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From Ortona’s shattered streets to the hills of Sicily and the rivers of Holland, this military history story traces how one Canadian division earned the German nickname “Red Patch Devils.” The focus is on the 1st Canadian Infantry Division, the Loyal Edmonton Regiment, the Seaforth Highlanders, and the hard lessons learned in urban combat, mountain fighting, and river crossings under fire.
The narration follows Jim Stone from a lone act of courage in Ortona to the brutal fighting in Italy, where the Canadians learned to move through buildings, blow holes through walls, and turn close-quarters warfare against German paratroopers. It also shows how that reputation carried into the final push through the Gothic Line and later into Holland, where the red patch on the sleeve still meant something to civilians and enemies alike.
This is a wartime documentary-style history story about WW2 Canadian Army combat, tactical adaptation, and the men who fought across Sicily, Italy, and the Netherlands. It is ideal for listeners who enjoy military history narration, Second World War stories, battlefield analysis, and long-form historical storytelling.
For fans of WW2 stories, Canadian military history, narrated history, and documentary-style war stories, this episode explores the Red Patch Devils, the Ortona battle, urban warfare, and the fighting spirit of the Canadian Army. It also fits searches for military history podcast content, history narration, and detailed World War 2 storytelling.
The narration follows Jim Stone from a lone act of courage in Ortona to the brutal fighting in Italy, where the Canadians learned to move through buildings, blow holes through walls, and turn close-quarters warfare against German paratroopers. It also shows how that reputation carried into the final push through the Gothic Line and later into Holland, where the red patch on the sleeve still meant something to civilians and enemies alike.
This is a wartime documentary-style history story about WW2 Canadian Army combat, tactical adaptation, and the men who fought across Sicily, Italy, and the Netherlands. It is ideal for listeners who enjoy military history narration, Second World War stories, battlefield analysis, and long-form historical storytelling.
For fans of WW2 stories, Canadian military history, narrated history, and documentary-style war stories, this episode explores the Red Patch Devils, the Ortona battle, urban warfare, and the fighting spirit of the Canadian Army. It also fits searches for military history podcast content, history narration, and detailed World War 2 storytelling.
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LearningTranscript
00:00December 21, 1943. Ortona, a small port town on the Adriatic coast of Italy, and a street called
00:07the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, the main street, wide enough for two cars, running dead straight
00:13through the middle of the town. Halfway down it, behind a steel shield, sat a German anti-tank gun.
00:20It was not there for tanks. It was laid flat along the pavement, at knee height,
00:25and every few minutes it fired the whole length of that street, and what it fired went through
00:31Stone and through men, without much difference between the two. Major Jim Stone had his company
00:37pressed into the doorways on both sides. They could not go forward, because going forward meant
00:43crossing the open mouths of the side streets, and the men who had tried that earlier in the day
00:48were still lying out in them. They could not sit still, either. Behind Stone's company came the
00:54rest of the loyal Edmonton regiment, and behind the Edmontons, a brigade, and behind the brigade,
01:01an army with orders to take this town. Stone was thirty-five. He was a big man, big enough that
01:08almost everyone who wrote about him afterwards mentioned it first, and he was holding a smoke
01:13grenade. He did not hand it to anyone. He threw it himself out into the middle of the road, and
01:19when
01:19the white cloud came boiling up off the cobbles, he walked into his own smoke. Alone. Towards a gun
01:27firing down a street at knee height. There was no plan beyond the smoke. There was no covering fire on
01:34earth that could reach that gun. There was one man going into a white cloud with a grenade in his
01:40hand.
01:41He came out of it beside the gun. He dropped the grenade over the top of the armor shield,
01:46into the crew, and the gun stopped, and it did not start again. The street was open. His company went
01:53forward into the houses. For that morning's work, Jim Stone was given the military cross. Remember him.
02:01He is the man we are following for the next hour, from a beach in Sicily to a river in
02:06the Netherlands,
02:07and almost everything he does is going to explain the two words at the top of this film. Because on
02:14the
02:14upper sleeve of the battle dress Stone was wearing, sewn flat against the wool, there was a rectangle of
02:20red cloth about the size of a playing card. No badge, no lettering, no design. A red rectangle.
02:29Every man in the 1st Canadian Infantry Division wore it, and the German paratroopers holding Ortona,
02:36the men behind that gun, knew that patch on sight, and they had a name for the people who wore
02:42it.
02:42They called them the Red Patch Devils. If what the Canadians did here matters to you, a subscribe
02:49helps these stories reach more people. I'd be glad to have you along. Now, that name is easy to say,
02:56and very hard to earn, and I am not interested in simply repeating it to you. There are three things
03:02I
03:02want to get to the bottom of. Who exactly gave them that name? What the Canadians had to do to
03:08be given it,
03:09and, this is the part almost nobody has heard, what those same Germans said about the Canadians
03:15on the night they finally walked out of Ortona. That last one is a single sentence. It was written
03:22down at the time by a German who was there, and it is not what you are expecting. Hold on
03:27to that,
03:27we will get there. But we start somewhere stranger, because five months before Stone walked into his
03:34own smoke, the Germans in Italy did not know who they were fighting. The 18th of July, 1943,
03:42a hill town in the middle of Sicily called Val Guarnera. German panzer grenadiers with armor and
03:49support stood and fought there on ground that handed them everything. Stone ridges, one road through,
03:55perfect observation over every yard of it. The Canadians came at them across that ground anyway,
04:02and took the town, and it cost them 145 men, 40 of whom were left in the hills.
