The Canadians Were Given the Job

Our first action was at Monte, Monte Cassino, in Italy. That was where the Americans and the British had two different attempts, tried to take the, and remove the Germans, or the enemy, I should say, from that part of the, of the mountain. They were not successful. So, the Canadians were given the job. And with us, we had Polish regiments or divisions, and we had New Zealanders. And after, we were prepared for about a month, preparing for the country there, for the assault coming up. And on, in May, the 1st of May, at 11 o'clock at night, the order come down to start, and one thousand pieces of artillery fired all at the same time. And for couple of hours, one would see, you could read a book until the gunpowder smoke got so bad, you couldn't see anything. This went on for all night, and about three, three days later, the Germans moved out, or what was left of them. The Polish division was the one that took the worst beating. They, they had to go up the mountain foot by foot, and it took them about three days to get up the mountain. And they lost an awful lot of men. We Canadians did lose some, but not so much, because we were on their left, and it was a little bit better going. Well, then we went, we went back out, and we went on the Adriatic coast. And I guess the worst part was Ortona. That was where the terrible fighting took place, in Ortona. The streets were so narrow that tanks and such-like track vehicles were too narrow for them. And it is house to house fighting. And there wasn't much of the, of the city, of the town left. And when we came Christmas of 1944, we spent that in a place called Larino, and we called it Latrino because it didn't smell very good. And shortly after Christmas, the word came that we would be going up to, to Europe. And in February, we were pulled out of action and got cleaned up a bit, taken back to Naples, put aboard ships, and sailed off to Marseilles in southern France.