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After the devastation at Cisterna, Canadian soldiers taught green American infantry a hard lesson in how the Germans fought at night—and the enemy’s response revealed the impact of what they learned.
Set on the Anzio beachhead in World War II, this military history story follows a mixed Canadian-American unit holding a long front with limited manpower. A Canadian sergeant’s bold daylight walk into an exposed field shows how soldiers adapted to the enemy’s world, while essential night-fighting knowledge passed from veteran to replacement in whispers. Explore a lesser-known Canadian war story about infantry tactics, battlefield survival, and the lessons shared between Allied troops. A WW2 military history account for viewers interested in the Canadian Army, the Battle of Anzio, and how soldiers learned to fight at night.
Set on the Anzio beachhead in World War II, this military history story follows a mixed Canadian-American unit holding a long front with limited manpower. A Canadian sergeant’s bold daylight walk into an exposed field shows how soldiers adapted to the enemy’s world, while essential night-fighting knowledge passed from veteran to replacement in whispers. Explore a lesser-known Canadian war story about infantry tactics, battlefield survival, and the lessons shared between Allied troops. A WW2 military history account for viewers interested in the Canadian Army, the Battle of Anzio, and how soldiers learned to fight at night.
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LearningTranscript
00:00On the 8th of February, 1944, on the flat farmland south of Latoria, a man in a filthy Italian coat
00:07walked out of a ruined farmhouse, picked up a hoe, and began working a row of beans.
00:12He was not a farmer. He was a Canadian sergeant named Tommy Prince, and there were German artillery positions within
00:18easy sight of the row he was weeding.
00:20The nearest German assembly area was about 200 yards away. He was a long way inside their lines, alone, and
00:28the only thing keeping him alive was a telephone wire running back across open ground to his own side.
00:33Prince was 28, an Ojibwe from the Broken Head Reserve at Scanterbury, Manitoba, one of 11 children, a lumberjack before
00:41the war and a hunter before that.
00:43He had joined up in June of 1940 as a sapper. He spent two years digging before anyone thought to
00:49ask what a man who could track game across frozen ground might be worth in the dark.
00:54For three days he had been lying in the wreckage of that farmhouse, watching German guns and talking quietly into
01:00a handset.
01:021,400 meters of wire connected him to his own artillery. Every time he spoke, shells came down where he
01:09said they should.
01:11It was the coldest and most patient kind of killing, and he was very good at it.
01:16Then Allied shell fire cut his own wire. Understand what that meant. The moment the line went dead, he was
01:24a man alone in a ruin behind a German front with nothing left to do but wait to be found.
01:30He could stay and be useless, or he could walk out into an open field, in daylight, in front of
01:37enemy gun positions, and find the break.
01:40He put on the coat. He picked up the hoe. He walked into the open and began weeding, and the
01:47German gunners, a few hundred yards off, watched an Italian peasant work his crop the way they had watched a
01:54hundred peasants work a hundred crops.
01:56At the break in the wire, he knelt, as if to tie his boot laces, twisted the two ends together
02:02in his fingers, stood up, and by the account that came out of that farmhouse afterwards, shook his fist at
02:09the Germans, then turned and shook it at the Allied lines too, a farmer furious with both armies for wrecking
02:16his field.
02:17Then he walked back inside, picked up the handset, and went back to work. Four German gun positions were destroyed.
02:24He was given the military medal for those three days.
02:27Hold on to that image, because we are coming back to it.
02:31The farmer hoeing beans in front of the German guns was a Canadian sergeant with a telephone in his pocket.
02:37It tells you almost everything about how the men in his unit had learned to live inside the enemy's world
02:43instead of hiding from it.
02:45If what the Canadians did here matters to you, a subscribe helps these stories reach more people.
02:50Now let me show you the ground Prince was lying in, because it explains why he was there at all.
02:56Two weeks earlier, the Allies had landed at Anzio, 30 miles below Rome, hoping to unlock the Italian front in
03:04one stroke.
03:06Within days, the landing had stopped dead. A beachhead 15 miles wide sat under German artillery that could see every
03:15road inside it.
03:16There was no rear area. The field hospitals were shelled. Its right-hand edge ran along the Mussolini Canal and
03:24out into the drained marshes of the Pontine Plain,
03:28the flattest, loneliest, most exposed ground on the whole perimeter.
03:34And nine days before Prince put on that coat, something happened out there that the American army would still be
03:41arguing about forty years later.
03:44On the night of the 29th of January, 767 men, the 1st and 3rd Ranger Battalions, the best light infantry
03:54the United States had in the Mediterranean, moved out in the dark toward the town of Cisterna.
04:00The plan was sound on paper. Go through the German outposts at night. Use a drainage ditch. Bypass the strong
04:08points. Be inside the town before dawn.
04:12They got in. They did not get out. Six men came back. Six out of 767. More than 300 killed.
04:22450 taken prisoner.
04:24Two ranger battalions ceased to exist in a single night.
04:29In the units that did it, the Hermann Göring Panzer Division and the 715th Infantry Division had done nothing clever
04:37at all.
04:38They had simply understood what the darkness in that sector was for.
04:42That is the question this story is built on, and I want you holding it for the next forty minutes.
04:48The American army had been taught that night was cover. The German army in Italy had learned something else.
