- 2 days ago
On a rain-soaked road near Pieve Sestina in Italy, a Canadian soldier ends up face to face with a German Panther while his wounded friend lies trapped in the ditch behind him. The story follows Ernest “Smokey” Smith of the Seaforth Highlanders, the flooded Savio River, and the desperate night fight that turned a simple PIAT ambush into one of the most dramatic moments in Canadian military history.
The narration unpacks how rising water left Canadian tanks and anti-tank guns stranded, forcing a small platoon of tank hunters to hold the bridgehead alone. It moves through the chaos of German armour, infantry, mines, a disabled assault gun blocking the road, and Smith’s decision to stand in the open and keep firing to protect Jimmy Tennant. This is a gripping World War II history story, a military history documentary-style narration, and a powerful Canadian war story about courage, survival, and split-second decisions.
If you enjoy WW2 stories, Canadian Army history, battlefield narration, military documentaries, or historical war stories with strong human drama, this episode fits that search perfectly. It also works well for listeners looking for immersive history storytelling, Second World War combat accounts, and Canadian military history.
SEO: World War II history, Canadian war stories, military history narration, Seaforth Highlanders, Smokey Smith, Panther tank, PIAT, Savio River, Italian campaign, WW2 documentary, battlefield story, Canadian Army history, war stories, historical narration, military documentary listening.
The narration unpacks how rising water left Canadian tanks and anti-tank guns stranded, forcing a small platoon of tank hunters to hold the bridgehead alone. It moves through the chaos of German armour, infantry, mines, a disabled assault gun blocking the road, and Smith’s decision to stand in the open and keep firing to protect Jimmy Tennant. This is a gripping World War II history story, a military history documentary-style narration, and a powerful Canadian war story about courage, survival, and split-second decisions.
If you enjoy WW2 stories, Canadian Army history, battlefield narration, military documentaries, or historical war stories with strong human drama, this episode fits that search perfectly. It also works well for listeners looking for immersive history storytelling, Second World War combat accounts, and Canadian military history.
SEO: World War II history, Canadian war stories, military history narration, Seaforth Highlanders, Smokey Smith, Panther tank, PIAT, Savio River, Italian campaign, WW2 documentary, battlefield story, Canadian Army history, war stories, historical narration, military documentary listening.
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LearningTranscript
00:00October 22nd, 1944. A ditch beside a narrow country road near the church of Pieve Sestina
00:08on the German side of the Savio River in northern Italy. It is the dead hour before dawn and
00:15everything is wet. Two Canadian privates have just crossed that road at a run. They went over
00:23for a second anti-tank launcher, a piat, a heavy tube with a spring inside it that throws a bomb
00:29a short distance. It is not a weapon for long range. It works when the man holding it lets the
00:35tank come close. Very close. Now the two of them are back in the ditch, and down the road something
00:43is moving. You hear a panther before you see it, the squeal of the tracks, the deep note of an
00:50engine
00:50that is not a truck. Then the shape comes out of the dark, 45 tons of German armor with infantry
00:58riding
00:58on the back of it. The panther's machine gun opens up. The crew cannot see the Canadians. They don't
01:05need to. They fire along the line of the ditches, because the ditches are where infantry hide, and
01:12they know it. The men on the hall begin throwing grenades. One of the two Canadians goes down. His
01:19name is Jimmy Tennant. He is hit and bleeding, and whatever happens in the next few minutes,
01:25he will not be running from it. The other man is Ernest Alvia Smith, 30 years old, from New
01:32Westminster, British Columbia. The battalion calls him Smokey. In four years of service, he has been
01:39promoted to corporal nine times, and nine times he has lost the stripes. Tonight he is a private, lying in
01:48a ditch beside a wounded friend, with a panther coming down the road toward both of them. Years later,
01:55Smith would sum up this moment in a single sentence. In the end, there was just Jimmy and I, and
02:01then he
02:02got wounded, so that left only me. Only me. Hold on to those two words. By the end of this
02:10story, you will
02:11know exactly what they cost, and exactly what they bought, because that panther was not alone. Behind
02:19it, somewhere in the dark, were two more panthers, two self-propelled guns, and about 30 German infantry.
02:28And between that armor and the Canadian company around the church, there was no Canadian tank. No
02:35anti-tank gun. There was a ditch, a wounded man, and a private who had never been much good at
02:43taking
02:44orders. If what the Canadians did in Italy matters to you, a subscribe genuinely helps these stories
02:51reach more people. Thank you. Now let me tell you what this story is really about. Because it is not
02:59only about one shot from one launcher. It is about a question the official record answers in a few
03:06formal lines, and that Smith himself answered very differently decades later. The question is simple.
03:15When German armor came down that road for one Canadian guarding his wounded friend, what actually
03:23stopped it? Not what the metal says, what stopped it? To answer that properly, we have to go back about
03:31eight hours, to the other side of that river. Because the reason Smokey Smith was alone in that ditch,
03:39with a spring gun and no tank behind him, was not bad luck. It was water. And it was timing.
