- 34 minutes ago
A small Canadian force held the road through St. Lambert-sur-Dives as German troops fled the Falaise Pocket—and ultimately took 2,100 prisoners. This military history documentary follows Major David Currie and the South Alberta Regiment through three days of tank battles, close-range attacks and desperate attempts to escape across the River Dives.
With no artillery for the initial assault, Currie’s men faced German armour and waves of infantry before gaining crucial artillery support. Their stand, Currie’s steady leadership and the choices made by the soldiers around him reveal how a force under pressure became the one place in the valley where surrender offered safety. Explore the Battle of Normandy, the Falaise Pocket and a remarkable story of Canadian courage, resilience and wartime leadership.
With no artillery for the initial assault, Currie’s men faced German armour and waves of infantry before gaining crucial artillery support. Their stand, Currie’s steady leadership and the choices made by the soldiers around him reveal how a force under pressure became the one place in the valley where surrender offered safety. Explore the Battle of Normandy, the Falaise Pocket and a remarkable story of Canadian courage, resilience and wartime leadership.
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LearningTranscript
00:00August 18th, 1944. Last light. On a road above the river Dive in Normandy. In front of a village
00:08called Saint-Lambert-sur-Dive, two Canadian Sherman tanks have just been hit by German 88s.
00:15The crews are somewhere inside, or under the holes, or in the ditch. Nobody behind can see which.
00:22The officer commanding the column doesn't send a patrol. He doesn't wait for dark. He walks forward
00:28alone, on foot, through the German outposts and into the village, while mortar bombs come down
00:34around him. One man, on foot, into a village held by the Germans. He is going to find out what
00:41is in
00:41Saint-Lambert, and he is going to bring his crews out. His name is David Curry, Major, South Alberta
00:49Regiment, Commanding C-Squadron, 32 years old. Before the war, he was a mechanic and welder in
00:55Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and one army report on him used four words you should remember,
01:01rather shy and retiring. Hold on to that. It's going to sound very strange before this story is over.
01:09Curry found the crews and brought them out under fire. His Victoria Cross citation records it in a
01:16single sentence. Further down, the same citation records a number that is very hard to believe
01:23once you see what Curry had to work with. Fifteen Sherman tanks. Fifty-five infantrymen of B Company,
01:33the Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders of Canada. Later, a few more companies, some anti-tank guns,
01:40and whatever reinforcements could get through. The American official history puts Curry's force at
01:47about 175 men. And the citation says that by the end, that force had taken 2,100 German prisoners.
01:58Not killed. Not scattered. Captured. More than 10 Germans for every Canadian in the fight.
02:08So here is the question this whole story is built on. How does a force that small take that many
02:15prisoners? From an army that was not surrendering, but running for its life? If what the Canadians did
02:22at Saint-Lombert matters to you, a subscribe genuinely helps these stories reach more people.
02:28Thank you for being here. To answer it, you need to see what was behind Curry that evening,
02:35and what was in front of him. For days, the remnants of two German armies had been caught in a
02:43pocket
02:43around Falaise. The Americans were closing from the south, the British, Canadians, and Poles from the north.
02:52By August 18th, what was left of the gap was a few miles of valley between the towns of Trun
02:59and Chambois.
03:00The little river Dive ran through the middle of it. And everything the Germans still had inside.
03:07Panzers, horse-drawn guns, staff cars, ambulances, generals, had to cross that river to get out.
03:17Eisenhower himself would walk through that valley a few days later, and what he wrote about it comes
03:23near the end of this story. At Saint-Lombert, there was a bridge. Remember that bridge. It is going to
03:30matter more than any tank in this story. At three that afternoon, Curry had been called in and given
03:37the job. At six, he set out from Trun with his squadron and the Argyles. That winter, on CBC radio,
03:46he remembered thinking it was the toughest job the regiment had ever been given. Before the column
03:52even reached Saint-Lombert, things went wrong. On the road, Polish tanks opened fire on it. Then RAF
04:00Spitfires came down and strafed it. Allies on the flank, allies overhead, and nobody quite sure where
04:07anyone else was. That is how confused that valley had become. Then came the 88s, the two knocked out
04:15tanks, and Curry's walk into the village. Curry wanted to fight straight in that night. His commanding
04:22officer said no. Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Wotherspoon, SWATI to the regiment, a Toronto lawyer in peace
04:30time, ordered him back to the high ground north of the village, point 117. Go in at first light. So
04:38Curry pulled back, and below him, in the dark, the Germans held the village and the bridge. Now here is
04:45the first piece of the puzzle, and everything after this depends on it. The Germans inside that pocket,
04:52were not coming to fight the Canadians. The Canadians were not their target. They wanted that river
05:00crossing. Anything standing on it was simply in the way. A private in the Argyles named Arthur Bridge
05:08would later sum up the Canadian position in five words. We were right in their way. Keep that sentence
05:16in mind, because it sounds like the whole answer. It isn't. Being in the way of a desperate army
05:23usually gets you run over. It doesn't get you 2,000 prisoners. Curry knew what was waiting in Saint
05:31Lambert. He had been inside it, and when he went back down the hill in the morning, he would go
05:37without
05:38the one thing an attack like that normally gets first. At 6.35 the next morning, a radio message
05:46went out. Attacking Rooster now. Rooster was Saint Lambert. By noon, Curry would be holding half the village.
