October 1944, northern Italy.
A Canadian Private from an experimental Tank Hunter platoon
faces down a German Panther tank,
armed only with a PIAT.
He knows the best range to make his shot is less than 20 yards.
It’s an absolutely terrifying ordeal.
You had to practically stand right up in front of the tank in order to hit it.
The soldier waits until the tank is within ten yards
...before he launches.
On June 6th, 1944. Allied forces finally land troops in Normandy
to open the Western Front.
But Nazi fanatics and die-hards
continue to fight ferociously for survival.
D-Day was a battle.
They still need to win the war.
October 21st, 1944.
The Savio river, northern Italy.
Soldiers from the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada wade warily through the water.
As the Seaforths enter the river, it's really dark,
it's raining really hard,
and the water levels of the Savio River are beginning to rise rapidly.
Platoon Leader Lieutenant D.H. McKay
scans the far shore.
More than the mud and cold current make the crossing a challenge.
While under fire from the enemy, he must also locate soldiers from
Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry Regiment on the other side.
The PPCLI have crossed before them.
They're being shelled quite heavily and frankly
the Seaforths don't know if the PPCLI have been overrun or not.
The Canadians had landed
in Italy more than a year earlier.
They started in Sicily, long before D-Day.
Sicily is the supposed soft underbelly of Europe because Churchill, above all,
does not want to invade France and Normandy at this particular time.
He doesn't think the western Allies are ready for it,
and yet there's tremendous pressure from Stalin and
the Soviets to draw away pressure from the Eastern Front.
But the progress has been very slow.
The Germans incorporate the Italian terrain
into their defense lines.
And they built bunkers, barbed wire, minefield and so on.
And this makes it extremely difficult for the Allies to
proceed from bottom of the boot up to the north.
Despite the effort of American
and Commonwealth troops, the bitter fighting means that 15 months later,
the Germans still occupy a swath of northern Italy,
including its industrial heart.
By October 1944, the Canadians who fight with
the British Eighth Army emerge from the Apennine mountains.
The mountains have been such a terrible barrier with river after river.
From the western edge of the Adriatic sea...
It looks as if they're just finally going to be able to get
to flat ground and actually make a run for Bologna.
But numerous rivers still cut across
the plain, and the enemy remains determined.
In response to the Canadian breakthrough the Germans know that
this is extremely dangerous for the entire position in northern Italy.
So, they bring in reinforcements to stop the Canadian advance.
To exploit the natural defenses,
they have withdrawn to the west side of the Savio river.
The German ninth Panzergrenadier Regiment defends a sector about five miles long,
along the Savio, north of the city of Cesena.
The Commander of second Battalion, Captain Ekkehard Maurer,
has been assigned here as part of his officer training.
Captain Ekkehard Maurer is only 25 years of age during this time.
He got posted into this thing only a couple of days earlier.
He pursues a General Staff Officer corps. And at this moment,
he's on a front-line posting, which is rotational.
Maurer knows Canadians have crossed the Savio.
But he has no idea how far they’ve advanced.
From the village of Pieve Sestina,
Maurer will dispatch the heavily armored vehicles
of a Kampfgruppe towards the river to intercept them.
Still under fire, and despite the darkness,
Canadian Lieutenant McKay and his men link up with the Princess Patricias.
The Seaforths must've been pretty excited to connect.
That means that the Canadians had a bridgehead.
They were holding out and the Seaforths weren't going to be
alone in fighting against the Germans.
The Princess Patricia’s point out enemy positions
including six machine gun nests, that had kept them pinned down.
Drake, hand over your guns.
They also volunteer to exchange weapons
with McKay’s men after the wet crossing.
They know that the Seaforths are going to leapfrog over them to engage the Germans.
And to do that they need clean, dry guns.
Move out.
Companies D and B must clear the enemy within 500 yards of the river.
Germans have occupied the local farmhouses and outbuildings
and protect each one with up to three machine gun posts.
Many remain concealed until the Canadians step too close.
But the flashes of their guns in the dark...
allow the Seaforths to outflank them...
and eliminate the machine gun nests from behind.
As company B and company D secure their objectives on the west side of the Savio,
two more Seaforth Highlander companies A and C arrive and
position themselves to continue the advance.
Their mission is to cut off the main north south road to Cesena
which runs parallel to the river.
This route is an important transportation corridor for
the enemy and they expect defenses to be heavy.
A platoon of Tank Hunters is attached to C company.
Like so many of these things in war time,
the Canadian Tank Hunting strategy came out of failure.
Commanders reported soldiers often panicked at just
the threat of enemy tanks.
And so it was very important for commanding officers and
the soldiers themselves to have strategies as
to how to attack these tanks.
Tank Hunters train to trap and destroy
all kinds of armored vehicles like tanks and self-propelled guns.
They use only weapons they can carry; anti-tank mines,
and Thompson sub-machine guns, and the armor piercing rounds
of the Projector Infantry Anti-Tank; the PIAT.
The strategy starts with immobilizing the prey.
Tank hunters bury mines across roads in front of
the armored advance.
When triggered, the mines destroy the tank tracks
to stop it. PIAT teams move in to fire bombs
straight into the tank’s hull. The ideal range is just 20 yards.
Soldiers with Tommy guns protect the PIAT operators
and take out any escaping tank crew.
After the Germans blew the bridges, the rising Savio river means
the Canadians can’t bring their own armor into the fight.
These platoons are their best chance against German tanks.