03:48On the
03:48evening of October 21st, a Canadian infantry brigade was ordered to establish a bridgehead across the
03:55Savio, near the town of Jacenna. The Seaforth Highlanders of Canada, Vancouver's regiment, Smith's
04:03regiment, were picked to spearhead the attack. The Seaforths knew rivers by now. They had been crossing them
04:10for weeks, one after another, through the flat, soaked farmland of the Romagna. Every river on this coast
04:18ran down from the mountains to the Adriatic, which meant every one of them lay straight across the
04:24Canadian line of advance. Each crossing was a small, separate battle. Each one cost men. On the map, the Savio
04:34was just one more blue line. The first half of October had been nothing but rain and mud. On the
04:41night of the
04:41crossing, the rain came back. And this time, it came down in torrents. Smith had been with the Seaforth
04:48since March 1940. He had come ashore in Sicily in July 1943, and he had been wounded there. He had
04:57come
04:57back. He had gone through Ortona at Christmas, where, as he put it, we'd blow holes through the wall so
05:04we go
05:05through that way. Because if you walk out into the street, they'd get you. He knew how German soldiers
05:11fought when they meant to hold ground. He had seen it from a few feet away. He was, by now,
05:18one of the
05:18battalion's anti-tank men. He knew the P-I-A-T the way a carpenter knows a hammer he does
05:25not particularly
05:26like. He knew exactly how close a tank had to be before the thing was worth firing, and exactly what
05:33happened to the man who fired it and missed. And there is one more thing to keep in mind about
05:38him.
05:39A man with four years' service, two campaigns behind him, and a wound from Sicily was still a private.
05:47That was not an accident, and it was not the army's oversight. It was Smokey Smith. And on that road,
05:55it is going to matter. What he did not know, that evening, was what the rain was doing to the
06:03river in front of him. Here is the detail that decides everything that follows. Watch the water.
06:11Over the next few hours, the Savio would rise six feet. The banks would turn to vertical, sliding mud.
06:21No one would be able to bridge it. And when that happened, every Canadian tank and every anti-tank gun
06:29on the near side would be cut off from the men they were meant to protect, leaving the far bank
06:35to
06:36infantry, and to whatever those infantry could carry across on their backs. Smokey Smith was about to
06:45carry a P-I-A-T over that river. What he could not know was that for the rest of
06:52the night, nothing heavier
06:54was coming after him. On the evening of October 21st, the first Seaforths went down the bank and into the
07:01Savio. D Company and B Company crossed first. The water came up to their waists, and the current was
07:08fast enough that every man had to lean into it just to stay upright. There was an oily film on
07:15the surface,
07:16and it soaked straight through their battle dress. On the far side, the bank rose steep and slick. Men
07:23went up it on their knees, grabbing at roots and at each other, and came over the top coated in
07:29mud
07:29from boots to collar. And on the far side, the Germans were waiting. The citation Smith would later
07:37receive calls it, Strong Opposition. That is army language. On the ground, it meant machine guns firing
07:45low across the fields, mortar bombs falling on the river bank, and German artillery registered on the
07:52crossing points. To see what that river could do, look a short way upstream, on the Canadian left.
07:59The Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry had also tried to force the Savio. One Patricia Company
08:06was stopped short of the far bank. Of another, only seventeen men made it across. Seventeen men is not
08:15a company. It is a large platoon clinging to a bank in the dark. The Seaforths did better. D and
08:23B got
08:23across and dug in. Then A and C Companies passed through them and pushed deeper into German-held ground.
08:32C Company, on the right, moved up a road toward the village of Pieve Sestina and a church standing near
08:39it.
08:40Smokey Smith went with them. Now I want you to think about what every Canadian officer on that
08:46river bank was counting on. Because every river crossing on that coast followed the same logic.
08:53Infantry go first and grab the far bank. Then the engineers come up and build something that will
09:00carry weight. Then the tanks and the anti-tank guns cross. And by daylight, the infantry are no longer
09:08alone. That was the plan. And that plan depended on a river that would behave. The Savio did not
09:16behave. The rain, which had been heavy for hours, turned torrential. The river rose six feet in five
09:24hours. The banks, already soft, became vertical walls of mud that crumbled when anyone tried to work on them.
09:32The engineers could not get a bridge across. No Canadian tank could reach the far side. No anti-tank
09:41gun could reach it either. Pause on that for a moment, because it is the whole situation in one line.
09:48Two Seaforth companies were now deep beyond the German front line. And the one thing that could have
09:54protected them against armor was sitting on the wrong bank of a flooded river. One account of that
10:00night puts it plainly. After breaking through, the Seaforths had enemy infantry, machine gunners,
10:08tanks, and self-propelled guns on all sides. So what did the Canadians have instead? This is the first
10:15answer. And it is only the first. They had a new platoon. A few weeks earlier, the Seaforths had formed
10:23a
10:23tank-hunting platoon. About 20 men, armed with four Piats and Tommy guns, whose only job was to deal
10:30with German armor when there was nothing else to deal with it. And the man leading it that night
10:36was not an officer. He was a sergeant. His name was Keith Thompson. Remember that name.
