- 1 day ago
Why did armed German soldiers cheer as Canadian paratroopers raced toward the Baltic in the final days of World War II? Their hope was not simply to surrender—it was to get behind a western Allied line before the Red Army arrived.
This military history documentary follows the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion’s dash to Wismar, where Lt-Col Fraser Eadie’s men faced armed German troops, fleeing families and, at the eastern checkpoint, Soviet forces. Through the choices made on the road and the tense standoff that followed, the story reveals what the refugees wanted from the Canadians—and what the soldiers could and could not promise. A compelling account of the Battle of Wismar, the end of the war in Europe and the race between Allied and Soviet forces. For listeners searching for WW2 stories, Canadian military history, paratrooper stories and narrated World War II documentaries, this is a detailed look at a little-known episode of the final Allied advance.
This military history documentary follows the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion’s dash to Wismar, where Lt-Col Fraser Eadie’s men faced armed German troops, fleeing families and, at the eastern checkpoint, Soviet forces. Through the choices made on the road and the tense standoff that followed, the story reveals what the refugees wanted from the Canadians—and what the soldiers could and could not promise. A compelling account of the Battle of Wismar, the end of the war in Europe and the race between Allied and Soviet forces. For listeners searching for WW2 stories, Canadian military history, paratrooper stories and narrated World War II documentaries, this is a detailed look at a little-known episode of the final Allied advance.
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LearningTranscript
00:00May 2nd, 1945. A field outside the village of Ballendorf, just east of the River Elbe.
00:08Half past five in the morning. A Canadian paratrooper puts his boot on the track guard
00:14of a Sherman tank, grabs the edge of the turret, and swings himself up onto the engine deck.
00:21Nothing holds him there but his own grip. No armor around him. No hole to drop into.
00:29Steel underneath. Open German country in front. All around him his company does the same.
00:37They are the first Canadian parachute battalion, and they are about to ride into the part of Germany
00:43where the German army still exists. Not its wreckage, the army itself. Men with rifles, machine guns,
00:52half-tracks, self-propelled guns. Thousands upon thousands of them, somewhere between this field
01:00and the Baltic Sea. And the Canadians are going to drive straight through them, sitting on the outside
01:07of tanks, in broad daylight, as fast as a Sherman will go. One burst from one hedgerow would sweep a
01:15deck
01:16clean. Behind the lead tanks, in a jeep, rides the man who gave the order. Fraser Eady, 27, from Winnipeg.
01:25Before the war he played hockey and worked at the Ford Motor Company. Five weeks ago he was second in
01:32command. Then his commanding officer was killed on the drop zone across the Rhine, and Eady picked up
01:38the battalion where it lay. Up front, on the lead Shermans, is Major Stan Waters, 24, from Alberta. Eady
01:47has given him one instruction. Go fast. Now pay close attention to what happens next, because the whole
01:55story turns on it. The tanks roll. The first village comes up. And there they are. German soldiers. Not
02:03hiding. Standing along the road in the open, weapons in their hands. Nobody fires. The next village. More
02:11of them. Gray uniforms lining the roadside, filling the doorways, sitting on the curbs. The Canadians on
02:19the engine decks hold their stens and wait for the first shot. It never comes. Instead, the battalion's
02:26war diarist writes down something he plainly never expected to write about the German army.
02:32Most of the men along that road, he noted, looked despondent. But some of them were… even cheering
02:40us on. Think about that for a moment. Normandy. The Ardennes. The Rhine. For 11 months, every German
02:50these Canadians had met with a rifle in his hands had used it on them. And now, on the last
02:56road of the
02:57war, armed German soldiers were cheering Canadian paratroopers past. Cheering them on toward what?
03:05That is the question this story is built around. What did those Germans actually want from the
03:11Canadians? Not what they said with their hands up. What they wanted. The answer came in layers that day,
03:19and every layer changed the meaning of the one before it. If what the Canadian paratroopers did
03:25on this road matters to you, a subscribe helps these stories reach more people. Thank you.
03:31To understand why there were Canadians on those tanks at all, go back 12 hours.
03:37On the evening of May 1st, the American general Matthew Ridgway, whose corps now had the British
03:446th Airborne Division under command, came forward with an order. Get to Wismar on the Baltic coast,
03:52and get there fast. Here is why. From the east, the Red Army's 2nd Belorussian Front,
04:00under Marshal Konstantin Rokosovsky, was driving west along the Baltic shore. Beyond Wismar lay Lübeck.