05:57What it cost to get there, and what the Germans started doing once he was there, is where the 2
06:03,000
06:04prisoners begin. August 19, 1944. 6.35 in the morning. Curry's tanks go down the hill towards Saint
06:14Lambert with the Argyles beside them, and with no artillery bombardment in front of them at all.
06:21That was the missing thing. No shells to keep German heads down. The citation says it plainly. Curry
06:29attacked without any previous artillery bombardment. The artillery support that would later matter so
06:36much only became available after this attack went in. The lead Sherman was hit almost at once. Now watch
06:45what happens next, because it tells you what kind of squadron this was. Captain John Redden spotted a
06:52German Panzer IV in the village and talked Curry's own gunner onto it. The Panzer was knocked out.
06:59It was the South Alberta's first confirmed kill at Saint Lambert, and it came from the Major's tank.
07:07Curry was not directing this from the hill. He was down in it, leading the attack himself,
07:13exactly as the citation says. Beside the tanks went the Argyles of B Company under Major Ivan Martin.
07:22Martin was 32, the same age as Curry, born in Chatham, Ontario, and living in London, Ontario. Remember his
07:31name. Before this story is finished, the United States Army will give him one of its highest awards,
07:38and he will never know it. Inside Saint Lambert, the fight broke into the kind of thing that never
07:45fits on a map. House to house. Lieutenant Gill Armour of 10 Platoon put his PIAT team onto a Panther,
07:53and the bomb knocked it out. Armour then forced the tank's officer out himself. Elsewhere in the village,
08:01a Sherman was hit and began to burn, with the driver still inside. Company Sergeant Major George
08:08Mitchell of the Argyles and Private Holmes climbed onto the burning tank under fire. For about five
08:16minutes they stayed up there. They brought the driver out alive. Hold those two scenes side by side,
08:24because they matter for the question we're chasing. The Canadians in Saint Lambert that morning were not
08:30a force about to break. They were killing tanks at close range and climbing onto burning hulls to get
08:37their own people out. The official historian, C.P. Stacy, gives the result in one line. After six hours of
08:46fierce fighting, Curry's force got halfway through the village. By noon, he had seized half of
08:54Saint Lambert and dug in. Half. Not the whole village. And as long as the Canadians held only half,
09:02the road through Saint Lambert was not closed. It was only narrowed. Shortly after noon, a small party of
09:11Canadians came into Saint Lambert from Tron. They had come to take pictures. Lieutenant Donald Grant of the
09:18Canadian Army Film and Photo Unit with two cine cameramen, Sergeant Jack Stollery and Sergeant
09:24Lloyd Millen. What Grant saw when he got there is the first real clue in this story. Not burning tanks.
09:33Prisoners. In his notes, he wrote of a terrific number of prisoners. His headline for the day was that B
09:40Company of the Argyles was having a field day with Jerry. Grant took 15 frames that afternoon on a
09:48speed graphic camera. One of them would become one of the best known Canadian photographs of the Second
09:55World War. In it, German soldiers are surrendering in a village street, and at the left stands a tired,
10:03grimy Canadian major with a pistol in his hand. That major is Curry. And I'm going to come back to
10:11that
10:11photograph at the very end, because of something a historian wrote underneath it. But think about what
10:18it shows. Half a village held for a few hours by a squadron and a company that had just fought
10:25for six
10:25hours without artillery. And already, Germans are giving themselves up to it. Why? These were men of an
10:34army that had fought hard all summer. Part of the answer is in the German Army's own reports. Over those
10:41days, the 7th Army lost its radio stations one after another until it could no longer command at all.