04:55That night is not cover. Night is ground. And ground can be owned.
05:01Two completely different ideas about the same hours of the clock. At Cisterna, the difference cost 761 men.
05:09Into that sector, on the first and second of February, came a unit of about 2,000 men that was
05:15half American and half Canadian.
05:18The Canadians had been in uniform since 1940 and 41.
05:22They wore American uniforms and American rank badges so that nobody could argue about who gave orders to whom.
05:29And they were spread right through every company and every section in the force.
05:34And the men sent up to fill the thinning ranks that spring were American infantrymen out of the replacement depots
05:40and the ranger survivors of Cisterna.
05:44Men who had just learned, in the worst way available, that they did not understand the German knight.
05:51Somebody was going to have to teach them.
05:54It began with an order from their commander that was one sentence long, and the first patrols crossed the canal
06:00within days of the landing.
06:02What those patrols found on the far bank was the reason the rangers never came home.
06:06On the 2nd of February, 1944, the 1st Special Service Force moved out of the Anzio Beach area and took
06:14over the right flank of the whole Allied position, the line of the Mussolini Canal, running east into the drained
06:20marshes of the Pontine Plain.
06:22It was about 10 miles of front.
06:2410 miles is a divisional job.
06:26On a good day, a division is 15,000 men, with reserves behind it and neighbors on both sides.
06:32The force put fewer than 2,000 men into that line, and it was 40% understrength when it arrived.
06:38There is a reason it was that thin, and it matters, so I will keep it short.
06:42Two months earlier, at the beginning of December, these men had gone up a mountain in the Italian reign called
06:48Monte La Defensa, a climb in the dark, up wet rock, with ropes, against German positions that had already stopped
06:55everything the Allies had sent at them.
06:57They took it.
06:58It cost the force more than 500 casualties in that fighting, and among the dead was one of its battalion
07:05commanders, Lieutenant Colonel Tom McWilliam of New Brunswick.
07:08By the end of January, of the men who had gone up that mountain, roughly 400 were still present and
07:15unwounded.
07:16Those 400 were about to become the most important instructors in the Mediterranean, and none of them had ever taught
07:22anything in their lives.
07:24Because look at who was arriving to fill the gaps.
07:28American infantrymen out of the replacement depots, trained soldiers in the sense that they had been taught to advance by
07:34bounds, fire and movement, dig in before dark, and hold what they had.
07:38And the survivors of Cisterna, rangers, men who had spent the last week in a rear area writing letters to
07:46the families of friends who were now in German prison camps.
07:49Their new commander looked at a ten-mile ditch, counted the men he had, and did the exact opposite of
07:56what the arithmetic suggested.
07:57Brigadier General Robert Frederick was 36 years old, wore wire-rimmed glasses, and would be wounded nine times before the
08:05war finished with him.
08:06He did not order his men to dig deeper. He ordered patrols. Every night.
08:12Squads and platoons, across the canal, into the German side, hunting.
08:16I want you to sit with how strange that is.
08:19He was outnumbered, under strength, on the flattest ground on the beachhead, with the Hermann Göring division across from him.
08:25The same formation that had just wiped out two ranger battalions in one night, eight miles up the road.
08:31And his answer was to send his thinnest resource out into the dark, over and over, on foot.
08:37To the new men, it sounded like a death sentence. To the Canadians and Americans who had come down off
08:42La Defensa, it sounded like the only sane thing anyone had said since the landing.
08:47Here is the first thing the patrols proved, and it is the first piece of the answer to the question
08:52I gave you at the start.
08:54They crossed the canal in the first week, with their faces blacked, wearing the dark fatigues that would later give
08:59them their name.
09:00And they found that the German front line in that sector was not a line at all. It was a
09:06crust.
09:07Outposts, a machine gun team here, a listening post there, in farmhouses and ditches and drainage culverts, with gaps between
09:15them measured in hundreds of yards.
09:17You could walk through it. The rangers had walked through it.
09:21And then, behind the crust, they found the other thing. The interior was awake.
09:28Ration parties on the tracks, relief sections walking up, wire teams, mortar teams, gun crews shifting positions,
09:35wheels going to the rear, men talking in ordinary voices because they were behind their own front and had no
09:42reason to whisper.
09:44The German army in that sector did its living at night. It moved at night. It fed at night. It
09:50repaired at night.
09:51Because in daylight, the allied air forces and the allied guns owned the Pontine plain, and every German in those
09:58marshes knew it.
09:59Now put the two facts together the way the force put them together, and Cisterna stops being a mystery and
10:04becomes a mechanism.
10:07767 rangers went through the crust in the dark, exactly as planned, and came out the other side into a
10:13place where the enemy was not asleep, where the enemy was working, listening, and thoroughly at home.
10:18The rangers thought they were passing through an empty zone into a sleeping town. They were walking into a populated
10:24one.
10:25When the shooting started at dawn, the Germans did not have to find them. They already knew where they were,
10:30and they simply closed the crust behind them.
10:33That is what the American army had not been taught, and I want to be fair about it, because it
10:37was not stupidity. It was doctrine.
10:40Night was a covering asset. A way of getting from A to B without being seen.
10:45For the Germans in Italy, after two winters in Russia, night was a working shift.
