- 27 minutes ago
Canadian infantry pulled a German Panther tank out of a flooded ditch in Italy, then turned the captured machine into a lesson in war, engineering, and battlefield reality. The story begins on the Savio River and at Martorano, where men of the Seaforths and the Royal Canadian Engineers found a whole Panther buried in mud, its hatches open and demolition charges still inside.
From there, the narrative follows what happened next: recovery crews, improvised repairs, Allied markings, a single combat action, and a grim reminder that the ground itself was as dangerous as the armor. It also explains why the Panther’s fearsome reputation did not match every part of its performance, especially in mud, recovery, and long-term use. This is military history, World War II history, and Canadian war stories told through one tank and the men who handled it.
Created for listeners who enjoy WW2 stories, military history documentaries, Canadian Army history, tank recovery stories, and narrated battlefield analysis. It also suits fans of war stories, armored warfare, and historical storytelling with a strong focus on the Italian campaign.
SEO: Canadian WW2 history, Panther tank, military history narration, World War 2 tank story, Canadian war stories, armored warfare documentary, battle of the Savio River, Italian campaign history, tank recovery, narrated history storytime.
From there, the narrative follows what happened next: recovery crews, improvised repairs, Allied markings, a single combat action, and a grim reminder that the ground itself was as dangerous as the armor. It also explains why the Panther’s fearsome reputation did not match every part of its performance, especially in mud, recovery, and long-term use. This is military history, World War II history, and Canadian war stories told through one tank and the men who handled it.
Created for listeners who enjoy WW2 stories, military history documentaries, Canadian Army history, tank recovery stories, and narrated battlefield analysis. It also suits fans of war stories, armored warfare, and historical storytelling with a strong focus on the Italian campaign.
SEO: Canadian WW2 history, Panther tank, military history narration, World War 2 tank story, Canadian war stories, armored warfare documentary, battle of the Savio River, Italian campaign history, tank recovery, narrated history storytime.
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LearningTranscript
00:00On the night of October 21, 1944, two companies of Canadian infantry crossed the Savio River
00:07in northern Italy, holding their weapons above their heads, and the water was still rising
00:13while they were in it.
00:15It had rained for two days without stopping.
00:18The Savio ran in a muddy trough fifteen feet below the level of the fields around it, and
00:24in five hours it rose six feet.
00:27The banks were soft and almost vertical.
00:31The engineers said what nobody wanted to hear, nothing could be bridged here tonight.
00:37No tanks were coming across, no anti-tank guns either.
00:41The Seaforth Highlanders of Canada were going over alone, and whatever waited on the far
00:47side they would meet it with what they carried on their backs.
00:51At half past two in the morning it came for them.
00:53Four Panther tanks, two self-propelled guns, about thirty German infantry walking in the
01:01tank ruts where the ground was firm.
01:03Sergeant K.P. Thompson did the only thing a man can do when he knows armor is coming
01:09and has nothing that fires a shell.
01:11He strung anti-tank mines across the road.
01:16He put his tank hunting teams in the ditches on both sides, in the dark, in the rain, close
01:23enough that missing would be almost impossible and surviving almost as unlikely.
01:28One of those men was a private named Ernest Smith.
01:32His friends called him Smokey.
01:35He had been promoted and broken back down to private so many times that the paperwork
01:40was a standing joke in the battalion.
01:43Smith carried his piot across the open road through machine gun fire and went down in a
01:49ditch beside a wounded friend, Private James Tennant.
01:53A panther came up the road and stopped, thirty feet away.
01:58That is the length of a city bus.
02:01At that range a panther is not a tank.
02:04It is a wall of steel filling everything you can see.
02:08And you feel the engine in the ground under your chest.
02:12Smith fired.
02:13The panther stopped for good.
02:15Ten German infantry came off the back of it.
02:18Smith stood up in the open with a tommy gun, killed four, and drove the rest back.
02:24A second tank rolled forward to finish him.
02:27He crossed that road again, took another piot from a wounded man, hit the second tank hard
02:33enough that it reversed into the dark, then went back to Tennant, and stayed at the bottom
02:38of that ditch until the counterattack came apart and went home.
02:42That night made Ernest Smith the only Canadian private of the entire Second World War to receive
02:49the Victoria Cross.
02:52If what the Canadians did on that riverbank matters to you, a subscribe helps these stories
02:57reach more people.
02:59Now hold that picture, because this story is not about the German tanks the Canadians destroyed
03:04on the Savio.
03:05It is about the ones they didn't.
03:09Later that same morning, the 22nd of October, the Seaforths pushed northwest out of the bridgehead
03:16toward a scatter of farm buildings called Martorano.
03:19Every furrow in those fields held water.
03:22And in a drainage ditch at the edge of one of them, a section of A Company came over the
03:26lip of the ground and found itself looking down at a panther.
03:30Not a wreck, a panther.
03:34Model G, the newest in the German inventory.
03:3845 tons, a long 75mm gun that could open a Sherman at a range where the Sherman could
03:44not answer.
03:45It belonged to Panzer Regiment 4 of the 26th Panzer Division, and it sat nose down in the
03:51mud with its tracks buried past the top of the wheels.
03:55It had not burned.
03:56Nothing had punched through it.
03:58No shell scar on the front plate.
04:01No scorch above the engine deck.
04:03The hatches were open.