10:49Fighter bombers had burned almost all its vehicles and fuel. Many of the men reaching the Dive were no
10:56longer in units. They were groups of exhausted soldiers looking for a way out. But exhaustion
11:03doesn't explain it on its own. Exhausted men in Normandy had fought to the end before. And not every
11:10German who came to Saint-Lambert over the next two days would be a straggler. Some would come in panzers,
11:17with a general leading them. Saint-Lambert was nowhere near safe. On Grant's next run into the village,
11:25his party was ambushed. Everyone with him was wounded except Grant, and they were pinned down
11:31for five hours. Half of Saint-Lambert was Canadian. The other half was not. That evening, a few miles east,
11:40Polish and American soldiers met at Chambois. On paper, the filet's gap was now closed. Stacy's verdict on
11:50that encirclement? Loose in the extreme. The Germans were about to show just how loose. And as darkness
11:58came on, Curry made a decision that looked from the outside like giving ground. Without it, the story of the
12:062000 might have ended that night. August 19th, late afternoon. Curry's half of Saint-Lambert gets its
12:13first reinforcements. C Company of the Argyles comes down. So does C Company of the Lincoln and Welland
12:21Regiment with a platoon of D Company. And with them comes something Curry has not had since dawn. A link
12:29to the guns. On the high ground north of the village, point 117, the same hill Curry had pulled back
12:37to the
12:37night before, Captain Charles Clerkson of the 15th Field Regiment set up an observation post. His
12:45military cross-citation explains why up there. The ground around the South Albertus gave him nowhere to
12:52see from. So he worked from the hill, under constant shell and sniper fire. Remember, Clerkson. Before
13:00this is over, he is going to describe what he saw in a word you would not expect. Now, the
13:08decision.
13:08As the light went on the 19th, the German pressure on the village rose again. Curry's men were, as he
13:16put
13:16it, pretty well spread out. In the dark, a position like that can be taken apart, one post at a
13:23time.
13:24Curry said exactly what he feared. I was afraid that we might be chopped up piecemeal. So he drew the
13:32whole force in tighter for the night. In his own words, we gave up a part of the village. Think
13:39about
13:39what that costs a commander. He had fought six hours, without artillery, for that ground. Men had been
13:47hit taking it. And now he was handing some of it back without a fight. Here is why it mattered.
13:54A force
13:55scattered in the dark is a set of separate targets. A force drawn in tight is one position. Tanks and
14:03slit trenches close enough to cover each other, so that whatever comes at one of them, comes at all of
14:08them. Curry traded ground for a shape that could not be taken apart one piece at a time. Hold on
14:15to
14:15that shape. Everything that happens in Saint-Lombert over the next two days happens against it. Among the
14:23Argyles in Saint-Lombert was a private from Hamilton named Earl McAllister. The men called him Scotty. He
14:30was 5'3 and the air force had turned him down over a weak nerve in his ear. He told
14:36his parents,
14:37either I come back a hero or I won't come back at all. He was clearing houses with a corporal
14:44named
14:44Harold Shouse. The way you cleared a cellar was a grenade down the stairs first. At the last cellar,
14:52they didn't throw it. Inside were the women and children of the village. Decades later,
14:59Shouse said it plainly. We didn't throw a grenade there. We would have got them all. Keep Scotty
15:06McAllister in mind. When we come back to him, the Germans he captured will be arriving at the Canadian
15:12rear with a password nobody gave them. Now cross the valley, into the pocket, because the Germans were
15:21making decisions that night too. General Eugene Meindel commanded the 2nd Parachute Corps. When
15:28he was told of the encirclement, he had said, I presume the lid is on, and we shall probably have
15:35to try to break out. Now his paratroopers were the spearhead. After the commander of the 3rd Parachute
15:42Division was badly wounded, Meindel had taken personal command of it. His orders for the night were strict.
15:49Single file. No noise. No firing before dawn. At about half past midnight, Meindel's group crossed the
15:58Deve. Not at St. Lambert, but about half a mile downstream. They ran head-on into machine gun fire
16:05from a concealed tank 30 yards away. Even so, many of them got through in the dark. At midnight,
16:13Kurt Meyer of the 12th SS had gathered everything of his division still in the pocket.