10:44In a battle where there were no tanks, no anti-tank guns, and no one above a company commander to
10:50ask,
10:51Sgt. Thompson's decisions about where to put 20 men and four launchers would decide whether anyone
10:58near that church saw the morning. Together, C Company and Thompson's tank hunters came to roughly
11:0550 men. And among Thompson's tank hunters was a 30-year-old private who had already lost his corporal
11:12stripes nine times. It is worth asking how Smokey Smith fit into a platoon like that. Years later,
11:20he was asked about army discipline, and he did not dress it up. I didn't take orders, he said. I
11:27didn't believe in them. He had come into the army in 1940, the way he did most things. Fast. He
11:34had first
11:34tried the air force. Then he joined the army instead. And in his words, I was gone in a week.
11:41He wanted action. He expected the war to be short. Now put that man into a tank hunting platoon,
11:49where the whole method depends on one thing. The discipline to not fire. Smith described that
11:58method himself, very simply. Our way was to fight from the ditches and wait until they got real close.
12:0630 feet or less, if possible. 30 feet. That is closer than the length of the tank you are waiting
12:15for.
12:16A man who does not take orders, lying in a ditch, has to let 45 tons of steel come nearly
12:24on top of him
12:25before he is allowed to do anything at all. Keep that contradiction in mind. We are going to come
12:33back to it, because it is closer to the answer than it looks. Around 4 o'clock in the morning
12:39of October
12:4022nd, C Company was nearing the church. The rain had soaked everything. The men were tired, cold,
12:49and a long way from their own side of the river. Then they heard it. German armor, moving somewhere
12:56out in the dark. Not one engine, several. Close enough to be heard over the rain, not close enough to
13:04be
13:04seen. Everybody in C Company knew what that sound meant. Tanks meant the Germans had decided this
13:12bridgehead was not going to survive until daylight. Keith Thompson did not wait to find out which
13:18direction they would come from. He started building roadblocks. He sent his PIAT men into the ditches on
13:26both sides of the road, where the armor was most likely to come. Smith's three-man team took a position
13:32in a ditch alongside a lane. Then Thompson did something himself. He went out onto the road,
13:40carrying anti-tank mines, and personally laid a string of them across it, and camouflaged them,
13:47while German engines were grinding somewhere out there in the dark. A sergeant, on his knees on an open road,
13:54hiding mines under mud by feel. When he was done, he got back into cover, and the ambush was set.
14:03There was nothing left to do, except the thing Smith said the method required. Wait until they
14:09got real close. They did not have to wait long. But the first thing to come down that road toward
14:17Thompson's mines was not a tank, and what happened to it would tell every man in those ditches exactly how
14:24the rest of this night was going to go. Just after four in the morning, the Germans came out of
14:30the
14:30dark around the church at Pieve Sestina. First, there was movement near the buildings. German infantry,
14:37close to the Canadians, closer than anyone had expected. Then, a vehicle. Not a tank. A German staff
14:46car coming fast down the road, as if whoever was inside believed this ground still belonged to them.
14:54It ran straight into the seaforth line. The driver was killed instantly, and the car rolled
15:01over into the ditch. The senior German officer riding in it did not survive either. Think about what
15:08that means. A German officer was driving through that spot in the dark, at speed. Whatever the German
15:16command believed about this road, they did not yet know that Canadians were sitting on it.
15:23That was the first piece of luck the seaforths got that night. It would also be the last time the
15:29Germans were surprised by where they were. Because now they knew.
15:34So here is the question you should be asking. Who exactly was out there in the dark? The answer
15:42is the 26th Panzer Division. Not a scratch unit. A tank division that had fought at Salerno,
15:51at Casino, at Anzio, and on the Coriano ridge. Its commander, Eduard Kraseman, was a veteran of North
16:00Africa and the Russian front. Two months before this night, soldiers of his division had taken part
16:07in the massacre of Italian civilians in the marshes of the Padule di Fucecchio. After the war, a British
16:15military court sentenced Kraseman to 10 years. He died in prison. Those were the men on the other side
16:22of Keith Thompson's mines. Next came a self-propelled gun. A 75mm gun on a tracked chassis, low, armored,
16:33built to kill tanks and anything else in front of it. It came down the road toward the church. A
16:39seaforth
16:40named Private Ballard was waiting for it with a P-I-A-T. And here the method showed its first
16:47weakness.
16:48Ballard fired. And he missed. Now you need to understand what a miss meant with that weapon,
16:55because it hangs over everything that follows. A P-I-A-T bomb goes out once. To fire again,
17:02the man has to re-cock a spring so heavy that soldiers often had to stand up and put their
17:08whole
17:09body into it. Lying in a flooded ditch with a gun coming at you? That is not a small thing.
17:17For those seconds, a P-I-A-T man is a man in a ditch with a very heavy tube.
17:24The self-propelled gun kept coming. Then it reached the place where Keith Thompson had knelt in the
17:30dark. It struck one of the mines. The explosion tore off a track and the machine lurched and stopped
17:38dead in the road. Before the crew could do anything about it, a Canadian soldier got close enough to
17:44drop a hand grenade inside. The crew was killed. So the first German armored vehicle to come for the
17:52church was finished. Not by the launcher, but by a sergeant's mines and a man with a grenade.
17:58And now I want you to fix one image in your mind, because it comes back at the worst possible
18:05moment. That dead gun was sitting in the road. It had blocked the way. Anything else coming down
18:13that road would have to get past it. For a few minutes, it looked as if Thompson's ambush was
18:19working exactly as planned. Then the Germans answered with what they had been holding back.