04:08Beyond Lübeck lay the narrow neck of land that leads into Denmark. Whoever held Wismar first would
04:16decide how far west the Soviet army came. London knew it. Churchill knew it. And the job of getting there
04:24first had gone to a division of paratroopers who had crossed half of Germany in commandeered trucks,
04:30captured cars, and, at one point, a few fishmongers' bicycles. The brigade commander, Brigadier James Hill,
04:39an Englishman the Canadians in his brigade would have followed anywhere, gave the lead to his Canadian
04:45battalion. On paper, the plan said Wittenberg by noon. Hill's order went further. Keep going. As far as
04:56possible. Remember those words. As far as possible. They are going to come back to you later in this
05:04story, from a direction you will not expect. So Edie put waters on the tanks. The Royal Scots
05:12Greys, a British armored regiment, supplied the Shermans. And at half past five on the morning
05:18of May 2nd, the Canadians climbed aboard. Nobody on those decks knew where the Russians were.
05:25Twenty miles off? Fifty? Already in Wismar, waiting? Nobody knew whether the Germans ahead would fight.
05:34And nobody yet understood why, when the Canadians reached them, the Germans stepped to the side of
05:40the road and let them through. By mid-morning, Waters had his tanks through Wittenberg, the town where
05:47the plan said to stop. Edie had no intention of stopping. But past Wittenberg, the road began to fill
05:54with Germans walking the other way, straight at his column, more of them with every mile. Stop to take
06:01them in, and the race was lost. Don't stop, and thousands of armed men would be left loose behind
06:08his tanks. And a few miles ahead, at a small town called Lützo, some of those Germans were waiting
06:15for the Canadians with something nobody on the tanks had expected to see. Past Wittenberg, the road north
06:22stopped being a road. It became a current, and it was flowing the wrong way. Germans. Soldiers in columns,
06:32soldiers in ones and twos, civilians walking among them. All of them heading west and south, back toward
06:39the Elbe, straight into the front of a Canadian column heading the other way. From his jeep behind the lead
06:47tanks, Fraser Edie could see exactly what that meant. When a battalion takes prisoners, it stops. Somebody
06:57disarms them, somebody searches them, somebody guards them and marches them back. Every one of those
07:05somebodies is a man who is no longer on a tank, and every one of those steps costs time. Edie
07:14had
07:14neither the men nor the time. So the Canadians made the only decision that kept them in the race.
07:21They did not stop. The men on the engine decks pointed west. That way. Keep walking. Nobody took
07:31names. Nobody counted. Up front, Stan Waters kept the Shermans at full speed, and the river of gray
07:39uniforms parted around the tanks and closed again behind them. Where the Germans did stop, they left
07:45their weapons behind. Sergeant Andy Anderson remembered a pile of captured arms about 25 feet long
07:52and 10 feet high. Rifles, machine guns, ammunition, thrown on a heap at the side of a German road by
08:00German soldiers who had carried them across half of Europe. Now here is the first layer of the answer,
08:07and Anderson put it more plainly than any historian. In town after town, he said, the Germans were flying
08:14white tablecloths and pillowcases from the windows. And he knew why. They're all fleeing the Russians.
08:22These men wanted to surrender. To the British. To the Americans. To the Canadians. To anybody in a
08:29Western uniform. Just not to the Red Army. That layer is true. But hold it loosely. Because it is not
08:37the
08:37whole answer. And in a few hours, the Canadians would find out how much it left out. To see how
08:44deep that
08:44fear ran, step back three days. April 29th, 1945. The British crossing of the Elbe was launched two days ahead
08:55of schedule. One of the reasons was simple. The planners were afraid that if they waited, the
09:01roads east of the river would be choked solid with refugees fleeing the Russians. Before a single
09:08Canadian paratrooper reached the far bank, the Germans' flight from the east was already setting
09:14the Allied timetable. But do not picture a defeated army waving everyone through. Not every German on that
09:22road wanted to give up. Some armed groups stood their ground. When they did, the greys tanks fired
09:30a few rounds on the move and kept rolling. No halts, no skirmishes, no getting pinned in a village while
09:37the Russians drove on. Whatever resistance there was, tank fire swept it aside in minutes.
09:44So the Canadians were learning something as they went. This was not an army that had stopped fighting.
09:50It was an army that had chosen whom to stop fighting. And it was particular about it.