16:18He waited for his reconnaissance unit to come back. It didn't. In his memoir, he wrote that,
16:25no noise of fighting was heard from St. Lambert, and so, we assumed the paratroopers' breakout was a
16:31success. Stop on that for a moment. A German commander reads silence from St. Lambert as a sign that the
16:38way
16:39is open. But the silence did not mean the Canadians were gone. They had pulled in tight, and they were
16:45still there. And now you can see the limit of everything Curry had done so far. A position drawn
16:52in tight is hard to break, but it cannot reach everything. In the dark, along the river, Germans
17:00were slipping past. Stacey doesn't hide it. Through the breach, he writes, considerable numbers of
17:07Germans continued to escape. Being in the way was not the same as closing the road. So by the end
17:15of
17:15this night, the question has changed. It's no longer only how a small force took so many prisoners,
17:22it's how a force that could not stop the Germans getting past ended up with 2,000 of them in
17:29its
17:29hands. A German report from those days has a sentence about St. Lambert. It is about 5 hours. Those hours
17:38would be the closest the Canadians at St. Lambert came to being overrun. And they began with something
17:44the South Alberta's own diary could barely call an attack. August 20th, 1944. About 8 in the morning.
17:54In front of the Canadian positions at St. Lambert, the fields begin to move. The South Alberta
18:01Regiment's war diary describes it, and I want you to hear the exact words, because they are not what
18:07you'd expect from a battle report. Waves of German infantry began moving against the positions. It could
18:15hardly be called an attack as there was no covering fire plan, simply a mass movement of riflemen.
18:23No covering fire. No plan. Just men on foot heading for the dive, because the dive was the way out.
18:32American infantry near Chambois described the Germans in their sector the same way. Not attacking,
18:39but merely trying to escape. From inside a Canadian slit trench, it made no difference. A crowd of men
18:46trying to get through you looks exactly like a crowd of men attacking you. The tanks at regimental
18:53headquarters opened fire, and in the diary's words, they began to mow down the advancing infantry.
19:00Then comes a line that tells you how close this came. A little later, the diary says, the situation
19:08began to get out of hand as there were just too many infantry. Too many infantry. A regiment writes that
19:18when it is running out of ways to stop them. And down in the village, Curry's squadron was taking the
19:24same
19:25flood. Curry described it on CBC radio that December. Jerry's came in so fast and thick that they climbed
19:34all over the tanks. The boys, he said, were fending them off with pistols, grenades, and in one instance,
19:43swinging the turret. Picture that. A Sherman crew inside a tank with German soldiers climbing over the hull
19:52above them. The tank is the strongest thing in the street, and its crew is fighting for it with pistols.
20:00Now watch the other side of the board, because this is where the Germans played their strongest card.
20:06About 10 that morning, the armor of the 2nd Panzer Division reached St. Lambert, about 15 tanks,
20:14with the division commander, General Heinrich von Lutwitz, at their head.
20:19Lutwitz led an attack across the river into the village. Remember the bridge? I said it would matter
20:26more than any tank in the story. Here is why. After all the bombs and shells of those days,
20:33it was still standing. The Argyles had no explosives to blow it. So the panzers had a crossing.
20:41Lutwitz described it after the war. The crossing of the Dieve bridge was particularly horrible.
20:47The bodies of killed men, dead horses, vehicles, and other equipment having been hurled from the
20:54bridge into the river to form there a gruesome, tangled mass. The German daily report from Army
21:02Group B tells the same story from headquarters. After a dashing attack by the 3rd Parachute Division,
21:09it was possible to break out at St. Lambert. And then the sentence I promised you.
21:16At St. Lambert-sur-Dive, the battle for a breach lasted for 5 hours. Listen carefully,
21:23because that sentence cuts two ways. Yes, the Germans broke through at St. Lambert. That is a failure,
21:31and I'm not going to dress it up. Some of the best troops left in the pocket got out past
21:37Curry that
21:38day, and Lutwitz was one of them. But the same sentence says that a squadron and a few companies
21:44of Canadian infantry made what was left of two German armies fight 5 hours for a hole in one village.
21:52By mid-morning, Curry's force had been pushed back to the northern edge of St. Lambert.
21:59Wotherspoon reported that his men were much too thin on the ground. Nearly everything Curry had taken
22:06the day before was gone. And Curry? His citation gives no times for its most personal lines,
22:13but they belong to these hours of counterattacks. A tiger tank had been harassing his position.
22:20Curry directed the fire of his own command tank onto it and knocked it out. Another time, while his
22:28tank's guns were busy with targets farther off, German snipers crept to within 50 yards of his
22:35headquarters. Curry picked up a rifle and dealt with them himself, from the turret. A major commanding
22:43the whole force, shooting at snipers with a rifle from his own turret. That is not a man running a
22:51battle from a map. And now, here is the strangest line in the record of that morning. At half past
23:00nine,
23:00in the middle of all this, C Squadron reported that it was sending back an additional 200 prisoners of war.