18:25A panther. One of the most dangerous tanks in the German army. Thick, sloped armor on the front. A
18:34long 75-millimeter gun that could kill a Sherman long before the Sherman could reply. Machine guns.
18:42And riding on its back, a squad of panzer grenadiers. Against that, the Seaforths had
18:49piots in the ditches. And the first piot had already shown what happened if a shot went wrong.
18:56Smokey Smith was still in the ditch beside the lane with his three-man team. And what he did next
19:02is the first thing the official citation praises him for. Not the shot, not the fight on the road,
19:10but a decision about where to be. Under fire from the approaching tanks,
19:16he led his piot group across an open field to a position from which the weapon could best be used.
19:24Then, leaving one man on that launcher, he crossed the road to get another one.
19:30The man who crossed with him was Private James Tennant. Jimmy. I would like to tell you more about Jimmy
19:38Tennant, where he came from, how long he had known Smith, what he did before the war.
19:45The records I have say very little. His name, his rank, that he was Smith's companion that night,
19:52and what happened to him in the next minute. The two of them got the second piot. And almost
19:58immediately, the panther came down the road toward them, its machine guns firing along the line of the
20:05ditches. The grenadiers on its hull threw grenades. Tennant was hit. And now, you are back exactly where this
20:13story began. The ditch. The panther. The wounded friend. In the end, there was just Jimmy and I.
20:22And then he got wounded, so that left only me. Look at what Smith had at that moment. One launcher,
20:30one bomb ready. A friend who could not move. And a ditch, which was the only thing keeping him alive,
20:38because that panther was spraying bullets at knee height and could not see him.
20:44And here is the problem with the ditch. From the bottom of it, lying beside Tennant, Smith could not
20:50get a proper line on the tank. The ditch that was protecting him was also keeping him from doing the
20:56one thing that might stop it. Remember Ballard's miss. Remember what Smith said the method required.
21:04Wait until they are real close. To hit that panther, Smokey Smith was going to have to do the one
21:11thing
21:12the ditch was there to prevent. He was going to have to let it see him. There is a line
21:17in Smith's
21:18Victoria Cross citation that is easy to read past. It says he fired, having to expose himself to the full
21:26view of the enemy. Here is what that meant in the ditch beside the road at Pieve Sestina.
21:34Smith climbed up out of the ditch. Then he lay back down, not in the ditch, but on the open
21:41ground at its
21:42edge, flat, in plain sight, because that was the only place from which he could get a clean line on
21:49the tank.
21:51Behind him, in the water, lay Jimmy Tennant, wounded and unable to move. The panther was coming on.
21:59Its machine guns were still raking the ditches. The grenadiers on its back were still throwing grenades.
22:06And now there was a Canadian lying on top of the ground in front of it.
22:11Listen to how Smith himself explained the method years later. I gave you the first half of this
22:17earlier. Here is all of it. Our way was to fight from the ditches and wait until they got real
22:24close,
22:2530 feet or less if possible. Because if you miss, you're dead. They have the machine guns and they'll
22:32just eat you alive. If you miss, you're dead. Every man in Thompson's platoon knew that
22:40rule. Ballard had just shown them what the first half of it looked like. Smith was now lying in the
22:47open with a single bomb in his launcher and a wounded friend a few feet behind him. And the rule
22:54said he
22:54still had to wait. So he waited. Let me turn the camera around for a moment. Consider what the
23:02panther crew could see. Almost nothing. It was dark. They were buttoned up behind thick armor,
23:10looking through narrow vision blocks, firing at the places where infantry usually were. The dead,
23:17self-propelled gun was sitting in the road ahead of them, blocking the way. The driver had to get 45
23:24tons around it, on a road with a flooded ditch on either side. That is the wrecked gun I asked
23:31you to
23:32remember. This is where it earns its place in the story. The panther tried to squeeze past the wreck,
23:39and as it did, it slid toward the water-filled ditch. The range, by the citation, was 30 feet.
23:47Smith later said he had barely enough time to aim. He fired. The bomb hit the panther squarely.
23:55Accounts differ slightly on the last seconds, so I will give you what they agree on. The tank was put
24:01out of action. It lurched on a few more yards and stopped. Before the night was over, it was burning
24:09in the ditch it had slid into. Years later, Smith described the whole thing in four words.
24:16I knocked out one. That was all. Four words for 30 feet. So now you have the first part of
24:26the answer.
24:27When the panther came for Smokey Smith and Jimmy Tennant, the first thing that stopped it was a
24:33bomb from a spring-loaded tube, fired by a man lying in the open at a range most soldiers would
24:40never
24:41choose. And I want to pause on why it was Smith who fired that shot, because it connects back to
24:47the
24:47question of the nine lost stripes. Smith was not a model soldier. He drank. He fought. He argued with
24:56sergeants and ignored officers. And the army kept taking his stripes away because of it. By any peacetime
25:04standard, he was a problem. But he said something about himself much later that explains what happened on
25:12that road better than any citation. I always say most soldiers were afraid to shoot. I was never afraid
25:20to shoot. He was not boasting. He was describing the one thing he knew for certain about himself.
