- 2 months ago
Berlin quietly erased his own name from a fortified line in Italy before the Canadians ever reached it, but the concrete, buried tank turrets, wire, and mines remained. In May 1944, Canadian infantry entered the Liri Valley and found a defensive belt built to crush an attack, yet held by shattered German units and hidden firepower that turned wheat fields into killing ground. One brigade suffered 543 casualties in a single day, while the Seaforth Highlanders and other Canadian battalions fought through fog, wire, and anti-tank positions toward Ponte Corvo and Aino.
This military history documentary-style narration follows the attack on the Hitler Line, the German decision to rename it the Senger Line, and the brutal fighting that followed. It also traces the Canadian breakthrough, from failed probes and heavy artillery support to the West Nova Scotia Regiment’s advance and the collapse of the German position. The story is built from battlefield detail, command decisions, and firsthand combat accounts.
For listeners who enjoy WW2 stories, Canadian war stories, battlefield history, and narrated military history, this episode offers a gripping look at the Italian Campaign, the Hitler Line, and the cost of breaking a fortified German defense. It is ideal for fans of history podcasts, war narration, Canadian Army history, and World War 2 documentary storytelling.
This military history documentary-style narration follows the attack on the Hitler Line, the German decision to rename it the Senger Line, and the brutal fighting that followed. It also traces the Canadian breakthrough, from failed probes and heavy artillery support to the West Nova Scotia Regiment’s advance and the collapse of the German position. The story is built from battlefield detail, command decisions, and firsthand combat accounts.
For listeners who enjoy WW2 stories, Canadian war stories, battlefield history, and narrated military history, this episode offers a gripping look at the Italian Campaign, the Hitler Line, and the cost of breaking a fortified German defense. It is ideal for fans of history podcasts, war narration, Canadian Army history, and World War 2 documentary storytelling.
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LearningTranscript
00:00May 23, 1944. Six minutes past six in the morning at the edge of a wood south of the Aquino
00:07-Pontocorvo road in the Leary Valley of Central Italy.
00:11Major Lee Morgan McBride of the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada is walking into the thickest fog he has ever seen
00:18in this country.
00:18He is 26 years old, from Nelson, British Columbia, and he is commanding D Company that morning only because another
00:26officer, Major Davy Fulton, was hurt in a road accident days earlier.
00:32McBride inherited a hundred men and a start line. The company crosses the start line and the wood erupts. Machine
00:39guns, artillery, mortars.
00:41The Canadian tanks moving with them, Churchills of the North Irish Horse, have been warned that German snipers may be
00:48up in the trees, so their gunners are firing high into the branches.
00:52Then the tanks pitch over uneven ground, and those same guns drop hundreds of yards in an instant, and the
00:58fire that was meant for the treetops arrives in the middle of D Company.
01:03McBride tries three times to get it stopped. The radios are already failing. In the fog, his company breaks apart
01:09into small groups.
01:10Some of them tangled in with the Princess Patricias on the right, and it never comes back together.
01:16McBride gathers what is left of company headquarters and starts picking his way through the German wire.
01:21He is stepping only on hard ground, ground that has not been turned over, because turned earth means a mine.
01:28Behind him, his runner, Johnson, is placing his boots exactly in McBride's footprints.
01:34Then the explosion. McBride wakes up on the ground, back in front of the wire he had been threading. Johnson
01:40is dead.
01:40So is Warner, the older of his two signalers.
01:43The younger radio operator has his cheek laid open, and McBride helps him into a ditch and gets a field
01:49dressing on him.
01:50That is the whole of company headquarters, in about four seconds.
01:55One man left standing, and he is the officer.
01:58Hold that image, because we are going to come back to it.
02:01And hold this with it.
02:03Somewhere in McBride's kit that morning was a map, and on that map, the fortified belt in front of him
02:09was labeled with a name.
02:11Every Canadian in the valley used it.
02:13Eighth Army used it in its intelligence summaries.
02:16The newspapers back in Vancouver and Halifax would use it within 48 hours.
02:21It was called the Hitler Line.
02:23And in the German army that was defending it, that name had already been struck out.
02:28Not after the battle, before it.
02:31Berlin had reached down into its own paperwork and removed something from that position months before the first Canadian shell
02:37landed.
02:38And the name was only the part you could see.
02:41If these stories matter to you, subscribing helps them reach more people who remember what Canadians did.
02:46Now, what were these men actually walking into?
02:50The line ran across the Liri Valley from the mountains above Aquino, through Ponthecorvo, down to the coast.
02:58The men who built it were labor battalions of the Tote organization, working with drafts of Italian laborers, and they
03:05had been at it for months.
03:07It was a belt roughly 900 meters deep, and everything in that belt was designed to do one job.
03:13Take an attacking army, break it into pieces, and feed those pieces into places where the guns were already pointed.
03:20There was an anti-tank ditch.
03:22There was a barrier of wire and mines about 19 feet across.
03:26There were something like 200 small concrete emplacements, sunk almost flush with the ground, showing nothing but a rim and
03:33a weapon.
03:33And there were eight positions of a kind Canadian infantry had not met before.
03:38A Panther tank turret, complete with its long 75mm gun, bricked into a block of concrete, traversing a full circle,
03:47sitting so low and so well camouflaged that men walked into its range without ever seeing it.
03:53The crews lived 20 feet underground.
03:56Now consider what that means for a man on foot.
03:58The waist-high wheat and hay in those fields had not been burned off.
04:02It hid the Germans completely, and it did nothing to hide the Canadians, because a man moving through standing crop
04:09draws a line across it that anyone can read.
04:11Why were the Canadians the ones sent at it?
04:14Because on the 18th of May, a Polish flag went up over the ruins of the abbey at Monte Cassino,
04:20and the Gustav Line, the position that had held the Allied armies for half a year, finally came apart.
04:26Behind it lay the Leary Valley and Route 6, the road to Rome.
04:31And behind the Leary Valley lay this belt of concrete, waiting.
04:36Nobody was going to get to Rome without going through it.
04:40The job went to 1st Canadian Corps.
04:44So the Canadians came up the valley, and they attacked a line named for the most powerful man in Europe.
04:50Except that in the German army, it was no longer named for him.
04:54That order had come out of Berlin months earlier, and it was short, a change of one word, on maps
05:01and in orders, from the mountains to the sea.