10:50Tommy Prince had already worked that out. He had been going out ahead of the force since it came into
10:57the line, alone or with one other man, with a rifle, and on the 5th of February, he was sent
11:03forward again.
11:04Not to raid, but to lie somewhere inside the German half of the plain and report what he could see.
11:11He found a shell-wrecked farmhouse 200 yards from a German assembly area, ran his wire back into it, and
11:19settled in.
11:19You know what happened in that farmhouse. Keep the date in your head, the 8th of February, because in a
11:27moment you will see what the rest of the force was doing while he lay there hoeing beans for the
11:32German gunners.
11:33So Frederick had his answer. If the ground between the lines belonged to whoever was willing to walk on it,
11:40then from now on it would not belong to the Germans.
11:44There was one problem with that. The men who knew how to take ground in the dark were the 400
11:50who had come off La Defensa, and a good half of them were Canadians.
11:55Everyone else had to be taught on the job, at night, with the enemy marking the work.
12:00The first lesson was one word long. The new men hated it. The word was silence. Not stealth, not surprise,
12:10not any of the things that sound good in a lecture.
12:14Silence. Enforced like a religion. And the new men coming into the force that February hated it.
12:20Because silence meant giving up the one thing a frightened soldier reaches for. You did not fire. That was the
12:29rule.
12:30A patrol crossing the Mussolini Canal went out under orders not to shoot unless there was no other way home,
12:37and the men who wrote that rule were not being clever.
12:40On that plane, a rifle shot did not frighten anybody. It gave a bearing.
12:45The German mortars in that sector had the crossings, the culverts, and the ditch lines already measured, in the dark,
12:52on paper, and the crews slept beside the tubes.
12:56One nervous burst from a Thompson at 2 in the morning, and the bombs arrived where the noise had been,
13:01in under a minute, with nobody on the German side ever having to see a face.
13:06So you carried the rifle, and you were forbidden to use it. Instead you carried a knife, the force's own
13:13double-edged fighting knife, issued to every man on the strength.
13:18And you were expected, if it came to it, to do the job with that.
13:22Now, how do you teach that to a replacement in a week?
13:28There was no school. There was no training area. The whole beachhead was inside German artillery range, and a rehearsal
13:37ground would have been shelled like anything else.
13:40There was only the patrol itself.
13:44So the force did the one thing available. It put the new man in the middle of the file, with
13:51a veteran in front of him, and a veteran behind him, and took him across the water on his first
13:57night in the line.
13:58In front of him, more often than not, was a Canadian. That was simply how the force was built. The
14:06Canadians had come out of the Canadian army in 1942 as trained soldiers.
14:10They had gone up Monte la Defensa in December, and they were scattered through every company in the unit, instead
14:17of being kept together.
14:18Which meant that in most sections in most companies, the man who had done this before was a Canadian, and
14:25the man who had not was an American.
14:27Watch the first lesson land.
14:30The file leaves the near bank blacked up. Boot polish, burnt cork, whatever there was. Moves a few hundred yards
14:39into the German half of the plane, and a flare goes up.
14:42Everything in a new man screams at him to drop, to run, to get behind something. The veterans do not
14:49move. They do not even turn their heads, because a face is the brightest thing in a field at night,
14:55and an eye catches light.
14:58They stand in the open, half-lit, and the flare burns down, and the German sentry who fired it sees
15:05a plane with nothing in it.
15:07Joe Dauphiné of Starbuck, Manitoba had learned that lesson higher up the mountain, with a German machine gun working over
15:14the rocks he was lying in.
15:15His own account of surviving it is four words long.
15:19I didn't move a muscle.
15:22An American in the force, Urban Sippel from Glenbula, Wisconsin, learned it the hard way at Anzio on a three
15:28-man reconnaissance that got caught in the open between a stone building and a road.
15:32Flares went up. Machine gun fire came over them, and the way out was not speed and not shooting. It
15:40was timing. The gap between one flare dying and the next one climbing.
15:45They read the rhythm, moved in the intervals, and came home.
15:50The next night, men from the force blew the building. That is what the instruction actually looked like. No manual,
15:57no lecture, no demonstration.
15:59A veteran's shoulder in front of you in the dark, and one whispered correction, and the understanding, by about the
16:06third night, that everything the replacement depot had taught you in the sunshine of the United States was the wrong
16:13shape for this ground.
16:16Then came the second lesson, and this one turned the new men into something the German army in that sector
16:23had not met before.
16:25You do not move away from a sound. You move toward it.
16:30The whole point of a force patrol was not to look and come back. Frederick wanted prisoners. A living German
16:40brought across the canal with his boots wet was worth more than any amount of map reading, because he could
16:47be asked who his regiment was, when it had come into the line, and where the next one along was.
16:54So a patrol that heard voices in a farmyard did not go around the farmyard. It went into it, at
17:02walking pace, to take one of those voices home.
17:06Think about what that requires of a man, who three weeks earlier had been on a troopship.
17:12He is being asked to walk toward the enemy, at night, with a knife, under orders not to fire.
17:20Tommy Prince was doing the same arithmetic in his own way, and it is worth seeing the difference, because it
17:27tells you how far this thing could be taken.
17:30Most men learned to move through the German half of the plane in threes and fives and be back before
17:37first light.
17:38Prince learned to stay.