23:09Two hundred more. From a squadron that was being pushed out of the village. Think about what that
23:17means. The Germans were breaking through at St. Lambert, and in the very same hours, other Germans
23:24were coming into Curry's position with their hands up. So whatever made those men surrender, it was not
23:30that the Canadians were winning. That morning, the Canadians were losing ground. Something else was
23:38happening in St. Lambert, and before it was over, Curry would ask the gunners for something no commander
23:44asks for lightly. To keep firing after their shells had started landing next to his own tank.
23:52Up on point 117, Captain Charles Clerkson was looking down into the valley of the Deves. I told you he
24:00would describe what he saw in a word you would not expect. Here it is. Below in the valley, targets
24:08appeared one after another. It was an OP officer's dream. Roads and fields were full of Germans moving
24:17eastward, seeking a way out of the trap. The resulting carnage was terrible. An OP officer is the gunner who
24:27watches the ground and calls down the fire. Dream. And terrible. In the same breath. That is an honest
24:38man telling you what this looked like from the hill. The roads out of the pocket lay open below him,
24:45and every German column on them was a target. A time correspondent, William White, came into St.
24:53Lambert after the battle. He wrote that Canadian artillery was already ranged on the main road,
25:00and that its first salvos tore the German column apart. Here is the turn in this story.
25:08On the morning of the 19th, Curry had gone into St. Lambert with no artillery at all. Now he had
25:14it.
25:15And his citation says something very specific about how he used it. It was typical of his
25:22cool calculation of the risks involved in every situation. Cool calculation. Put that phrase next
25:31to the one I asked you to hold at the start. Rather shy and retiring. Same man. Now watch what
25:39the
25:39calculation was. At one point, the Germans were attacking right around his position, and Curry had
25:46the medium guns firing into them. Heavy shells brought that close to your own men do not all land
25:53where you want them. Short rounds began falling within 15 yards of Curry's own tank. He could have
26:01stopped it. He ordered the fire to continue. Because, in the citation's words, of its devastating effect upon
26:09the attacking enemy in his immediate area. 15 yards. A little more than the length of a city bus.
26:18He was weighing the risk to his own crew against what those shells were doing to the men coming at
26:24them.
26:25And the citation records the result. The attacks were repulsed, with severe casualties to the enemy.
26:35He was not the only one. Major Ivan Martin of the Argyles, the man from Chatham I asked you to
26:43remember,
26:44twice went forward, alone, on foot, to bring the artillery down on German self-propelled guns.
26:52A company commander, walking out on his own to do the spotting himself.
26:58That afternoon, more help came down the road. And it came the hard way. A troop of towed 17-pounder
27:08anti-tank guns of the 6th Anti-Tank Regiment, under Lieutenant John Flowers, had been assured that
27:16Saint-Lombert was clear of the enemy. It was not. The troop was ambushed. Flowers put his guns at the
27:25disposal of the Argyle Company in the village and fought them there. Over about seven hours,
27:32his citation says, the 17-pounders accounted for a tiger, a self-propelled gun, an armored car,
27:39another tank, and more than 200 German infantry. The French gave him the Croix de Guerre for it.
27:46And here is a detail almost nobody knows. Some of the men fighting in the Canadian line at Saint-Lombert
27:53were Americans, prisoners the Germans had been holding, freed in the village. Curry's force gave
27:59them rifles and put them in the line. One of them was Private Joe Hoops of the 825th Tank Destroyer
28:06Battalion. He came through Saint-Lombert. He was killed in April 1945. Now, the moment in the citation
28:14that tells you the most about Curry. Only once, the citation says, did reinforcements get through to
28:20his force. Forty men. Curry led them forward into their positions himself and explained why their piece
28:28of ground mattered to the whole defense. Then the next attack came in under intense fire and the new
28:35men withdrew. It is not hard to understand. They had just walked into a village full of dead horses and
28:43wrecked vehicles, with Germans coming at it from the pocket. Curry went and got them, personally.
28:51He collected them and led them forward into position again. And from then on, the citation says,
28:58they held for the remainder of the battle. Stop on that. Men who had just withdrawn from that position
29:06went back into it behind him and stayed there. The citation's word for why is inspired.