05:05Ask yourself why a man who never conceded anything in public would quietly take his own name off a fortress
05:12he had ordered held at all costs.
05:15Because the answer is not embarrassment.
05:17The answer is an admission, and it was made long before McBride ever stepped into that wire, four days earlier.
05:25The 19th of May, on the floor of the Leary Valley, and the men out in front are not infantry
05:31at all.
05:31They are armored cars and reconnaissance troops of the Princess Louise Dragoon Guards, pushing northwest toward Ponte Corvo.
05:39And they are doing something that changes the shape of the next week.
05:42They are collecting prisoners.
05:44Not one or two.
05:45Enough of them that the reports going back to 1st Canadian Division headquarters begin to read like a position coming
05:51apart.
05:52Remember that, because it is the first piece of a misunderstanding that will cost 543 Canadians in a single morning.
05:59Major General Chris Vokes commanded 1st Canadian Infantry Division, and Vokes read those prisoner reports the way any aggressive commander
06:07would.
06:07If the Germans were surrendering in front of Ponte Corvo, the belt might not be properly manned yet.
06:13And if it was not properly manned, then a full set-piece attack, days of preparation, every gun in 8th
06:20Army, might simply let the enemy dig in deeper while the Canadians organized paperwork.
06:26So Vokes tried to bounce it.
06:28Individual battalions pushed at the line on the 19th and the 20th to find a soft place.
06:33They were stopped cold.
06:35Every one of them.
06:37And here is where the story turns.
06:40Because those failed probes were not the Canadians being naive.
06:44They were the Canadians running into the exact thing Berlin had already accounted for.
06:49Go back with me to the winter, months before any of this.
06:53To a headquarters in Italy where an order arrived from the German High Command.
06:57It was not an order about troops or guns or ammunition.
07:01It was an order about a word.
07:03The position across the Leary Valley had been designed and built as the Führer's own line.
07:09His name was on the plans, on the overlays, in the orders that went down to battalion level.
07:15And now that name was to come off.
07:17From that point forward, the fortified belt from the mountains to the sea would be called the Sängerline,
07:23after General Fridilin von Sänger und Etelen, one of the core commanders in the sector.
07:28Think about what that order looked like as actual work.
07:31Somebody had to go through the map overlays and strike a word out.
07:35Somebody had to re-issue orders and tell the engineers and the artillery liaison officers
07:40that the fortress they had been building since the previous autumn now belonged, on paper,
07:45to a general most of them had never met.
07:47The reason recorded in the German documents is blunt, and I want you to sit with it for a moment.
07:52The name was removed so that if the line were penetrated, the loss would carry no propaganda significance.
07:59Read that again.
08:00This is a man who broke generals for retreating, who ordered positions held to the last round
08:07and treated the very idea of withdrawal as treason.
08:10And in private, in his own paperwork, months before the Canadians arrived,
08:15he took his name off this particular belt of concrete for one reason only.
08:20Because he had already worked out that it might not hold.
08:24That is the first layer of the answer to our question.
08:28What Berlin erased from that line was a name.
08:31But the name was not the point.
08:33The name was the evidence.
08:34The erasure is Hitler's own private assessment of his own fortress,
08:39written down in the only language he would allow himself, an administrative correction.
08:43And the same man, in the same period, was still sending orders that the line was to be defended at
08:49all costs.
08:50Hold both of those in your head at once, because the men in the concrete had to live inside that
08:55contradiction.
08:56Defend this to the death.
08:58Also, we have quietly removed the label that would make your death mean something.
09:03Now, the general whose name went onto the line.
09:06Sanger was not a Nazi and never pretended to be.
09:09He was the officer who had refused to put troops inside the abbey at Monte Cassino,
09:14on the grounds that some things should not be fortified.
09:17And after the war, he wrote plainly about what he thought of rigid, no-retreat defense of fixed positions,
09:23that it squandered good troops and prolonged fights that were already lost.
09:28So the fortress that Hitler no longer wanted his name on was handed, in name,
09:32to a man who believed the whole concept was a mistake.
09:35The Canadians walking toward Pontecorvo did not know any of that.
09:40They could not have known it.
09:41They kept calling it the Hitler Line, and so did 8th Army in its intelligence summaries,
09:46and so did every newspaper in Canada,
09:48because the Allies had been given no reason to change and no interest in changing.
09:53Which produced one of the strangest facts of the Italian campaign.
09:57On the 23rd of May, Canadian infantry attacked a fortification
10:01named after a man who had already deleted his own name from it.
10:04But the name was only the visible part,
10:07and I told you in the beginning that something else had been taken off that line as well.
10:12The second thing was not on any map.
10:14It was on the position itself,
10:16and the first Canadians to reach the wire found the evidence of it in their hands.
10:20A discovery so specific, and so strange,
10:24that it made the line both weaker and far more lethal
10:27than anyone at divisional headquarters had calculated.
10:30To understand it, you have to meet the one Canadian officer
10:33who looked at the plan for the attack and refused to lead it.
10:36Late on the night of the 21st of May,
10:39in a farm building behind the Canadian line,
10:41Lieutenant Colonel Ian Johnston of the 48th Highlanders of Canada
10:45listened to an orders group
10:47and understood that he was being asked to destroy his own battalion.
10:52Brigadier Dan Spry was giving out the task.
10:55The 48th would lead off at first light,
10:58breach the fortified belt in front of Ponte Corvo,
11:00and take a hill beyond it.
11:02The Royal Canadian Regiment
11:04and the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment
11:06would follow and widen the hole.
11:08Some British Churchill tanks would be available.
11:12Johnston did the arithmetic
11:13every battalion commander does in that moment.
11:16First light was less than four hours away.
11:19Nobody had seen the ground.
11:21Nobody had arranged artillery.
11:23And in front of him lay 900 meters of wire,
11:26mines, concrete, and buried tank turrets.
11:29So he said no.
11:31I want to be precise about how unusual that is.
11:35A lieutenant colonel in the middle of a shooting war
11:38does not tell his brigadier
11:39that an operation is badly conceived.
11:42Johnston did.
11:43He said an attack without proper preparation
11:45was inviting heavy casualties with no chance of success.
11:49told his superiors he would not take responsibility for it
11:52and asked to be relieved of his command.