09:58Anderson remembered a problem no training manual had ever covered. Senior German officers were ready
10:05to surrender, but only to an officer of equal rank. A German colonel was not going to hand his pistol
10:13to a
10:14sergeant. The only Canadian colonel available was in a jeep, racing for the Baltic. So the Canadians
10:21produced one. They took a private from Saskatchewan, put a helmet marked with an eagle on his head,
10:28and presented him to the Germans as a colonel. The surrender went ahead. Laugh if you like,
10:35the men who were there certainly did. But look at what it tells you. Those German officers were not
10:43throwing down their arms in panic. They were negotiating the terms of their own capture,
10:49on a road with the Red Army somewhere behind them. And they wanted it done by the right army,
10:56in the right way. Ask yourself though, whether any of that explains what the war diarist saw at the
11:03start of the day. A man who wants to surrender puts up a white pillowcase. He doesn't cheer.
11:10Something else was going on along that road, and the Canadians had not seen it yet. They were about to.
11:18Shermans burn fuel fast, and waters had been driving them flat out since dawn. By the time the column
11:25reached the small town of Litzo, the tanks had to be refueled. For the first time that day,
11:32Edie's race was forced to a halt, and every minute at the pumps was a minute the Red Army kept
11:38moving.
11:39Waiting at Litzo was a German workshop detachment. Around 3,000 men, in good order, with orders to
11:47surrender. That alone was enough to swamp a battalion that had no cages, no guards, and no time.
11:54Then the Canadians noticed who else was standing among those soldiers. Women. Children. The wives and
12:03families of the German troops had come with them. The battalion's war diarist wrote down what those
12:10families wanted from the Canadians. It took him six words. And those six words put Fraser Edie in front
12:19of a choice he could not wave away to the West, terrified of the Russians. That is how the battalion's
12:27war diarist described the families standing among the German soldiers at Litzo. And then he wrote the
12:35six words. They wanted only to be taken by us. Read that line again, slowly. Not wanted to surrender. Not
12:46wanted to go home. Wanted to be taken. These were wives and children. Nobody was asking them to lay down
12:55arms. They had walked out to meet an enemy column because, for them, being captured by the Canadians was the
13:03safest thing left in Germany. And this is where the first layer of the answer begins to shift
13:10under your feet. On the road from Wittenberg, the Canadians had seen soldiers choosing whom to surrender
13:17to. At Lutzau, they saw families making the same choice. The fear was not a military calculation anymore.
13:25It was a mother deciding which army she wanted standing between her children and the East.
13:31Now put yourself in Fraser Edie's Jeep. Three thousand soldiers with orders to surrender.
13:38Their families with them. Every one of them asking, in effect, for the Canadians to stop and take charge.
13:47A battalion that stopped here would be a battalion running a prison camp by nightfall. And somewhere to
13:54the East, the Red Army was not stopping for anyone. Edie had been a commanding officer for five weeks.
14:02Before that, a second in command. Before the war, a hockey player and a Ford man from Winnipeg. Nobody had
14:10trained him for a decision like this because nobody had imagined one. The war diary does not record a long
14:17debate. The tanks took on their fuel. The Canadians climbed back onto the engine decks. And the column
14:24went on north, leaving the workshop detachment and its families to wait for the troops coming up behind.
14:32It sounds hard. It was the only choice that made sense of what those families were asking for.
14:38They wanted to be inside the Canadian lines. The Canadian lines would only be worth being inside
14:44if the Canadians got somewhere first. Beyond Luzzo, the scale of it grew with every mile.
14:51At Gadebush, the greys tanks came into the town so fast that they caught the German garrison by surprise.
14:58The Germans surrendered, in the words of the regimental diary, without trouble. The prisoners
15:05ran into the thousands, and among them were women of the German auxiliary services, in uniform,
15:12falling in with the men. Along the road, columns of prisoners now streamed back one way while the
15:19Canadians drove the other. Picture that road from above. Two currents. A thin one of Shermans and
15:27paratroopers pushing northeast toward the sea. A thick one of gray uniforms and civilians pouring
15:34southwest toward the Elbe. Every German in that thick current was walking away from the same thing
15:41the Canadians were driving toward. There were moments that day nobody could have scripted.
15:48At Bobitz, a German train loaded with brand new self-propelled guns was caught on the line and
15:55held without a shot. A second train came along carrying Messerschmitt fighters. The commanding
16:01officer of the greys stopped it by parking his own scout car on the track in front of it. And
16:07all the
16:08while, the race went on inside the race. Brigadier Hill's brigade was not the only one heading for the
16:15Baltic. The 5th parachute brigade was moving on a separate route, and the plan had expected it to lead.
16:24Hill had got his Canadians on the road first. Eadie meant to keep them there.
16:30Now stop and ask the question this whole story is built around. Do we have the answer yet?
16:37We know the Germans wanted to surrender. And to surrender to the West.
16:42We know their families wanted to be taken into Canadian hands rather than wait for the Russians.