04:09Two days later, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, commanding all German forces in Italy, sent a
04:16report back to Berlin about this new enemy on his southern flank. Near Val Guarnera, troops trained for
04:24fighting in the mountains have been mentioned. They are called Mountain Boys, and probably belong to the
04:301st Canadian Division. Read that again, and listen for the word probably. The most senior German soldier
04:38in the Mediterranean was guessing. He had a nickname for them before he had an identification. And he was
04:45wrong about the other half of it as well, because there were no mountain troops in the 1st Canadian
04:51infantry division. There were no mountains in most of the places these men came from. There was Jim
04:57Stone, who had come out from Gloucestershire at 19 years old and spent the next 12 years homesteading,
05:04cutting trail, working timber, and running cattle in the Peace River country of northern Alberta. Flat
05:10country, black soil, a very long way from anywhere. In September of 1939, he walked into the armory at Grand
05:18Prairie and signed on as a private soldier at the age of 31. Not an officer, a private in the
05:25ranks,
05:26with a rifle and a paybook. That is who Kesselring was calling mountain troops. Volunteers, all of them,
05:3418,000 men in the division, and not one of them sent overseas against his will. The red patch was
05:41older
05:42than any man wearing it. Canadian infantry first sewed that rectangle onto their sleeves in the summer of
05:491916 in France, so that in the mud one division could be told from another at a glance. By 1943,
05:56it had stopped being a convenience. The Germans were about to spend 21 months finding out what it meant.
06:02The division had landed in Sicily on the 10th of July. In 27 days, it fought its way 130 miles
06:10up the
06:10spine of the island, and it left 562 of its own men in Sicilian ground. And a fortnight after
06:18Kesselring sent his guests to Berlin, Canadian infantry climbed a hill on the road to Mount
06:22Etna called Monte Crescina, and for the first time in the campaign, a Canadian battalion was thrown
06:28straight back off ground it had been ordered to take. The men who did that to them had a nickname
06:34of
06:34their own. Their own army called them the Green Devils. Within a day, the two of them were fighting
06:40each other again at a town called Regalbuto. And from that week onward, all the way up Italy, these two
06:47divisions could not stop walking into each other. Before we get to the Green Devils, I want to show
06:52you why Kesselring's guess was not a stupid one. Because two days after he wrote that report, a Canadian
07:00battalion did something that would make any professional soldier reach for the words mountain
07:05troops. The 20th of July, 1943. A hill town in central Sicily called Asoro, sitting on top of a rock
07:15face
07:15about 300 meters high. The Germans held the summit and the road, and they had looked at that cliff and
07:22written it off. Nobody was coming up there. So they watched the road. The Canadian brigade decided to
07:30come up the cliff. Lieutenant Colonel Bruce Sutcliffe of the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment took the job.
07:37And then he did what good commanding officers do and went forward with his intelligence officer to look at the
07:44route with his own eyes. A German 88 millimeter crew saw two men moving on the slope below them and
07:52fired. It killed both of
07:54them. Command of the battalion passed on the spot to Major Lord John Tweedsmuir, 32 years old and the son
08:01of the man who had been
08:02Canada's governor general until three years before. His first act as commanding officer was to take his dead colonel's plan
08:09and go
08:10through with it. The night of the 21st of July, the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment climbed the eastern face
08:17of Asoro in the dark, on
08:18goat tracks and up dry ravines, each man carrying what he could get on his back. At first light, they
08:25were standing
08:25on the summit, looking down on the German gun positions from above. Tweedsmuir got on the radio and began reading
08:32those positions back to the Canadian artillery. After the shelling, the rest of the brigade came at the town
08:38from the front, and the Germans went. That is what Kesselring was reacting to when he told Berlin about mountain
08:45troops.
08:46Farmers and clerks and a governor general's son had gone up a cliff nobody goes up. Now hold that picture
08:53of men climbing
08:54in the dark, because the very next night a different Canadian battalion did the exact opposite. It walked straight
09:00into a town it could not get back out of. The 22nd of July, Léonfort. One rode in and the
09:08road crossed the deep ravine
09:09on a long bridge, and German engineers had dropped the bridge into the ravine before the Canadians arrived.
09:16No bridge meant no tanks and no anti-tank guns. The loyal Edmonton regiment went down into the ravine on
09:23foot,
09:24climbed out the other side, and was in the streets of Léonfort by the middle of the day. Jim Stone
09:29was in that battalion.
09:30At dusk, the Germans counter-attacked into the town with tanks and reinforced infantry. There was nothing
09:37on the Canadian side of those streets that could stop a tank. By dark, the Edmontons were surrounded
09:43in the center of Léonfort, with a ravine and a wrecked bridge between them and their own army.
09:48At brigade headquarters, Brigadier Chris Vokes came to the conclusion that the Edmonton regiment had been destroyed.
09:54It had not. Their commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Jim Jefferson, wrote a message out by hand.
10:02He could not address it to anyone in particular, so he addressed it to whoever found it, to any Canadian
10:07or British officer.
10:09Then he gave it to an Italian boy from the town. That boy walked out of Léonforte at night, through
10:15German positions,
10:16and put the note into Canadian hands. Before dawn on the 23rd, Canadian engineers bridged the ravine.
10:24Then a column went across it and up the road into the town. One company of the Princess Patricia's Canadian
10:30Light Infantry,
10:31four tanks of the Three Rivers Regiment, and a troop of guns from the 90th Battery of the 1st Anti
10:36-Tank Regiment.
10:38By noon, Léonforte was Canadian, and the Edmontons were still standing in it.
10:43Count the days with me, because the Germans certainly were.
10:46The 18th of July, Val Guarnera. The 21st, a cliff at Assoro. The 23rd, Léonforte.
10:55Three prepared German positions in six days, in August heat, by a division that had been in action for less
11:02than a fortnight.
11:04Then, on the 2nd of August, on the road running towards Mount Etna, the Germans put something different in front
11:10of them.
11:11The hill was called Monte Cristina, and the men holding it were the 3rd Regiment of the 1st Parachute Division,
11:18professional airborne infantry who had been fighting since 1939, and who had a nickname of their own in the German
11:24press and the German ranks.
11:26The Green Devils.
11:29The West Nova Scotia Regiment attacked Monte Cristina, and was thrown off it.
11:34That is the first time the Red Patch and the Green Devils touched each other, and the Canadians came second.
11:40I am not going to pretend otherwise. It was a straight repulse by better trained troops on better ground.
11:47But look at what the Canadians did with the rest of that same week.
11:51Regalbuto fell to them on the 3rd of August. Adrano on the 6th.
11:56By then, the German army was clearing out of Sicily altogether, and the Canadians had gone 130 miles.
