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While D-Day gets more of the glory, Canadians’ battles in Italy were also vital – but victory came at a steep cost. Seventy-five years later, veterans and dignitaries assembled in Italian cemeteries to honour the fallen

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Canadian and Italian dignitaries stand for their countries' national anthems in Ravenna, Italy, on Dec. 4, alongside veterans of the Italian campaign in the Second World War.Photography by John Sopinski/The Globe and Mail/The Globe and Mail

David Lloyd Adlington is a century old, but his memories of the battles he fought in Italy in the Second World War, his brushes with death, are still vivid – too vivid.

“The nights after the war were hard,” said Mr. Adlington, who was the oldest of the 15 veterans who toured Italy with the Canadian Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Canada as part of the 75th anniversary commemorations of the Italian campaign. The Canadians lost no battles, even if their progress through Sicily and up the Italian peninsula came at a horrific cost.

“One of the things that got you was the screams of the wounded. They may have been gut shot 25 yards away and screaming as they died, and there was nothing you could do.”

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David Lloyd Adlington, shown during the war and today, at age 100.

The headline of the Dec. 6, 1944, Rome edition of The Maple Leaf, the wartime newspaper of Canadian soldiers, read: “Ravenna falls to the Canadians, Left Hook Forces Nazis to Evacuate.”

The Princess Louise Dragoon Guards had forced the Germans to retreat from Ravenna, leaving the ancient city on the Adriatic coast, about 150 kilometres south of Venice, largely intact. The victory essentially ended Canada’s longest period of sustained fighting in the entire war.

Of the 93,000 Canadians who slogged their way through Italy after the Allied landings in Sicily in July, 1943, almost 6,000 died, 25,000 were wounded and 1,000 became prisoners of war.

SLOVENIA

Venice

Milan

CROATIA

ITALY

Bologna

Ravenna

Adriatic

Sea

Gothic

Line

Ortona

Liri

Valley

Rome

Corsica

Gustav Line

Monte Cassino

Pontecorvo

Naples

Sardinia

Tyrrhenian Sea

0

100

Agira

KM

Sicily

Catania

john sopinski/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

SOURCE: TILEZEN; OPENSTREETMAP

SLOVENIA

Venice

Milan

CROATIA

ITALY

Bologna

BOSNIA AND

HERZEGOVINA

Ravenna

Adriatic

Sea

Gothic

Line

Ortona

Liri

Valley

Rome

Corsica

Gustav Line

Monte Cassino

Pontecorvo

Naples

Sardinia

Tyrrhenian Sea

0

100

Agira

Sicily

KM

Catania

john sopinski/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

SOURCE: TILEZEN; OPENSTREETMAP

SLOVENIA

Milan

CROATIA

Venice

Bologna

Ravenna

BOSNIA AND

HERZEGOVINA

Gothic

Line

ITALY

Ortona

Liri

Valley

Gustav

Line

Corsica

Rome

Adriatic Sea

Monte

Cassino

Pontecorvo

Bari

Naples

Tyrrhenian Sea

Sardinia

0

100

Agira

KM

Sicily

Catania

john sopinski/THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: TILEZEN; OPENSTREETMAP

The dead are buried in 19 sites throughout the country. The Cassino War Cemetery, halfway between Naples and Rome, alone holds 855 Canadian graves, many of them teenagers.

Yet their stories are barely known.

The D-Day invasion of France in June, 1944 – when U.S., British and Canadian forces opened the Western front against Germany – gets most of the glory. By then, their brothers in Italy had been fighting the Germans for almost a year in some of the toughest battles of the war, including Cassino, Liri Valley and Ortona, a siege so costly it became known as Canada’s “Little Stalingrad.”

The Commonwealth cemetery outside Ravenna, which contains the graves of 438 Canadians, was the veterans’ last stop in a three-cemetery tour that had started on Nov. 30 in Pontecorvo, where, in the battle of the Liri Valley in May, 1944, a Canadian armoured regiment breached the Hitler Line just north of Cassino – a crucial breakthrough on the road to Rome. The next stop was Ortona, on the Adriatic coast, followed by Ravenna.

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A Canadian military parade band marches into the Ravenna cemetery.

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Governor-General Julie Payette prepares to review the troops.

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Veteran Jim Summersides is helped back to his seat after speaking at the ceremony.

Mr. Adlington remains in amazing shape. He has a firm handshake and is a dedicated golfer – he celebrated his 100th birthday on a golf course in September. Born in Wales, he and his family emigrated to Canada when he was 10. He spent six years in uniform during the war.

