- 37 minutes ago
At Anzio, a small force of Canadian and American soldiers held eight miles of flooded farmland against a German army that expected easy answers — and instead found men who moved like hunters in the dark. This military history story follows Tommy Prince, the Canadian sergeant who used camouflage, patience, and fieldcraft to repair a cut telephone wire in broad daylight, then went on to stalk enemy positions across the Mussolini Canal.
The transcript traces how the First Special Service Force turned hunting, scouting, and outdoor skills into battlefield advantage: blackened faces, silent patrols, prisoners taken without a shot, and German officers writing that the “black devils” were all around them. It also connects that Anzio fighting to the recruiting of trappers, bushmen, farmers’ sons, and Indigenous volunteers in Canada, where moving unseen was a life skill long before it became a war skill.
This is a WW2 documentary-style narration about Canadian war stories, military reconnaissance, special forces history, and the hidden cost of elite combat. It also follows Prince beyond Italy, including his Silver Star action in southern France and the difficult return home.
For listeners searching for WW2 stories, Canadian military history, special forces documentary narration, and battlefield history about Tommy Prince, Anzio, and the First Special Service Force, this story offers a gripping mix of war history, scouting, and human endurance. It is ideal for military history fans, history podcasts, and long-form narrated war stories.
The transcript traces how the First Special Service Force turned hunting, scouting, and outdoor skills into battlefield advantage: blackened faces, silent patrols, prisoners taken without a shot, and German officers writing that the “black devils” were all around them. It also connects that Anzio fighting to the recruiting of trappers, bushmen, farmers’ sons, and Indigenous volunteers in Canada, where moving unseen was a life skill long before it became a war skill.
This is a WW2 documentary-style narration about Canadian war stories, military reconnaissance, special forces history, and the hidden cost of elite combat. It also follows Prince beyond Italy, including his Silver Star action in southern France and the difficult return home.
For listeners searching for WW2 stories, Canadian military history, special forces documentary narration, and battlefield history about Tommy Prince, Anzio, and the First Special Service Force, this story offers a gripping mix of war history, scouting, and human endurance. It is ideal for military history fans, history podcasts, and long-form narrated war stories.
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LearningTranscript
00:00February 8th, 1944. A stone farmhouse on the Pontine Plain, north of Littoria, Italy.
00:07The nearest German position is 200 meters away, close enough that the men inside it can see the
00:14doorway of this house and anyone standing in it. Inside, alone, a Canadian sergeant is lying on
00:21the floor of an upstairs room with a telephone handset against his ear. Sergeant Thomas George
00:27Prince, 28 years old, from the Broken Head Ojibwe Nation at Scanabury, Manitoba, one of 11 children.
00:35As a boy, he tracked and hunted for the family table, and he could shoot. Behind him, running
00:42back across 1,400 meters of open, drained farmland, is the wire that connects him to his own guns.
00:49Everything he sees through that window, a truck, a gun pit, men moving between buildings, travels
00:56down that wire, and comes back as artillery. He has been in this house, watching, for hours. He will
01:03stay in it for 24. Then a shell lands somewhere out in the field behind him, and the handset goes
01:09dead.
01:11Now think about what a soldier is trained to do here. The line is cut, the position is compromised.
01:17You wait for dark, you crawl out, you find the break, you crawl back. That is doctrine. That is
01:24what the manual says, and the manual is not wrong. Prince does not do that. He goes downstairs into
01:31the farmhouse the Italian family left behind, and he finds their clothes. He takes off his uniform,
01:37he puts on a farmer's shirt and trousers, he picks up a hoe from beside the door, and in broad
01:43daylight,
01:44in full view of German observers 200 meters away, he walks out into the field and starts weeding.
01:50He does not hurry. Hurrying is what would kill him. He works the ground the way a man works ground
01:57he
01:57owns, moving a little, bending, chopping at the weeds, moving a little more. And every few meters,
02:04without ever looking down at it, he is following the line of his own telephone wire. It takes him a
02:10long time. The Germans watch him. They let him work. When he reaches the break, he kneels, and he ties
02:18his
02:19shoelace. That is all a man watching from 200 meters can see. A farmer kneeling in a field, fussing with
02:27his
02:28boot. Under his hands, the two ends of the wire come together. Then he stands up, and, by several accounts,
02:37he
02:37shakes his fist at the Germans. And he shakes his fist at the Allied lines, too. The way a man
02:44might curse
02:45both armies for wrecking his crop. And he goes back to hoeing. Then he walks into the farmhouse, picks up
02:52the
02:52handset, and goes back to work. Before that day ended, four German positions had been destroyed on his reports.
03:00Hold that image, because we are going to come back to it more than once. Not the courage, the choice.