12:04And it was in those weeks, somewhere on that road, that the Germans stopped guessing at who these people were,
12:11and started naming them by the only marking they could see from a distance.
12:16Not mountain boys anymore. The men with the Red Patch. The Red Patch Devils.
12:24Here is the trap in that name, and I want you to be careful of it, because most accounts fall
12:30straight into it.
12:32Said at the end of Sicily, it sounds like a compliment about legs and lungs.
12:37Tough lads. Good in the hills. Keep coming. Stamina. Endurance.
12:44A pat on the head from an enemy who is impressed but not worried.
12:49That is not what the word devils ended up meaning.
12:53And the men who changed its meaning were the ones standing on Monte Cristina,
12:58watching Canadians carry their dead back down the slope.
13:02On the 13th of December, on a low ridge of ground in Italy that the Canadians had started calling the
13:09Gully,
13:10General Heydrich's paratroopers came quietly into the line to take over from a German division the Canadians had already broken.
13:18They were not sent there to hold a river.
13:22Vokes, by then commanding the entire 1st Canadian division, did not yet know they had arrived.
13:29The 9th of December, 1943.
13:31A village called San Leonardo standing on high ground a mile beyond a small Italian river called the Moro.
13:38The loyal Edmonton regiment and the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada went into San Leonardo that day,
13:44behind the tanks of the Ontario regiment and the Calgary regiment, and they took it.
13:49Jim Stone was one of the Edmonton company commanders who went up that hill.
13:53Five months out of Sicily, the division had learned how to do this.
13:57Artillery, tanks, infantry, a village, a night of clearing it, move on.
14:04Then they walked about a thousand yards past San Leonardo and the whole division stopped for a week.
14:09What stopped them was not a fortress.
14:12There was nothing to bomb and nothing to see.
14:14About a mile short of Ortona, the ground simply split open,
14:17a ravine roughly 200 feet deep running 3 miles across the entire Canadian front and out into the Adriatic.
14:25The Canadians gave it the plainest name they could find.
14:28The Gully.
14:30You cannot see into it until you are standing on the lip,
14:34and by then you are standing in the open.
14:37The Germans had gun pits and dugouts cut into the far wall,
14:41on the reverse slope where no Canadian shell could reach them at any angle.
14:48Machine guns fired up out of the ground.
14:51Mortars fired from inside the earth.
14:54And every man who wanted to get at them had to go over the top edge first,
15:00upright, in daylight, into the fire.
15:04On the 10th of December, three Canadian battalions went at it.
15:08They took Vino Ridge on the near side.
15:12The ravine itself they could not touch.
15:15On the 11th they went at it again,
15:18and the Edmonton regiment was cut up badly doing it.
15:22One of their companies, mauled down to a fraction of itself,
15:26actually got over the lip and onto the reverse slope,
15:30which nobody had managed.
15:33It was the closest thing to a result the division had achieved in two days.
15:38And then, in the official language of the campaign,
15:42newly arrived German units pushed them back off it.
15:46Hold on to that phrase, newly arrived.
15:49Because on the 13th of December,
15:51the German command pulled the 90th Panzer Grenadier Division out of that ground,
15:56a formation the Canadians had already fought to pieces,
15:59and moved the 1st Parachute Division into the line to take over the gully.
16:03General Richard Heydrich's men, the Green Devils,
16:07the same division whose 3rd regiment had thrown a Canadian battalion off Monte Cristina in Sicily
16:12four months earlier.
16:13Nobody on the Canadian side knew yet that the relief had happened.
16:17All they knew was that the ravine had somehow got harder,
16:20so Chris Vokes stopped feeding battalions into it.
16:23That is the move, and it is worth noticing,
16:26because it is the opposite of what commanders are usually accused of in this campaign.
16:30Instead of one more frontal attack,
16:33he reached round the inland end of the gully for a farmhouse
16:36in a bit of ridge that sat on the road behind it.
16:39On the maps, it was a cluster of stone buildings with a name
16:42that would end up on a regimental battle honor,
16:44Casa Berardi.
16:46The 14th of December
16:49The job went to a company of the Royal 22nd Regiment, the Vandus,
16:54commanded by Captain Paul Triquet, 33 years old, from Cabano, Quebec,
16:59a professional soldier who had been in the army since he was 18.
17:03He started with a company and a squadron of Canadian tanks.
17:07The ground between him and the farmhouse was open,
17:10and the paratroopers had it covered with machine guns and anti-tank guns and mortars.
17:15Men went down the whole way.
17:18Tanks burned.
17:19His company commander casualties mounted until Triquet was the last officer on his feet.
17:25By the time the survivors got close to Casa Berardi,
17:29Paul Triquet had two sergeants and fifteen men.
17:33Fifteen.
17:34Against a farmhouse held by German paratroopers,
17:37with more Germans between him and his own army than in front of him.
17:41This is the moment, and the words he said are in the record.
17:45Triquet turned to what was left of his company and told them,
17:49There are enemy in front of us, behind us, and on our flanks.
17:53There is only one safe place.
17:55That is on the objective.
17:58Then those seventeen men took the farmhouse.
18:01They got into the buildings, they dug in around them,
18:03and they held through the evening against counter-attacks while the paratroopers tried to shove them back out.
18:09At dark, another Vandu company fought its way forward to them.
18:13In the early hours of the 15th, the rest of the battalion came up.
18:17Paul Triquet was awarded the Victoria Cross for that day, and he lived to collect it.
18:23Now look at what those seventeen men had actually done to the Germans.
18:27The gully was only worth holding as long as nothing was behind it.
18:31With Canadians sitting on the ridge at Casa Berardi, astride the road,
18:35the finest ravine in Italy was suddenly a trench with an open back door.
18:40The paratroopers held on a few more days out of pure professional stubbornness,
18:44and then they gave it up and went back into the town.
18:47Which brings us to the town.
18:49And here is the thing about Ortona that took me a long time to believe,
18:53because it makes what happened next stranger, not simpler.
18:57The German High Command did not want a battle there.
19:01Kesselring said so plainly.