04:05The crew was gone.
04:07Stand where those Canadians stood, because it matters to everything that follows.
04:12For 16 months, from Sicily up the spine of Italy, this machine had been the thing that
04:17ruined their days.
04:19Men in that battalion had watched one kill their friends the night before, from 30 feet.
04:24And here was another, whole, quiet, wet to the sponsons, and completely helpless, because
04:30it was stuck in a Canadian field.
04:32Then somebody climbed up on it, looked inside, and found German demolition charges still in
04:37place.
04:38Remember that.
04:39Remember that.
04:40Someone had begun the work of destroying this tank, and had not finished it.
04:44Nobody had the time, nobody had a toe.
04:47That detail comes back at the center of this story, and it explains something much larger
04:52than one panther in one ditch.
04:54Because this was not a one-off.
04:56It kept happening.
04:57In the flooded Romagna that autumn, on the polders below the Scheldt, in the thaw of the
05:02Rhineland the following February, Canadians kept walking up on German tanks sitting in
05:07the mud, undamaged.
05:09And the Canadians had a habit that the German army, by that stage of the war, had almost
05:13entirely lost.
05:15They pulled them out.
05:17What they did with them next is a stranger and more revealing story than the campaign
05:21histories tend to tell.
05:22It ends with one of these tanks driving through the streets of Ottawa, and another deliberately
05:28shot to pieces on a Canadian range by Canadian crews.
05:32For a reason that had nothing to do with revenge.
05:36It starts with a problem of pure engineering.
05:39Getting 45 tons of dead German steel out of a waterlogged ditch is not a matter of enthusiasm.
05:47It took specific machines, specific cable, and men trained for exactly that job.
05:53And the Canadians had all three within a few miles that morning.
05:56The German crew that walked away from this tank had none of it.
06:01Not that night, not in that sector, and increasingly, not anywhere.
06:06Why not?
06:07That question turns out to be the whole war.
06:10The tank was found in the morning.
06:12Getting it out of the ground took the rest of the day, and the first part of that job
06:17had nothing to do with engines or cable.
06:20It had to do with what the Germans might have left behind.
06:24Every man in the Canadian sector by October of 1944 had been taught the same rule about
06:31abandoned enemy equipment.
06:33Do not touch it.
06:35Do not open it.
06:37A German crew leaving a vehicle in a hurry still had time to pull a pin, and the Wehrmacht
06:43had turned the abandoned vehicle booby trap into a small industry.
06:47A charge under the driver's seat, a wire from a turret hatch, an anti-personnel mine seated
06:54in the soft mud beside the track where a curious soldier would put his boot.
07:00So somebody had to go in first.
07:02He would have gone in through the turret roof, because the side hatches were half underwater.
07:07He would have had a torch and his hands, and nothing else, and he would have moved the way
07:13you move when every surface you touch might be the last decision you make.
07:18He found the demolition charges still sitting in place inside the fighting compartment, placed,
07:24not fired.
07:25Then he lifted them out by hand and passed them up through the hatch to the men on the
07:30deck.
07:32Hold that scene, because it is worth understanding exactly what it means.
07:37A German tank crew, at some point in the previous 24 hours, had stood where this Canadian was
07:43standing and had gone through the standard drill for destroying a vehicle they could
07:48not save.
07:50They had got as far as placing the charges, then they had left without setting them off.
07:56They had also done the other half of the drill.
07:58When the Canadians examined the gun, components were missing, the parts you strip out to make
08:04a captured weapon useless.
08:06That was doctrine, and the crew had followed it, which tells you they were not panicking.
08:12They were not running blind.
08:14They were methodical men doing their job in order.
08:18And somewhere in that order, they were interrupted, or they simply ran out of the one thing the
08:25drill assumed they had.
08:27Now the second problem.
08:29Forty-five tons, nose down, tracks buried past the top of the road wheels, in ground that
08:37had been absorbing rain for two days.
08:40This is where the story stops being about infantry, and starts being about a corps of men that almost
08:47nobody makes videos about.
08:48The Royal Canadian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers had existed, as a corps in its own
08:55name, for five months.
08:58Five months.
09:00It was formed in May of 1944, and by the autumn its structure was everywhere in the Canadian
09:07army.
09:08Light aid detachments living inside the fighting units, field workshops a few miles back, heavy
09:14workshops behind those.
09:16And with them, the machines.
09:19Armored recovery vehicles, Shermans with the turret taken off and a winch put in, spade
09:24at the rear, cable on the drum.
09:27A recovery job like this is done the way you would move a piano out of a basement, except
09:32the piano weighs as much as 30 cars, and the basement is filling with water.
09:37You dig the face of the ditch down into a ramp.
09:40You cut the mud away from in front of the tracks, so the hole has somewhere to go.
09:45You lay in whatever will bite, logs, spare track links, fascines.
09:51You run the cable, and if the straight pull is not enough, you rig a snatch block and double
09:56it, which halves your speed and doubles your power.
09:59You put a second vehicle in as an anchor.
10:03And then you take up the slack slowly, because a recovery cable under load that lets go will
10:08cut a man in half at 40 feet.
10:10And every recovery sergeant in Italy knew somebody it had happened to.
10:15And it came out.
10:17Muddy, whole, and worth more than any other single object on that section of front.
10:24Notice what has just happened, because the rest of this story turns on it.