25:28And it was exactly the thing the PIAT demanded. A careful man, a man who worried about consequences
25:37and followed every order, would have had every reason to fire early at a panther coming out of
25:43the dark. Or not to climb out of the ditch at all. The same stubbornness that cost Smith his stripes
25:50nine times was what let him lie on open ground and let a tank come to thirty feet. The army
25:58could not
25:58make him a corporal. It had not needed to. That night it needed a private who would not flinch.
26:06Now, if this were a film, the story would end right here. Tank burns. Hero stands up. Credits.
26:15It does not end here. In fact, this is where the real danger started. Think about what Smith had just
26:23done from the German point of view. The lead self-propelled gun was dead in the road.
26:28Their officer's car was in the ditch. And now a panther had been knocked out by somebody they had
26:34not seen until the bomb hit. But the panther had not been traveling empty. Remember the grenadiers
26:41riding on its back? The moment the tank was hit, about ten German infantrymen jumped down off its hull.
26:48They did not scatter. They did not go to ground. They had just seen where the shot came from. They
26:54came
26:54straight at him. Ten men, armed with Schmeisser submachine guns and stick grenades, charging across
27:01a few yards of wet ground toward one Canadian private. Look at Smith's position at that instant.
27:08His P-I-A-T was empty. Re-cocking it would take time he did not have, and it was
27:15useless against men
27:16anyway. He was lying in the open, exactly where he had put himself in order to make the shot.
27:23Behind him, in the ditch, was Jimmy Tennant, who could not run and could not fight.
27:30Smith had three choices, and every one of them was obvious to him. He could drop back into the ditch
27:38and
27:38hope the grenadiers ran past. He could go down the ditch, away from the road, and leave Tennant where
27:45he lay. Or he could do something that no manual on anti-tank ambushes would ever have recommended.
27:54What Smokey Smith did next is the reason there is a Victoria Cross in this story. Smokey Smith stood up
28:02and walked out onto the road. Not back into the ditch. Not away from it. Out onto the open road,
28:10in the path of ten men who were running at him with submachine guns and grenades. He had a Tommy
28:18gun.
28:18The Thompson, heavy, American designed, a weapon that fired pistol ammunition as fast as a man could
28:26hold the trigger, and that was most useful at exactly the distance he was about to fight at.
28:32The citation says point-blank range. Smith, asked about the distance years later, estimated it the
28:40way a man estimates something he has never forgotten. Oh, 30 feet, 25 feet, something like that. He opened fire.
28:51They came after me with hand grenades, he said. I just kept shooting them. Four of the grenadiers
28:58went down on the road. The rest broke and fell back into the dark. I want you to hold that
29:05picture
29:06for a second, because we are now at the heart of the title. Not a Canadian hiding in a ditch
29:12while
29:12the Germans passed. A Canadian standing in the middle of the road between the Germans and the ditch where
29:19his wounded friend was lying. The ditch was behind him. Tennant was behind him. Smith had put himself
29:26where anyone coming for Tennant would have to go through him first. And here is something worth
29:31noticing. Nobody ordered him to do that. There was no officer in that ditch. There was no sergeant
29:38beside him. Keith Thompson was somewhere else on the line, running his own fight. The man who, as he put
29:45it, didn't take orders and didn't believe in them, was now doing the one thing no order could have made
29:53him do. He was standing on an open road in the dark, alone, because a friend could not stand up.
30:00Smith once explained this part of the fight with a sentence that tells you everything about how he
30:05saw himself. I'm a good shot with a machine gun. That is all. No speech about duty, no mention of
30:13courage. A man stating a fact about his hands. But the Germans were not finished. And here is where the
30:20night turns again. The four men on the road had barely stopped moving when another German tank opened
30:27fire. This one did not come close. It had seen what happened to the first Panther. It stayed back and
30:35swept the whole area with fire from a longer range, from a distance where no PIAT could touch it. That
30:43was
30:43the German answer to Smith's method. If a Canadian with a PIAT kills anything that comes within 30 feet,
30:51then do not come within 30 feet. Stand off, rake the ground, let the machine guns and the main gun
30:59do the
30:59work, and send the infantry in behind them. And the infantry came. More German grenadiers moved in on
31:07Smith's position, working across the fields toward the road. Now look at what Smith had left. One Tommy gun.
31:15And a problem every soldier who has carried a submachine gun will understand immediately. That kind of weapon
31:22empties a magazine in a few seconds. He had just fought off ten men with it. He could not have
31:28much ammunition left.
31:30This is the detail in the citation that I find most revealing, because it is so ordinary. Smith went
31:37looking in the ditch. The Seaforths had been fighting along that road for hours. Men had moved, been hit,
31:45dropped equipment. In the mud, Smith found Tommy gun magazines that someone had abandoned. He gathered
31:52them up. He loaded. And he went back to the edge of the road. Remember, the whole night had begun
31:58with a
31:59river that swallowed the Canadians' heavy weapons. Now the fight had shrunk to one private, scraping
32:05loose magazines out of a ditch so that he could keep shooting. The citation describes what came next
32:11in a single phrase that covers a very long stretch of time. He steadfastly held his position, protecting
32:19private tenant and fighting the enemy with his Tommy gun. Protecting private tenant. That is the army's
32:26language for it. Here is what it meant. Every time a group of Germans worked their way toward that
32:32stretch of road, they came up against the same man, firing from the same place, with the same
32:39wounded Canadian lying in the ditch behind him. Let me widen the view for a moment, because Smith was
32:45not the only Seaforth fighting that night, and it would be wrong to tell it as if he were. Along
32:52the rest of
32:52the line, the Germans kept probing. Somewhere past the church, a self-propelled gun mounted on a half-track
33:00broke away from the road and tried to come across country, around the Canadian position. Another of
33:06Thompson's Piat teams was waiting for it and knocked it out. The Germans attacked Sea Company from other
33:13directions as well. Those attacks failed too. Thompson's tank hunters, twenty men, four launchers,
33:21one sergeant, were holding a bridgehead that the army had expected tanks to hold. But for our story,
33:27the center of the whole fight is still that one stretch of road. That is where the Panthers had come.