16:49Put together, that sounds like an answer. Fear of the Russians. Protection from the Canadians.
16:57Simple. But it still leaves the strangest thing on that road unexplained. Families who want protection
17:05beg you to stop. Soldiers who want to surrender wave you down. The men the war diarists saw that
17:13morning did neither. They stood back, watched the Canadian tanks go by without stopping, and some of
17:20them cheered. Why would you cheer the people who just drove past without taking you? Keep that question
17:27in your pocket. The Canadians were about to run into a town where the Germans did not stand back at
17:34all.
17:34In the afternoon of May 2nd, the lead tanks came up on Vismar. The German roadblocks on the approaches
17:42had not been closed. The Greys went straight in before any order to wait for the infantry could
17:48reach them, and behind them came the Canadian paratroopers. What they found was not a town that
17:55had given up. In the words of the Greys' own diary, Vismar was seething with armed German soldiers.
18:03Far more of them than there were Canadians on the whole road behind waters. And on the far side of
18:09the town, coming in from the east, the Red Army was closing on the very same bridges.
18:15Vismar. An old Hanseatic port on the Baltic. Red brick and church spires. The kind of town that looks
18:24the same in a photograph from 1945 as it does in a postcard from today. On the afternoon of May
18:312nd,
18:31it was full of German soldiers carrying loaded weapons. The first thing the Canadians hit was a
18:37German roadblock on the way in. This one had men behind it. B Company went at it on foot while
18:45the
18:45greys forced their tanks through, and the position was cleared. It was a short, sharp reminder that the
18:51cheering on the road had never been a promise. North of the town, near the aerodrome, someone threw a
18:58hand grenade at the commanding officer of the Greys. It missed. A few minutes later, a Luftwaffe vehicle
19:05drove up. Its crew put their hands in the air, and they were marched off under escort. That was Vismar
19:11in a single half hour. One German trying to kill you, the next one asking to be taken prisoner.
19:18Fraser Eady did not wait to find out which kind of German the rest of the town held. He set
19:24up his
19:24headquarters in Frinz Hotel and pushed his companies straight out to the edges of the town. B Company went
19:32through Vismar and out beyond the railway. C Company took the bridges on the eastern side. Barriers went up
19:40on the roads coming in from the east and the northeast. The men dug in. Here is the thing to
19:47understand about those barriers. Nobody in the battalion knew who would come down those roads
19:53first. A German counterattack? A column of Russian tanks? Or both, one chasing the other? So the Canadians
20:02dug in facing east, without knowing whether the next troops to arrive would want to shake their hands
20:08or shoot at them. In the harbor, German destroyers and submarines were still tied up when the Canadians
20:16arrived. Every one of them slipped out to sea before they could be stopped. There are some races even a
20:23battalion on tanks cannot win. The race that mattered? It had won. Four o'clock in the afternoon. At the
20:31barrier
20:32on the eastern bridges, C Company watched a single jeep come up the road from the east. In it, an
20:38officer and his driver. The uniform was not German. He was from the Soviet 3rd Tank Corps, 2nd Belorussian
20:46Front. He had driven well ahead of his own columns and he pulled up at the Canadian barrier with no
20:52idea
20:52anyone else was in Vismar. The battalion war diary recorded it dryly. The visit was,
20:59quite unofficial since he had no idea that we were in Vismar until he came to our barrier.
21:05And then, the line that the official historian of the Canadian army thought worth keeping. The Russian
21:11officer was, quite put out to find us sitting on what was the Russians' ultimate objective. Brigadier Hill
21:19later put the margin at about three hours. Three hours after a drive of something like 60 miles
21:26that began on the engine decks of tanks at half past five that morning. Now pay attention to what
21:32happened next because it is easy to miss. As darkness came down on May 2nd, thousands of German refugees
21:39and soldiers began to come through the Canadian lines. Not drifting past, coming through. Out of the east,
21:49past the Russians, who were now somewhere on the far side of the barrier, and into the few streets the
21:55Canadians held. The holding cages filled and overflowed. Nobody had planned for numbers like these, because
22:04nobody had planned for an enemy that wanted to get into your perimeter more than you wanted it to.
22:11Think about what that does to the first answer we found.
22:14All day, on the road, the Germans had wanted to surrender to the west. That was true. But now they
22:23were doing something more. They were moving. They were picking up their families and walking, at night,
22:31toward a line a few hundred Canadians had drawn across the east side of one town. The line itself had
22:39become the thing they wanted. Hold that thought, because it is the hinge of this whole story.