10:27On the 22nd of October, in a flooded field in the Romagna, the Canadians did, in one working
10:33day, the exact job that the tank's own army had not been able to do for it.
10:38The Germans had left it.
10:40The Canadians took it back out of the ground.
10:43The Panther went rearward, and the Canadians handed it to the men they had been fighting
10:47alongside all autumn.
10:48The 21st Tank Brigade.
10:50The British Armored Brigade, whose Churchills had been supporting Canadian infantry through
10:55the river battles, it went to the 145th Regiment Royal Armored Corps.
11:00Those men did what soldiers do.
11:02They looked at a 45-ton German tank that had walked away from its own side and turned up
11:07in an Allied workshop, and they gave it a name.
11:10They called it Deserter.
11:12Then they painted it.
11:14Allied recognition markings, a squadron sign, a number on the turret, the brigade badge on
11:19the hull.
11:19It was impossible, because a Panther in Allied hands has one overwhelming problem, and it
11:24is not mechanical.
11:26Every Allied anti-tank gunner, every tank crew, and every rocket-firing typhoon pilot in Italy
11:32had spent a year being trained to recognize that silhouette, and fire at it immediately.
11:39They stripped the German explosives out.
11:41They found replacement gun components.
11:44The German tanks, taken from a captured Pantoturm, one of the Panther turrets the Germans had sunk
11:49into concrete along the Italian defense lines as fixed fortifications.
11:54A tank fed with parts cut out of a bunker.
11:57And they got it running.
11:59Now, here is where most people would stop.
12:02Canadians pull a German tank out of the mud, Allied crews fix it up, turn it around, and
12:08use it against its former owners.
12:11Satisfying.
12:12Simple.
12:12Simple.
12:13And almost entirely wrong.
12:16Because deserter fired at the Germans exactly once.
12:19On the day it did, it killed the man on its own crew.
12:23The 11th of November, 1944.
12:26Northern Italy, three weeks after the Savio.
12:30There was a German observation post that needed dealing with.
12:34An OP is not a glamorous target.
12:36It is a few men with binoculars and a radio, usually in a farmhouse upper floor or a church
12:42tower.
12:43And it is the most dangerous thing in a landscape, because those men are the eyes of the German
12:49artillery.
12:49Everything that lands on your infantry lands because somebody like that saw them.
12:55And on that day, the men of C squadron took out the Panther.
12:59Think about what that morning looked like from the German side of the line.
13:02You are in an observation post.
13:05You have been watching Allied movement for days.
13:08Somewhere out in front of you, a tank engine starts.
13:10And it is the wrong engine.
13:12It is a Maibach.
13:14It is a sound your side owns.
13:16And then a Panther comes up into view, with the wrong markings painted on it and the guns
13:21swinging onto your building.
13:24Deserter fired on the observation post.
13:28That is the whole of its combat record.
13:30One action, on one day, against one target.
13:34Then the action ended and the tank's gunner climbed down out of the hatch onto the ground
13:39and stepped on an anti-personnel mine and died there.
13:43I want to sit in that for a second, because it is the kind of detail that gets left out
13:47of the tidy version of this story.
13:50The most sought after prize on that front.
13:52A working Panther in Allied hands doing exactly what everybody fantasized about it doing.
13:58And the prize paid for its single engagement was a crewman killed the moment he put a foot
14:04on the ground.
14:06Not by German fire.
14:07By something the Germans had left in the dirt weeks earlier and forgotten about.
14:13That is not a coincidence tacked on to the end of the story.
14:17It is the story.
14:18In the mud of that autumn, the ground itself was doing most of the killing on both sides.
14:24And the machines were the least reliable thing on the battlefield.
14:29So why did deserter never fight again?
14:32Not sentiment.
14:33Arithmetic.
14:35Start with the bridges.
14:37The Romagna is a landscape of rivers.
14:40And the Allied armies crossed those rivers on Bailey bridges.
14:45Prefabricated panel bridges, built to a load class, thrown across a gap in hours by engineers
14:52working in the dark.
14:53The whole Allied advance in Italy moved at the speed of Bailey bridging.
14:59And a Panther is too heavy and too wide for what the sappers were putting across those rivers.
15:05Which means that in the one theater where every mile of advance crossed a water course, the
15:12most powerful tank available to the Allies could not follow the advance.
15:17A Panther drinks in a way no Allied tank drinks.
15:24And it drinks German-grade fuel through a German fuel system in an army whose entire supply chain
15:32runs on American parts and American petroleum.
15:36Then parts.
15:39Every mile put on that tank brought it closer to a failure that no Allied workshop had the
15:45components to fix.
15:47There were no spares.
15:49There would never be spares.
15:51The only source of Panther parts within a thousand miles was other dead Panthers.
15:57And then the last one, which mattered most.
15:59Every hour that tank spent forward, it was being looked at through gun sights by men on
16:05its own side.
16:06Anti-tank gunners with seconds to decide.
16:09Sherman commanders who had lost friends to that exact silhouette.
16:13Fighter bombers at 300 miles an hour whose pilots identified targets by shape and had
16:18roughly two seconds to do it.
16:20You cannot brief that risk away.
16:23You can paint a tank any color you like.
16:25The shape is still the shape.
16:27So the men who owned the most desirable trophy on the Italian front arrived at the conclusion
16:33that the trophy was, as a weapon, close to worthless.