19:03We do not want to defend Ortona decisively,
19:05but the English have made it appear as important as Rome.
19:09The English.
19:10Five months after his own report to Berlin had correctly identified the 1st Canadian Division,
19:16the German commander-in-chief in Italy was still calling them the English.
19:20He would be corrected.
19:22So, in the plainest possible terms,
19:25the Canadians about to walk into that town
19:28had a commander-in-chief opposite them who had already written the place off.
19:33And yet, for eight days, his paratroopers fought for it,
19:38street by street, house by house, room by room,
19:43in a way no German unit had fought for an Italian town before.
19:48Somebody in that town had decided otherwise.
19:51And while the Canadians were spending a week bleeding at the gully,
19:55the men inside Ortona were not resting.
19:58They were building something in there.
20:01While the Canadians were dying at the gully,
20:03the paratroopers spent six days rebuilding Ortona.
20:06Not fortifying it. Rebuilding it.
20:09As a machine with one purpose.
20:11A German engineer works his way along a side street with a coil of wire and a satchel.
20:16And he is not preparing that house to be defended.
20:19He is preparing it to be walked into.
20:21He wires the door.
20:23He wires the shutters.
20:24He wires a chest of drawers,
20:26because a tired man in a strange room opens drawers.
20:30Further up the street,
20:31a demolition party drops the front of a building into the roadway,
20:34and then the building next to it,
20:36until the side street is closed off by ten or fifteen feet of stone rubble.
20:40And then they mine the rubble.
20:42Because the only people who will ever climb over it are Canadians.
20:45In the houses along the main street,
20:47they carry anti-tank guns up to the first floors,
20:50and place machine guns and marksmen above them,
20:53so that fire comes down into the street from three levels at once.
20:56They knock openings through the inside walls of their own buildings,
21:00so that a gun crew can shoot across the street from the middle of a dark room
21:06and never be seen from outside.
21:08Rooms connect to rooms.
21:11Cellars connect to cellars.
21:13A single house is not a position.
21:16The whole block is one position, and it is three stories deep.
21:21And when they had finished,
21:23exactly one route into the center of Ortona was still passable to a tank or a carrier.
21:30The main street.
21:31The Corso Vittorio Emanuele.
21:35They built a town with one door,
21:37and they put every gun they had in the hallway.
21:41On the 20th of December, 1943,
21:44the forward Canadian platoons got into the southern outskirts
21:48and the fighting started in the houses.
21:51On the 21st,
21:53the Loyal Edmonton Regiment and the Seaforth Highlanders
21:56were in the town proper
21:58with the Sherman tanks of the Three Rivers Regiment behind them,
22:02and the Canadians began to learn what had been done to Ortona.
22:06You have already watched Jim Stone deal with one anti-tank gun on that street.
22:12Now look at what was waiting for his company once the gun was silent
22:16and they got into the buildings.
22:19They went in the way infantry had gone into houses for a thousand years,
22:24through the front door on the ground floor.
22:27And the Germans were waiting above them on the stairs,
22:30and the first thing that came down the staircase was a grenade.
22:34A section could lose half its men in the hallway of a house without ever seeing a German.
22:40The men who got past the stairs found the room behind them already registered by a machine gun,
22:46sighted in the dark through a hole in a wall across the street.
22:50Put yourself on that street for a moment and add it up.
22:54You cannot advance along the street because the street is covered from three floors and blocked with mined rubble.
23:01You cannot go around because the side streets are worse.
23:05You cannot go in the front door because the front door is where they kill you.
23:09So what do you do?
23:11That is the actual question in front of a Canadian company commander on the 22nd of December, 1943.
23:18And I want you to sit in it for a second.
23:20Because the answer is going to sound obvious.
23:22And it was not obvious to anybody in any army before that week.
23:27The man who answered it was Captain Bill Longhurst of the Loyal Edmonton Regiment, commanding A Company.
23:34Longhurst looked at the street where his men had been dying,
23:37and then he looked at the wall of the house he was standing in,
23:40the wall he shared with the next house along.
23:43A stone party wall, twelve or eighteen inches of it.
23:47And on the other side of that wall, the German who was waiting for him was facing the wrong way.
23:53He sent for two pioneers and had them tie plastic explosive into a single fat bundle.
23:58The men called it a beehive.
24:00Not against the front door.
24:02Not against the street wall.
24:04He had them carry it up to the top floor.
24:07His men went to the lower floor and got their heads down.
24:10The pioneers set the charge against the top floor wall and came down.
24:14The charge went off.
24:16Then the Edmontons ran up their own staircase, into the smoke, through a ragged hole in the stone,
24:21and came out on the top floor of the next house, above the Germans, inside their building, on a floor
24:28nobody defends.
24:29They went through the upper rooms with grenades and Thompsons, and then they cleared downwards,
24:34driving the paratroopers towards the cellar instead of letting them drop grenades from above.
24:40Mouse holing.
24:41That is the name it got.
24:42And it was invented in the middle of a battle by a captain from Alberta who had run out of
24:46any other option.
24:48Watch how fast it spread, because this is the part that tells you what kind of division this was.
24:54Word of Longhurst's toll in the wall went along the Edmontons, then to the seaforths, then across the brigade, inside
25:01a day.
25:01The tank crews adapted to it, an armor-piercing round to punch the wall, then high-explosive to finish the
25:08room,
25:08and Shermans nosing up the ruined streets acting as ammunition carriers on the way in, and ambulances on the way
25:15out.
25:16The whole brigade stopped fighting for the street and started eating the town from the inside, roof down.
25:22And this is the moment where the word devils begins to change its meaning.
25:28Remember it out of Sicily, a compliment about stamina.
25:31Tough lads in the hills.
25:33What the paratroopers were now looking at was something else entirely.
25:37They had built a town designed to kill an army that fought for streets,
25:41and the army in front of them had simply stopped using the streets.
25:45It was coming through the walls.
25:47The Germans in Ortona had been fighting since 1939.
25:52They had jumped into Holland, held Casino's ground, seen the Eastern Front.
25:56They had never had this done to them.