03:07The
03:08choice to solve a battlefield problem with patience and camouflage, instead of speed and cover. That is
03:15not how the war was being fought 200 meters away. If what the Canadians did on this front matters to
03:21you,
03:22a subscribe helps these stories reach more people. Now let me show you the ground.
03:29Prince belonged to the 1st Special Service Force, a joint Canadian-American unit, and on the 1st of
03:37February 1944, it had been dropped into the worst corner of the Anzio Beachhead, the right flank,
03:44along the Mussolini Canal, where the drained, pontine marshes ran out into flat, wet,
03:51treeless farmland cut by irrigation ditches. Here is the number I want you to remember.
03:58The force in that sector was down to roughly 1,200 men. The frontage it was told to hold was
04:068 miles.
04:08That is, twice the length of front assigned to an entire American Infantry Division on the same
04:15beachhead. A division being something on the order of 15,000 men. 1,200, holding double the ground of
04:2415,000. And they held it for 99 days without relief. Across the canal from them were regular German
04:32formations, the 715th Division, and elements of the Hermann-Golling Division, professionals who had
04:38been fighting in Italy for months and had already destroyed two American ranger battalions in this
04:43same sector a few days earlier at Cisterna. These were not garrison troops. They had every reason to be
04:50confident. And within weeks of the Canadians and Americans arriving on that canal, those German
04:55units pulled their forward positions back. In some places by as much as half a mile. Not because they
05:01were pushed. Because of what was happening to them at night. That is the thing worth explaining. Not that
05:08Canadians were brave. Every army in that war had brave men, including the one on the far bank. The
05:14question is narrower and stranger than that. Why did the Germans facing this stretch of front stop
05:20describing the men opposite them the way you describe an enemy unit, with a number, a strength, a frontage,
05:29and start describing them the way you describe something in the dark that is looking for you?
05:35Because a German officer would soon write a sentence about them in his diary, and that sentence would be
05:41found on his body. It says nothing about weapons or numbers or tactics. It is about sound. And it is
05:51the first crack in a much bigger answer. The men who went out on those nights had a routine before
05:57they
05:57crossed the canal, and it is worth watching, because everything about it is the opposite of what an army
06:04usually asks of a soldier. They blackened their faces with boot polish, hands and neck as well.
06:10They went through their own equipment piece by piece, jumping in place, listening for the one thing
06:17that rattled, a loose sling swivel, a cartridge in a pocket, a full canteen, and they fixed it or they
06:24left it behind. They carried very little ammunition, because on a good night they would not fire. Some
06:31carried the V-42, the long thin fighting knife the force had been issued, worn point down on the chest.
06:38Then they went into the water of the drainage ditches, in the dark, in February, and they came out the
06:45other side wet, and they stayed wet for the next six hours. Then they went looking, not attacking,
06:52looking. A patrol from that sector would work its way as much as 1,500 feet behind the German forward
06:58positions, that is nearly half a kilometer inside the enemy's own ground, past his outposts, in among the
07:05farm buildings where his mortar crew slept and his signalers ran their cable. And then they would lie
07:11still and watch him, sometimes for hours, learning which building held the machine gun and which one
07:17held the men who were off duty. Understand what that requires. It is not a dash, it is not a
07:24charge. It is a
07:25man in wet clothing, in the cold, holding one position for 2 hours without shifting his weight, because shifting
07:32his weight makes a sound in gravel, and he is inside the hearing range of 40 Germans. And here is
07:38what the patrols
07:39brought home. Prisoners. Not corpses. Prisoners. Lifted out of dugouts and slit trenches and walked back across the
07:48canal, sometimes without a single shot being fired in that sector all night. A German sentry would be
07:54alive at 2 in the morning and, quietly, without an alarm, without a flare, he would simply cease to be
08:01part of the German army by 3. Tommy Prince, the man you watched hoeing that field, became known in the
08:08force for going out alone, not with a section, alone, into ground the Germans believed they controlled.
08:16Now, the sentence I promised you. A German officer on that front was killed, and when his body was gone
08:23through, his personal diary came back to Allied Intelligence. The line he had written reads,
08:29The black devils are all around us, and we never hear them come. Read it again, because the important
08:36word is not devils. It is here. That officer was not writing about firepower. He was not writing about
08:44numbers, or artillery, or tanks. All the things a professional soldier is trained to assess and report.
08:51He was writing about a sense. He had stopped analyzing an enemy formation, and started listening
08:57in the dark, like a man alone in a wood. The black came from the boot polish. An American sergeant
09:04in the force,
09:05Viktor Keisner, heard the words shouted out of the dark on a night raid,
09:10Schwarze Teufel, black devil, as one of his own men closed on a German position.