16:37And that is the point where this story turns.
16:39And where the answer to the question in the title starts becoming interesting.
16:44Because there was one thing a captured Panther could do that nothing else in the Allied inventory
16:50could do.
16:51And it had nothing to do with shooting at Germans.
16:54It could answer a question.
16:56Every Canadian and British crew in Italy carried the same private conviction.
17:02And it was corrosive.
17:04It was the belief that the enemy's tank was simply better than theirs.
17:09Not slightly.
17:11Categorically.
17:12The men in the Shermans knew what a Panther's gun did to a Sherman at 800 yards.
17:18And they knew what their own gun did to a Panther's front plate at the same range.
17:24Which was mostly nothing.
17:26That belief travels through an army faster than any order.
17:30It makes crews hesitate.
17:32It makes commanders route around ground rather than take it.
17:36In an army, a belief about equipment is a tactical fact whether or not it is true.
17:42And underneath the gunnery question lay a second one that Autumn had made urgent.
17:48Everything in Italy now happened in mud.
17:51The rivers.
17:52The plowed fields.
17:53The drainage ditches.
17:54The churned tracks.
17:56A tank's worth was no longer measured only by what its gun could pierce.
18:00It was measured by whether it could get to the place where the infantry needed it.
18:05The Canadians had just found a Panther stuck fast in a waterlogged ditch.
18:10Every man who saw it drew the obvious conclusion.
18:13That the German tank was too heavy for this country.
18:16That it belonged on a Russian steppe and not in a Romagna farm field.
18:20And that the mud was the thing that beat it.
18:23So they took deserter out to soft ground, put a Sherman and a Churchill beside it, and ran
18:29all three.
18:30What they measured came out backwards from what everybody expected.
18:33Here is the test.
18:35And here is why it mattered more than any gunnery trial.
18:38You take three tanks.
18:39A Sherman, the tank the Canadian armored regiments actually fought in.
18:43A Churchill, the infantry tank of the brigade that had been supporting Canadian infantry across
18:47the rivers all autumn.
18:49And deserter.
18:50You put them on ground that has been taking rain for weeks.
18:53The same ground the infantry was living in.
18:56And you drive them until something stops.
18:59Start with the numbers the crews could see with their own eyes, standing beside the vehicles.
19:03The Panthers track is roughly 26 inches wide.
19:07The Sherman standard track is under 17.
19:10Put a handspan between those two figures and you have the entire visual argument about mud.
19:16Because the wider your track, the more ground you spread your weight across and the less
19:20you sink.
19:20On paper, in that one respect, the 45 ton German tank presses down on soft ground more gently
19:27than the 30 ton American one.
19:30That is not a rumor.
19:31That is geometry.
19:33And any crewman who had ever dug out a Sherman understood it instantly.
19:39Now the result.
19:40Over soft ground, the Panther did float better.
19:44It's wide tracks kept it up where narrower tracks were cutting down.
19:49The men running the trials could see it happening in front of them.
19:53But flotation is only half of moving.
19:56The other half is traction.
19:58Whether the track, once it is sitting on the mud, can actually grip and pull the machine
20:04forward.
20:05And in traction, the Panther was poor.
20:09Not catastrophic, poor.
20:12Barely better than the Sherman it towered over, despite carrying track more than half again
20:17as wide.
20:18Which is a strange, specific, deeply revealing failure.
20:23The German tank had the geometry and could not convert it.
20:27It sat on top of the mud and then struggled to claw its way through it.
20:32And picture the man in the driver's seat when that is happening, because that is where
20:37the finding actually lives.
20:40He has driven Sherman's.
20:42Now he is in the German machine, low in the front hole, with the gearbox between his knees
20:49and the levers in his hands, and the ground is going soft under him.
20:54He gives it power.
20:55The engine, a big Maybach, more than 20 liters, comes up in pitch behind him.
21:03The hole shivers.
21:05The tank slews rather than climbs.
21:09He is doing the thing every driver in that theater had done a hundred times.
21:14Feeding power in and feeling for the moment the track bites.
21:18And it is not biting.
21:21What he is feeling through his hands is the difference between a machine that is designed
21:27and a machine that works.
21:29The rest of the trial confirmed the shape of it.
21:32In speed across country, the Panther came out roughly level with a Churchill the 7th, a
21:39British infantry tank built to walk beside foot soldiers, and never built to be fast.
21:45Going uphill, it was about the same as the Churchill again, and worse than a Sherman.
21:52Stop and put those two facts side by side, because the crews certainly did.
21:58The tank they had been afraid of for a year and a half, the one they believed was categorically
22:03superior, moved across broken country at about the pace of the slowest thing in the British
22:08inventory.
22:09Now, none of that made the Panther a bad tank.
22:12Its gun and its frontal armor were exactly what the crews thought they were, and men died
22:17learning it.
22:18But something had shifted, and it shifted in the direction of the men who had to fight
22:23the thing.
22:23The Panther was not a superior machine in every dimension.
22:27It was a machine with one overwhelming dimension, the gun and the glacis plate, and ordinary or
22:33worse performance in almost everything else that determines whether a tank arrives where
22:38it is needed.
22:39That is a tank you can fight.
22:40That is a tank you can outmaneuver, out-schedule, out-arrive.