22:46That same evening, at around nine o'clock, a small party of Soviet troops in scout cars and on motorcycles
22:53drove into the British tank positions. There were handshakes and a considerable amount of vodka,
22:59and then they drove back the way they had come. For a few hours on May 2nd, the meeting of
23:07east and west at
23:08Vismar looked like the meeting at Torgau on the Elba a week before. Friendly. Unofficial. A little drunk.
23:17The official historian, C.P. Stacey, would later write that Vismar was the most easterly point reached
23:25by Commonwealth troops in that campaign, and the first place where any of them met the Russian ally.
23:32For the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion, he wrote, the shooting war was over. He was right about the
23:39shooting. He said nothing about what came to the Canadian barrier after dark. The next morning, May 3rd,
23:49the telephone rang in the early hours for Sergeant Andy Anderson. There were Russians at the North Road
23:55Block. They were not driving one unofficial jeep, and they did not want to shake hands. They wanted
24:03to come through. It was still dark when Sergeant Andy Anderson got to the North Road Block. On the
24:10other side of the barrier stood a party of Soviet soldiers, and it did not take an interpreter to read
24:16the mood. They were belligerent. Several of them looked drunk. The battalion's Russian speakers were
24:24somewhere else, so the conversation was carried on with hands and faces and raised voices. What the
24:31Russians wanted was clear enough. They wanted through. Anderson offered them an escort to battalion
24:38headquarters. They refused. Then they made a counteroffer. Anderson and a comrade, a man he remembered only
24:48as Pete, could climb in with them and ride back through the Soviet lines. Two Canadians, alone, in
24:56the dark, in the hands of a drunken patrol from an army nobody in the battalion yet understood. Anderson
25:04said no. The Russians argued. Anderson kept saying no. In the end, the Russians turned round and left.
25:14Nobody fired a shot. But that barrier had just done its first night's work, and it is worth noticing
25:21which way it faced. When daylight came on May 3rd, a Canadian paratrooper named Jerry McFadden looked
25:29out on something he later put in a letter. The evening before, he had seen Russian tanks on the coast
25:36road near Vismar. Now, in the town square, more than 6,000 German soldiers were standing and waiting.
25:47Silently. Waiting to be marched off to a prisoner of war camp. 6,000 armed men, and not a sound.
25:57Now hold
25:58that image next to the Russian tanks on the coast road, and you begin to see what those soldiers were
26:05really waiting for. Not a meal. Not a march. They were waiting to be taken somewhere west of that
26:14barrier before anybody from the east came to collect them. The Russians did come, in force.
26:23Brigadier Hill sent Lieutenant Colonel Napier Crookenden, a British battalion commander, east to make
26:30formal contact, and with him went Canadians from Edie's battalion who spoke Russian. They found a
26:36column of Soviet tanks driving hard for Vismar. The column was stopped on the outskirts of the town,
26:43and there it found itself looking down the barrels of a troop of 17-pounder anti-tank guns. Then came
26:52the
26:52demand. A senior Soviet officer stated his orders plainly. He was to pass through Vismar and take
27:00Lübeck. Remember the map from the beginning of this story. Beyond Vismar, Lübeck. Beyond Lübeck,
27:08the road into Denmark. This was the moment the whole race had been run for, and it had arrived not
27:15as a
27:15battle, but as a conversation at a barrier. The division commander, Major General Eric Bowles,
27:22answered the Soviet officer himself. He told him that he had an airborne division and five regiments
27:28of artillery at his disposal, and that he would use them if he had to. But the men in Frasier
27:34Edie's
27:35battalion always told it another way, because the men on the barrier were Edie's men. Years later,
27:42one of them, Jan de Vries, described Edie facing a Russian officer who was pressing to get through.
27:49Get ready lads, Edie told his battalion, and to the Russian, as de Vries remembered it,
27:56you better have ten men for my one. Another version, handed down through the battalion's veterans,
28:03has Edie telling an insistent Soviet officer that any one of his paratroopers could beat seven Russians,
28:10and offering to prove it. Ten men, or seven, the story does not live in any official file,
28:17and the numbers change with the teller. What does not change is the answer. The Canadian answer was no,
28:25and the Russians did not come through. For a few days, the line at Vismar held on a strange mix
28:33of firmness and friendship.
28:35The divisional orders called for friendliness and tolerance, tempered with firmness, and the Canadians
28:41gave the Russians all three. Major Richard Hilborn became the battalion's chief liaison officer.