25:59They also had the same explosive the Canadians did.
26:02While Bill Longhurst was blowing his first hole through a party wall on the 22nd of December,
26:07a German parachute combat engineer named Karl Beierlein was working the same arithmetic in the opposite direction.
26:15Beierlein was with the 3rd platoon of the 3rd company of the 1st Parachute Engineer Battalion,
26:20and he kept a diary through every day of that battle.
26:23He had noticed something about the new Canadian method.
26:27The Canadians were now spending their nights inside houses.
26:30The Germans answered inside 48 hours,
26:33and their answer was the ugliest piece of engineering in the Italian campaign.
26:38If the Canadians were going to live inside the houses, then the houses would be the weapon.
26:44German parachute engineers worked at night, which is when engineers always work.
26:49They went into buildings the Canadians had not reached yet, or had reached and were now sleeping in,
26:54and they packed charges into the load-bearing walls and the stairwells and ran the wire back out into the
27:01dark.
27:01Then they waited for the rooms to fill up with men.
27:05Think about what that does to the fight.
27:07A machine gun can be located, flanked, grenaded, killed.
27:12You can hear a mortar leave the tube.
27:14A house coming down on top of you gives you nothing at all.
27:17No direction, no warning, no target, and no chance.
27:22It does not need to be aimed.
27:24It kills a whole platoon in one second, and the men who do it are already two streets away.
27:31One of the men doing it was Karl Beierlein, the parachute engineer with the diary.
27:36He was not a fanatic, and he was not a monster.
27:39He was a tradesman of that particular trade, and he went out every night of that battle with explosive on
27:44his back,
27:45and came back and wrote down what the day had been like.
27:48So now, look at the position the Canadians were in on the 23rd of December.
27:53Their one great advantage, moving inside the buildings instead of in the open, had just been turned into their greatest
27:59danger.
28:00The safest place in Ortona was the inside of a house, right up until the moment it was the worst
28:06place in Italy.
28:07And they did not stop.
28:09That is the whole thing, and I want to be exact about it, because it is very easy to say,
28:14and it was not easy to do.
28:16They kept going into the houses.
28:19What they changed was everything else.
28:21They went in at the top and worked down, so the grenades fell the right way.
28:26They stopped bunching.
28:27Before men settled anywhere, somebody went looking for wire, for freshly disturbed plaster, for a door that felt wrong.
28:36They learned to distrust furniture.
28:38And then the Canadians started doing it back.
28:41Canadian pioneers took the same trade and turned it round.
28:45Buildings full of paratroopers, brought down deliberately, on purpose, by men who had watched their own friends dug out of
28:52rubble that morning.
28:54By Christmas week, both sides in Ortona were demolishing occupied houses on each other.
28:59There is no clean way to describe what that town became.
29:03It was two sets of professional engineers competing to bury each other's infantry.
29:08Through all of it, the loyal Edmonton regiment kept moving up the Corso Vittorio Emanuele.
29:13Jim Stone's company was on that axis from the 21st onward.
29:18Street, wall, hole, room, stairs, cellar, next house, and the tanks coming up behind with ammunition and going back with
29:27wounded.
29:27Not a single dramatic action.
29:30Days of it.
29:31A house at a time.
29:33With the roof of the next one possibly wired.
29:37Here is the figure that tells you what those days cost.
29:41And it is not a statistic.
29:43It is a roll call.
29:45The company Jim Stone led onto that street came out of Ortona with 18 men still on their feet.
29:53Eighteen.
29:54A rifle company in 1943 was a hundred odd men.
29:59Picture the four platoons of it as they went in.
30:02And then picture the group that came out standing.
30:06Small enough to fit around two tables.
30:09They were still going forward.
30:11On the other side of the wall, the German command had a decision to make.
30:16And it is the most revealing decision of the whole battle.
30:20On the 24th of December, they fed a second battalion into Ortona.
30:25The second battalion of the 4th Parachute Regiment.
30:29Moved in to prop up the 3rd Regiment's men who had been holding the town since the 20th.
30:35Sit with that for a moment.
30:38Kesselring had said he did not want to defend Ortona decisively.
30:42His paratroopers had built the place into a fortress with one door.
30:46And four days in, they were committing fresh elite infantry to hold a town they had already declared not worth
30:52a decisive fight against two Canadian battalions.
30:56You do not reinforce a position that is holding comfortably.
31:00And in a cellar somewhere in that town on Christmas Eve, the engineer with the diary wrote two sentences that
31:06I think are worth more than any general's memoir about Ortona.
31:11Beyerlein was a professional soldier in the best light infantry division Germany had.
31:16This is what he put on paper.
31:18There is no place of Christmas sentiments here.
31:21We do not know how long we can hold on to Ortona.
31:25We do not know how long we can hold on.
31:28Written by a green devil, in Ortona, on the 24th of December, 1943, about the men with the red patch.
31:36That is not a compliment about stamina anymore.
31:39Outside his cellar, the fighting on Christmas Eve was going on around a small square the Seaforths had renamed, the
31:46way soldiers do, after the dead horse lying in the middle of it.
31:50The Piazza San Francesco.
31:52Dead Horse Square.
31:54The Seaforth Highlanders were fighting for it, building by building in the last hours before Christmas Day, and their casualties
32:01were going past their own battalion headquarters, which had been set up inside a 4th century church.
32:07Their commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Sid Thompson, stood in that church and watched his wounded come past him, and made
32:15a decision that on the face of it was completely unhinged.
32:18He decided that his battalion was going to sit down to Christmas dinner, white tablecloths, soup, pork, Christmas pudding, candles,
32:27in a church 600 yards from German paratroopers, with the artillery firing over the roof.
32:34He gave the job to his quartermaster, and his quartermaster took it seriously.
32:39There was only one problem, and everybody in the battalion could see it.
32:43The companies were in contact.
32:45They were fighting.
32:47You cannot take a battalion out of a house-to-house battle to eat pork off a tablecloth.
32:51So Thompson and his quartermaster worked out how to do it anyway, and the way they did it is the
32:57single strangest hour of the Canadian war in Italy.
33:00They did it in relays.