09:18And the force made it worse on purpose. The men carried printed stickers with the unit's red spearhead
09:24patch and a line in German, Das dicke Ende kommt noch. The rough sense of it is, the worst is
09:32still to
09:33come. They left them behind on the night's work, on equipment, on dugouts, where the relief shift
09:40would find them at first light. So the Germans in that sector woke up to two facts every morning.
09:47Someone had been standing where they slept, and someone had left a note about it.
09:53Now follow what that did to a professional army, because the Germans responded exactly the way
09:59trained soldiers should. They pulled their forward positions back, in places by as much as half a
10:05mile, to get out of reach. They thickened the sector. Field Marshal Kesselring ended up committing
10:12more men to that stretch of the beachhead than his own plan called for, because of night raiding by a
10:17force he could not pin down. That is not panic. That is a competent enemy making a rational adjustment.
10:25Which is why what happened next is so strange, and it is the reason I want you to keep listening.
10:31The prisoners kept coming back across that canal, and under interrogation they kept saying the same
10:36thing. Not one of them, several of them, independently. They believed they were facing a division.
10:44A German division on that front meant somewhere between 10 and 15 thousand men.
10:50You already know the real figure. Roughly 1200. Say those two numbers next to each other,
10:56and you will feel how large the error is. The German army, the most experienced ground force on that
11:03continent, with signals intelligence, prisoner interrogation, aerial reconnaissance, and patrol
11:09reports of its own, was overestimating the strength in front of it by a factor of 10.
11:16Armies do not make that mistake by accident. They are made to make it. And the way 1200 wet men
11:23on an
11:23eight-mile front convinced 15,000 Germans that a division was watching them has almost nothing to
11:30do with weapons, and everything to do with how those men moved across ground. The order that made it
11:36possible came from the force's commander, an American. Robert Frederick, in his late 30s, a man who would be
11:43wounded eight times before the war ended. His instruction to that eight-mile front was simple
11:49and close to merciless. Nobody sits still. Every night, from every company, patrols go out. There
11:58will be no quiet nights on this sector. Now watch what that does when you draw it on a map,
12:04because this
12:04is the trick, and it is not a weapons trick. The patrols did not go out in one place. On
12:11a given
12:12night, small groups crossed the canal at points spread miles apart, and several of them pushed deep,
12:17past the German forward companies, in among the support positions behind them. So when the German
12:23reports came in at dawn, they came in from everywhere. A machine gun post north of Sassano reports movement.
12:30A mortar section well to the rear reports a sentry missing. A battalion on the far side of the sector
12:37reports a firefight at its boundary. Three separate German commanders, three separate sectors, one night.
12:44Put yourself in the office where those reports land. You are a German staff officer. You have no
12:51photograph of the enemy line, only paper. And the paper in front of you says the enemy is active
12:56across eight miles of front, and also behind it, simultaneously, every single night, without pause.
13:04What strength would you write in your estimate? Nobody sane writes 1200. You write a division,
13:11and you ask for more men, and Kesselring sends them, because the paper says so.
13:16The Germans were not fooled by a lie. They were fooled by arithmetic they had every reason to trust.
13:23Now the price. Because I am not going to pretend this was clever and free.
13:28Those same 1200 men held that line for 99 days without relief. The ground was reclaimed marsh.
13:36Dig two feet, and you are standing in water. They lived in wet holes in February and March.
13:42They went out at night, came back at dawn, tried to sleep in daylight under German artillery observation,
13:49and went out again. Men lost the feeling in their feet. The force's numbers ground steadily downward
13:57the whole time, and there were almost no Canadian replacements coming. Canada had committed a limited
14:04pool to this unit, and as casualties mounted, the Canadian share of the force fell to about a third of
14:11its strength. So every night, fewer men had to look like more men. And they did.
14:19Here is where I want to slow you down, because this is the point most tellings of this story get
14:26wrong.
14:27The easy explanation is aggression. Elite commandos, hard men, sharp knives, keep punching.
14:36But aggression on its own does not survive 99 nights. Aggression on its own gets a patrol chased,
14:45pinned by mortars on the way home, and wiped out on the third or fourth outing. And after two of
14:51those,
14:52patrols stop going deep, and the illusion collapses in a week. What made it last was not the going in,
14:59it was the coming out. These men could break contact. They could take a prisoner out of a hole in
15:07the
15:07ground and be gone before the alarm ran up the line, moving along the irrigation ditches with the
15:13water taking the sound and the banks taking their outline off the skyline. They chose their route by
15:19the wind and by what the ground would do underfoot. Soft earth over gravel, wet over dry. They knew that
15:28a
15:28man's silhouette above a dike is visible far longer than he thinks, and that the eye catches movement,
15:35not shape. So you move when there is other movement, and you freeze when there is not.