22:45But the trial also broke the comfortable explanation the Canadians had carried away from that ditch
22:50at Martorano.
22:52Go back there.
22:53Go back to the field on the 22nd of October, and the 45 tons sitting nose down with its tracks
23:00buried, and the demolition charges lying in the fighting compartment where somebody had
23:05placed them and left them.
23:08Everybody who looked at it assumed the mud beat it.
23:12The country was too soft, the tank too heavy, the German machine too big for Italian farmland.
23:20And now the measurements were saying that on soft ground that Panther should have floated
23:25better than the Shermans that came to look at it.
23:28So it was not the mud.
23:31Something had put that tank in that ditch, and then made it unrecoverable.
23:36And the thing that made it unrecoverable was not the ground it was sitting in, because the
23:42Canadians had it out of that same ground inside a day.
23:46Here is where I want you to remember the detail from the beginning of this story.
23:51The demolition charges, placed and not fired, a crew that started the destruction drill and
23:59never finished it, a crew that had time to strip the gun components, a job that takes
24:04real minutes, but did not have time to do the last, simplest thing, which is to set the
24:10charge and walk away.
24:11There is only one situation that produces that exact combination.
24:16It is not panic.
24:17It is a crew that stayed with their tank, working on it, expecting help, right up until
24:23the moment they were told that no help was coming.
24:25What broke that tank was not underneath it.
24:28It was 8 inches from the driver's left shoulder, and it had been breaking Panthers all over Europe
24:34that year, at a rate that should have ended the argument about German engineering permanently.
24:38Climb down into the driver's seat of a Panther and you are sitting inside the machine's own
24:43worst decision.
24:44Your legs go forward under the front plate.
24:47Between your knees is the gearbox, and on either side of you, packed into the corners of the
24:52hull where the sprockets come through, are two assemblies about the size of a beer keg.
24:57Those are the final drives.
24:59They are the last set of gears in the chain, the ones standing between 700 horsepower and
25:05the track.
25:05Every ounce of force this tank will ever put into the ground goes through those two boxes.
25:11On a Panther, they were the wrong gears in the wrong housing.
25:15The German designers had used a simple double spur gear, the quick thing to make, the thing
25:20you choose when the factory has to deliver tanks this quarter, not next year.
25:24It was fitted to a machine that had grown during design from around 30 tons to 45.
25:29The gear teeth carried a load they were never sized for.
25:36Now the number, and this is the one to remember for the rest of this story.
25:40Under hard use, the service life of a Panther final drive was reckoned at somewhere around
25:47150 kilometers.
25:50Sit with that.
25:52It is a morning's drive.
25:54It is less than the distance from the Normandy beaches to Paris.
26:00The Germans built the most feared tank on the western front and hung it on a component
26:05that could be worn out inside a single week of ordinary movement, not fighting, just moving.
26:13This was not a secret inside the German army.
26:16In June of 1944, Guderian himself, the man who effectively built the panzer arm, recorded
26:25that Panther final drives were wearing out far faster than the engines and that the problem
26:30needed fixing urgently.
26:32The crews knew, and the tanks in the field that autumn were still running the gears they
26:38had.
26:39So here is how it ends, in one tank after another.
26:43And here is why it ends in a ditch.
26:45Picture a driver, 20 years old, in soft ground.
26:50He is not even in combat.
26:52He is doing the most ordinary thing a driver does, turning on ground that holds onto his tracks.
26:59To turn, he breaks one side and drives the other.
27:03Which means that for a few seconds, one final drive is taking the whole engine against the
27:09resistance of 45 tons and wet clay.
27:13And then there is a sound.
27:16Men who heard it described a crack.
27:18Then a change in the note of the whole machine.
27:23Then a track that will not answer.
27:25That is the end of that tank as a tank.
27:29Not because anything an enemy did to it.
27:31It still has its gun.
27:33It still has its armor, uncracked.
27:35The engine still runs.
27:38It simply cannot move.
27:40And it cannot turn.
27:41And it is now a 45 ton fixed object in a field.
27:46And the crew is looking at each other.
27:49So they do what any crew does.
27:51They call for recovery.
27:53And here is where the German army's problem stops being about gear teeth and becomes something
27:59far larger.
28:00To pull out a Panther, you need a bag of Panther.
28:04The purpose built recovery version developed in 1943 precisely because the Germans could
28:10not retrieve their own heavy tanks.
28:13There were never enough.
28:15Or you need FAMO half tracks, the big 18 ton prime movers.
28:20And for a Panther, you need two or three of them working together.
28:24And what you may absolutely not do, what the regulations forbade outright, is hook up
28:30another Panther and pull.
28:32Because the towing tank's final drives are the same final drives.
28:37Tow a Panther with a Panther, and the standard outcome is that you now have two dead tanks
28:42instead of one.
28:43Read that again, because it is one of the strangest sentences in the mechanical history of the war.
28:49The German army fielded a tank that its own tanks were not permitted to rescue.
28:55So the crew waits.
28:56They wait beside the vehicle, in the rain, listening to the front, and they get the tools out and
29:02start on the job themselves.
29:04Which is why the gun components come out, stripped and stowed with a kind of methodical care.
29:09They are still expecting the recovery detachment.
29:12Then, a runner or a radio tells them that no Bergpanther is coming, tonight or ever.
29:19Then, they place the charges.