33:02On Christmas Day, 1943, one company at a time came out of the fighting in Ortona, walked back through the
33:09wrecked streets to the church of Santa Maria di Constantinopoli, and sat down to dinner.
33:15Then they went back in, and the next company came out.
33:18The church was 4th century.
33:21A German shell had come through it and blown open a stone sepulcher so that the bones inside were lying
33:27exposed at the edge of the room.
33:29The Seaforth's padre, Roy Durnford, noted that down, because he was the kind of man who noticed and wrote things
33:36while they were happening.
33:38Captain D. B. Cameron, the Seaforth quartermaster, had spent the evening of the 24th setting the place out properly.
33:45Not a messed-in queue.
33:48Tablecloths.
33:49White ones.
33:50A seating plan.
33:51Soup, then pork, then Christmas pudding.
33:55Candles, cigarettes, nuts, oranges, beer.
33:59Somebody had found a table for the officers to serve from, because in that regiment, on that day, the officers
34:05served the men.
34:06Lieutenant Wilf Gildersleeve sat at the church organ and played carols, and when the men started calling for the barracks
34:13songs, and you know exactly which songs, he refused.
34:18Sternly, by the account of the men who were there.
34:22Carols only.
34:24Outside, Canadian guns were firing over the roof from a few hundred yards away, and the men eating pork under
34:31that noise had come out of a street fight and were going back into it before dark.
34:37The Edmontons got their Christmas dinner, too, up in the houses, and the Germans on the other side of the
34:43wall had sausage and cake sent up to them, because somebody in the German supply chain had also decided that
34:50it was Christmas.
34:51Both sides ate.
34:53Then both sides went back to burying each other.
34:57I am not going to dress that day up.
34:59It was not a truce, and it was not a Christmas story.
35:03It was a battalion commander, Sid Thompson, looking at his own casualties going past him in a church doorway, and
35:11deciding that his men would have one hour in which they were treated like human beings.
35:16That is all it was.
35:18It is also the reason that every Seaforth Highlander mess in Canada still sits down to an Ortona dinner every
35:26December, and why they still serve the junior ranks first.
35:30The next morning, it got worse than anything that had happened yet.
35:34On the 26th of December, a Canadian platoon of the loyal Edmonton Regiment took shelter in a building.
35:42German pioneers had been there first, and they had not put in a small charge.
35:46The building came down complete.
35:49Twenty-three men were killed in that one second.
35:53One man was not.
35:55Lance Corporal Roy Boyd was buried alive under the rubble of that house, and he stayed there, in the dark,
36:03under the weight of it, for three and a half days before he was dug out.
36:07He came out alive.
36:09He was the only member of his platoon who did.
36:13Three and a half days.
36:14Think about the arithmetic of that from inside the pile.
36:18You cannot move, you cannot be heard over the shelling, and you do not know whether the men digging will
36:23be Canadian or German, or whether anyone is digging at all.
36:28That is the 26th of December, and the Canadians were still coming forward, still at the top floor walls, still
36:35going up their own staircases into the smoke.
36:38By the 27th, the town was nearly gone from underneath the paratroopers.
36:42Two battalions of Germany's best light infantry had been ground down inside their own fortress.
36:49Over those nine days, the division's losses in Ortona came to 68 men killed and 159 wounded, and 205 listed
36:58as missing, which in a town made of rubble means either a Canadian prison camp or a cellar nobody ever
37:04opened.
37:05On the night of the 27th of December, the Germans left.
37:09They left the way professionals leave.
37:12They blew up buildings on their way out, not to kill anybody this time, but to make noise and dust
37:18so that the Canadians would think the fight was still going on, and under cover of their own demolitions, they
37:25walked north out of Ortona in the dark.
37:27By the morning of the 28th, the town belonged to the 1st Canadian Infantry Division, and Carl Bayerlein, the engineer
37:36with the diary, wrote down what he thought of that.
37:40The enemy gained a destroyed city.
37:43We left undefeated.
37:45Now, that is the sentence I promised you at the very beginning, and I want to handle it honestly, because
37:52half of it is simply true.
37:54The city was destroyed.
37:57Roughly 1,300 civilians of Ortona died in it.
38:01People who had nothing to do with any of this, in their own cellars, in their own town.
38:07But hold the second half of it up to the light.
38:10We left undefeated.
38:12They left.
38:13Eight days earlier, they had been sitting in a town rebuilt as a killing machine, holding the only road into
38:19it with guns on three floors,
38:21with every stairwell wired, facing two Canadian battalions of volunteers.
38:27Farmers, railwaymen, clerks, a forest ranger from the Peace River country, who had been in the army for four years
38:34and in a city fight for four days.
38:36And the paratroopers were the ones who walked out at night under a screen of their own explosions.
38:42So here is what the name actually means, and it has nothing to do with legs and hills.
38:48The Germans did not call them the Red Patch Devils because the Canadians climbed well.
38:53They called them that because these were the people who came through the wall.
38:57Who would not use the street you had covered, would not come in the door you had wired,
39:02would sleep in a house that might be mined because there was nowhere else to sleep,
39:06and would be in the top floor room above you by morning.
39:09Kesselring's own divisional commander at Ortona had spelled out what that cost him.
39:15The German general, Joachim Lemelson, put it in one line,
39:19It costs so much in blood, it cannot be justified.
39:24The Canadian verdict came from Chris Vokes, and it was blunter.
39:28We gave the first German parachute division a mauling which it will long remember.
39:34But Bayerlein's claim still stands there, unanswered.
39:38We left undefeated.
39:40And it is the kind of claim that can be tested,
39:43because these two divisions were not finished with each other.
39:47They had five more meetings coming.
39:49And on a ridge in northern Italy nine months later,
39:53Jim Stone was going to settle it in about 20 minutes.
39:56The Germans learned from Ortona, too.
39:59What they built next tells you exactly what they had learned.
40:03Five months later, across the Liri Valley southeast of Rome,
40:08the Canadians came up against a belt of defenses the Germans called the Hitler Line.
40:13And there was nothing in it to mousehole through.