15:41That is not raiding. There is a different word for it. That is stalking. The discipline of getting
15:48close to something alert enough to run and leaving before it knows what happened. And the Germans,
15:55to their credit, understood quickly that they were losing something they were supposed to own.
16:01No man's land is not a gift. It is contested every night by both sides. And whoever patrols it harder
16:09owns the information, where the guns are, where the boundaries are, where the attack will land.
16:16The Germans had been very good at this. On this sector, they were being pushed out of it. So they
16:23answered. And their answer is the single most revealing German document in this story.
16:30A written order from a German headquarters was taken off a prisoner and translated. It reads,
16:36in part, you are fighting an elite Canadian American force. They are treacherous, unmerciful,
16:44and clever. You cannot afford to relax. And then it makes an offer. The first soldier,
16:52or group of soldiers, to capture one of these men will be given a 10-day furlough. Read that as
16:59a
16:59soldier would. A 10-day pass, in Italy, in 1944, was close to the most valuable thing a private could
17:08be
17:08handed. But notice what the order does not contain. It does not contain a method. It does not tell the
17:15German soldier how to detect these patrols, how to counter them, what to change. It offers a reward,
17:22and calls the enemy clever. When a professional army stops issuing technique and starts issuing bounties,
17:30it is telling you something about itself. And it raises the question this whole story turns on.
17:36Where does a man learn to move like that? Not in Italy. Not on that canal. The answer is a
17:44sheet
17:44of paper pinned to a notice board in Canada in 1942. And what it asked for was not soldiers.
17:521942. Canadian army posts, notice boards in orderly rooms, and a call for volunteers that reads like
18:00nothing else in that war. The American version of the notice asked for single men,
18:0621 to 35, with three years or more of schooling. Then it listed the occupations it preferred. And here
18:14is the list. Rangers, Lumberjacks, North Woodsmen, Hunters, Prospectors, Explorers, Game Wardens.
18:23Read that again, and notice what is missing. There is no military skill on it. Not marksman,
18:30not veteran, not machine gunner, not parachutist. Every single item is a civilian trade practiced
18:37outdoors, alone or in a pair, in bad weather, at a distance from other people.
18:43The Canadian recruiters were working to the same idea, and one of them put it in words that are worth
18:49hearing exactly. They wanted trappers and hunters, bushmen, farmers' sons, all good individual outdoor
18:57types who would know their way around in the woods and in the country and in all kinds of weather
19:03conditions. I want you to hold on to two words in that sentence, individual and weather, because most of
19:14what an army does to a recruit is the opposite of both. An army takes an individual and teaches him
19:22to act as part of a section, to move when the section moves, to fire when told, to hold his
19:29position
19:30and not to think alone. And an army treats weather as a hardship to be endured. What these recruiters
19:37were shopping for were men who had already spent years alone, in weather, making decisions with
19:45nobody watching. Roughly 500 Canadians came through that door. They joined a force authorized at around
19:53900 Canadians and 900 Americans, and they went to a post in Montana called Fort William Henry Harrison
20:01to be turned into something. Meet two of them, briefly. Herb Pepard from Truro, Nova Scotia.
20:09He grew up in the depression, could not afford school books, and left school at 16 to work in a
20:15lumber
20:15yard. He volunteered, believing he was joining a new parachute battalion. He was not, but by then he was in,
20:23and he would come out of the war with an American silver star and go home to Nova Scotia.
20:29Jack Callohill, 19, from Hamilton, Ontario, already a soldier when the call came.
20:36Eighteen months later, on a mountain in Italy, mortar fragments would put more than a hundred
20:41pieces of steel into his body. He survived that, went home, and spent 37 years working in a factory
20:48making cans. And the man you met in the farmhouse. Tommy Prince was already in uniform, a sapper in the
20:56Royal Canadian Engineers, and he volunteered onward, into parachute training, and from there into this
21:02force. He did not arrive as a natural to be discovered. He arrived as a soldier who had been
21:08a hunter first. Now, what did the army actually teach these men in Montana? Parachuting, demolitions,
21:17mountain climbing, and rope work. Skiing. Most of them had never been on skis in their lives.
21:25Handling the force's oversized tracked snow vehicle. Hand-to-hand fighting. Look hard at that list,
21:34because it tells you the whole argument. Every one of those is a loud skill. Every one is a technique
21:42you
21:42can teach a fit young man in a matter of months, on a timetable, with instructors, and a syllabus.
21:50Not one of them is the skill that emptied the ground along the Mussolini Canal at night.