His first near-death experience came on the night of July 4, 1943, aboard the SS City of Venice, a British steamship that was carrying almost 300 troops of the 1st Canadian Infantry Division to Sicily, where they were to join the Allied invasion. Off the coast of Algeria, the ship took a direct hit from a torpedo from the German submarine U-409 and sank quickly. He remembers seeing the cargo hatch blow off before he clambered down the side of the listing ship and jumped into the water.

A British frigate came to the rescue. “The frigate came close, and its propeller sucked me under the water,” even though he was wearing a life jacket, he told The Globe and Mail. “I breathed in water and blacked out, then I popped up to the surface. I came as close as you could come to drowning without drowning.”

His second near-death experience came during the horrific battle of the Moro River, just south of Ortona, where the Canadians would suffer more than 2,300 casualties.

He got knocked out by a shell burst or mortar bomb, was evacuated and returned to Canada at the end of 1944. The term PTSD – post-traumatic stress disorder – did not exist back then, but Mr. Adlington knows he had it – and may still. “We called it shell shock,” he said. “For a long while, I hated going to bed at night because my dreams were always about fighting for my life. It’s not as bad now.”

Visiting the war cemeteries in Italy filled him with sadness. “We were all just a bunch of kids,” he said. “When I see all these graves, I wonder what they would have been doing now [if they had survived]. It makes you think: What a terrible waste war is.”

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Jack Callowhill, 96, was part of the elite Devil's Brigade commando unit that fought in Italy.

At the Ravenna cemetery, the veteran sporting the most medals was Jack Callowhill, a sprightly 96-year-old who was born in Hamilton and is greatly admired by fellow veterans and students of war. That’s because he was a member of famed and feared First Special Service Force, better known as the Devil’s Brigade.

It was an elite, and unique, commando unit of U.S. and Canadian troops – about 1,400 in all – who trained in Montana to become the ultimate soldiers. They were hard men, some of them lumberjacks and miners, who learned how to parachute from planes, climb mountains, fight in snow, sabotage bridges and carry out attacks under the cover of darkness. They would leave terror calling cards on their victims that read, in German, “The worst is yet to come.” Their story was told in the 1968 movie The Devil’s Brigade, which played the staid Canadians against the wild Americans.

Mr. Callowhill remembers the biggest fight of his life, in early December, 1943, when the Devil’s Brigade climbed a near-vertical escarpment at night to reach the top of Monte La Difensa, just south of Cassino, to take out a German stronghold. They had to use ropes and fitted condoms over the muzzles of their rifles to protect them from the pounding rain.

“On the way up the mountain, we passed 300 American bodies,” he said. “We were behind German lines. And when we got there at dawn, we were behind them, and their guns were all facing the wrong way.”

Still, the fighting was savage. The Devil’s Brigade suffered a 77-per-cent casualty rate, one of the highest of any Allied fighting unit in the war. A National Geographic broadcast would later dub the battle “Mount Massacre.” Mr. Callowhill, a machine gunner, was wounded. He was awarded a variety of medals for bravery. In 2015, he and the 41 other surviving Canadian and American members of the unit were given the Congressional Gold Medal.

At the Ravenna ceremony, Mr. Callowhill read an act of remembrance and went in search of the lone Devil’s Brigade member buried at the site, Private Arsene Allain of New Brunswick, who died at the age of 27 in January, 1945, a month after the unit was disbanded. He placed a red carnation against the white marble tombstone. “We don’t know how he got here,” he said.

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Mr. Callowhill searches for a comrade's grave, a red carnation in hand.

The ceremony was a pilgrimage for many Canadian families, not just those of the survivors. Rosalyn Ing, an 81-year-old Cree elder from Manitoba who was educated in residential schools and won the Canadian Policy Research Graduate Award in 2000 for her doctoral thesis on the schools, came with her son to find the grave of her uncle, Peter Bignell. The young private from Le Pas, Man., fought with the Seaforth Highlanders, who suffered terrible casualties in Ortona. He died on Dec. 9, 1944. There is no age on his gravestone because his birth records are missing.

Ms. Ing said he was killed by a grenade near Ravenna as he was trying to save a wounded comrade. He must have suffered terribly before his death. His wife died in childbirth when he was overseas.

Ms. Ing and her family held a private service by the grave, where they placed a wreath and small Canadian flags. Later, she talked to The Globe about the lessons of war. “The younger generation doesn’t know about this war,” she said. “What price freedom? It’s important to tell their stories. We should never take freedom for granted.”

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Cree elder Rosalyn Ing bows her head listening to a speaker's remarks.


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