28:48Canadians and Russians visited back and forth. On May 4th, Anderson took a patrol out with an interpreter,
28:55and once the Russians understood who they were, the patrol was swallowed in handshakes, hugs,
29:01and vodka. The battalion war diarist called the Soviets the most persistent and thirsty drinkers the
29:09Canadians had ever met. Anderson drank to avoid giving offense, and was violently sick before he
29:16reached his own lines. That same day, a Canadian photographer caught a paratrooper shaking hands with
29:23a Russian officer at the barrier on the edge of Vismar. That photograph is in Stacy's official history.
29:31It is the image most Canadians who know this story have seen. Look at it closely if you ever find
29:37it.
29:38The handshake is real. So is the barrier between them. Because the Canadians set a rule. One Soviet
29:47courier jeep a day could pass through the Canadian line. Not a column. Not a company. One jeep.
29:55The Russians answered with a move of their own. On May 5th, they built their own armed roadblock about
30:02a hundred meters east of the Canadian one. Hilborn later recalled the Russians digging in and pointing
30:08their guns toward Vismar. Two barriers now, facing each other across a hundred meters of German road.
30:16And between and behind them, a town full of German families who had walked through the night
30:21to get to the Canadian side. The Russians had stopped at the barrier in daylight. The question
30:28was what they would do after dark. And the answer to that question would bring a Canadian sergeant up
30:34onto a rooftop in Vismar, with a woman screaming behind a chimney. The Russians did not come through
30:41the Canadian barrier in daylight. At night, some of them came through anyway. They came in small groups,
30:49around the roadblocks and across the fields, and into the streets the Canadians were holding.
30:55What they did there, the Canadians who saw it never forgot. Private A. Kerrignan, of the battalion,
31:03said Soviet soldiers assaulted women of almost every age. The Canadians had come across Germany
31:10expecting to fight the German army. They had not expected to spend their nights in a German town
31:17protecting German civilians from their own allies. But that is what they did.
31:24Sergeant John Feddick was one of the men who went out on those night patrols. Back home in Ontario,
31:31he had once crossed the Welland Canal on floating tin cans, though he could not swim, just to see if
31:39it could be done. Now he was walking the dark streets of Vismar with a rifle. One night he heard
31:47screaming. He went toward it. He found a Soviet soldier firing at a woman who had taken cover behind
31:53a chimney. Faduk did not wait for an interpreter, a liaison officer, or an order from brigade. He went for
32:02the man and subdued him. One Canadian sergeant, one Russian soldier, one German woman behind a chimney.
32:11That is how the line at Vismar was held after dark. Not by divisions and artillery regiments,
32:18but by men like Faduk, deciding, in a few seconds, which side of it they were going to stand on.
32:27Then there was the train. One night, near a railway sighting, a woman stopped Major Bob Firlat.
32:35She told him there was a train standing on the line, full of women evacuated from a hospital in
32:41Rostock to the east. Many of them were sick. Many were wounded. The crew had gone. There was no food,
32:50no fuel, and the toilets had long since blocked. Firlat did not file a report and wait.
32:57He gathered drivers and vehicles and went back to the train himself. When they opened it,
33:03one of the women was already dead. Some were too weak to walk and had to be carried out.
33:09The Canadians took them to a school gymnasium, the nearest place they could find with running water.
33:16Firlat remembered one thing about those women above all. They were, in his words,
33:22scared to death of the Russians. Rostock is east of Vismar. Those women had been put on a train to
33:31get them west, and the train had stopped just short of the Canadian line.
33:37Now, at last, we can go back to the beginning of this story, to the morning of May 2nd,
33:44to the road north of Wittenberg, to the German soldiers who stood at the side of the road,
33:51and some of whom cheered. Because the battalion's war diarist had already written down why they did
33:58it. He wrote it that same day, on the road, before anyone in the battalion knew about the night
34:05crossings or the hospital train. One sentence. All resistance had collapsed, because the Germans
34:14wanted us to go as far as possible. Remember the three words from Brigadier Hill's order that morning?
34:22As far as possible. The British Brigadier had told the Canadians to go as far as possible,
34:29because he wanted to beat the Russians to the Baltic. The Germans on that road wanted exactly the same
34:35thing, for exactly the same reason. That is what the cheering was. Not cheering for the Canadians,
34:43cheering for the distance. Every mile those Shermans drove was a mile of Germany that would sit behind
34:51a western line instead of a Soviet one. Every village the Canadians passed through without stopping
34:58was a village where some German family might wake up on the right side of the barrier.
35:04The men who stood back and let the tanks go by were not waving off their own capture,
35:10they were doing arithmetic. The farther the Canadians got, the more of Germany, and the more Germans,
35:17would end up on this side. And now look again at everything else we have seen. The white pillowcases.