11:5520 years of career,
11:56on the table in one sentence.
11:58The pressure came back at him.
12:00There were other operations depending on this.
12:03The Americans were about to break out
12:04of the Anzio beachhead on the 23rd,
12:06and the Germans in the Leary Valley had to be pinned.
12:10Johnston finally agreed,
12:11on his own conditions.
12:13The attack would be postponed
12:14until 8 in the morning,
12:15and later than that
12:16if his battalion and the tanks were not ready.
12:19He used what was left of the night for reconnaissance
12:21and for begging anybody who would listen for guns.
12:24The 48th Highlanders went forward
12:27at half past 10 in the morning
12:28on the 22nd of May.
12:30And the first thing they discovered
12:32is the thing I have been holding back.
12:35The wheat was still standing.
12:37Waist-high crop,
12:39all the way up to the German wire,
12:41unburned.
12:42And that is not a housekeeping detail.
12:45Any defender preparing a fortified line
12:47clears his fields of fire.
12:49You burn the crop,
12:50you cut it,
12:51you flatten it,
12:52because standing vegetation in front of your guns
12:55is a gift to the man attacking you.
12:57The Germans in the Leary Valley had not done it.
13:00They had come back from the Gustav line
13:02too fast and with too few hands.
13:05So the Highlanders walked into the wheat
13:07and used it.
13:08They got right up to the wire.
13:10A troop of Churchills came in alongside.
13:13The Germans switched their attention to the tanks.
13:16And while that was happening,
13:17the Canadian infantry got into the defensive belt
13:20and started taking the steel-domed machine gun posts
13:23one after another.
13:24Now watch the other half of it
13:26because this is where the shape of the whole battle appears.
13:29The Germans in front of Ponte Corvo
13:31were short of infantry.
13:32They were not short of firepower.
13:34As the Highlanders pushed in,
13:36the anti-tank positions opened up on the British armor
13:39and tore it apart.
13:40And then the mortars
13:41and the six-barreled nebelware for rocket launchers
13:44came down on the Canadians in the wire
13:45and would not stop.
13:47Johnston's men could not go further
13:49and they could not go back.
13:51They dug in and took it.
13:538th Army's intelligence people
13:54put perhaps 3,500 German troops
13:57between Aquino and Ponte Corvo.
13:59A garrison spread thin over 8 kilometers
14:01of the most heavily engineered position in Italy.
14:04Men who had lost their units in the retreat
14:06were scraped together at the fortifications
14:08into improvised battle groups
14:10and pushed in wherever the gaps were.
14:13Reinforcements from the 90th Panzer Grenadier Division
14:15came into the valley one unit at a time.
14:18So here is the second layer of our answer
14:20and it changes the first one.
14:23Berlin erased a name from that line.
14:25Berlin also erased the garrison it was built for.
14:29That concrete belt was designed
14:31for a full, coherent, properly supplied defensive core.
14:35By the 22nd of May, it was held by fragments,
14:38by men who had arrived the day before
14:40and been handed a piece of somebody else's front.
14:43And now understand the trap in that
14:45because most people get it exactly backwards.
14:48An understrength defense does not make
14:50a fortified line easier to break.
14:52It makes it different to break.
14:53With too few infantry,
14:56the Germans could not hold a continuous front,
14:58which is why Johnston's Highlanders
15:00got into the belt at all.
15:01But everything they did have
15:03was concentrated in the machinery.
15:05The buried Panther turrets,
15:07the anti-tank guns,
15:08the pre-registered mortars,
15:10the rocket launchers.
15:12Take the infantry away
15:13and what is left is a position that lets you in
15:15and then kills you inside it.
15:17That is exactly what happened to the 48th.
15:20They breached.
15:21They could not exploit.
15:23Spry was told to hold what he had
15:25until the main attack went in.
15:27By the evening of the 22nd,
15:29Vokes had his answer.
15:31Pontecorvo was not a soft spot.
15:33And there were no soft spots.
15:36The set-piece attack would go in
15:37at 6 the following morning.
15:39Every gun in 8th Army
15:41on a frontage of 2,300 yards.
15:45Operation Chesterfield.
15:46And because he had committed
15:471st Brigade at Pontecorvo,
15:49the brigade that would now make
15:50the main assault
15:51had spent the crisis sitting in reserve
15:53on the wrong part of the battlefield.
15:55They would move to their forming up place
15:57in the dark,
15:58on ground not one of their company commanders
16:00had ever laid eyes on.
16:02And in a few hours,
16:03the fog would come down
16:04over the Leary Valley.
16:056 o'clock in the morning,
16:07the 23rd of May,
16:08and the Leary Valley comes apart.
16:12682 field and medium guns
16:14open on a frontage of 2,300 yards.
16:18Another 76 mediums and heavies
16:20work on the German artillery
16:22behind the line.
16:23The barrage lifts 100 yards
16:25after 5 minutes,
16:27then another 100 every 3 minutes,
16:29walking north,
16:30and the infantry are supposed
16:31to walk behind it.
16:33Let me put that number
16:34where you can feel it.
16:36682 guns.
16:37On a front,
16:39a man could walk end-to-end
16:40in about 25 minutes.
16:42Everything 8th Army had,
16:44aimed at one strip of Italian farmland.
16:47The first reports back are good.
16:49The enemy is stunned.
16:51The forward positions are being overrun.
16:53The thing is working.
16:55Then the smoke and the dust
16:57from the barrage mix with the fog
16:58that has settled on the valley floor.
17:00And by 7 in the morning,
17:02a man in that field
17:03can see a few meters in front of him.
17:05Not a hundred.
17:06A few.
17:07Now everything starts to go wrong at once,
17:10and I want you to watch
17:11how quickly it happens.
17:13The Seaforth Highlanders
17:14and the Princess Patricia's
17:16Canadian Light Infantry
17:17are the two forward battalions.
17:19To get through the wire and the mines,
17:21they need the engineers,
17:22and the breaching party
17:23from 3rd Field Company,
17:25Royal Canadian Engineers,
17:26is pinned before it can finish.
17:28So Lieutenant Carr Harris
17:30takes a second party forward
17:31into the same fire
17:32that stopped the first one,
17:34and pushes the gap through
17:35with the Patricias behind him.
17:36He is wounded doing it.
17:39Three of his sappers are killed.