17:40He went out alone with a rifle, at night, and did not come back with the patrol.
17:46He found a place inside the German position and lived in it. A ditch, a haystack, a wrecked farmhouse with
17:55a telephone wire trailing behind him, and used the daylight, which was supposed to belong to the enemy, to work.
18:03By the middle of February, the German outposts on the far bank had begun to notice things that did not
18:09make sense.
18:10A sentry post found empty in the morning. A field telephone cable cut in a place no allied soldier should
18:19have been able to reach.
18:21Men missing from a section with no shooting heard by anyone in the next farmhouse.
18:28And the force, having learned that the ground beyond the canal was walkable, then did something no manual in any
18:36army suggested.
18:38They stopped coming home.
18:41On a normal front, a fighting patrol goes out after dark, does its work, and is back behind its own
18:47wire before the sky greys.
18:49That is the arrangement both armies expect, and it means the ground between the lines belongs to nobody every night
18:56and to the defender by day.
18:58The force broke the arrangement by simply staying on the far side.
19:02They took the wrecked farms out beyond the Mussolini Canal, buildings that on any map belonged to the German half
19:09of the plain, and they moved in.
19:12Sandbags in the windows, machine guns in the rubble, wire in the ditches, men sleeping in the cellars through the
19:19daylight hours.
19:19And the best known of those forward positions belonged to a first regiment officer named Gus Heilman, who took over
19:27an abandoned hamlet in no man's land, declared himself its mayor, and renamed it Gusville.
19:33I am not exaggerating any of this, and it is one of my favorite things in the whole Anzio story.
19:39Gusville had a newspaper.
19:41It was called the Gusville Herald Tribune.
19:44It had livestock, because the farms and the marshes had been abandoned, with the animals still in them.
19:51And the men of the force drank the milk, and ate the beef, and raced the horses that were left
19:57behind.
19:59War correspondents made the trip out to it specifically so they could file copy with the dateline, Gusville, Italy.
20:08Which meant a story in an American or Canadian newspaper datelined from a place that did not exist, in front
20:16of an allied front line, inside artillery range of the German army.
20:22And underneath the joke, there was a piece of hard military thinking.
20:28If your outposts sit on the enemy's side of the obstacle, then every patrol you send out starts its night
20:36already inside his half of the plane.
20:39You are not crossing water anymore, you are stepping out of a cellar.
20:44The distance a man has to walk to reach a German ration party drops from 2 miles to 400 yards.
20:54The crust that had swallowed the rangers was now something the force lived inside of.
21:00And it worked in the other direction, too.
21:02Every German relief section coming up to the outpost line, every wire party, every mule train with ammunition,
21:10now had to make its night walk through ground where men with blacked faces were sitting still in the dark,
21:17listening.
21:19That is what changed hands out there in February.
21:23Not a line on a map.
21:25A shift.
21:26Watch what it did to the new men.
21:28A replacement who arrived in the first week of the month, who had never in his life been beyond his
21:35own wire at night,
21:36was by the end of the month doing what the veterans did.
21:40Going out in threes and fives, freezing under flares, walking toward voices instead of away from them.
21:48Some of them were ranger survivors of cisterna, which is a sentence worth stopping on.
21:55Six weeks after the German army had taught them what the night was, they were out in it again, working
22:02it the way the force worked it,
22:04with a Canadian sergeant somewhere in the file.
22:07It was not all quiet knife work.
22:10On the 10th of February, the force went into a village out in the marshes in strength.
22:14The Canadian accounts named it Sassouno, and cleared it.
22:19Something like 70 Germans were killed there.
22:22Six men of the force died taking it, and ten more were wounded.
22:26Which, for a unit that could not replace anybody quickly, was a real price for a village nobody had heard
22:32of.
22:32But the prisoners were the point.
22:34Frederick wanted Germans brought back alive.
22:37And his men brought them back, night after night, out of farmhouses and slit trenches and ditches, gagged and walking.
22:45Each one of them could be sat down in a tent on the beachhead, and asked the questions that keep
22:50an army alive.
22:52Which division are you?
22:53When did you come into the line?
22:55Who is on your left?
22:57Where are your guns?
22:58A beachhead that could not see over its own horizon was suddenly being handed the German order of battle in
23:04installments,
23:05by men who had walked out and fetched it.
23:08Tommy Prince was doing his version of the same work on his own schedule.
23:12He would take a rifle and go out at night, alone, into that plane,
23:16and there are accounts of him spending the daylight hours lying up inside the German half and coming back with
23:22what he had seen.
23:23He had, by then, spent so much of his war in the enemy's ground that the enemy's ground had stopped
23:29being a special place to him.
23:31It was simply where the work was.
23:33And this is the point in the story where the other side stops being scenery.
23:38Because the German command in that sector was not blind, and it was not slow.
23:43They were the Hermann-Göding division and the 715th, and they had been reading their own losses since the first
23:49week of February.
23:50Sentries gone. Cable cut. Sections short of men in the morning.
23:55Outpost commanders who could no longer guarantee what was in front of them at 3 in the morning.
24:00So they answered. More flares. Fired on no pattern so the rhythm could not be read.
24:06Mines pushed out into the approaches and booby traps in the obvious places.
24:10The gate. The culvert. The gap in the hedge where a man would naturally step through.