33:34That is where the Grenadiers kept trying to break through. And that is where one Canadian private was
33:41standing, reloading from magazines he had found in the mud. Now I have to ask you the question that
33:49Smith himself asked decades later. Why didn't they simply finish him? Think about it. A German tank was
33:58firing on that area from a safe distance. German infantry were closing in. Against them was one man
34:06with a submachine gun and whatever ammunition he could find. A single, well-aimed shell. A single
34:13determined rush from two directions and it would have been over. The Germans had every advantage on
34:20that road except one. Smokey Smith knew exactly what that one advantage was. He said it later in a single
34:28sentence and it is the most important sentence in this entire story. It explains why the Germans did what
34:36they did next and it is not what the citation says at all. Here is the sentence. They must have
34:43figured
34:43there was a whole army there because they could have wiped me out in no time if they'd known I
34:49was
34:49practically all by myself. A whole army. Now go back to the two words I asked you to hold onto
34:59at the very
34:59beginning. Only me. At the start of this story they sounded like the loneliest words a soldier could
35:09say. A friend down, a panther coming, nobody else in the ditch. Listen to them again now. Only me
35:20was not just Smith's problem that night. It was his secret. And the whole fight on that road depended on
35:29the Germans never finding it out. Put yourself on the German side of the road and look at the night
35:36as they lived it. They had come down that road believing it was theirs. First their officer's car
35:44was destroyed. Then a self-propelled gun hit a mine and was finished off at close quarters. Then a panther,
35:54the tank they trusted most, was knocked out at 30 feet by someone they never saw until the bomb struck.
36:02Ten grenadiers charged the spot the shot came from and four of them died on the road. Somewhere else,
36:09a half-track gun was destroyed trying to go around. Every time they reached out in the dark, something bit
36:17off the hand. What would you conclude from that? You would conclude that the church was held in strength.
36:25That the ditches along that road were full of anti-tank teams. That somewhere behind the muzzle
36:32flashes was at least a company with heavy weapons, maybe more. You would not conclude that the most
36:39dangerous stretch of that road was being held by one private with a wounded man behind him and magazines
36:46he had picked out of the mud. That was the first half of the answer. The darkness that had hidden
36:53the panther from Smith was now hiding Smith from the Panthers. And the fear of what might be waiting
37:00in that dark did what no Canadian tank could do that night, because there were no Canadian tanks.
37:07But there is a second half, and it comes from the German side, and it changes the picture again.
37:14Remember that staff car racing down the road in the dark, as if the road still belonged to the Germans?
37:20Why was a senior officer driving through there at speed at four in the morning?
37:27Because the 26th Panzer Division was not only counterattacking a bridgehead that night.
37:33According to Mark Zilke's account, a column of the division was racing out of Chisena toward Ravenna.
37:40The Canadian advance across the rivers had put the division in danger. It had to pull back, or risk
37:46being cut off and surrounded. So think about what that road was to the Germans. It was not just ground
37:53to retake. It was a way out. And sitting across it were Keith Thompson's mines, a wrecked, self-propelled
38:01gun blocking the lane, a panther burning in the ditch, and fire coming out of the darkness from
38:08an enemy they could not count. This is what the citation cannot tell you, because the citation
38:14only looks at the Canadian side. To the Germans, that road was a door they needed. And at the exact
38:22place where the door was, one Canadian private kept firing. And kept firing, and did not go away.
38:31The German infantry kept probing for a while. They could not get through. The citation describes the
38:38end of it in a phrase that is very rare in official language. The enemy finally gave up and withdrew
38:45in
38:46disorder. In disorder. Not a planned pullback. Men who had been told the road was theirs, running back
38:54the way they had come. And now Smith did the thing he had been waiting to do the whole time.
39:01He turned
39:01around, went down into the ditch, and got Jimmy Tennant. He did not wait for a lull. That second German
39:09tank was still out there, still sweeping the area with fire from long range. The citation says Smith
39:17did this, still showing utter contempt for enemy fire. He helped his wounded friend to cover, got him
39:25away from the road, and brought him to the church, where the battalion's medical staff could finally get
39:31their hands on him. Picture that walk. After everything, the last part of protecting Tennant was not a
39:39shot and not a charge. It was a tired man carrying another man across open ground under fire toward
39:48a door with light behind it. I want you to know the answer to the question you have been carrying
39:55since the first minute. Jimmy Tennant lived. Smith got him to the aid post, and Smith's obituary,
40:04sixty years later, would say simply that during that night he saved the life of his wounded comrade.