17:40He comes out of that morning
17:42with a military cross
17:43and two of his men,
17:44acting Corporal Harrison
17:45and Lance Sergeant Irvine,
17:47with military medals.
17:49Behind them come the churchills
17:50of the North Irish horse,
17:52and the line does to them
17:53what it was built to do.
17:55Mines first.
17:56Then the anti-tank guns
17:58and the buried Panther turrets
17:59firing from positions
18:01no tank crew can see,
18:02barrels sitting almost at ground level
18:05in the standing crop.
18:06The Canadian record of that morning
18:08puts it in one line.
18:09The tanks that could no longer move
18:11went on firing
18:12until the enemy set them alight.
18:15Crews who knew they were finished,
18:16working the gun anyway,
18:18because the infantry out in front of them
18:19were in the open.
18:21By 10 minutes to 8 in the morning,
18:23the barrage is switched off.
18:25Not because the attack has succeeded,
18:27because there is nothing left
18:28to walk behind.
18:29The infantry are not advancing,
18:31and the guns are firing
18:33ahead of men who are pinned.
18:35At 8 o'clock,
18:36the Loyal Edmonton Regiment
18:37starts forward
18:38to help hold the exposed flank
18:40toward Aquino,
18:41where the fire is worst.
18:43Their commanding officer,
18:44Lieutenant Colonel Rowan Coleman,
18:46and the battalion radio operators
18:47are hit almost at once,
18:49by snipers,
18:50and by machine gun posts
18:52the leading companies
18:53had walked straight past in the fog.
18:56Understand what that means.
18:57The line is not in front
18:59of the Canadians anymore.
19:00It is around them,
19:01and behind them.
19:02On the right,
19:04the seaforths get as far
19:05as the edge
19:05of the Aquino-Pontecorvo Road.
19:08Their armor is destroyed,
19:09or stuck.
19:10And Lieutenant Colonel Sid Thompson
19:12reports what his men have left
19:14to fight German tanks
19:15and self-propelled guns with.
19:17They have PIATs.
19:19That is a spring-loaded infantry weapon
19:22a man fires from his shoulder
19:23at a range where he can hear
19:24the enemy engine.
19:26That is the anti-tank capability
19:28of a Canadian battalion
19:29sitting on the objective
19:30in the open
19:31at eight in the morning.
19:33And in the middle of all that,
19:34we come back to where we started.
19:37Major Lee McBride,
19:38the whole of his company headquarters
19:40gone in that one explosion
19:41in the wire,
19:42cannot find his three platoons.
19:44What he finds instead
19:45is a private from the Patricias,
19:47another man cut loose
19:48from his own unit in the fog,
19:50and the two of them
19:51go on together
19:52through the standing hay.
19:53Then the machine gun opens up
19:55and they go flat.
19:56And here is the detail
19:57that tells you
19:57what that field was.
19:59Every time either of them moves,
20:01the crop moves with them
20:02and marks exactly where they are,
20:04and the gun answers.
20:05Two men,
20:06lying in a hayfield,
20:07unable to shift a shoulder
20:08without drawing fire.
20:09From the sound,
20:10they work out
20:11that the heavy firing
20:12between them and the woods
20:13is German tanks,
20:14or 88s,
20:15dug in so well
20:16you would not find them
20:17until you fell over them.
20:19Their only hope
20:19is their own armor,
20:21and neither man knows yet
20:22what has happened
20:23to the North Irish horse.
20:24Then something,
20:25a shell,
20:26a mortar bomb,
20:27McBride was never sure,
20:28comes down on them,
20:29and it takes his left eye.
20:30What happened to him
20:32after that
20:32is one of the strangest turns
20:34in this entire story,
20:35and we will come back to it,
20:37because it puts
20:37a Canadian officer
20:38inside the German system
20:40at exactly the moment
20:41that system is deciding
20:42what to admit.
20:44But hold that,
20:45because at this hour,
20:46the battle is being lost.
20:48Three Canadian battalions
20:49cling to a few acres.
20:51Runners go forward
20:52and do not come back.
20:54The walking wounded
20:55bring information
20:56that dissolves
20:57the moment anyone
20:57tries to use it.
20:59The Corps artillery commander,
21:01Brigadier Plough,
21:02spends the morning
21:02cancelling one phase
21:04of the fire plan
21:05after another,
21:05because there is
21:06no advance to support,
21:07and his air observation pilots
21:09can see nothing
21:10through the smoke.
21:11Then,
21:12at 27 minutes past 12,
21:14a Canadian brigadier
21:15picks up a telephone
21:16and asks for something
21:17that had almost never been done.
21:18A single target,
21:20for every gun
21:21in 8th Army at once.
21:22The brigadier is
21:23N.S. Ziegler,
21:25the artillery commander
21:26of 1st Canadian Infantry Division,
21:28and what he asks for
21:29at 27 minutes past 12
21:31has a codename.
21:32A William target.
21:35Every gun in 8th Army,
21:37on one map reference,
21:38at one moment.
21:39There is nothing subtle
21:40in the reasoning.
21:41Nobody can identify
21:43a specific enemy position anymore,
21:45because nobody can see anything.
21:47So Ziegler asks
21:48for the whole weight
21:49of an army
21:50to be dropped
21:50on the town of Aquino,
21:52on the open flank
21:53where the fire is coming from,
21:54simply to loosen the grip.
21:56Now watch how
21:57a Canadian gunner network
21:59answers a request like that
22:00in the middle
22:00of a losing morning.
22:0333 minutes.
22:04That is how long it takes
22:05for batteries scattered
22:06across the Leary Valley
22:08and beyond it,
22:09units that are not
22:10in the same brigade,
22:11not in the same division,
22:12some of them
22:13not in the same core,
22:14to receive the order,
22:16work out their own firing data,
22:17and report ready.
22:19Then the signal goes out,
22:20timed so that shells fired
22:22from positions
22:23kilometers apart
22:24arrive together.
22:27668 guns,
22:283,509 shells,
22:3192 tons of high explosive,
22:34into one town
22:35in a matter of seconds.
22:37Stop on that number
22:39for a moment,
22:40because it is the sort of thing
22:41that gets read past.
22:4392 tons is roughly
22:44the loaded weight
22:45of two Panther tanks
22:46arriving in the air
22:48at once
22:48on a place the size
22:50of an Italian village.