24:15And then the real reply, the one that mattered.
24:19German ambush patrols, lying out in the dark on their own side, not moving, waiting for the men with the
24:25blacked faces to come to them.
24:28Think about what that means.
24:30For six weeks the force had owned the night because they were the only people willing to sit still in
24:35it.
24:36Now there was somebody else out there doing exactly the same thing, and doing it on ground he knew better.
24:42The hunters had company.
24:45On the 14th of March a five-man ambush patrol from the force crossed into the German half of the
24:50plane,
24:51and its officer heard something he could not identify and went to look at it alone.
24:56His patrol carried on with the job.
24:59They did not know for some time that they no longer had an officer.
25:03The Germans had him.
25:05And of all the men in the force they could have taken that night,
25:09they had just taken one who knew exactly how the whole system worked.
25:14The night of the 14th of March, 1944.
25:18A five-man ambush patrol from the force crossed the Mussolini Canal and went out to lie up in the
25:24German half of the plane,
25:25and somewhere out there its officer heard a noise that did not fit.
25:30His name was Mark Radcliffe, a lieutenant in the 3rd Regiment.
25:34He did what he had been trained to do and what the force had spent six weeks teaching everybody else
25:39to do.
25:39He moved toward the sound rather than away from it,
25:43and four or five Germans came out of the dark onto him at once.
25:47They had him down, gagged and held in a few seconds.
25:51And here is the part that I find hardest to read.
25:54His own patrol did not know.
25:56That is what total silence costs.
25:59No shout, no shot, no scuffle loud enough to carry.
26:04Four men lying still in a ditch a short distance away,
26:08doing exactly what the rule said, while their officer was being carried off in the other direction.
26:13They went on with the night's work.
26:15It was some time before anybody realized there were four of them instead of five.
26:21Remember Radcliffe.
26:22He is going to matter twice in this story, and the second time will surprise you.
26:28They took him back through their own positions,
26:30and in a German command post somewhere behind that front,
26:34a captain of the Hermann Göring Panzer Division sat down to talk to him.
26:39The captain's name was Ehrlich,
26:42and before the war he had been a stockbroker in Philadelphia.
26:46Sit with that for a moment,
26:48because the Second World War is full of these joints where the two worlds touch.
26:53A German officer in a cellar on the Pontine Plain,
26:57who knew Broad Street and the American way of talking,
27:00facing a young American lieutenant out of a unit that half the German army in that sector was now afraid
27:07of.
27:08He had a great deal he wanted to know, and there was no mystery about what.
27:13When your outposts are being emptied night after night,
27:17divisional intelligence wants one thing above all.
27:21What is over there?
27:23How many?
27:25Who?
27:25Since when?
27:27By March, the Germans on that flank had been living under the forces' patrols for six weeks,
27:33and until this night they had not had one of them in a chair.
27:37The conversation did not go the way Ehrlich wanted.
27:40At some point he stopped asking and swung a solid rubber truncheon into the right side of Radcliffe's throat,
27:48and Radcliffe lost the power of speech,
27:51which, if you are running an interrogation, is an interesting way to fail at it.
27:56Then the beachhead did the one thing the beachhead was always doing.
28:01An allied barrage came down.
28:04The Anzio perimeter was small enough that the guns were never quiet for long,
28:09and when the shells started arriving, the Germans in that position did what everybody on that plane did.
28:16They went for cover.
28:18Radcliffe was left with one guard.
28:21He put the guard down, and he did not run for it alone.
28:25He went and got two other prisoners out, one British, one French, and took them with him into the dark.
28:33Then he climbed a tree.
28:34That is the detail that tells you he had been out there before.
28:38The search would go through the ditches and the buildings and the culverts, all the places a hunted man goes,
28:44and he sat in an evergreen above their heads and let it pass underneath him.
28:49He spent three days out in that ground, wounded by shrapnel, in country crawling with German patrols who knew a
28:56prisoner had got away.
28:57And on the third day, he was found by a force patrol, because there was always a force patrol.
29:04The sergeant who brought him in was a big Canadian-American units kind of character,
29:08with a name that has survived in the records as Big Swede Erickson.
29:13And he was out there for the same reason everybody else was out there.
29:17Because Frederick's order had never been rescinded, and every single night those men went across.
29:23I want you to see the loop that just closed. The system that lost Radcliffe is the system that found
29:29him.
29:29The Germans could take one man out of the dark, but they could not stop the dark being full of
29:34his friends.
29:34And that is the difference between having a tactic and owning the ground.
29:39A German ambush patrol went out that night, did everything right, and got a prize. Then it had to go
29:45back.
29:46The force did not go back. The force lived there.
29:49Tommy Prince was the extreme case of it. While all this was happening, he was doing what he had been
29:55doing since the first week of February,
29:57going out with a rifle, alone or nearly alone, staying through the daylight in a ditch or a ruin inside
30:02the German half,
30:04coming back when he had something worth bringing. For most men, the far bank was a shift.
30:09For Prince it had become an address. But do not let me make March sound like a triumph. It was
30:14not.
30:14The force had been in the line since the beginning of February without relief,
30:19undermanned from the start, sleeping in daylight in cellars that were shelled,
30:23going out every night into ground that was now mined, wired, flared at random,
30:28and patrolled by Germans who had learned to lie still and wait.
