Will Ogilvie, Landing in Sicily, CWM 19710261-4603, Beaverbrook Collection of War Art, Canadian War Museum.
Tim Cook is chief historian at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa and author of 13 books of Canadian military history.
“D-Day Dodgers” was a dismissive slight against the close to 100,000 Canadians who served in the Italian campaign during the Second World War. The moniker came from a cheerful Second World War nameless song that was belted out by soldiers to the tune of Lili Marlene, with the words, “We’re the D-Day Dodgers here in Italy/Drinking all the vino, always on the spree.” While it was typical soldiers’ fare in not taking themselves too seriously, the term occasionally was used callously to describe the hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers who served in the Mediterranean against the fascist forces of Germany and Italy. It implied that they missed the real show in Normandy.
While it’s true that the war in Western Europe overshadowed that in Italy, from July, 1943, that was the place of Canada’s first sustained test of battle.
It happened in Sicily, 80 years ago this month.
When the Anglo-American armies finally defeated the Axis forces of Germany and Italy in North Africa in May, 1943, which culminated in the capture of 250,000 enemy soldiers, the next Allied campaign against Europe’s supposedly soft underbelly of Italy was an opportunity to attack the Axis forces and perhaps drive Italy from the war.
The target was Sicily, with more than 230,000 German and Italian soldiers garrisoning the rugged island off mainland southern Italy.
The invasion would also provide much-needed experience in an amphibious landing of a large force against an enemy-held position.
The memory of Dieppe on Aug. 19, 1942, shrouded all amphibious assaults. That misguided and poorly planned operation threw about 5,000 Canadian soldiers against the fortified town, leading to a costly disaster. The corpse counters finally determined that 907 Canadians had been killed, even more wounded, and almost 2,000 taken prisoner.
Nearly a year later, a larger Canadian force would go into battle for what was expected to be a punishing campaign in Sicily, standing shoulder to shoulder with the Americans and the British.
Will Ogilvie, Street Scene, Assoro, Sicily, CWM 19710261-4779, Beaverbrook Collection of War Art, Canadian War Museum.
As is often the case with the soldier at the sharp end, the Canadians who were loaded on warships and convoys in Scotland in early June, 1943, had no idea as to where they were headed.
It was a long and perilous journey as the 1st Canadian Division and 1st Canadian Army Tank Brigade of about 25,000 men steamed toward the warm waters of the Mediterranean, running the gauntlet of German U-boats.
Even with precautions and protection from warships, the deadly submarines sank three ships. More than 50 Canadians died and much of the division’s vehicles were lost.
The Canadian soldiers, fish-white after years in rainy England, arrived off the coast of Sicily and, surrounded by British and American troops floating on nearby ships, prepared for the titanic battle ahead.
Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily, would see 3,000 ships and 4,000 aircraft support the landing of 150,000 soldiers on the first day of combat.
Allied planners worried that it might all go wrong.
The monstrously complex operation was fraught with danger. Landing exposed soldiers on beaches left the vulnerable infantrymen susceptible to enemy fire and rapid counterattack to drive them into the water.
But before the invasion, Allied fighters and bombers, including those from the Royal Canadian Air Force, plastered the southern coastal defences of Sicily to pave the way for the invasion of seven divisions that came ashore on 26 beaches along a 70-kilometre stretch.
A complex deception plan, code-named Mincemeat, also threw off the Germans. A dead body was dressed in a British officer’s uniform, along with fictitious identification and fake plans to invade Greece and Sardinia. The corpse was dropped off the southern coast of Spain, where it was found by the enemy. The Germans fell for the ruse, and moved forces to those fronts, although there were still effective Axis defenders in Sicily.
On July 10, 1943, the first waves of troops came ashore amid much confusion.
“Hour by hour the tension mounted,” wrote Lieutenant Farley Mowat of the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment, an infantryman who survived the war and later became a famous writer and activist. “All around us the sea and air were pulsing with gathering power as more and more convoys hove into view; new packs of grey destroyers formed up to guard our flanks; and the planes patrolling overhead multiplied like shrilling locusts.”
Landing craft became lost and dropped soldiers on the wrong site, while others ran aground of unseen sandbars far from the beaches.
Still, most of the infantry stormed ashore, and the Italian defenders had little heart for a battle at the beachheads. Thousands were captured in the first days of battle.