29:14So step back and look at the whole picture. A Canadian position at the north end of Saint-Lombert
29:21that will not move. 17 pounders firing from inside the village. Medium shells falling all around it,
29:29so close that some fall within yards of Curry's own tank. And walking into this all day, German soldiers
29:37without radios, without fuel, without orders, looking for a way across a river. You may already see part of
29:45the answer. Not all of it. At dusk on the 20th, the Germans gathered for one last assault on the
29:51Canadians
29:52in Saint-Lombert. What happened to that assault, and what Curry did the moment it was over, is the
29:58piece that makes the 2000 make sense. August 20th, 1944. Dusk. Around Saint-Lombert, the Germans are
30:08gathering for one more try the Canadian position. This time, it never arrives. The citation says the
30:16attacking force was routed before it could even be deployed. By one account, Curry had eight tanks left,
30:25and they put about a hundred rounds into the buildings where the attack was forming. And then,
30:30Curry does the thing that turns this story around. He does not sit tight. For two days, the Germans have
30:38been the ones attacking. Now, in the citation's words, Major Curry then promptly ordered an attack and
30:45completed the capture of the village. Think about who is doing this. A force pushed back to the northern
30:52edge that very morning. A force in which, by the end, every officer under Curry would be killed or
30:59wounded. And it goes forward and takes the ground it had given up and lost. The citation says that this
31:06denied the Chambois-Trent escape route to the remnants of two German armies. That is the failure turned around.
31:15On the morning of the 20th, the Germans broke through at Saint-Lombert. By that night,
31:22the same Canadians were closing the breach. And now I can bring back Scotty McAllister,
31:29the private from Hamilton, the Air Force did not want. At Saint-Lombert, McAllister took prisoners by
31:37himself. Fifty by one comrade's memory. A hundred and fifty by the Argyle's war diary. The story told
31:46afterwards, it even became a wartime comic, is that his prisoners turned up at the Canadian rear on
31:53their own and told whoever met them, Scotty sent us. Whether every word of that story is exact, I cannot
32:02promise you. But hold on to the picture, because it is the heart of the answer. German soldiers walking
32:10back through the Canadian lines with nobody guarding them. And not running. Why not? Because there was
32:19nowhere to run to. Put yourself, for one moment, in the boots of a German soldier at the Dieve that
32:27day.
32:28Your army has lost its radios. Your vehicles are burned. The bridge is choked with the dead,
32:36the way Lute Fitz described it. The roads and fields out of the valley are under the guns
32:42Clerkson is calling down. And in front of you is a Canadian position that has been there for two days
32:49and will not move. You can try to get past it through the shell fire, or you can walk into
32:56it with your
32:56hands up. Out in that valley, there is no safe place. The one place a man can stop being shot
33:05at
33:05is inside the Canadian line. That is why the prisoners kept coming all through the fighting.
33:12On the 19th, when Grant photographed them, and at half past nine on the 20th, when the Canadians were
33:18losing ground. They were not surrendering to a winning army. They were surrendering to the one fixed
33:25thing in a valley where everything else was falling apart. But that is only half the answer.
33:32The next question is obvious. Why did that position not move? A squadron and a few companies,
33:39attacked for two days, pushed to the edge of the village. Officers killed and wounded, reinforcements
33:46pulling back. Positions like that break. This one did not. The citation answers with the words of one of
33:55Curry's own non-commissioned officers, a man it does not name. That is a man who saw Curry up close,
34:03at the worst of it. Listen to him. We knew at one stage that it was going to be a
34:08fight to a finish,
34:10but he was so cool about it, it was impossible for us to get excited. And around that sentence,
34:16the citation lays out what COOL actually cost. With all his officers killed or wounded, Curry had
34:24virtually no relief. In three days and nights, he got one hour of sleep. He spent the rest going
34:32round the weapon pits, talking to his men, advising them on their weapons, cheering them on. The citation
34:39says he never considered the possibility of failure or allowed it to enter the minds of his men. Now put
34:46it together, because this is the answer the title promised. A small Canadian force stood in the way
34:53of an army that had to get past it. The guns made everything around it deadly. It held because one
35:00exhausted man would not let his men see that it might not. And for as long as it held, it
35:06was the only safe
35:07place in the valley. By the citations count, 2,100 Germans ended up inside it as prisoners. Remember
35:16those four words from the beginning, rather shy and retiring. That was the man at the center of it.