30:33Men were being lost in ones and twos, night after night, for a prisoner and a map reference.
30:40By the end of it, the force would have spent ninety-nine days in that position without being pulled out.
30:46Frederick's answer to the German counter-move was not another weapon. He did not have another weapon.
30:53What he had was two thousand exhausted men and an understanding of what six weeks of unexplained disappearances does to
31:01the inside of a soldier's head.
31:03So he ordered something printed. It was a sheet of gummed paper, with the force's arrowhead badge and one line
31:11of German on it,
31:12and his patrols began leaving it out in the enemy's half of the plane, on doors, on equipment, and on
31:18the faces of German dead,
31:20where the men who came up in the morning could not miss it.
31:23The line on the sticker read,
31:25Das dicke Ende kommt noch.
31:28The worst is yet to come.
31:31It was printed under the force's red arrowhead badge, in German,
31:36and the patrols carried sheets of them across the canal at night and left them where they would be found
31:42in daylight,
31:43on the doors of occupied farmhouses, on abandoned equipment, and on the bodies of German soldiers who had been killed
31:52quietly a few hours earlier.
31:54Now think about being the man who finds one.
31:58You are a German infantryman in the Pontine Marshes.
32:03Your outpost lost two men last week and nobody heard anything.
32:07The field telephone cable has been cut twice in places that ought to be behind you.
32:14This morning you walk into a farmyard you hold,
32:17and there is a dead comrade with a sticker on his forehead,
32:22telling you in your own language that this is not the bad part yet.
32:27Nobody in the German army in Italy had an answer to that,
32:31because it was not a weapon and you cannot shoot back at it.
32:35It was information, accurate information, delivered politely.
32:41And somewhere in that spring, on a body on that plane,
32:46an allied burial party or a search of a dead man's pockets turned up a diary with a line in
32:52it that has followed this unit ever since.
32:55I will give it to you plainly,
32:57and I will also tell you that historians have argued for years about exactly where and how it was found,
33:04because this audience deserves honesty rather than a good story told twice.
33:10The black devils are all around us every time we come into the line,
33:14and we never hear them come.
33:17Die schwarzen Teufel.
33:19The black devils.
33:21That is where the name came from.
33:23From the enemy.
33:25About the blackened faces.
33:27And specifically, about the silence.
33:30Not about how hard they hit.
33:32About the fact that they arrived without sound.
33:36But a quote is a quote.
33:38And I promised you evidence rather than atmosphere.
33:41So here is the hard measurement.
33:43Frederick recorded that within about three weeks of the patrol program beginning,
33:49the Germans opposite him had pulled back so far that his men could no longer reach them and return in
33:56a single night.
33:57Read that again, because it is the whole answer to the question I set at the start of this film,
34:02and it is written in a unit of distance that only makes sense on a front like this one.
34:08The German army moved itself out of walking range of a man on foot in the dark.
34:14They did not do that because they were beaten.
34:17They were not beaten.
34:19The beachhead was still surrounded, still shelled from the hills, still going nowhere.
34:24They did it because a defended line depends on holding the ground in front of it at night,
34:29on your own listening posts, your own patrols, your own certainty about the black field in front of the wire.
34:36And on that flank, they had lost it.
34:39If you cannot own the night in front of your line, the only way to be safe in it is
34:44to put more distance between yourself and whoever can.
34:47So here is the thing the German army knew that the Americans at Cisterna did not.
34:54Stated as simply as I can state it.
34:57Night is not a covering material.
35:01Night is terrain.
35:03It is held or it is lost.
35:06By patrols, by listening posts, by discipline about noise and light.
35:11By knowing where the enemy must walk and being there first.
35:15The Germans had learned that in Russia and in the Italian mountains,
35:20and they applied it on the 29th of January against the best light infantry the United States had,
35:26and 761 men did not come back.
35:31And what the force did that spring was not to invent something cleverer.
35:35It was to take the German idea, accept every word of it,
35:39and then apply it harder than the Germans were willing to apply it themselves.
35:44Every night.
35:45In the enemy's half.
35:47From outposts inside his ground.
35:50Without firing.
35:52Which brings me to the men this story is actually about.
35:56By April, the patrols crossing that water were not the same men who had crossed it in February.
36:01The force had been bled continuously,
36:04and the ranks had been filled with the American infantry replacements out of the depots,
36:09and the survivors of the ranger battalions.
36:11Those men learned it in the dark, from whoever was in front of them in the file.
36:15And in a unit built half out of Canadians, that man in front was very often Canadian.
36:21A Manitoban, or a Nova Scotian, or a Montrealer.
36:25In an American uniform with American rank badges, who had been doing this since Monte La Defensa.
36:31There was no course, no certificate, and nobody ever wrote it up as a training method.
36:37It was passed from man to man, on a plane in Italy, at two in the morning, in whispers.
36:43And I am not going to pretend this came cheap.
36:46The force held that sector for ninety-nine days without relief.
36:50Ninety-nine days of sleeping in shelled cellars by day,
36:53and walking into mined ground by night.
36:55Of men going out in threes, and coming back in twos.
36:59Across its whole existence, the force took casualties amounting to some seventy-seven percent of its strength,
37:06and turned over its men something like six times.