21:57Moving through country without being detected is not a course. It is not something you learn in
22:04eight weeks in Montana. It is what happens to a man's body after 10 years of walking up on animals
22:11that will be gone at the first wrong sound. Where the punishment for clumsiness is not a failing grade.
22:19It is going home with nothing. The army did not train that into these men. The army bought it,
22:27already made, and then bolted parachutes and explosives onto it. And here is where your picture
22:32of this has to change. Because if this were only about one clever unit, it would be a footnote. A
22:37special
22:38force assembled by a lucky recruiting notice. It was not one unit. The same logic was running right
22:44through the Canadian army. Ask where Canadian battalions found their scouts and snipers, and the
22:49answer comes back the same every time. The historian Mark Zilke put it plainly,
22:54The best snipers were usually country boys who knew how to hunt. They knew how to handle a gun,
22:58and handle it well. British battalions were drawing heavily on men from cities and industrial towns.
23:04Canadian battalions were drawing on farms, bush country, trap lines, and reserves, from a country
23:10of 11 and a half million people with an enormous amount of empty ground in it. And the Canadian
23:15schools that trained those men were not gentle about it. On one sniping course, 39 men applied.
23:2211 of them were sent straight back to their units, not for failing the shooting, but for failing the
23:28field craft, the stalking, the ability to be invisible and patient. So the force at Anzio was not a freak.
23:36It was the same national raw material, concentrated, and handed an eight-mile front. Which raises the
23:45obvious objection, and it is a serious one. Germany was not a country without woodsmen. Germany had
23:52foresters, gamekeepers, whole regiments with hunting in their name and hunting in their traditions. They
24:00had the same raw material. So why, on that canal, could they not answer? Start with the money, because
24:08that is where this actually comes from. For the men on that recruiting list, hunting was not a weekend,
24:13it was income. A trap line was a business with a route, a schedule, and a ledger. A cartridge cost
24:20money,
24:20and a decade when there was none, Canada in the 1930s had one in five workers unemployed at the
24:26worst of it. And farm families in Saskatchewan and Manitoba were watching topsoil leave in the wind.
24:32In that economy, a boy who could put meat on the table was not doing a hobby. He was doing
24:37his
24:38share of the household's survival. And if he missed, the family ate what there was. Now think about what
24:44that does to a person over ten years. A man who hunts for sport learns to shoot. A man who
24:50hunts
24:50because the alternative is going without learns something narrower and much more useful in war.
24:56He learns not to waste the first chance. He learns that the shot is the last five seconds of a
25:01two-hour
25:02job, and that everything decisive happens before it. The approach, the wind, the choice of ground,
25:08the discipline of not moving. That is the whole of what happened on the Mussolini Canal, translated
25:14back into its original language. Tommy Prince came out of exactly that. His family were of the broken
25:20head Ojibwe nation at Scanterbury, Manitoba. Eleven children, a reserve, the depths of the depression.
25:27He tracked and hunted as a boy, and by every account he could shoot. He also spent six years in
25:33the army
25:33cadets before the war. The skills that made him famous in Italy were not issued to him at Fort
25:38Harrison. They were the ones his family had needed him to have when he was 12. And he was not
25:44an
25:44exception in the Canadian army. Indigenous men volunteered at a rate far out of proportion to
25:50their numbers. Thousands of them, from communities that were denied the vote federally, whose men had
25:55to leave a reserve to enlist in a war fought by a country that did not treat them as citizens.
26:01In the sniping and scouting sections of Canadian battalions, they were disproportionately the ones
26:06who succeeded, for the same reason. The trade came with them. So that is where the raw material came
26:12from. Now let me deal with the objection I left you with, because it is the one a careful viewer
26:18raises,
26:18and the answer is not what you would expect. Germany did have hunters. It had a deep hunting culture,
26:25foresters, gamekeepers, and light infantry regiments that carried the word Jäger, hunter, in their titles.
26:32On paper, the raw material was there. But look at who was actually dug in across that water in February
26:391944.
26:41The formation holding much of that stretch was the 715th division. It had spent its existence as a static
26:48division in occupied France, the kind of unit built for garrison work and coastal watch, filled out with
26:54older men and limited category soldiers, only later reorganized and pushed into Italy as a mobile
27:00formation. Alongside them, on that same waterline, the Germans put Italian marines into the line to
27:06thicken the frontage. And behind them, elements of the Hermann Göring division, a genuinely dangerous
27:13formation, but a panzer formation whose skill was armor, guns, and counterattack.