29:21And if they are lucky in the way soldiers understand luck, they get to fire them and walk out.
29:27The crew at Martorano did not get that far.
29:30They laid the charges in the fighting compartment, and something took the last minutes away from
29:36them.
29:36The Canadians moving faster than expected, a shell, an order, the dark.
29:42They walked away from a whole tank with the explosives sitting inside it, unfired.
29:47Which means, the Canadians in that field on the 22nd of October had not captured a tank.
29:53They had captured a piece of evidence.
29:56Evidence about an army that could still design a superb gun, still build a machine that terrified
30:02everybody in front of it, and could no longer perform the boring, unglamorous, decisive task
30:09of dragging its own broken equipment out of a hole and putting it back into the line.
30:15One tank in one ditch proves nothing.
30:18It could be bad luck.
30:20It could be one careless crew.
30:22But two months earlier, in a valley in Normandy, a small team of allied operational research
30:29specialists had walked into the sector the 1st Canadian Army had just sealed shut, carrying
30:35notebooks and tape measures, and started counting the German tanks lying in it.
30:40What they wrote down is the answer to this whole question, and it is worse than anything
30:46the Germans ever admitted out loud.
30:49The 19th of August, 1944.
30:52A village called St. Lambert-sur-Div in Normandy, sitting on one of the last roads out of the
30:59Falaise pocket.
31:00Major David Currie of the South Alberta Regiment held that village for three days, with a force
31:07that started as a squadron of tanks and a company of infantry, and got smaller every hour.
31:14Two German divisions were trying to get out through him.
31:18He fought at ranges where his own tanks were being hit from behind hedges, barely slept, and
31:25at one point personally directed the fire that knocked out a tiger.
31:29When it was over, seven German tanks, twelve 88mm guns, and forty other vehicles lay wrecked
31:38around his position, and 2,100 Germans had surrendered to him.
31:45He received the Victoria Cross, the only one awarded to a Canadian in the entire Normandy campaign.
31:53When the shooting stopped in that valley, the Allies had a problem.
31:57The pocket was full of German armor, and nobody knew what had actually killed it.
32:03That sounds like a strange thing not to know.
32:06It is not.
32:08When you look at a burnt out tank in a field, you cannot tell from a distance whether it
32:13was hit by a shell, hit from the air, blown up by its own crew, or simply left there.
32:20And the answer matters enormously, because on it depends what weapons you build next, what
32:28tactics you teach, and what you tell a 19 year old in a Sherman about his chances.
32:35So teams from operational research went into the pocket, on foot, with notebooks and tape
32:42measures, and did the least romantic work of the campaign.
32:46They walked up to each wreck.
32:48They measured the holes.
32:50They looked at the angle of penetration, the state of the tracks, whether the demolition
32:56charge had gone off inside.
32:58Here is what they counted in that one valley.
33:02187 tanks and self-propelled guns, 157 lighter armored vehicles, 1778 lorries, 669 cars, 252 artillery
33:19pieces.
33:20And here is the finding.
33:23Around three quarters of that armor had not been destroyed by Allied fire at all.
33:28It had been blown up by its own crews, or simply abandoned where it stood.
33:34Three quarters.
33:36The wider survey was worse for Germany.
33:39Across the French battlefields, investigators examined 176 Panthers, the same model the Seaforths
33:46would find at Martirano two months later.
33:49Half of them had never been knocked out.
33:52They had been left or destroyed by the men who drove them.
33:56And of the ones abandoned in Normandy, roughly half had a failed final drive.
34:01Put those two numbers together and look at what they say.
34:05The single most destructive force acting on the Panther tank in the summer of 1944 was not
34:11the Sherman.
34:12Not the 17-pounder.
34:14Not the Typhoon.
34:15It was a gearbox in the corner of the hull, multiplied by an army that could not get to
34:20its own casualties in time.
34:22Now turn the mirror around, because this is the part of the story that has no monuments.
34:27The Royal Canadian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers were five months old as a corps.
34:31Their men went ashore on D-Day with the assault units, two beach recovery sections whose
34:36entire job on the 6th of June was to keep Juno clear, dragging drowned and shot up vehicles
34:42off a beach that had to keep working or the invasion stopped.
34:45Their first workshop in France opened in June, and the first tanks they worked on were beach
34:50casualties.
34:51Most of them hit at point-blank range.
34:53Behind them was a system.
34:55Light aid detachments living inside the fighting units for running repairs.
34:59Field workshops a few miles back for engine and component changes.
35:03Heavy workshops behind those, rebuilding what came in.
35:07And threaded through all of it, the recovery crews.
35:10Understand what those men actually did.
35:12A tank goes down in front of the infantry, mine, shell, bogged to the belly in a flooded
35:18field.
35:19It is dark, the position is under mortar fire, and the crew may still be inside it.
35:24The recovery crew drives forward to the tank rather than away from it, in a vehicle with
35:29no turret and no gun.
35:31Somebody gets out, on the ground, in the open, and crawls under the front of a 30-ton machine
35:37to shackle a cable, working by feel because a light draws fire.
35:41Then they pull.
35:43And the tank that would have been a total loss in any other army goes back down the road,
35:47gets an engine or a new final drive, gets a new crew if it needs one, and is back in
35:52the line in days.
35:54That is the answer to the question this whole story asks, and it is not a glamorous answer.