35:23The shyness and the calm were not opposites. They were the same quiet man, doing the one job he had
35:30been given. But the fighting was not over. The next morning, the 21st, would bring the biggest flood of
35:36prisoners of the whole battle. It would also bring the shell that found Ivan Martin. What he was doing
35:42when it found him tells you what kind of men were holding St. Lambert. August 21, 1944, half past seven
35:50in the morning. Another German tank is knocked out at St. Lambert. Stacey would later write that the attacks
35:58that morning were, the last important effort of the Germans in and about the pocket. After that, what comes out
36:05of the
36:05pocket is not attacks. It is men. By noon, Curry's C squadron alone had sent back 700 unwounded prisoners
36:15and 150 wounded. Stop on that. In one morning, a squadron that had been fighting for three days
36:23took in many times more prisoners than it had men. That same day, Ivan Martin was killed,
36:30the major from Chatham, the company commander who had twice walked out alone to call down the guns.
36:36He was talking with a captured German doctor about the wounded when an 88 shell came in. With him was
36:43the Argyle's interpreter, Lt. Albini Daupe, 24 years old, from Hull, Quebec. Daupe died that same day.
36:52By one account, Curry had been with them moments before and had just climbed back into his tank.
36:59Hold the picture of what those two Canadians were doing when the shell came. Not attacking. Talking
37:06with an enemy doctor about the wounded in a village where for three days the enemy had been trying to
37:13kill them. I cannot tell you what any German soldier knew about the men he was surrendering to. But
37:21remember the cellar where Macalester and Shouse held back the grenade? And remember this shell.
37:28The Canadians at Saint Lambert killed when they had to. They did not stop being careful with the
37:34people in their hands. The Argyles paid heavily. When B and C companies were counted, only about 70 men
37:44were left. Both company commanders were casualties. But the last move of this battle belongs to the
37:51Canadians, and it is the one everything else was for. On the 21st, Stacy writes,
37:58The South Alberta regiment smashed its way through to Chambois. Firm contact was made with the Poles,
38:05who had spent the same days holding the high ground above Chambois against the same breakout,
38:11and the gap was finally and completely closed. Up on the hill the Poles had been holding,
38:18the Canadian Grenadier Guards reached them shortly after noon. Their war diary has a line worth stopping
38:25on. The Poles cried with joy when we arrived. Now listen to the outsiders, the Germans who ran into this,
38:34and the Americans who wrote it down. Kurt Meyer, the man who heard silence from Saint Lambert and took
38:41it for an open road, got out of the pocket. In his memoir, he described the dead lying behind the
38:48bushes and walls of the orchards by the Deve. Then he wrote, They had all run into the waiting weapons
38:56of
38:56the Canadian 4th Armored Division. Waiting. That is the word the enemy chose. Not attacking,
39:05waiting. It is the Canadian line on the Deve described by a man who had to get past it.
39:12The Americans wrote it down twice. The United States Army's official history says Curry's small
39:19force held doggedly against repeated attacks. And for Ivan Martin, the American Army went further.
39:27It awarded the Canadian Major from Chatham its Distinguished Service Cross, second only to the
39:34medal of honor. For heroism in the fanatically defended town of Saint Lambert. That is the award I
39:42promised you. He never knew. And Eisenhower. I told you at the start that he would walk through this valley.
39:52Forty-eight hours after the gap was closed, he did. On foot. He wrote that it was,
40:00Unquestionably, one of the greatest killing grounds of any of the war areas. With scenes that could be
40:06described only by Dante. And it was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards at a time,
40:14stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh. Eisenhower does not name Curry or Saint Lambert,
40:23but the valley he walked was the neck of the bottle. And at Saint Lambert, the Canadians had been the
40:30cork.
40:30Set that beside the photograph Grant took on the 19th. Out in the valley, the dead. At the Canadian
40:38position, Germans, standing, alive, surrendering. That is the other side of the number in Curry's
40:47citation. And Curry? His citation keeps one last scene for him. When his force was finally relieved,
40:56he waited until he was satisfied the handover was complete. Then he fell asleep on his feet and
41:02collapsed. One hour of sleep in three days. He stayed on his feet exactly as long as the job needed
41:11him to.
41:11C.P. Stacey gave it one plain sentence in the official history. The ordeal of Major Curry's force
41:19at Saint Lambert came at last to an end. That autumn, word reached Curry of something on its way from
41:27London.
