. Searched, escorted, recorded,
42:32moved rearward. He would end the war in a prisoner of war camp in Mississippi and go home in 1947.
42:40But before that, he was brought to meet the commander of the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division,
42:45Major General Dan Spry. And Eberding, a prisoner, defeated, in Canadian hands,
42:51decided to give him a lecture. He told Spry that the Canadians had not been aggressive enough,
42:58that they had failed to exploit their opportunities, that any German general would have moved far more
43:03quickly than Spry had moved. Spry answered him with an arithmetic problem. He said that he had lost
43:10around 700 men killed in two aggressive operations inside five days, and that he therefore preferred a
43:17methodical advance, one that preserved the lives of his soldiers. And Eberding gave him the answer that
43:23is the whole reason this film exists. He said that this showed weakness. He explained that German
43:31generals concerned themselves with winning and never allowed casualties to interfere with victory.
43:37There it is. The thing that shook German officers who spent one night as Canadian prisoners
43:43was not mercy, and it was not chocolate, and it was not the cigarette on the table.
43:49It was the discovery that they had spent five years fighting for a system that regarded the careful
43:55preservation of human life as a defect, and that they had just been captured by one that regarded it
44:01as the point. Eberding could not see it standing in the room. His own men had seen it from the
44:08wire.
44:08By the 3rd of November, it was over. Since the first crossing of the Leopold Canal,
44:14the Canadians had taken 12,707 prisoners out of that pocket. 12,707 men who went home after the war.
44:24The morning of the 15th of August, 1944. The Major walks out of a farm building in Normandy,
44:31into ordinary daylight. He gets onto a truck. The truck takes him north to the core cage at Ife's,
44:37and from Ife's to an army cage, and from there to the coast, and across the channel, and into a
44:44camp,
44:45and out the other end of the war, alive, four or five years later, to whatever was left of his
44:52town.
44:53We do not know his name. That is worth saying plainly. The Canadian records of that afternoon
45:00give us the sergeant, the tank, the number of prisoners, the guns, the map references, and the
45:05hour. The Major is simply the senior officer. He walked six miles beside a Canadian from Quebec.
45:13He handed over the papers he had been trying to burn. He spent one night inside a system that was
45:19not what he had been told it was. And then he disappeared into a number. 352. He is not alone
45:28in that. Almost everyone this story is about is a number somewhere. Some of them are not.
45:35Kurt Meyer was tried by a Canadian military court in December of 1945, convicted on counts arising from
45:42the garden at the Abbe Dardenne and sentenced to death. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment
45:48by a Canadian general, Christopher Vox, who was not satisfied that a direct order to kill had been
45:54proved. Meyer served less than 10 years and died in 1961 at home of a heart attack.
46:02You may find that hard to take. A good many Canadians did, and said so loudly. But look at what
46:10it actually
46:10is. The army whose prisoners he murdered gave him a trial, and a defense, and an appeal, and a general
46:19who refused to hang a man on evidence he thought insufficient. Right to the last man on the worst
46:26possible case, the machine held. Knut Aberding went to a prison camp in Mississippi. He was released in
46:35June of 1947 and died in Germany in 1978, 34 years after the flooded Polders, having lived a long life
46:45on the strength of a suitcase packed in advance. David Curry came home and lived quietly and died in
46:52Ottawa in 1986. Ivan Martin never left Normandy. And the ordinary ones, the men from the cops, the men from
47:02the flooded Polders, went into camps, and a great many of them went to Canada. Around 35,000 German
47:10prisoners were held on Canadian soil in 26 camps from Alberta to New Brunswick, run to the letter of the
47:18Geneva Convention. Of the roughly 37,000 men who passed through that system, 137 died in captivity,
47:27most of them of ordinary illness. Set that number beside the prisoner systems on any other front of
47:35that war, and it stops being bookkeeping and starts being a statement. Thousands of them went home,
47:43having spent three years living inside a democracy. A few of them wrote about it decades later, and what
47:49comes off those pages is not gratitude so much as bewilderment that has never quite worn off.
47:55The garden at the Abbey d'Alden is kept as a memorial now. There are 20 names on it. Canadian
48:01visitors leave small maple leaf flags against the stone, and the inscription says that they are gone,
48:06but not forgotten. And Léo Gariepi went home to Canada and discovered what a great many of them
48:13discovered. He stayed in the army until 1947, training young recruits. Then he was discharged in
48:20Toronto, and the return to ordinary life went badly. Money, health, a marriage that came apart.
48:27He worked for an oil company for the better part of 17 years. In 1964, he went back to Normandy
48:33for the
48:34first time, for the 20th anniversary. And then he did something almost nobody does.
48:40In 1967, he took a job as a technical assistant with the town of Courceles-sur-Mer, on the stretch
48:47of sand the maps called Juneau. And he moved there for good. His family did not come with him.
48:54He spent his last years on a project. Out in the water in front of Courceles, lay a Canadian swimming
49:00tank that had gone down on the morning of the 6th of June, 1944, with the rest of the ones
49:06that never made
49:07the beach. Gariepi led the effort to bring it up. They raised it, restored it, and gave it to the
49:14town.
49:15It is still there. It stands on a square by the harbor, in sight of the beach, and the square
49:20is
49:21named after him. He died on the 8th of May, 1972, the anniversary, to the day, of the end of
49:29the war in
49:29Europe. An honorary citizen of Courceles-sur-Mer. He is buried in the military section of the town
49:36cemetery, 400 meters from where he came ashore, in the country he went back to. So here is the answer,
49:44and it is very simple. What shook German officers who spent one night as Canadian prisoners was not
49:51that the Canadians were kind. It was that the Canadians had decided, in writing, in advance,
49:57and at real cost to themselves, that the value of a human life did not depend on which uniform it
50:03was
50:03wearing, and that they held that decision through the murder of their own men, through a summer of
50:10dead friends, and through the worst provocation an army can be given. A German general called that
50:17weakness. 12,707 of his soldiers came home because of it. And 400 meters from the beach
50:25at Courceles, a tank that swam ashore on the 6th of June, stands on a square named after the sergeant
50:32who
50:32brought it there. Veo Gueriepi never asked for the square. He just kept coming back until the place would not
50:40let him
50:40leave. That is what the Canadians were. Not saints, not angels. Soldiers who built a system, held it when it
50:49cost them everything, and then went home and never talked about it. Thank you for giving this story your time.
50:56These men are getting harder to hear from every year, and the ones who did the quiet, unglamorous, decent things
51:02almost never got written about at all. If you think this one deserves to be remembered, a like genuinely
51:09helps it find more people. And if you would like to hear more, we are here every week. If anyone
51:15in your
51:15family has a connection to the Canadians who served, I would be honored to hear about it in the comments.
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