27:19That is the honest picture. Not a wall of alpine hunters. A garrison-bred division, foreign marines
27:25filling gaps, and armored troops used as infantry, on wet ground with no cover and a canal that was
27:32built like an anti-tank ditch. Steep sides, 16 feet of water at the bottom. Now put a 19-year
27:38-old
27:39rifleman of that division in his hole on the bank at 2 in the morning and watch him do everything
27:44correctly. He hears something in the ditch line. He does what his orders tell him to do. He stays in
27:50his position, because his position is a fixed point in a fire plan, and if he leaves it, there is
27:56a gap.
27:57He fires a flare. Under the light, he sees drained farmland, a dike, an irrigation ditch, and nothing
28:04else, because the men in that ditch stopped moving the instant the flare went up and are lying in water.
28:11The flare burns out. He calls his section commander. A machine gun fires a burst into the dark on a
28:18fixed
28:18line at a map reference chosen weeks ago. He has done nothing wrong. He has followed the system
28:25exactly. And in the morning, a man from the mortar section 300 meters behind him is missing. Do you see
28:32the shape of it now? He is not permitted to hunt. He is permitted to hold. That flare told the
28:38men in the
28:39ditch where his post was. That burst of machine gun fire told them the ark it covered. Every correct,
28:45disciplined, doctrinal thing he did handed information across the water to men whose entire
28:51profession was collecting exactly that kind of information, and gave them nothing back, because
28:58nothing they had done left a trace. So the Germans on that canal were not beaten by better men. They
29:06were
29:06beaten by a mismatch between two definitions of what a soldier at the front is for. And that mismatch is
29:15the real answer to this whole story. The one that would still be true even if Berlin had shipped in
29:22its
29:22finest mountain troops. To see why, you have to look at what the German army did next when it finally
29:30stopped
29:30guessing and tried to take the night back by force. On the 16th of February 1944, at half past six
29:38in the
29:38morning, the German army gave its answer. Not a patrol. Not a raid. Virtually every German gun at Anzio opened
29:46at once. And behind that barrage came seven divisions, aimed at splitting the beachhead in half and driving it
29:53into the sea. It was called Operation Fischfang, and it was the German army doing the thing it did better
29:59than anyone in the world, concentrating overwhelming force on a chosen line and breaking it. The main
30:06weight fell in the center, against the American 45th division astride the Albano road, with pressure
30:12applied around the rest of the perimeter to hold everyone else in place. And on the first days, it worked.
30:18The German attack tore into the beachhead and came close enough to the sea that the outcome was
30:23genuinely in doubt. Then it was ground down, by allied artillery, by aircraft, by naval guns offshore,
30:31and by men who would not leave their holds. On the 20th of February, the Germans called Fischfang off.
30:38Five days had cost them 5,389 men killed, wounded, and missing. Now hold those two pictures side by side,
30:50because this is the center of everything I have been building for you. On the right flank, in the wet
30:58fields
30:58along the Mussolini Canal, the barrage came down on 1,200 men in waterlogged holes. They took it, the way
31:07everyone on that beachhead took it. And that night, with the great German offensive still running, with seven
31:14divisions in motion a few miles away, the patrols went out again. Blackened faces, wet ditches, a section
31:23commander lying still in a drainage cut, counting the seconds between the machine gun's fixed line
31:29bursts, waiting for the pattern to repeat so he could move inside it. That is the whole war in this
31:38sector in one image. By day, the Germans applied mass, and mass is aimable. It needs a target with an
31:47outline, a line, a salient, a road junction, a division. By night, the force applied something mass
31:55cannot touch, because there is nothing to aim at. You cannot lay a seven-division fire plan on four men
32:03in a ditch. And now the answer this story has been walking toward. The German soldier on that canal
32:11was employed to hold a line. That is not a criticism, it is a doctrine, and it had conquered most
32:17of a
32:18continent. A line is a system. Fixed positions, interlocking arcs, registered defensive fire, a reserve
32:27behind for the counterattack. It is built to defeat the thing that comes at it. Everything
32:33in it assumes an enemy that will eventually present itself. The men opposite them were doing
32:39something structurally different. They were not attacking the line. They were working the ground
32:45the line stood on. Going through it, around it, behind it, taking a man out of it, and leaving. Night
32:54after night, for ninety-nine nights. You cannot defeat that with a fire plan, because a fire plan
33:00defends a place, and these men were not interested in places. You cannot defeat it with a counterattack,
33:07because a counterattack needs something to strike, and by the time the alarm reaches the reserve,
33:12there is nothing there but a missing sentry and a sticker on a dugout door.
33:16You cannot even defeat it with better men, and this is the part I want to be very clear about.
33:22If Berlin had shipped in its finest mountain troops that spring,
33:25they would still have been given the same job. Hold this position. Do not leave it. Report contact.