40:11So that part of the title is answered. The Panthers came for one Canadian guarding his wounded friend,
40:19and the friend came out alive. And if this story were only about that, it would end right here in
40:26the
40:26church. Warm, dry, surrounded by his own company. With the Germans gone, and his friend in the hands of
40:35the medics, Smokey Smith had done more than anybody could ask of a private soldier. He was entitled to
40:43stay inside. But he knew something about that road that nobody else in the church knew yet. He knew that
40:51the Germans had fallen back because they thought an army was out there. And he knew that if the next
40:58German probe came down that road and found it empty, the secret was gone, and so was everything the night
41:07had cost. So here is Smith's own description of what happened next. Nine words that tell you which way
41:15he walked. I had to stay out there by myself while everybody else was in the church. So Smokey Smith
41:23walked back out of the church. Behind him were dry walls, his own company, the medics working on Jimmy
41:31Tennant. In front of him was the road, the dead self-propelled gun, the Panther in the ditch, the
41:39bodies of the grenadiers, and somewhere out in the dark, a German tank that had been firing on this
41:45ground only minutes before. The citation records it in one flat sentence. He then returned to his
41:54position beside the road to await the possibility of a further enemy attack. The possibility of a
42:02further enemy attack. Read that again and remember what Smith knew. If one did come, the only thing
42:10standing on that road would be him. I want you to notice something about the order of events here,
42:17because it is the key to the whole night. Smith did not stay on the road because he was trapped
42:24there.
42:25He had already got out. He had carried his friend to safety and he was standing inside the one building
42:32in that bridgehead where a man could reasonably stay. Then he chose to walk back. Everything that has
42:39happened in this story so far, the shot, the charge, the magazines in the mud, happened because the
42:47Germans came to him. This was the first time he went to them. And the Germans did try again. Not
42:56straight down that road. They had learned what waited there. They pushed at C Company from other
43:02directions. Each of those attacks failed. Thompson's tank hunters, soaked, exhausted, down to whatever
43:11ammunition they had carried across a flooded river, held every side of the position. Somewhere in the
43:18dark, Smith kept his post by the road. By six o'clock in the morning of October 22nd, the enemy
43:25had pulled
43:26back. Let me give you the ledger of that night on the seaforth stretch of road as the records have
43:32it.
43:33By the time Smith took Tennant to the church, one German tank and both self-propelled guns had been
43:39destroyed. According to Zulka, the fight at the road itself lasted barely an hour. Eight Germans were
43:46killed there and ten were taken prisoner. And there is one more line in the citation that finishes the story
43:54of the river. Thanks to what happened that night, the bridgehead was held firm against all enemy
44:01attacks, pending the arrival of tanks and anti-tank guns some hours later. Some hours later. Think about
44:11that. The heavy weapons that everyone had been waiting for, the whole reason the plan was supposed to
44:17work, finally came across the Savio and found the job already done. The ground they were meant to
44:25protect had been held by a platoon of tank hunters, a company of infantry, and a private who had gone
44:31back out into the dark. Now listen to the German side the next morning. Lieutenant General Hans Rottiger
44:40was chief of staff of Army Group C, the headquarters running the entire German war in Italy. He was not
44:48a man who spent his time on one road outside Chisena. When the reports from that night reached him,
44:54he summed up the state of the 26th Panzer Division in six words. This is quite a mess at Krasemans.
45:03That is the verdict from the other side, not from a Canadian newspaper, not from a metal board, from
45:10the German staff officer whose job was to know exactly what had gone wrong. A veteran panzer
45:17division with panthers and self-propelled guns trying to get its column out along the roads north
45:23of Chisena had run into Canadians where it did not expect them, and had come away with wrecked armor,
45:30dead officers, and a mess that reached all the way up to Army Group. Smith, typically, put it in
45:38his own terms. Years later, he said what he believed that night had been worth. It changed the whole
45:46picture of the front. It made it so the rest of the army got through. I will be honest with
45:52you about
45:53the larger picture, because this audience deserves honesty. The Savio was not the end of anything.
45:59The Germans fell back to the next river line, and the Canadians would spend the coming winter
46:05crossing those rivers, one after another, and paying for every one.
46:11The 2nd Brigade's crossing of the Savio cost it 191 casualties, 33 of them killed. But on that one
46:21road, on that one night, what Smith said is true. The Canadians who were supposed to be the weak point,
46:29with no armor and no guns, were the ones still standing at dawn.
46:35Then came a question the army had to answer. Who should get the credit? The Seaforth's company commander,
46:43Major Stuart Lynch, was honest about how hard that was. It was a section commander's battle, he wrote,
46:51and each did his job more than admirably. Some were luckier than others, some results more spectacular,
46:59but I can assure you, when it came to the question of awards, it was a very difficult decision to
47:05favor
47:05one over the other. Keith Thompson, the sergeant who had knelt on the open road in the dark and laid
47:12the
47:12mines by hand, received an immediate Distinguished Conduct Medal for his Coolness and Tenacity,
47:20and his leadership. Smith was recommended for the Victoria Cross. It was gazetted on December 20, 1944.