22:52And here is what
22:53I need you to understand,
22:54because it is the hinge
22:55of this whole story.
22:57It was not enough.
22:58It helped.
23:00It cut down the volume of fire
23:01coming out of Aquino.
23:03It did not change
23:04the facts on the ground,
23:05and the reason it did not
23:06is the reason this position
23:08had a name worth erasing
23:09in the first place.
23:11You cannot kill men
23:12with high explosive
23:13if they are 20 feet
23:14underground in concrete.
23:16The crews serving
23:17those buried Panther turrets
23:18lived below ground
23:20and came up to fight.
23:21The anti-tank guns
23:23were dug in
23:23and camouflaged
23:24in standing crop.
23:26The mortars
23:27and Nebuwerfers
23:28were behind the line,
23:29firing on ground
23:30they had measured
23:31weeks before.
23:32A fortified belt
23:34900 meters deep
23:35is not a thing
23:36you break
23:36by weight of shell.
23:37It is a thing built
23:39specifically
23:39so that weight of shell
23:41will not break it.
23:42So the Canadian infantry
23:44lay in that field
23:45through the afternoon
23:46and the pounding went on.
23:48The Patricia's own history
23:50describes men
23:51holding a few acres
23:52they had taken,
23:53waiting for help
23:54that did not come,
23:55knowing the attack
23:56had failed
23:57and refusing to treat
23:58the failure as final.
24:00Let me tell you
24:01what that cost
24:02in the plainest terms
24:04I can.
24:05By the end of the day
24:06the Princess Patricia's
24:07Canadian Light Infantry
24:08had 75 fighting men left.
24:11Not 75 casualties.
24:1475 men still able to fight
24:16out of a battalion.
24:18The Seaforth Highlanders
24:19had about 100 men
24:20on their objective.
24:22At one point that afternoon,
24:24after a German counter-attack
24:25had been driven off,
24:26one Seaforth company
24:27was down to 8 men
24:29and the senior man standing
24:30was the company sergeant major.
24:33Three Seaforth officers
24:34and 49 other ranks killed.
24:36Seven officers
24:37and 99 men wounded.
24:40Two officers
24:40and 50 men taken prisoner.
24:43210 casualties
24:44in a single day,
24:46the heaviest the battalion
24:47suffered in the entire war.
24:49Worse than Ortona.
24:50Worse than the Moro.
24:52And not one Seaforth officer
24:54who went into that field
24:55came out of it unhurt.
24:56Not one.
24:57By the end of the war,
24:59no Canadian unit
25:00had lost a higher proportion
25:01of its officers
25:02than this regiment.
25:03And a great deal
25:04of that arithmetic
25:05was set on the 23rd of May.
25:07The brigade total
25:08tells you the rest.
25:10Second brigade lost
25:11543 men that day.
25:14162 killed,
25:15306 wounded,
25:1775 taken prisoner.
25:19It was the worst day
25:20of the war
25:20for that brigade
25:21and the costliest single day
25:23for any Canadian brigade
25:24in the whole Italian campaign.
25:28Behind the line,
25:29the Seaforth chaplain,
25:30Major Roy Durnford,
25:32worked himself to exhaustion
25:33bringing in bodies.
25:35Among the men he collected
25:36was Private Louis Street
25:38of the Mortar Platoon,
25:39who had fought with the battalion
25:40for a solid year
25:42from Sicily through Ortona
25:44and who is buried today
25:45at Casino.
25:47And now hold the thread
25:49we started with
25:50because this is the moment
25:51where the erasure
25:52stops being an interesting
25:53piece of paperwork.
25:55Months earlier,
25:56in a headquarters far away,
25:58a man had quietly conceded
25:59on paper
26:00that this line
26:01might be lost.
26:02He conceded it
26:03and then he ordered it held
26:05and the concrete stayed
26:06and the buried turrets stayed
26:08and the fireplans stayed.
26:10Which means the men
26:11in that hayfield
26:12were paying
26:13in the only currency
26:14that matters
26:14for a position
26:15whose owner
26:16had already written off
26:17the possibility
26:18that it would hold.
26:19That is what makes
26:20the next hour
26:21so extraordinary.
26:23Because while 2nd Brigade
26:24was being destroyed
26:25on the right,
26:25the battle
26:26was quietly being won
26:27somewhere else.
26:292,000 yards
26:30to the left
26:31of the Seaforths,
26:32another Canadian brigade
26:33had gone in
26:34at the same 6 o'clock
26:35behind the same barrage
26:37against the same belt
26:38of concrete.
26:39Nobody at divisional
26:40headquarters
26:41was watching it closely.
26:42The German self-propelled guns
26:44counterattacking
26:45out of the Aquino airfield
26:46ignored it completely
26:47and went for the right flank
26:49instead.
26:49And by half past 5
26:51that evening,
26:52a battalion of Nova Scotians
26:53would send back
26:54a single word
26:55over the radio
26:56that headquarters
26:57would not believe.
26:58Half past 4 in the morning,
26:59the 23rd of May,
27:01in the dark,
27:02and a battalion of Nova Scotians
27:04is eating breakfast.
27:05That is the West Nova Scotia
27:07regiment,
27:08and the detail matters,
27:09because their whole day
27:10turns on preparation.
27:12Their own account
27:13describes companies
27:14moving down
27:14to the forming up place
27:15in the first grey light
27:17and dropping into position
27:18with almost unnatural precision.
27:20Then they wait,
27:22all morning,
27:23under shellfire,
27:24listening to what is happening
27:26on the right.
27:26Go back to 6 o'clock,
27:28though,
27:28and meet the men
27:29who opened the door.
27:303rd Brigade
27:31attacked on the left
27:32of the seaforths
27:33with one battalion forward,
27:35the Carleton and York Regiment,
27:37a rural New Brunswick outfit
27:38that had been in almost
27:39every serious Canadian fight
27:41in Italy since Sicily.
27:42And they did something
27:43that morning
27:44that sounds simple
27:45and is not.
27:46They kept up with the barrage.
27:48That is the hardest discipline
27:49in infantry warfare.
27:51Your own shells
27:52are falling 100 yards ahead
27:54and lifting every 3 minutes.
27:56And if you lag,
27:57the curtain walks away
27:58and leaves you naked
27:59in front of undamaged machine guns.