33:33The problem was never the quality of the German soldier. It was that his role and his enemy's
33:38role were not the same activity. Which is why the German language about them changed. Go back to the
33:44documents and watch it happen. Early on, you get the normal vocabulary of a professional army. Strength
33:51estimates. Sector activity. A division's worth of enemy in front of us. Then you get an officer's
33:57private diary, found on his body. The black devils are all around us, and we never hear them come.
34:04Then you get a headquarters order taken off a prisoner, which does not describe a formation at all.
34:10It describes a character. Treacherous, unmerciful, and clever. And it offers a ten-day pass to any man
34:19who can lay hands on one of them. That is not how one army writes about another army. Nobody in
34:25the
34:25Wehrmacht wrote that the American 45th division was clever or offered a furlough for capturing a
34:31British gunner. Those are the words of men who have stopped assessing an opponent and started describing
34:37a predator. And that, finally, is where the idea comes from that the men on this front did not move
34:44like soldiers. The Germans were not paying a compliment. They were reporting a change in
34:49their own condition. A soldier fights a formation he can see on a map. A hunted man lies in a
34:56hole and
34:57listens. But everything you have watched so far was defensive. Twelve hundred men holding ground and
35:04owning the dark on it. In late May, the beachhead broke out. And the question nobody had answered yet
35:11was what this kind of soldier does when the war stops being about holding a line and the ground
35:18in front of him opens up all the way to Rome. The 23rd of May, 1944. After four months, the
35:26beachhead
35:27attacked. And here is where you find out whether everything I have told you is real. Because
35:32holding ground at night is one thing. Attacking in daylight is the test that breaks specialists.
35:38The force went forward with the rest of the beachhead, up out of the wet fields and into the hills,
35:44Monte Arestino, then the town of Rocca Massima on its high ground. Same men. Same wet boots. Now moving
35:52against positions in daylight uphill. But watch how they did it, because the trade came with them.
35:59Approaches chosen along ground that hid movement. Positions worked around rather than charged frontally.
36:05The habit, beaten into these men over years, long before any army wanted them, of spending an hour
36:12to save a rush. On the 4th of June, they were at the edge of Rome, and the force was
36:17given the job
36:18of getting into the city and seizing the bridges over the Tiber before the Germans could blow them.
36:22They went in at night, through streets they did not know, in a city where every corner could hold a
36:27rear
36:27guard. They took the bridges. Their commander, Frederick, was hit three separate times in that single day,
36:34and kept going. The force was the first allied unit into the center of Rome. Then, on the 14th of
36:41August, a different kind of job entirely, the invasion of southern France. Two islands, Port Croix
36:48and Levant, sat off the landing beaches with German guns on them that could reach the invasion fleet.
36:54The force went in at night, again, and again up cliffs the Germans had not bothered to defend heavily,
37:00because nobody sensible would climb them in the dark. The islands were cleared. The 7th Army landed
37:06behind them. And then the force was sent to the Franco-Italian border, into the Maritime Alps. And
37:13there, on the 3rd of September 1944, you get the clearest single demonstration of everything this story
37:20has been about. Tommy Prince, now a sergeant, took one other man and walked into the mountains behind
37:25the German positions. Not a raid, a reconnaissance. Seventy kilometers of rock and ridge, on foot,
37:33inside enemy-held terrain. Seventy-two hours without food and without sleep. He located German outpost
37:41positions. He located gun positions. And he found their bivouac area. The place where the troops in that
37:48sector actually lived. Then he came back and reported it. Precisely enough that on the 5th of September,
37:55his regiment moved forward onto new heights and destroyed what he had found. The information brought
38:01in by that two-man patrol contributed to the capture of roughly a thousand German soldiers.
38:07Stop on that figure for a moment. Two men. Three days. No battle. No bombardment. No breakthrough.
38:16Around a thousand prisoners. Now put it next to the number that opened this story. Five days of
38:22Operation Fishfang. Seven German divisions. Every gun on the front. Five thousand three hundred and
38:28eighty-nine German casualties. And a beachhead that did not break. I am not telling you that a patrol is
38:35worth an offensive. I am telling you that these two things were done by two different professions.
38:40One of them spends men to take ground. The other spends patience to take information and lets the
38:46ground follow. Prince was awarded the American Silver Star for those three days, on top of the
38:53military medal he had earned in the farmhouse with the hoe. But now the ledger, because this costs
38:58something and I am not going to hand you the triumph without it. Across its whole existence, that force,
39:04a unit that never exceeded around eighteen hundred men, inflicted an estimated twelve thousand casualties
39:11on the Germans and took some seven thousand prisoners. And it suffered about two thousand three hundred and
39:17fourteen casualties of its own. Do that arithmetic against its own strength and you get a turnover of
39:23more than six hundred percent. Every fighting position in that unit was emptied and refilled, on average,
39:30six times over. That is what an elite unit actually means when you take the glamour out of it.