35:25The private from Saskatchewan with an eagle on his helmet. The families at Lutzow who,
35:31wanted only to be taken by us. The six thousand silent men in the square. The crowds coming through
35:39the Canadian lines in the dark. The women on the train from Rostock. It was never really about
35:47surrender. Surrender was just the price of getting in. What the fleeing Germans wanted from the Canadian
35:53paratroopers was not mercy. And it was not a prison camp. They wanted a line. They wanted it drawn as
36:01far to the east as a few hundred Canadians on tanks could carry it. And then they wanted to be
36:07on the
36:07right side of it when it stopped. On May 2nd, Fraser Eady's battalion drew that line at Vismar. On the
36:15nights
36:15that followed, men like Feduk and Ferlat held it. But there was one thing those Germans wanted that
36:21no Canadian sergeant could give them, however fast he drove or however hard he held a barrier.
36:27And on May 7th, a British Field Marshal flew into Vismar to talk about it.
36:33May 7th, 1945. Vismar.
36:37Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery flew in that day to meet the man whose army sat a hundred meters beyond
36:44the Canadian barrier, Marshal Konstantin Rokosovsky of the 2nd Belorussian Front.
36:51The meeting was held in a large house in the town. It was done with all the ceremony the British
36:58army
36:58could find at the end of a war. A 19-gun salute from the airborne gunners. A guard of honor
37:05from the
37:06Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. Handshakes for the cameras. And behind the ceremony
37:13sat a fact that nobody at Vismar could change. The lines that would divide Germany after the war
37:20had already been agreed, months earlier and far away, by governments meeting at Yalta.
37:28Vismar lay inside the zone set aside for the Soviet Union. The town the Canadians had raced to, held
37:36through the knights and protected from the men in the opposite roadblock, was going to be handed over.
37:42Not because anyone had lost a battle, because it had been decided on a map.
37:49So here is the last layer of what the fleeing Germans wanted, and it is the one that cut deepest.
37:56They did not just want the Canadians to get there first, they wanted the Canadians to stay.
38:03Sgt. John Fedek remembered the residents of Vismar begging the Canadians not to leave them to the
38:09Soviets. The same people who had walked through the night to reach the Canadian line, now understood that
38:16the line was going to move. And no Canadian sergeant, no Canadian colonel, not even a British field marshal,
38:24could promise them otherwise.
38:26The next day, May 8th, the war in Europe ended. The Canadians celebrated with everyone else.
38:34But in Vismar, the friction did not stop because a document had been signed.
38:40For days after the surrender, the battalion went on keeping order in the town, holding the barrier,
38:46running the patrols, sorting the prisoners and the refugees who kept arriving from the east.
38:51Now look at what the Canadians actually did with the time they had, because this is where the story
38:58turns from what they could not do to what they did.
39:02They could not keep Vismar. What they could do was decide where the Red Army stopped while they were
39:09there. And it stopped at the Canadian barrier. The Soviet tank column that had been driving for Lubeck
39:17never went past Vismar. One courier jeep a day, and no more. A demand to pass through
39:24met with a no. A hundred meters of road with two armed roadblocks on it, and not one shot fired
39:32between
39:33allies across it. Think about how easily that could have gone the other way. A drunken patrol at the north
39:40roadblock that Anderson let through. A tank column that kept rolling past the 17-pounders. A sergeant
39:48who looked away from a woman behind a chimney. Any one of those, and the line at Vismar becomes a
39:54suggestion. It never did. The Canadians held it every night they were there. And beyond Vismar, the road
40:02the Soviet officer had been sent to take stayed closed. Lubeck stayed on the western side. So did
40:10the road into the Danish peninsula, the very thing the race had been run to protect. In the words of
40:17the official historian, the task had been to block the advancing Russians off from it. The Canadians and
40:24the British troops with them did exactly that. Now listen to who noticed. Brigadier James Hill,
40:31the Englishman who had sent them, wrote that the Canadians had got into Vismar three hours ahead
40:38of the Russians, just as Churchill had demanded. He praised them for keeping pace with an armored
40:45division on their flank, on their own feet, and on borrowed tanks. The Americans noticed too. The
40:52battalion had made that final drive under an American airborne corps, and in Vismar, Fraser Eady was
40:59presented with the American Silver Star. A Winnipeg hockey player, five weeks in command, decorated by
41:07a foreign army for a race that ended at the Baltic. And the official historian of the Canadian army,
41:13C.P. Stacy, a man who measured his words, wrote that it was fitting that the first Canadian unit to
41:20fight in Normandy should also be the one that went deepest into Germany. No other unit of the Canadian
41:27army, he wrote, got so far east. Think about where those men had started. A battalion raised
41:34from volunteers in a country of 11 million people, trained to fall out of aircraft, not to drive
41:41across Germany. Jumping into Normandy in the dark before the landings, fighting in the snow of the
41:48Ardennes, losing their commanding officer on the drop zone over the Rhine, and then, on the last road
41:55of the war, riding on the outside of British tanks under American orders to stand on the edge of the
42:01Baltic, facing east, while the people behind them begged them not to leave. By the middle of May,
42:09orders came for the battalion to go home. Fraser Eady had one last thing to say about Vismar.