But hard fighting was to come as the Allied forces, with the British on the right flank, the Americans on the left and Canada’s 1st Division between them, advanced through the dust and heat to engage the Axis soldiers.
Will Ogilvie, Tanks Moving into Dittaino Valley Sicily, CWM 19710261-4800, Beaverbrook Collection of War Art, Canadian War Museum.
The untested Canadians were not expected to do much fighting. Instead, they were to largely act as a flanking formation to the left of the British, who aimed for a brisk victory by charging northward to capture the city of Messina on the northeast of the island, closest to the Italian mainland.
No plan survives contact with the enemy, however, and under command of the famed General Bernard Montgomery, the British forces were stopped south of Catania, about halfway up the east coast, in fierce battles with elite German divisions.
The American GIs, commanded by the hard-charging General George Patton, followed roadways around the western part of the island, gobbling up territory but acting in a manner unco-ordinated with the British.
Somewhat strangely, it was the Canadians who were thrust into a prominent role in fighting their way northward through the Sicilian badlands.
On the 15th and 18th of July, the Canucks captured Grammichele and Valguarnera in battles that involved outflanking German panzer grenadier units.
In brain-baking heat and with the sunburnt soldiers slathered in a dust that caked to a paste with their sweat, the Canadians were greeted as liberators by the desperately poor Sicilian people who had no love for their dictator Mussolini.
“Wine and fruit were passed out to the troops, the hatred of Mussolini and the Germans always being expressed time and time again,” wrote one Canadian officer.
A few days later, at Assoro, the Germans were dug in high above the Canadians in a hilltop fortress, and any advance up the single road to capture the position was certain to end in ruin.
The Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment, formed from farmers around the Peterborough and Belleville region, studied the situation and devised a daring and dangerous manoeuvre to climb a steep rockface to an ancient Norman castle.
In the audacious operation they scaled the heights and from the castle they called down artillery fire on the shocked Germans below them. The enemy’s defences collapsed on July 22, when the 48th Highlanders of Toronto broke through the final barriers in fierce combat.
In the aftermath of this battle, the commander of the 15th Panzer Grenadier Division reported candidly that the Canadians exhibited “fieldcraft superior to our own troops.”
The Canadians were fast becoming hardened to battle and they fought other bruising affairs against the Germans who occupied formidable positions at Leonforte, Nissoria and Agira.
When the Americans finally entered Messina on Aug. 17, the campaign came to an end. The Axis forces had suffered a significant defeat, with 147,000 killed, wounded and captured. Hitler raged and watched as his fellow fascist dictator, Mussolini, was removed from power by the Italians. In September, Italy surrendered to the Allied forces.
At the end of the heavy fighting, Gen. Montgomery congratulated the Canadians and, at one gathering, said, “I regard you now as one of the veteran divisions of the Army.”
The fighting was not over, however, with a long and costly campaign to follow in German-occupied Italy, where almost 100,000 Canadians would serve for another 18 months. However, the invasion of Northwest Europe that began on June 6, 1944, overshadowed the hard and difficult battles of the Allied forces in Italy.
About 5,300 Canadians were killed in the Italian campaign, along with 19,400 wounded. They would fight in countless battles: wearing down the Germans and forcing Hitler to feed hundreds of thousands of his soldiers to this front.
As befitting the sardonic Canadians, those who served in Italy proudly adopted the term of “D-Day Dodgers.”
Will Ogilvie, Jeep Ambulance, CWM 19710261-4596, Beaverbrook Collection of War Art, Canadian War Museum.
To return to Sicily, the victory there came at a heavy cost in lives, with some 20,000 Allied casualties, including 562 Canadians killed.
Most of Canada’s fallen lie today at the Agira Canadian War Cemetery.
It is a bright and well-manicured site, but one feels the oppressive weight of history there and cannot help but shudder at the young men buried under headstones inscribed with the maple leaf who never had a chance to grow up.
One of the slain, Private Steve Slavik, a 30-year-old of Czech origin who arrived in Canada in 1930, has his headstone engraved with these words, translated from his native tongue: “Born in a foreign land, in a foreign land he lay down his young life for democracy.”
To walk that silent city of Canadians, from all communities and backgrounds, is to understand the price of freedom.