35:59What the Canadians did with German tanks they pulled out of the mud is precisely what they
36:04did with their own.
36:05They pulled them out.
36:07Their army was built, staffed, and equipped to do it, down to the level of a single infantry
36:12battalion.
36:12And the German army by 1944 was not.
36:15That was still true six months later, when the ground changed again.
36:19On the 8th of February 1945, 1st Canadian army attacked into the Rhineland.
36:25The Germans opened the Rhine dikes and flooded the ground in front of them, and then the winter
36:30thaw did the rest.
36:31A single Canadian division ran on more than 3,300 vehicles, and the roads those vehicles
36:37used turned to porridge.
36:39Canadians went into the attack in buffalo amphibians, over ground no tank could hold, past German
36:45equipment sitting exactly as it had sat in the Romagna and in Normandy.
36:50By May of 1945, the German army had left thousands of these machines lying across Europe.
36:55And a 24-year-old Canadian captain was handed a written order to go and collect them.
37:01May 1945, Germany has surrendered, and somewhere in the paperwork of the 1st Canadian army,
37:08an order goes out to form a unit with one of the strangest jobs of the entire war.
37:14Five men, one officer, four other ranks.
37:18They were called the 1st Canadian Army Museum Collection Team, and their task was to drive
37:23around the ruins of the Netherlands and occupied Germany and take home the equipment of the
37:28army that had just lost.
37:30The officer was 24 years old.
37:33Captain Farley Mowat had gone up Italy as an infantry officer with the Hastings and Prince
37:38Edward Regiment, had seen enough of the sharp end to write about it for the rest of his life,
37:43and had a talent his superiors clearly noticed for getting hold of things that were not, strictly
37:48speaking, available.
37:49In three months, that team of five collected more than 700 tons of German equipment.
37:56Stop and picture what 700 tons of equipment actually is.
38:00It is not a crate of rifles.
38:02It is tanks.
38:03Aircraft.
38:05Artillery pieces.
38:06It included a V2 rocket, the ballistic missile that had been falling on London and Antwerp weeks
38:12earlier.
38:14It included midget submarines.
38:17Five men, in a wrecked country, with no rail network worth the name, decided what an entire
38:22nation would remember of this war, and then physically moved it.
38:26And here is the thing that never gets said about that job.
38:30Every single one of those items had to be recovered.
38:33The rules had not changed just because the shooting stopped.
38:36A dead panther in a Dutch field in June of 1945 weighed exactly what it had weighed in
38:42October of 1944.
38:44It still had a seized final drive, or a burnt engine, or tracks sunk into ground that had
38:50been underwater all winter.
38:51It still could not be pulled by another tank.
38:55It still needed heavy recovery gear, cable, a crew who knew what they were doing, and a
39:00low loader to carry it to a port with working cranes.
39:03Which means the last chapter of this story is the first chapter repeated at national scale.
39:10Canadians walking up to abandoned German armor sitting in the mud and dragging it out.
39:16Not now to fight it, or to test it, but to keep it.
39:21Some went to Ottawa.
39:22Some went to Camp Petawawa in the Ontario bush on the Ottawa River.
39:28And there, one of the panthers that Mowat shipped home was deliberately shot to pieces
39:33by Canadian gunners.
39:35That sounds like vandalism, and if you love machines, it stings.
39:40It was neither.
39:41It was the most useful thing that could possibly be done with it.
39:46Understand what firing at a captured tank on a range gives you.
39:50Not opinion, not a rumor from a crew who saw a panther at 800 yards and lived.
39:57Measurement.
39:58You fire a known round at a known plate from a known range, then walk up and look at the
40:05hole with your hands.
40:06That is how the Allies learned what German armor had become by the end of the war.
40:11And the answers were not what the reputation suggested.
40:15Late war German plate was tested and found to be brittle.
40:19Hard enough to shatter rather than absorb.
40:22The sulfur content in one panther sample examined by American investigators ran to more than twice
40:28what was considered safe in armor steel.
40:30By 1944, it had become rare to find molybdenum in German tank plate at all.
40:36And molybdenum is the element that gives armor steel its toughness.
40:40Welded seams had a tendency to burst.
40:43None of that means the panther was a poor tank.
40:46It means the panther of 1944 and 45 was being made by a country running out of alloys and out
40:53of time.
40:54Cutting the temper of its own steel to get vehicles out of the factory doors this month.
41:00But a laboratory report does not teach a gunner anything.
41:03So picture instead what happened on that petawawa range.
41:07A crew fires.
41:09The round goes downrange and there is a flat clang across the bush that everybody on the
41:15position feels in their teeth.
41:18And then, the instructor takes the class forward and walks them up to the hulk.
41:23And they see, at arm's length, exactly what a Canadian gun does to a panther's flank,
41:29or the lower hull, or the joint where two plates meet.
41:34And just as important, what it does not do to the front.
41:39That is not a lecture.
41:41That is a man putting his fingers into a hole in the most feared tank in Europe and understanding,
41:48in his body, where it can be hurt.
41:52And there was a reason to teach it in the summer of 1945.
41:56The war in Europe was finished, but Canada was raising a force for the Pacific.
42:01And no one could promise that the next enemy would not have something similar.
42:05So, the German tanks that Canadians had hauled out of European mud finished their careers
42:11as teachers on a Canadian range.
42:13The enemy's best machine turned into a classroom.