41:28He said later that he was staggered. He sat down, had a cigarette, and thought it over. What he said
41:36next
41:36about whose honor it really was, and what he admitted in his own written account about the fear he had
41:43carried into Saint Lambert, is how this story ends. November 27, 1944. The London Gazette publishes the
41:53citation you have been hearing all through this story. Major David Vivian Curry of the South Alberta
42:01Regiment is awarded the Victoria Cross. It is the only Victoria Cross won by a Canadian in the Normandy
42:08Campaign, and the only one ever won by the Canadian Armored Corps. Three days later, he stands before
42:16King George VI at Buckingham Palace. He has been rushed to London, and he goes to the King in his
42:23battle
42:24dress, and tank overalls. By one account, he refused to change out of his pixie suit, the tankman's overall.
42:33On CBC Radio that December, he described hearing the news,
42:37I was staggered. I sat down, had a cigarette, and thought it over. And he said the honor belonged to
42:46the
42:46regiment. It is easy to hear that as modesty. It was also accurate. Go back through what you have seen.
42:55The NCO who found it impossible to get excited. The forty reinforcements who went back in behind him.
43:03Mitchell and Holmes on the burning Sherman. Flowers and his seventeen pounders.
43:09Martin walking out alone to call the guns. McAllister's prisoners finding their own way to the rear.
43:17Curry held the position together. But the South Albertas, the Argyles, the Lincoln and Welland,
43:25and every man who stayed in it, were the position. Not all of them heard him say it. Scotty McAllister,
43:33the private from Hamilton, became a lance sergeant. On October 20, 1944, he went to help a wounded
43:41comrade and was killed by a sniper. He was twenty-one. He is buried at Bergen-Op-Zoom in the
43:48Netherlands.
43:49He had told his parents he would come back a hero, or not at all. Ivan Martin lies in the
43:56Canadian War
43:56Cemetery at Brettville-sur-laise in Normandy. A mountain in the Yukon carries his name. And the
44:04photograph. I promised to come back to it. When C.P. Stacy put Grant's picture into the official
44:11history, he wrote a caption under it.
44:14Major Curry himself, tired and grimy, appears at the left, pistol in hand. This is as close as we
44:22are ever likely to come to a photograph of a man winning the Victoria Cross. Look at what that picture
44:29actually shows. Not a charge, not a burning tank, a surrender. Germans giving themselves up to a tired
44:37man with a pistol, in a village that was only half his. The closest anyone came to photographing a
44:44Victoria Cross being one is a picture of the enemy walking into the Canadian line. Curry came home. He
44:53worked in the paper business in Baie-Comeau, Quebec, and then in manufacturing in Montreal. Then, for close
45:00to twenty years, he served as Sergeant at Arms of the House of Commons, the officer who carries the mate
45:07into Parliament. In May 1966, when a bomb went off inside the Parliament buildings, Curry was among
45:15the first on the scene. He died in Ottawa in June 1986 and is buried in Owensound, Ontario, his wife
45:24Isabel's hometown. In 2018, the Canadian War Museum brought his Victoria Cross home. So come back with me,
45:35one last time, one last time, to the beginning. August 18th, last light. Two Canadian tanks knocked out in front
45:45of
45:45Saint-Lambert. A mechanic from Moose Jaw walking alone into the village to bring his crews out. Curry wrote his
45:55own
45:55account of Saint-Lambert. In it, he says the men, had been asked to take on incredible odds. And he
46:04admits what
46:05he had carried into that village. The greatest fear was the possibility that I might not measure up to
46:12that which was asked of me. Not fear of dying, fear of not measuring up. The shy man's fear. And
46:22it is the
46:22same man his NCO saw, so cool it was impossible to get excited. The calm his men leaned on for
46:32three days
46:33sat on top of that fear, and he never let it reach them. So why did one small Canadian force
46:41capture 2,100
46:43Germans fleeing Normandy? Because for three days, a squadron of tanks and a few companies of volunteer
46:51infantry, with no artillery for their first attack and no explosives for the bridge, stood in the one place the
46:59enemy had to
47:00pass, and did not move. In that valley there was nowhere safe except the Canadian line, and the man
47:08holding it never let anyone see his fear that he might not measure up. The enemy called it waiting.
47:16The Americans called it dogged. Curry said the honor belonged to the regiment. He wrote,
47:23St. Lambert proved to me that I could measure up. And of the men beside him, every last man did
47:32the job
47:32asked of him, without complaint. Thank you for spending this time with David Curry, Ivan Martin,
47:40Scotty McAllister, and the Canadians who held St. Lambert. If you think what the Canadians did in that
47:47village deserves to be remembered, a like genuinely helps it find more people. And if you'd like to
47:53hear more, we're here every week. If your father, your grandfather, or your uncle served in the Second
48:01World War, I'd be honored to hear about him in the comments.