28:01The Carleton and Yorks
28:03stayed with it,
28:04through mortars,
28:05through Nebelwerfers,
28:06through everything
28:06the German gunners
28:07could put on them.
28:08And because they were
28:09tucked in on the left,
28:10two things happened
28:11in their favor.
28:12The flanking fire
28:13from Aquino,
28:14the fire that was tearing
28:152nd Brigade apart,
28:17could not reach them.
28:18And the German
28:19self-propelled guns
28:20counterattacking
28:21out of the Aquino airfield
28:22went right past them
28:23and hit the right flank instead.
28:25Now look at what
28:26the New Brunswickers found
28:27when the smoke
28:28lifted on their frontage,
28:29because this is the first time
28:31in this story
28:31that the wreckage
28:32is not all Canadian.
28:34Their supporting Churchills
28:35of the 51st Royal Tank Regiment
28:37had been badly hurt.
28:39But across that plain
28:40lay destroyed German 75s,
28:42self-propelled 88s,
28:44Mark IV tanks,
28:46the machinery of the line itself,
28:48broken and burning.
28:50The Carleton and York Regiment
28:51was the first unit
28:52to go clean through
28:53the Hitler line.
28:54And then they did
28:55the unglamorous work
28:56that decides battles.
28:58They brought their own
28:59anti-tank guns forward
29:00through the gap.
29:01They organized patrols
29:03to hunt the snipers
29:04left behind in the belt.
29:05They widened the hole
29:06and held the shoulders of it.
29:08Which brings us back
29:09to the Nova Scotians,
29:10still waiting under fire,
29:12nerves stretched all day.
29:14At half past five
29:15in the evening,
29:16the order finally comes
29:17and they go.
29:18They marry up
29:19with a squadron
29:20of Three Rivers Regiment tanks,
29:22Canadian tanks,
29:23rushed forward to take over
29:25from British crews
29:25who had been fighting
29:26since dawn
29:27and had nothing left.
29:29There is no time
29:30for the careful
29:30infantry armor drill
29:32they had trained on
29:33for months.
29:34One infantry officer
29:35described it afterwards
29:36with a shrug.
29:37The training went out
29:38the window,
29:39the Shermans came rolling
29:40through the wrecked
29:42Churchills,
29:42and the infantry
29:43waved them on,
29:45stood up,
29:45and started forward.
29:47The rain is coming
29:49down hard now.
29:50The shelling
29:50has not stopped.
29:51But the Germans
29:52in front of them
29:53have not recovered
29:54from the second phase barrage,
29:56and the West Novas
29:57move steadily.
29:59Divisional and Brigade
30:00headquarters could scarcely
30:01believe what came
30:02over the radio next.
30:04The lead company
30:05signaled one word,
30:07Caporetto.
30:08It was the code word
30:10for the final objective,
30:11less than 45 minutes
30:13after crossing the start line.
30:15The other three companies
30:16were minutes behind,
30:18and so were the Canadian tanks.
30:19Set that beside the morning
30:21we just lived through.
30:23On the right,
30:24three battalions bled
30:25for 11 hours
30:26and moved a few hundred yards.
30:29On the left,
30:30a fresh battalion
30:31with fresh armor
30:32went through the deepest
30:33fortified belt in Italy
30:34in three quarters of an hour.
30:37Vokes had kept
30:38the Royal 22nd Regiment
30:39and two squadrons
30:41of the 12th Canadian Armored Regiment
30:43in his pocket
30:43as divisional reserve.
30:45He released them
30:46to Brigadier Paul Bernice
30:48and the Quebec Regiments
30:49poured through the gap
30:50the New Brunswickers
30:51and Nova Scotians
30:52had opened,
30:53turned north,
30:54and took the high ground
30:55in front of the ground
30:56the Seaforths
30:57had bled for all day.
30:593rd Brigade's
31:00whole breakthrough
31:01cost 45 men killed
31:03and 120 wounded.
31:05And at Pontecorvo,
31:07Johnston's 48th Highlanders
31:08went at it again,
31:10while the Hastings
31:10and Prince Edward Regiment
31:12attacked north of the hill
31:13without artillery,
31:15because nobody was certain
31:16where the 48th were.
31:18Their own regimental historian,
31:20Farley Mowat,
31:21called that afternoon attack
31:22the most brilliant
31:23single action
31:24the regiment fought
31:25in the entire war.
31:27They made a clean breakthrough
31:28and opened a route
31:29for the tanks,
31:30and it cost them
31:318 men killed
31:32and 22 wounded.
31:33That night,
31:34the Royal Canadian Regiment
31:35walked into Pontecorvo
31:37and found the enemy going.
31:39Now here is the German side
31:41of the 23rd of May,
31:42and it is the third layer
31:44of our answer.
31:45The Corps holding that sector
31:46reported that after fighting
31:48in which both sides
31:49suffered severely,
31:50it had proved impossible
31:52to stop the Canadian advance.
31:54The left wing
31:55of the 90th Panzer Grenadier Division
31:56was wiped out.
31:58So were the parachute battalions
32:00sent in to shore it up.
32:01Around 700 Germans
32:03went into Canadian captivity,
32:05and then the sentence
32:06that matters most.
32:07The Corps asked 10th Army headquarters
32:09for help
32:10and for instructions.
32:1110th Army did not answer.
32:14Not refused.
32:15Did not answer.
32:16So the Corps commander
32:17made the decision himself
32:19and abandoned
32:20the surviving positions
32:21of the Hitler line
32:21before an orderly withdrawal
32:23became impossible.
32:25Berlin erased a name.
32:27Berlin erased the garrison.
32:29And on the day it mattered,
32:31Berlin erased the reply.
32:33But the Reich's answer
32:35to losing that line
32:35was not reinforcements,
32:37and it was not a new plan.
32:39Six weeks later,
32:40the same order went out again,
32:42about a different line,
32:43further north.
32:45And the same Canadians
32:46were going to meet it.
32:48The night of the 23rd of May,
32:49with the Hitler line broken
32:51and the Germans pulling out
32:52of Pontecorvo,
32:53the 5th Canadian Armored Division
32:55rolled forward through the gap
32:56the infantry had opened,
32:57and the pursuit began.