40:17No town, no party walls, no staircases.
40:21Concrete emplacements dug into the ground with only the muzzles showing.
40:26Panther tank turrets sunk into the earth as fixed gun positions.
40:31Wire in depth.
40:33Mine fields.
40:34And in front of all of it, the fields of fire cleared flat,
40:39so that a man standing up could be seen and hit from three directions.
40:43It was a position designed by people who had watched Canadians come through a wall,
40:49and had made sure there were no walls.
40:52The 23rd of May, 1944.
40:55The 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade,
40:58Patricias, Seaforths, Loyal Edmontons,
41:01the same three battalions from Ortona,
41:04attacked that line between Aquino and Pontecorvo just before 6 in the morning,
41:08with 800 guns firing ahead of them and the Churchill tanks of the North Irish Horse alongside.
41:13They went into it across open ground,
41:17upright, exactly as the Germans had designed.
41:20The Princess Patricias lost 58 men killed.
41:23Jim Stone's Edmontons lost 50 killed in a single morning.
41:27The Seaforths, 52.
41:30The North Irish Horse,
41:31British tank crews who fought that day alongside the Canadians
41:35and deserve their names kept in it,
41:37lost 36 men and 41 tanks.
41:40The line broke the same day.
41:43Hold those two facts next to each other,
41:46because that is the whole Canadian war in one sentence.
41:49It was the hardest prepared position the Germans built in Italy that year,
41:53and it lasted from breakfast to evening.
41:56Two weeks later, the Allies walked into Rome.
42:00Now watch the pattern, because I do not think it is a coincidence,
42:03and neither did the men involved.
42:05Every time the Germans built something to stop these people,
42:09they built it against last year's Canadians.
42:13On the 25th of August 1944,
42:16the 1st Canadian Infantry Division led the core attack across the Matero River
42:22and went into the Gothic Line,
42:24the last great belt of German defenses in Italy,
42:28laid across the Apennines from sea to sea.
42:30They spent three weeks chewing through ridges.
42:34And at the end of those three weeks,
42:36standing between the Canadians and the open plain of northern Italy,
42:40was one long ridge above the town of Rimini,
42:44with a village on it called San Fortunato,
42:47the last high ground.
42:50Behind it, flat country all the way to the Po.
42:54Holding it was the 1st Parachute Division,
42:56the same division.
42:58The Green Devils, from Monte Cristina in Sicily,
43:02from the Gully, from Ortona.
43:05Nine months after Karl Baerlein wrote that they had left undefeated,
43:09the two of them were standing on the last hill in Italy,
43:12looking at each other.
43:14The 20th of September, 1944.
43:17The loyal Edmonton Regiment attacked across the front of two brigades
43:22toward San Fortunato Ridge.
43:25D Company took a crossroads, the maps called Bovee,
43:29and then German armor came at them.
43:31Tigers, the heaviest thing in Italy,
43:34on ground where the Canadian infantry had nothing that could stop one.
43:39B Company fought its way across to them
43:41and got the radio link working again.
43:43C Company, under Captain Dugan, went in beside them,
43:48killed a great many Germans,
43:50took 50 prisoners in one bite,
43:53and then Dugan spent the rest of the day on the radio
43:56bringing Canadian shell fire down on counter-attack after counter-attack.
44:00And Jim Stone, now the second in command of the battalion,
44:05thirty-six years old,
44:06the same man who had walked into his own smoke on a street in Ortona,
44:11went and got the anti-tank guns.
44:14Not sent for them, got them.
44:18Anti-tank guns are not built to go up a ridge in the middle of a battle.
44:23They are heavy, they are meant to be towed,
44:26and the ground up there would not take a vehicle.
44:29So they went up by hand, by men,
44:33hauled and manhandled onto the ridge under fire,
44:37and stone put them where they could see the tigers.
44:40That is the whole action.
44:43There is no charge in it, and no medal-winning dash.
44:47A big man from northern Alberta decided that if his infantry could not be given armor,
44:54his infantry would be given guns.
44:57And then he physically put the guns on the hill.
45:01The German armor was held.
45:04It was held by those guns until British tanks could come up.
45:08And by then, the Edmontons had gone a thousand yards further forward
45:13and taken the village of San Lorenzo in Monte off the parachute division.
45:19The bill for that day?
45:2011 Canadians killed and 33 wounded.
45:24The return?
45:25Over 300 German prisoners.
45:28Read those two numbers again in that order.
45:3011 dead, 300 prisoners.
45:33Taken off the best light infantry division in the German army,
45:37on ground of their choosing, on the last hill before the plain.
45:40San Fortunato Ridge fell the next day, the 21st of September.
45:45Rimini went with it, and the Gothic line was finished.
45:48Captain Dugan got a bar to his military cross.
45:52Jim Stone was awarded the Distinguished Service Order.
45:55And the Edmontons drew their own conclusion from meeting tigers with nothing.
45:59Within weeks, they had formed a permanent tank-hunting platoon of their own.
46:03Four piats, anti-tank mines, Bren gunners.
46:06A battalion inventing an anti-armor unit out of its own manpower,
46:11because it had decided never again to stand in front of a tiger empty-handed.
46:15That is the same instinct that put a beehive charge against a top floor wall in Ortona.
46:20So, back to Bayerlein's sentence.
46:23We left undefeated.
46:25The man who commanded the Red Patch Division through Ortona answered it in his own report.
46:30And Chris Vogts was not a subtle man.
46:33We gave the 1st German Parachute Division a mauling which it will long remember.
46:38And the record answers it more quietly than Vogts did.
46:41The two divisions met in Sicily, at the Gully, in Ortona, in the Liri Valley, on the Metauro,
46:49and on San Fortunato.
46:51The Canadians lost the first meeting, on a hill called Monte Cristina in August of 1943.
46:58After that, whenever those two formations came up against each other,
47:01it was the parachutists who had the worst of it.
47:05Bayerlein's division spent the rest of the war going backwards up Italy,
47:08and surrendered on the 2nd of May, 1945.
47:11The Red Patch Division did not see the end of it in Italy.