47:29It was the third and the last Victoria Cross won by a Canadian in the Italian campaign, after Paul
47:36Triquet at Casa Berardi and John Mahoney at the MELPHA. And Smith would remain the only Canadian private
47:43soldier to receive the Victoria Cross in the Second World War, the only private. A man the army had tried
47:51to
47:52make a corporal nine times and failed nine times, which left the army with a very particular problem.
48:00To receive the Victoria Cross, Smokey Smith was going to have to stand in front of the King of England
48:06in Buckingham Palace and behave. The army had seen how Smith behaved, and what it did with him the night
48:15before he left Italy is one of the best stories he ever told. Before Smokey Smith could be sent to
48:22London to meet the King, the army had to get him out of Italy in one piece, and, if possible,
48:29sober.
48:31Its solution was simple. The night before he left, the military police locked him in a cell in Naples.
48:38Smith told the story himself, years later, and he did not sound offended.
48:44I got locked up in Naples, he said. They just wanted Smokey to be in the right spot.
48:50They also gave him beer. By his own account, that made him very happy.
48:56So the only Canadian private to win the Victoria Cross in the Second World War spent his last night
49:03in Italy behind bars, drinking beer the army had supplied, so that he would be on the plane in the
49:09morning. Then, Buckingham Palace. King George VI received him in his private apartments. Smith had
49:18been told how to behave in front of a King, and part of that was a bow. Smith let it
49:24be known that
49:25anyone who expected him to bow was out of his mind. When the moment came, he did what a soldier
49:31does in
49:31front of his commander-in-chief. He saluted. It was kind of astounding, he said later. I just saluted,
49:40and that was it. And then, with real warmth, I'd never met a King before. He was great to get
49:48along
49:48with. There was one more condition. He was not allowed to wear the medal for three days, so that
49:55the newspapers in Canada could carry the story at the same moment as the British ones. When the three
50:02days were up, somebody found him and said, Okay, Smokey, you can put on that medal now.
50:08So I took it out and put it on my chest, he said, and I never bought another drink that
50:14day.
50:15He flew home to British Columbia and New Westminster gave him a parade. Then he went back to being what
50:22he had been before the war, a man trying to find his feet. He took his back pay to Vancouver,
50:29and in his
50:30own cheerful words, spent all of it in a month. In 1947, he married Esther Weston. They had two
50:39children. When Korea came, Smith re-enlisted. He wanted to go. The army would not send the most famous
50:47private in Canada into combat. Instead, he became a recruiting sergeant in Vancouver, the man who had
50:55been busted nine times, now sitting across a desk from young Canadians, deciding whether they would
51:01make soldiers. He retired from the army in 1964, a sergeant at last. Then he and Esther ran a small
51:11travel agency together for more than 20 years. And one by one, the other Canadian Victoria Cross
51:18recipients died, until only he was left. In 2004, at 90, he went back to Italy. He was asked if
51:28the
51:28trip brought back good memories. None that I care about, he said. There really are no good memories.
51:36Asked if he hated the Germans he had fought, he said no. Why should I? They had a job to
51:43do too.
51:44Ernest Alvia Smith died at home in Vancouver on August 3, 2005. He was 91. His body lay in state
51:53in the House of Commons in Ottawa, the private who never took orders, resting where the country's
52:00leaders lie. After a full military funeral in Vancouver, his ashes were scattered on the Strait
52:08of Georgia, off the coast he had come from. Now, come back with me one last time to where this
52:15story
52:16began. October 22, 1944. A ditch beside a road near the church of Peave Sestina. It is dark, it is
52:27wet,
52:27and a panther is coming down the road. In the end, there was just Jimmy and I, and then he
52:34got wounded,
52:35so that left only me. At the start, those words sounded like the moment a soldier realizes he is
52:43finished. You know now what they really describe. They describe the moment a 30-year-old private,
52:50with a British launcher, a tommy gun, and no tank for miles, decided that the road ended with him.
52:58So what stopped the panthers that came for one Canadian guarding his wounded friend? It was not
53:05the river, which had taken the tanks away. It was not the doctrine or the heavy weapons,
53:10which arrived hours too late to matter. It was a sergeant laying mines by hand in the dark,
53:16and a private, who got up out of the ditch, walked into the road, carried his friend to safety,
53:23and then walked back out alone, so that the Germans would keep believing an army was waiting for them.
53:30Canada went to that war as a country of 11 million, with an army of volunteers,
53:36carrying other people's weapons into the places other armies did not want.
53:42That night on the Savio, one of those volunteers held a road with no armor behind him. And the next
53:49morning, the chief of staff of the German army in Italy had to call what happened there a mess.
53:57Jimmy Tennant lived. That was the whole point. Smokey Smith spent the rest of his life insisting he was
54:04nobody special. I never thought about being brave, he said. I just did what had to be done. On that
54:12road, in that dark, what had to be done was stay. And he stayed. Thank you for spending this time
54:21with
54:21Smokey Smith and the Canadians of the Seaforth Highlanders. If you think what the Canadians did
54:28on that road deserves to be remembered, a like genuinely helps it reach more people. And if you'd
54:35like to hear more of these stories, we're here every week. And if your father, your grandfather,
54:42or your uncle served in the Second World War, I'd be honored to hear about him in the comments.