42:18Most of them ended that way, fired at until they came apart, then cut up.
42:23But one of them did not.
42:25And its story is stranger.
42:28Because it had already been in Canada for months before Moet's team was even formed.
42:33It had been taken in Northwest Europe before the middle of November 1944, put aboard a ship
42:41in the winter, and brought across the Atlantic while the war it came from was still being fought.
42:48And on the 8th of May 1945, the day Germany's surrender took effect, with the crowds out
42:56in the streets, that Panther was in Ottawa, in the victory parade.
43:01What happened to it after the crowds went home is the last thing Canadians did with a German
43:07tank pulled out of the mud.
43:10It took 60 years, and it is the quietest part of this story.
43:15The 8th of May 1945, Ottawa.
43:19The crowds are out on Wellington Street, and among the vehicles moving through the city is
43:24a German Panther, taken in Northwest Europe the previous autumn and shipped across the
43:29Atlantic that winter aboard a freighter called the Manchester Shipper.
43:33Then the parade ended, and the tank went into the quiet.
43:37They sent it to Camp Borden, in Ontario, and it stayed there for 60 years.
43:43Six decades of Canadian soldiers walking past it on their way to somewhere else.
43:48Six decades of weather.
43:50A generation of children climbing on a machine their grandfathers had been terrified of, without
43:56knowing what they were sitting on.
43:57In 2005, the Department of National Defense transferred it to the Canadian War Museum.
44:04Restorers put two years and about 4,000 hours of work into it.
44:08Since January of 2008, it has stood indoors, under lights, in Ottawa, where anybody can walk
44:14up to it and put a hand on the front plate.
44:172005 was also the year Ernest Smith died.
44:21He had come home from Italy and lived a completely ordinary Canadian life in Vancouver.
44:25He ran a travel agency.
44:27He remained, to the end, a man who found the fuss slightly ridiculous.
44:32When he died in August of 2005, he was the last living Canadian holder of the Victoria Cross,
44:38and the country brought him to Ottawa and let him lie in state on Parliament Hill.
44:42A private, the only one Canada produced in that war, who wore that ribbon.
44:47David Currie, who held the road at Saint-Lambeos-Odive, came home too.
44:51From 1960 until 1978, he served as Sergeant-at-Arms of the House of Commons.
44:57The man who had stood in a Normandy village directing fire at Tigers spent 18 years carrying
45:03the mace into the Canadian Parliament, a few minutes' walk from where that panther now stands.
45:08He died in 1986.
45:11Farley Mowat went home and became one of the most widely read writers his country ever produced.
45:17He died in 2014.
45:20The 700 tons his five men dragged out of Europe became the spine of a national collection.
45:26And deserter?
45:28The record simply stops.
45:29The regiment that adopted it was disbanded in December of 1944, a few weeks after its
45:36one action.
45:37Nothing certain is written down about where that panther finished.
45:41Probably fired at on a proving ground until it came apart.
45:45Probably cut up for its steel.
45:47The most famous captured tank on the Italian front has no grave and no marker.
45:53Which leaves the field at Martorano and the men who are in none of this.
45:58We know almost nothing about the crew who left that panther in the ditch.
46:02No names came down.
46:03They were five young men from Panzer Regiment 4 who did their job in the correct order under
46:09impossible pressure.
46:11Stripped the gun so it could not be used against them.
46:14Laid the charges to destroy what they could not take with them.
46:16And then, in the last minutes, ran out of the one thing their army could no longer supply.
46:22Help.
46:24No recovery vehicle.
46:26No tow.
46:27Nobody coming.
46:29So they walked away into the rain.
46:32And left the explosives lying where a Canadian would find them the next morning and carry them
46:37out by hand.
46:38That is the whole war in one field.
46:41Because the question this story started with has a plain answer and it is not about trophies.
46:49What the Canadians did with German tanks they pulled out of the mud is what the German army
46:54had stopped being able to do for its own machines.
46:57They recovered them.
46:59They repaired them.
47:00They tested them until the fear came off them and only the facts were left.
47:05They fired at them on their own ranges until every young gunner knew where the steel would
47:09fail.
47:10And when it was finished, they took a few of them home and kept them, so the country could
47:15see what its people had been sent against.
47:18Almost none of that was done by the men whose names get remembered.
47:21It was done by recovery crews, fitters, and workshop hands, the part of an army that appears
47:27on no memorial, and the part that decided this.
47:31Two armies met in the same mud in the autumn of 1944.
47:36One of them could get its equipment out of the ground and back into the fight.
47:40The other could not.
47:42That is not a small mechanical footnote.
47:44It decided who was still in the field in the spring.
47:48The Panther in Ottawa is the proof.
47:5045 tons of the best steel Germany could still make in 1944, standing under museum lights,
47:57taken out of Europe by men from Moose Jaw and Trois-Rivières and Vancouver, and carried
48:034,000 miles across an ocean, because they won.
48:08Thank you for staying with this one.
48:10Knowing that people still want the details, the ditch, the cable, the gearbox, the names,
48:16is the reason these get made at all.
48:18If you think what the Canadians did here deserves to be remembered, a like helps it reach more
48:24people.
48:24And if you would like to hear more, we are here every week.
48:28And if your father, your grandfather, or your uncle served in the Second World War, I
48:33would be honored to hear about him.
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