37:09There was no such thing as a force veteran who had not been hit,
37:12or had not helped carry somebody who had.
37:15Tommy Prince was still out there through all of it,
37:18with his rifle, and his wire, and his talent for lying absolutely still in somebody else's field.
37:24So the force had taken the knight on that flank.
37:27It had taught two hundred-odd New Americans how to live in it.
37:30It had pushed a German division backwards without a single set-piece attack.
37:35And none of it unlocked Anzio.
37:37The beachhead was still a beachhead in the middle of May,
37:41with the same hills looking down into it.
37:44Then, on the twenty-third of May, the whole thing finally moved.
37:49In daylight, across open ground, straight at prepared positions with tiger tanks in them.
37:55Daylight was the one thing these men had never owned.
37:58On the twenty-third of May, 1944, the Anzio beachhead finally came off the leash,
38:04and the force went forward with the American third division in the sunshine.
38:09Everything that had protected these men for four months was gone.
38:13No darkness.
38:15No ditch to lie in until the flare died.
38:18Open, flat, cultivated ground.
38:22German positions dug in and waiting.
38:25And in front of them, at one point, seventeen tiger tanks.
38:29The heaviest thing the German army had in Italy.
38:33They went anyway, and they paid for it.
38:36Frederick was hit again.
38:38By the end of the war, he had been wounded nine times,
38:42which is not a statistic so much as a description of how he commanded.
38:46The men who had learned to take a farmyard in silence with a knife
38:50now had to do it at midday against armor.
38:54Twelve days later, at half past six in the morning on the fourth of June,
38:58a patrol of the force went through the Porta San Giovanni and into Rome,
39:03the first Allied troops into the city.
39:06And the officer at the head of that patrol was Mark Radcliffe.
39:10I told you he would matter twice.
39:13The man the Germans took out of the dark on the 14th of March,
39:18gagged, carried off, hit across the throat with a truncheon by a Hermann Göring captain,
39:23who climbed a tree while search parties went by underneath
39:27and spent three days wounded in no man's land.
39:30That man led the Allied armies into the first Axis capital to fall.
39:37Elsewhere in the city that morning,
39:39the forces' battalions were fighting German rearguards for the bridges over the Tiber
39:43and taking six of them intact,
39:46which is the difference between a pursuit and a pause.
39:50One of those battalions was commanded by a Canadian, Tom Gilday,
39:54who before the war had been the Canadian army's only ski instructor
39:58and who had helped recruit the Canadian half of this unit in the first place.
40:03Then, Italy was finished with them.
40:05In August, they went ashore on two islands off the French Riviera,
40:10Port Croix and the Ile du Levant,
40:12to clear old stone forts ahead of the landings in southern France.
40:16And by the middle of the month, the force was up on the Franco-Italian border,
40:20in the mountains above the coast,
40:22covering the right flank of the American 7th Army.
40:25Which is where Tommy Prince did the thing that made an American army decorate a Canadian.
40:32In September, in the hills behind Lescarenes, Prince went out to find the Germans.
40:37Not a patrol of five men, him and one other, on foot, into the mountains.
40:43He walked, by the accounts of it, some seventy kilometers through German-held country.
40:48Seventy kilometers in mountain terrain, over days, without proper food, without sleep,
40:54moving where the enemy was, and staying long enough to be sure of what he was looking at.
40:59He found a German encampment.
41:01He found their gun positions.
41:03Then he walked back, and he was not in a condition to be walking at all when he reached his
41:08own side.
41:09And having reported, he took the force back in.
41:13The attack that followed went in on positions that had been mapped by a man on his own boots,
41:18and it broke them.
41:19The Americans gave him the silver star.
41:23I want to stay on that for a second.
41:25Because this channel has told a lot of stories about outsiders being asked to admit what somebody else's soldiers did.
41:32And this is one of the cleanest examples in the whole war.
41:35The silver star is an American decoration, awarded under American authority by American officers for gallantry in action.
41:45Fifty-nine Canadians received it in the Second World War.
41:48Three of those men also held the military medal.
41:52An Ojibwe lumberjack from Scanterbury, Manitoba, a man who at home could not vote in a federal election without giving
41:59up his status as an Indian under Canadian law, was one of the three.
42:03He went to Buckingham Palace in February of 1945, and was given the military medal for the farmhouse at La
42:11Toria, and the American silver star for the mountains above Lescarennes, by King George VI, on the same day in
42:20the same set of hands.
42:21But the force itself did not last that long.
42:25On the 5th of December 1944, at Villeneuve-l'Ubaix, in the south of France, the first special service force
42:33was paraded for the last time.
42:35The Allied armies had plenty of infantry by then, and no further use for a two-nation experiment that nobody
42:43could quite categorize.
42:45The colors were cased.
42:47And then came the order that the Canadians who were there never stopped repeating for the rest of their lives.
42:54Because the parade was not dismissed as a unit.
42:57It was divided.
42:59Americans stand fast.
43:01Canadians fall out.
43:03Joe Dauphiné, of Starbuck, Manitoba, remembered those words sixty years later.
43:10Men who had gone up Monte La Defensa on ropes, who had held ten miles of the Mussolini Canal for
43:17ninety-nine days,
43:18who had walked into farmyards with knives to fetch a German back alive, stood on a parade square and cried.