33:00It ran into the next obstacle
33:01within a day,
33:03the Melfa River,
33:04the 24th of May,
33:05and a small Canadian force
33:07gets across to the far bank
33:08and holds a bridgehead there
33:10with the Germans counterattacking
33:11to throw it back into the water.
33:14The officer commanding
33:15that bridgehead
33:16is Major John Mahoney
33:17of the Westminster Regiment.
33:18He is hit.
33:20He keeps directing the defense.
33:22He is hit again.
33:24He stays on his feet,
33:25moving between positions
33:26in the open
33:27with German snipers
33:28working on him specifically
33:29for roughly five hours
33:31until the rest of the force
33:32can get across.
33:33He was given the Victoria Cross
33:35for that afternoon.
33:37I raise Mahoney
33:38for a reason beyond the medal.
33:40Look at the calendar.
33:41The Hitler line falls on the 23rd.
33:44On the 24th,
33:45the same army is fighting
33:46for a river crossing beyond it.
33:49The belt that six months
33:50of tote labor had built
33:52that the Germans intended
33:53to hold for weeks
33:54was a one-day problem,
33:56and then the Canadians
33:57were past it and gone.
33:59Now let me give you the piece
34:00that changes the meaning
34:01of everything you have heard so far.
34:04Six weeks after the Leary Valley,
34:06in June of 1944,
34:08another order came down
34:09about another line.
34:10Far to the north,
34:12across the Apennines,
34:13the Germans were building
34:14their last great defensive belt
34:16in Italy,
34:16the Gothic line.
34:18And Hitler looked at that name
34:19with all its historical weight
34:21and gave the same instruction
34:22he had given about the Leary Valley.
34:25Change it.
34:26Kesselring renamed it
34:27the Green Line.
34:28The recorded reasoning
34:29is what I want you to hear,
34:31because it is almost startling
34:32in its honesty.
34:34The name was to be downgraded
34:35so that if the Allies
34:36did break through,
34:37they would not be able
34:38to use the grander name
34:39to magnify their victory.
34:41Stop and hold the two orders
34:43side by side.
34:44February,
34:45or thereabouts,
34:46in the Leary Valley.
34:47Take my name off it,
34:48in case it falls.
34:50June,
34:51in the Apennines.
34:52Take the impressive name
34:54off that one, too,
34:55in case they get through.
34:56That is not embarrassment,
34:58and it is not superstition.
35:00That is a system.
35:01And once you see it as a system,
35:03the question in front of us
35:04finally opens all the way up.
35:07Here is the answer.
35:08What Berlin erased from that line
35:10was never really a word.
35:12The word was just the last thing
35:13left to erase.
35:15By 1944,
35:17the German command in Italy
35:18had run out of the things
35:19a defensive line actually needs.
35:21It could not put a full garrison
35:23into 900 meters of concrete.
35:25It could not feed reinforcements in
35:27as formations instead of scraps.
35:29It could not even answer
35:30a corps commander's radio call
35:31on the day of the battle.
35:33Every one of those
35:34was subtracted from the line
35:35before the Canadians
35:36ever touched the wire.
35:38And when a government
35:39cannot supply men,
35:40or guns,
35:41or answers,
35:42there is exactly one thing left
35:44that it can still control
35:45at no cost.
35:46The vocabulary.
35:48That is what the erasure was.
35:50It was the Reich
35:50managing the record
35:51of a defeat
35:52it had already privately accepted,
35:54because managing the record
35:55was the only form of action
35:57still available to it.
35:58The fortifications were real.
36:00The panther turrets
36:01and concrete were real,
36:03and they killed
36:03real Canadians by the hundred.
36:05But the promise
36:06attached to those fortifications,
36:07that this belt would hold,
36:09that it was worth
36:10the lives of the men inside it,
36:12had been quietly withdrawn
36:13in a headquarters months before,
36:15and nobody told the men
36:16in the concrete boroughs.
36:18And now watch the whole thing
36:19fail on its own terms.
36:21The Allies never adopted
36:22the new names.
36:24Eighth Army called it
36:25the Hitler Line
36:26in its intelligence summaries
36:27on the day of the battle.
36:29Canadian newspapers
36:30called it the Hitler Line,
36:31and the Canadian Army
36:33wrote it into its own records
36:34as the Hitler Line.
36:36The single purpose
36:37of the erasure,
36:38to make sure nobody
36:40could stand over the wreckage
36:41and say whose line it had been,
36:43failed completely,
36:45and it failed within 24 hours.
36:48Then, the second erasure
36:49failed the same way,
36:51at the hands of the same army.
36:53At the end of August 1944,
36:561st Canadian Corps
36:57went at the Gothic Line,
36:59the one Berlin had renamed Green.
37:01They broke into it
37:03in the opening days
37:04of the offensive,
37:05and they went on
37:05breaking through it.
37:07And to this day,
37:08no serious account of that battle
37:10calls it anything
37:10but the Gothic Line either.
37:13Twice, the Reich took the name
37:14off a fortress
37:15because it had privately concluded
37:17the fortress might fall.
37:19Twice, the fortress fell.
37:21Both times,
37:22the men who took the ground
37:23were Canadians.
37:25There is one more thing
37:26about the vocabulary,
37:27and it is the quietest cruelty
37:29in this story.
37:31The men holding that concrete
37:32were not fools,
37:34and not cowards.
37:35Roughly 700 of them
37:37went into Canadian captivity
37:38that day,
37:39and they fought a defense
37:40that cost Canada
37:41its worst brigade day
37:43of the entire Italian war.
37:45They were spending their lives
37:47for a position
37:47their own high command
37:49had written off on paper
37:50before the first shell landed.
37:52And one man on the Canadian side
37:55found that out from the inside.
37:57Because when Major Lee McBride
37:58opened his one remaining eye,
38:00there were Germans
38:01standing over him.
38:02And everything that happened
38:04to him next
38:04was recorded in the paperwork
38:06of the very system
38:07that had done the erasing.
38:09He came to in the hayfield
38:10with German soldiers
38:12looking down at him.
38:13They put a bandage on his eye.
38:15They left him there
38:16through the afternoon,
38:17and when it started to get dark,
38:19they loaded him into an ambulance.
38:20And the ambulance
38:21had barely got moving
38:22when a large shell
38:23went off underneath it.
