Somewhat strangely, it was the Canadians who were thrust into a prominent role in fighting their way northward through the Sicilian badlands. 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. “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.” “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. On July 10, 1943, the first waves of troops came ashore amid much confusion. The Germans fell for the ruse, and moved forces to those fronts, although there were still effective Axis defenders in Sicily. The corpse was dropped off the southern coast of Spain, where it was found by the enemy. A dead body was dressed in a British officer’s uniform, along with fictitious identification and fake plans to invade Greece and Sardinia. Landing exposed soldiers on beaches left the vulnerable infantrymen susceptible to enemy fire and rapid counterattack to drive them into the water.īut 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.Ī complex deception plan, code-named Mincemeat, also threw off the Germans. The monstrously complex operation was fraught with danger. 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 implied that they missed the real show in Normandy. 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. “D-Day Dodger s” was a dismissive slight against the close to 100,000 Canadians who served in the Italian campaign during the Second World War. Tim Cook is chief historian at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa and author of 13 books of Canadian military history.
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