39:37It means the men in it are used until there are none of the original ones left.
39:42The Canadian half suffered a particular kind of erosion. Canada had committed a fixed pool of volunteers
39:49to this force and could not feed it replacements the way the Americans could. So as the killed and the
39:55wounded
39:55went out, the Canadian share fell, from half the unit at the start to roughly a third by the end.
40:02The men who had been recruited off those notice boards in 1942 were being subtracted, one at a time,
40:08and not replaced by men like themselves. By the late autumn of 1944, the force had done what it
40:15was built to do, and the war had moved into a phase of great armies and broad fronts where nobody
40:20knew quite where to put it. So on the 5th of December 1944, in a field in southern France,
40:27the Canadians of that force were paraded for the last time. And what happened to them afterwards,
40:32to the men who had made the German army stop sleeping on a canal in Italy, is the part of
40:37this story
40:38Canada took the longest to face. Go back to that field one last time.
40:43The 8th of February 1944. A man in borrowed farm clothes, working a hoe in front of 200 meters of
40:53German observation, bending down to tie a shoelace that did not need tying, joining two ends of wire
41:01with his fingers while an army watched him and saw a farmer. Everything in this story is in that image.
41:09Not strength. Not ferocity. Patience. Camouflage. And an absolute refusal to do the obvious thing
41:18quickly. On the 12th of February 1945, Tommy Prince stood in Buckingham Palace and was decorated by King
41:27George VI, the military medal for the farmhouse at La Toria, and the American Silver Star for the
41:34three days in the mountains. Photographs from that day show a slight man in battle dress,
41:40standing very straight. Then he went home to Manitoba. As a status Indian under the law of that
41:47time, he came back to a country where he could not vote in the federal elections he had fought for,
41:54where the benefits available to returning soldiers were administered differently for men from reserves,
42:00and where the doors that opened for other veterans did not open for him. He tried business and it failed.
42:08He spoke for indigenous veterans and for his community and asked the government to honor
42:14agreements it had made with their grandfathers. When the Korean War came, he went back into uniform
42:20and served two tours with the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry on knees that were already
42:27finished. The last part is hard to say plainly, so I will say it plainly. He ended up poor. He
42:36pawned his
42:36medals. He died on the 25th of November 1977 in a veterans hospital in Winnipeg at 62. Hundreds of
42:46people came to his funeral. Representatives of foreign governments came. His old regiment came. The
42:54recognition arrived, in full, about 10 minutes after it could do him any good. The others went quietly,
43:01the way most of them did. Jack Callowhill, the 19-year-old from Hamilton who took over 100 pieces
43:08of steel on the mountain at La Defensa, went home and worked in a factory making cans for 37 years.
43:16Herb Pepperd, the boy from Truro who left school at 16 for the lumber yard and came back with an
43:23American silver star, lived in Nova Scotia to the age of 98. Lieutenant Colonel Tom McWilliam,
43:31the Canadian who led the attack across the summit at La Defensa, did not come home at all. He was
43:37killed
43:38there in December 1943. In 2013, the United States Congress voted its gold medal to that Canadian
43:47American force, 70 years late, to men who were by then almost all gone. So, why did the Germans across
43:56that canal describe the men opposite them the way you describe something in the dark rather than something
44:03on a map? Because that is what those men had been before anyone put them in uniform. Trappers, guides,
44:12bush workers, farm boys, hunters. Men whose skill at moving unseen across ground was not a military
44:21technique, but a trade they had learned to feed their families in the worst decade Canada ever had.
44:27The army did not create that. The army was clever enough to go looking for it, put a notice on
44:35a wall
44:36asking for those exact jobs, and then hand those men an eight-mile front. And when it did, the front
44:44stopped being a line to be held and became ground to be worked. Twelve hundred men made fifteen thousand
44:52professional soldiers believed they were facing a division, pushed them back half a mile, took their
44:59sentries out of their holes without a shot, and left them writing in their diaries about a sound they never
45:05heard. That is the whole answer. They were not better soldiers than the men across the water. They were
45:13something the men across the water were never asked to be. Thank you for staying to the end of this
45:20one.
45:20If you think what the Canadians did on that canal, and what it later cost men like Tommy Prince at
45:27home,
45:28deserves to be remembered, a like genuinely helps this story reach more people. And if you'd like to
45:34hear more of them, we're here every week. One last thing, if you have a moment, if your father,
45:41your grandfather, or your uncle served in the Second World War, I'd be honored to hear about him in the
45:47comments.
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