38:25The man in the bunk
38:26below McBride,
38:27a wounded German,
38:28took almost the whole force of it.
38:31McBride,
38:31who had lost his eye
38:32a few hours earlier
38:33to the German army,
38:34lay above a German soldier
38:36who absorbed a blast
38:37that would otherwise
38:38have finished him.
38:39and he never learned
38:40the man's name
38:40or whether he lived.
38:42He caught shrapnel
38:43in his left shoulder
38:44and his left leg.
38:45Then a memory
38:46of a very bright light
38:47over an operating table,
38:49which he knew afterwards
38:50was in Rome
38:51because the German records
38:52of his own treatment
38:53said so.
38:54Then waking on a German
38:55Red Cross train
38:56somewhere near Verona.
38:58Sit with that for a second.
39:00A Canadian officer,
39:01wounded on a line
39:02whose name had been struck
39:04out of German paperwork,
39:05spent the rest of his war
39:06being carefully documented
39:08by the same administration
39:09that had done
39:10the striking out.
39:11It kept meticulous records
39:13of one enemy major's eye.
39:14It had not been able
39:15to send a single answer
39:16to the Corps
39:17defending the line
39:18he was wounded on.
39:19In a prison camp,
39:21letters arrived
39:21from his parents
39:22in Nelson,
39:23British Columbia.
39:24That is how he learned
39:25that his brother,
39:26Captain Kenneth Gilbert McBride,
39:28also a Seaforth,
39:29had been killed
39:30by a roadmine
39:31near Rimini
39:31on the 16th of September,
39:331944.
39:35Lee McBride came home
39:36in a prisoner exchange
39:37in early 1945.
39:39He lived until 1995.
39:41And in 1968,
39:43when a historian
39:44writing the regimental history
39:45asked him what happened,
39:47he sat down
39:48and typed it all out.
39:49The fog,
39:50Johnson stepping
39:51in his footprints,
39:52the wire,
39:53and at the end
39:54he offered his own
39:54verdict on the battle.
39:56He thought 2nd Brigade
39:57should have gone through
39:58on the left,
39:59where the line
39:59had already been breached,
40:01instead of straight
40:02at the strongest part of it.
40:03Which is, of course,
40:05exactly what won
40:06the battle in the end.
40:07The New Brunswickers
40:08and the Nova Scotians
40:09on the left,
40:10the door the Quebec regiments
40:12poured through,
40:13the road opened
40:13for the tanks
40:14at Pontecorvo.
40:15A half-blind
40:16company commander,
40:17lying in a hayfield
40:18in the fog,
40:19had worked out
40:20the shape
40:20of the whole thing.
40:22There is a small
40:23human detail
40:24in that letter
40:24I have not been able
40:25to forget.
40:26He corrected
40:27the historian's
40:28manuscript
40:29on the weight
40:29of a Churchill tank.
40:31The book said
40:3239 tons,
40:33McBride remembered 40,
40:35and then wrote,
40:36cautiously,
40:37that he could easily
40:38be wrong.
40:39Later,
40:39on his own carbon copy,
40:41in pen,
40:42he added three words,
40:43I wasn't wrong.
40:4524 years
40:46after the worst
40:47morning of his life,
40:48still keeping
40:49the record straight.
40:50Some of the others.
40:51Major Davey Fulton,
40:53whose road accident
40:54put McBride
40:55in command
40:55of D Company,
40:56recovered,
40:57and went on
40:58to serve
40:58as Canada's
40:59Minister of Justice.
41:01Chaplain Roy Durnford,
41:02who gathered
41:03in the Seaforth Dead,
41:04carried that day
41:05for the rest
41:05of his life.
41:07Private Lewis Street
41:08of the Mortar Platoon
41:09lies in the Commonwealth
41:10Cemetery at Casino,
41:12one grave among many
41:13from the 23rd of May.
41:15And a Canadian war artist
41:17named Charles Comfort
41:18came up behind
41:19the division,
41:20walked over that
41:21broken ground,
41:22and painted
41:22what he saw there.
41:24He called the painting
41:25the Hitler Line.
41:26It hangs today
41:27in the Canadian War Museum
41:29in Ottawa,
41:30and if you stand
41:30in front of it,
41:31you are looking
41:32at the ground
41:32where the Seaforths
41:33and the Patricias
41:34lay in the wheat.
41:36Now, think about
41:37what the erasure
41:38was actually for.
41:39A man in Berlin
41:40ordered his name
41:41taken off that concrete
41:42for one purpose,
41:43so that on the day
41:44it fell,
41:45nobody would be able
41:46to stand on the wreckage
41:47and say whose line
41:48it had been.
41:49Here is how
41:50that worked out.
41:52Go into a Vancouver
41:52armory today
41:53or a New Brunswick one
41:55and look up
41:56at the regimental colors.
41:58Among the battle honors
41:59stitched onto that silk
42:00alongside Ortona
42:02and the Gothic Line,
42:04you will find three words.
42:06Hitler Line.
42:07The name Berlin,
42:09deleted to keep it
42:10out of history,
42:11survived.
42:11It survived
42:12because Canadians
42:13took the ground
42:14and kept the receipt.
42:16That is the whole answer.
42:18Berlin erased a name
42:19from that line
42:20because it had already
42:21decided the line
42:22might fall.
42:23It erased the garrison,
42:24the reinforcements,
42:26and finally the reply
42:27to a corps commander
42:28asking what to do.
42:30Everything Berlin
42:31took off that position,
42:32Canadian infantry
42:33paid for in one morning.
42:35And what they left
42:36in its place
42:36was the name itself,
42:38permanent,
42:39on their own colors.
42:41Thank you for staying
42:42with this one to the end.
42:44Stories like the Leary Valley
42:45don't circulate much anymore,
42:47and the men who fought there,
42:48the Seaforths,
42:50the Patricias,
42:51the Carlton and Yorks,
42:52the West Novas,
42:53the Vandus,
42:54the Hasty P's,
42:55deserve better than being
42:56a footnote
42:57between Ortona and Rome.
42:59If you think this story
43:00is worth remembering,
43:02a like genuinely helps
43:03it find more people.
43:04And if anyone in your family
43:06served in Italy,
43:07I would be honored
43:07to hear about it
43:08in the comments.
43:09We're here every week.
43:11We're here every week.