42:16He said it years later, and it was barely a sentence,
42:19but it is the most Canadian thing anybody said about this whole story. It is satisfactory that
42:27a Canadian battalion was there. That was all Fraser Eady said about Vismar. Not,
42:34we stopped the Russians. Not, we saved anyone. Satisfactory. A word from a man who had played
42:42hockey in Winnipeg and built cars for Ford, and who did not see much point in making a fuss.
42:49On May 19, 1945, the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion left Vismar. The barrier on the
42:57eastern edge of town passed to other hands. The next night, the Canadians were back in England,
43:03at Bulford. A few weeks after that, on June 21st, they came down the gangway in Halifax,
43:10the first complete Canadian unit to come home after the war in Europe ended. Halifax gave them a welcome
43:17they talked about for the rest of their lives. On September 30th, the battalion was disbanded.
43:24It had existed for a little over three years. In that time, it had jumped into Normandy before the
43:30landings, fought in the Ardennes, jumped across the Rhine, and finished its war further east than
43:37any other unit of the Canadian army. British troops held Vismar until July 1st. Then, they pulled back to
43:45the agreed line and the Red Army came in. For the next 45 years, the town where the Canadians had
43:53dug in,
43:53facing east, sat behind the Iron Curtain. It became a port and a garrison town in East Germany, with Soviet
44:02tank regiments stationed in it. Today, there is a small plaque on Vismar's town hall marking the Canadian
44:09part in that spring. Frunt's Hotel, where Eady set up his headquarters, still stands. So does the house
44:17where Montgomery met Rokossovsky. If you stand in the marked, it looks much as it did when 6,000 German
44:25soldiers waited there in silence to be taken west. Stan Waters, the 24-year-old major who drove the
44:33Shermans flat out that morning, stayed in uniform. He rose to lieutenant general and commanded the
44:40Canadian army in the field. Then, in 1990, he did something no Canadian had ever done before. He
44:49became the first senator in the country's history to be chosen by the voters. He died in office the
44:56following year. Fraser Eady went back to Ford. He worked there for 46 years, all told. He became the
45:04patron of Canada's Paratroop Association and, in 1989, honorary colonel of the Canadian Airborne Regiment.
45:14In 1993, at the age of 76, he put on a parachute and jumped with the regiment for its 25th
45:22anniversary.
45:23He died in 2003 at 86. So go back one last time to where this story started.
45:31Half past five in the morning, May 2nd, a field outside Ballendorf. A Canadian paratrooper swinging
45:38himself up onto the engine deck of a Sherman, with nothing to hold him there but his own grip.
45:45Fraser Eady in a jeep behind the lead tanks, with one instruction for Stan Waters. Go fast.
45:53And the German soldiers at the side of the road, holding their rifles and watching the tanks go past.
45:59Some of them cheering. Now we know what they were cheering for. What the fleeing Germans wanted
46:06from the Canadian paratroopers was never just surrender. They wanted a line. They wanted it
46:13carried as far east as men on tanks could carry it. And they wanted to be standing behind it when
46:19it
46:20stopped. They gave up their weapons, walked through the night with their families, and put their wives and
46:26children in Canadian hands. All for one thing. To be on the Canadian side. And the Canadians gave them
46:35that line. A battalion of volunteers from a country of 11 million, riding on borrowed tanks under borrowed
46:43orders, got to the Baltic three hours ahead of the Red Army, and held the edge of one German town
46:50against it until they were told to go home. A British brigadier said so. An American Corps decorated their
46:58colonel for it. The official historian wrote it into the record. Fraser Eady called it satisfactory.
47:06The people who walked through the night to reach his barrier would have chosen a different word.
47:13Thank you for spending this time with the Canadian paratroopers at Wismar. Stories like this one take
47:20a long while to piece together, and I'm grateful you stayed to the end. If you think what the Canadians
47:26did on that road deserves to be remembered, a like genuinely helps it find more people. And if your father,
47:34your grandfather, or your uncle served in the Second World War, I'd be honored to hear about him in the
47:41comments.