43:27And then the two halves of them walked away from each other for good.
43:31The Canadians went back to the Canadian army.
43:35A great many of them ended up in the first Canadian parachute battalion and jumped across the Rhine in March
43:42of 1945.
43:44Tommy Prince went home to Manitoba.
43:47And that, if this were an ordinary film, would be the ending.
43:52Decorated by a king, honored by two armies, home at twenty-nine.
43:58It is not the ending.
44:00Because the country he came back to had a very specific set of rules about who he was.
44:07And there was one more war coming that he was going to volunteer for.
44:11Go back to the field at La Toria for a moment.
44:15February, 1944.
44:18A man in a borrowed coat, hoeing beans in front of German guns, kneeling to tie a boot lace, and
44:25splicing a telephone wire between his fingers.
44:29Everything that man did in the war, he did because he was better at being outdoors than the people hunting
44:35him.
44:36Now watch what the country he did it for had ready for him.
44:41Tommy Prince came home to Manitoba in 1945 as one of the most decorated indigenous soldiers in Canadian history.
44:50And under the Indian Act, he came home as a ward.
44:54A status Indian could not vote in a federal election in this country until 1960.
45:02The benefits that other returning men arranged at a local veterans office had to come, for a man living on
45:09reserve, through an Indian agent.
45:11And a great many First Nations veterans never received what they were owed at all.
45:17He did not go quiet about it.
45:19He became a spokesman and then vice president of the Manitoba Indian Association.
45:24And in 1947, he sat in front of a joint parliamentary committee in Ottawa and told the government of Canada
45:30what he thought of the Indian Act and of the treaties it was ignoring.
45:34He had said of the uniform that as soon as he put it on, he felt a better man.
45:39He also said that all his life he had wanted to do something that would help his people recover their
45:44good name.
45:45Then, in August of 1950, at nearly 35 years old, he volunteered again, for Korea, with the 2nd Battalion of
45:53Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry.
45:56And the old trade came straight back.
45:58In February of 1951, he led a snatch patrol against a Chinese position and brought back their machine guns.
46:05The same craft, the same hours of the night, a different dark on the other side of the world.
46:10He was at Kapyong in April, where the Patricias held a hill against repeated assault and were given a United
46:16States Presidential Unit Citation for it, the second time in his life the American army formally put its name to
46:23what he had done.
46:24He went back for a second tour, and in November of 1952, he was wounded on the hook.
46:29By then, his knees were finished.
46:33Arthritis from years of lying still and wet ground in two wars.
46:38The last part is hard, and I am not going to dress it up.
46:42The business ventures failed.
46:44The marriage ended.
46:45The man who had walked 70 kilometers through the German army in the Maritime Alps ended up in rooming houses
46:52in Winnipeg, in pain, with his medals sold.
46:56He died in November of 1977, aged 62, at Deer Lodge Hospital in Winnipeg, and he was buried in the
47:05Field of Honor at Brookside Cemetery.
47:07More than 500 people came.
47:10The army sent a delegation.
47:12So did the province and the federal government, and so did the consuls of countries whose ground he had crawled
47:18over in the dark.
47:19So let me answer the question this film started with as simply as I can.
47:23The German army in Italy understood something the Allies had to learn at a terrible price.
47:29That night is not a blanket you hide under.
47:32It is ground.
47:33And ground is held by whoever is disciplined enough to stand still in it.
47:37They proved it at Cisterna against 767 American Rangers, and six men came back.
47:44Canada did not answer that with a better doctrine or a secret weapon.
47:48Canada had 11 million people, no special forces tradition, and no manual for any of this.
47:54What it had were volunteers, lumberjacks, trappers, prospectors, farm boys, who were put into American uniforms with American rank badges
48:03inside somebody else's unit,
48:05and who took the German idea about darkness seriously enough to outwork the people who invented it.
48:11Then, night after night on the Mussolini Canal, they handed it over in whispers to American replacements and to ranger
48:18survivors who had just lost everything in the dark.
48:21The verdict on whether it worked was not written by Canadians.
48:25It was written by a German soldier in a diary that the black devils were all around them and they
48:31never heard them come.
48:32It was written by a German commander who pulled his line back until it was beyond the walking range of
48:38a man on foot in one night.
48:40And it was signed, in September of 1944, by an American general pinning a silver star on an Ojibwe sergeant
48:48from Scanterbury, Manitoba.
48:49He is the one I would like you to carry out of this. Not the medals, and not the tragedy
48:55at the end of it.
48:56The field at Latoria, the borrowed coat, the hoe, the two ends of a broken wire twisted together between a
49:03man's fingers while four German gun crews watched him work.
49:07Thank you for giving this your time. Genuinely.
49:12These stories take a long time to research, and they only travel if people like you decide they are worth
49:19passing on.
49:20If you think what the Canadians did on that canal deserves to be remembered, a like helps it find more
49:26people.
49:27And if you would like to hear more, we are here every week.
49:31And I would like to ask you something. If your father, your grandfather or your uncle served in the Second
49:37World War,
49:38in any army, in any uniform, I would be honored to hear about him in the comments.
49:44Tell me his name and where he served.
49:47A surprising number of the men in these films were found because somebody's family remembered first.