47:15In October of 1944, Jim Stone was given command of the Loyal Edmonton Regiment,
47:21the first time in years the battalion got one of its own.
47:25And on the 25th of February, 1945, the whole division was pulled out of Italy in secret,
47:31and nobody in the ranks was told where they were going.
47:33They went to the Netherlands.
47:36On the 25th of February, 1945, the 1st Canadian Infantry Division left Italy for good,
47:42and moved in secret through France and Belgium to join the rest of the Canadian Army in Northwest Europe.
47:49By the 3rd of April, the Loyal Edmonton Regiment was on the Ischel River in the Eastern Netherlands,
47:54under Lieutenant Colonel Jim Stone.
47:57They crossed the Ischel on the 12th of April, 1945,
48:00and the resistance in front of them was almost nothing.
48:04Understand what that meant to these particular men.
48:06This was a battalion that had gone up a cliff in Sicily,
48:10gone into the gully, gone through the walls of Ortona,
48:13gone across open ground into concrete on the Hitler Line,
48:16and hauled anti-tank guns up San Fortunato by hand.
48:19Now they were walking into Dutch towns where people who had been starving all winter came out into the road
48:25to touch them.
48:26And the thing those people saw first, on the right sleeve of every man in that division,
48:32was a small rectangle of red cloth, the same patch.
48:36To German paratroopers in Ortona, it had meant the men who come through the wall.
48:42On a Dutch street in April of 1945, it meant food, and the end of five years, and somebody's father
48:50coming back.
48:51It was not free even then.
48:53Ten Edmontons were killed in the Netherlands, and seventy-four were wounded,
48:58in a campaign that everyone knew was nearly over, which is its own particular kind of cruelty.
49:05The last man of the regiment to be killed in the Second World War was Private G. Feschuk,
49:10on the 25th of April, 1945, thirteen days before the German surrender.
49:17Then it stopped.
49:18In July, two of Stone's companies stood in Berlin for the victory ceremonies.
49:23On the 26th of September, more than 500 men of the loyal Edmonton regiment boarded the Ile de France,
49:32docked at Halifax on the 2nd of October, and got off the train in Edmonton on the 6th.
49:37Let me tell you what became of the people in this story.
49:43Paul Trekay, the captain who told 17 men that the only safe place was on the objective,
49:51survived the war and collected his Victoria Cross in person.
49:56Lance Corporal Roy Boyd, dug out of a collapsed house in Ortona after three and a half days, lived.
50:05Bill Longhurst's hole in a wall outlived all of them.
50:10Mouse holing went into allied practice before the war was over, and Ortona is still taught,
50:17studied at staff colleges and military institutes as one of the defining urban battles of the 20th century,
50:25seventy years after a Canadian captain looked at a party wall because he had run out of better ideas.
50:34Carl Bayerlein, the German engineer who mined those houses, survived as well.
50:40He kept his diary of Ortona for the rest of his life, and in the early 1990s,
50:44he sat down and wrote out a fuller account of those days.
50:48It was published in a Canadian military history journal.
50:52The men whose friends he buried under stone printed his words in full, with his name on them,
50:57so that his side of Ortona would not be lost.
51:01The 1300 civilians of Ortona have their own memorial, in the town, and Canadians go there.
51:07And Jim Stone went home to Alberta, and then he went back.
51:12In 1951 he was in Korea, commanding the 2nd Battalion of Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry,
51:18and he had not changed at all.
51:21Told to put his battalion into the line before he judged it ready, he refused,
51:26in the face of pressure from his allies, and trained it first.
51:29On the 23rd and 24th of April, 1951, on a hill called 677 above the Kapyong Valley,
51:38700 Canadians were attacked by Chinese infantry in numbers many times their own.
51:44Stone's order to his battalion was three words long.
51:49No retreat, no surrender.
51:52Surrounded, he called Allied artillery down onto his own hilltop positions to break the assaults.
51:59and held the hill, and the road to Seoul stayed shut.
52:04His battalion was given a United States Presidential Unit Citation,
52:10one of very few Commonwealth units ever to receive one.
52:14He was given another bar to his Distinguished Service Order.
52:19Afterwards, when his own daughter developed cancer of the eye,
52:23he founded a fund through the military police to help blind children,
52:28and it is still running.
52:30He was made a member of the Order of Canada in 1994.
52:36He died on the 24th of November, 2005, in Victoria, British Columbia, at the age of 97.
52:44A private soldier from Grand Prairie who signed on at 31,
52:48and finished as one of the most decorated officers Canada has ever produced.
52:53Go back to the street one more time.
52:56The 21st of December, 1943, the Corso Vittorio Emanuele,
53:01a gun firing at knee height down the length of it,
53:04a company in the doorways,
53:06and a very large man throwing his own smoke into the road
53:09and then walking into it alone.
53:11That is the answer to the name and the title of this film.
53:14Not a doctrine, not a system, not a secret weapon.
53:19Canada put a division of volunteers into the Mediterranean,
53:22a country of 11 million people fighting inside somebody else's army,
53:27with British doctrine, British and American equipment,
53:31and consistently handed the ground nobody else wanted.
53:34That division was given the Gully, and Ortona, and the Hitler Line, and San Fortunato,
53:40and it took all four.
53:42And the name it is remembered by was not awarded by Ottawa,
53:46or printed in a Canadian newspaper.
53:48It was given to them, grudgingly, by the German paratroopers
53:51who had to live across the street from them.
53:54The Red Patch Devils
53:57That red rectangle is still worn today, on the right shoulder,
54:01by Canadian soldiers of the 1st Division.
54:03No lettering, no badge, no explanation.
54:07If you know what it is, you know.
54:10Thank you for staying with this one to the end.
54:12It is a long story and you gave it real time.
54:15If you think what the Canadians did at Ortona and San Fortunato
54:19deserves to be remembered, a like genuinely helps it reach more people.
54:23And if you'd like to hear more of these,
54:25were here every week.
54:27And if your father, your grandfather, or your uncle
54:30served in the Second World War, in any army,
54:33I would be honored to hear about him in the comments.
54:35Those are the stories that keep this channel worth doing.