C company closes in on the crossroads located beside
the parish church of Pieve Sestina.
With reports of enemy armor, the Commander of the Seaforths
new tank hunting platoon, Sergeant Keith Thompson,
must dispatch his teams.
He positions his men in ditches on either side of the approach
and rushes into the road himself,
to bury the mines before the German tanks arrive.
According to Canadian Tank Hunter strategy, Sergeant Keith Thompson
must stop, or at least slow down, the approaching enemy column.
As a first step, he moves to bury Hawkins grenades into the road
to cut off access to the intersection.
The Tank Hunters use the number 75 or Hawkins anti-tank grenade.
It was developed after Dunkirk for the use of the British army and the Home Guard.
A Hawkins grenade is a two pound explosive charge.
It's rectangular in shape and kind of looks like a flask.
It can be buried like a mine, it can be attached to something
like an explosive charge, and it can even be thrown like a grenade.
Multiple Hawkins grenades can be strung
together for a more explosive result.
One grenade might not do the trick,
but you know that a string of them will most likely disable
any sort of armored vehicle that rolls across them.
Thompson finishes laying his trap.
As the sound of the armored vehicles gets closer,
he camouflages the grenades with leaves and dirt.
His check complete, Thompson jumps in the ditch
with the other Tank Hunters from the Canadian Seaforth Highlanders.
The lead German vehicle approaches the road junction.
Thompson watches as the wheels roll between the grenades...
...and fail to detonate the explosives.
Well, Sergeant Thompson's reaction was probably of disbelief.
He had just set up this minefield and somehow this
German staff car goes right through it without triggering one mine.
Thompson and some of his soldiers spray
the moving vehicle with their machine guns.
While another Tank Hunter jumps up with a PIAT.
At just the right moment, he launches a bomb at very close range.
The PIAT is a hand-held weapon that fires a two and a half pound bomb,
filled with RDX and TNT explosives.
The force of impact can tear through up to four inches of armor.
The explosion of the PIAT bomb stops the car and kills the driver.
A German officer escapes the wreckage and attempts to alert
the armored column behind him.
But Thompson and the others move in for the kill.
- Fall back! - Then reset the trap.
It doesn’t take long. Not far behind the lead staff car,
a German self-propelled gun bears down on the crossroads.
Self-propelled guns, or SPG, look much like tanks.
But their gun is in a fixed case-mate instead of a rotating turret.
But in these conditions, operating both vehicles would be a challenge.
Given the rain and the darkness, visibility was extremely poor.
We can assume that the driver of this self-propelled gun didn't
understand and didn't see what was going on in front of him.
Most likely unseen, a Canadian Private
takes aim with his PIAT.
But his bomb misses the mark,
and the enemy self-propelled gun continues to rumble toward them.
As the German armor nears the crossroads,
the Tank Hunters hold back to see if Sergeant Keith Thompson’s minefield
can stop the self-propelled gun.
The vehicle’s track crosses the Hawkins grenades.
This time, it sets off an explosion.
What's interesting is that in retrospect Sergeant Thompson is probably pretty happy
the staff car didn't set off the mines, because now what happens
of course is he's immobilized the higher value target.
With damage to its track, the self-propelled gun comes to a standstill.
Bringing the vehicle to a stop is ideal for tank hunting.
You have a better chance of hitting it and causing more damage
from the PIAT if you're aiming at a stationary target.
The Canadian Tank Hunters move into the open to finish the job.
A PIAT team lines up their shot.
With an armor piercing hit, the SPG ceases to be a threat.
Other tank hunters scramble onto the gun to finish its crew.
- They drop a grenade into the hatch. - Fire in the hole!
The self-propelled gun is inoperable and blocks the road.
The armored column has been dispatched by Captain Ekkehard Maurer,
second Battalion Commander of the German ninth Panzergrenadier Regiment.
The ninth Panzergrenadier Regiment is the successor
of the Old ninth Infantry Regiment, the traditional Prussian Regiment
that was based in Potsdam near Berlin, and was seen as a source for
the aristocratic German or Prussian Officer Corps.
They had arrived in Italy during the summer of 1943.
And moved into defensive position near the east coast in September of ’44.
Maurer needs more information about the Canadian advance in order to thwart it.
The Germans are on their back-foot here,
and they are extremely surprised to see how far
the Canadians have already penetrated into their lines.
In addition, the Canadian artillery barrage has
disrupted communication lines, compounding the problem.
German Commanders cannot communicate with each other, so,
the left neighbor doesn't know what his right neighbor is doing and...
Or even communication further up the chain of command is barely possible.
But Maurer still has significant weaponry at his disposal,
including Mark V Panther tanks.
The Panzerkampfwagen or Mark V Panther
is one of the most powerful and feared tanks in Hitler’s army.
The Germans developed the medium sized tank rapidly
in 1941 in response to the threat posed by the Soviet T-34.
The Mark V stormed onto the battlefield in 1943 topped
with a powerful 75 millimeter high velocity gun,
and a pair of MG34 machine guns,
capable of unleashing hundreds of bullets per minute.
At 45 tons, this Panther is heavy but fast.
A 700-horsepower motor generates a top speed of 28 miles per hour.
As a Mark V tank grinds up the road,
another team of Canadian Tank Hunters dashes across a field.
Private Ernest Smith scouts for the best possible position.
Private Smith is an interesting guy. He's clearly brave.
And he's clearly a natural leader.
When things get hot, even though he's not in command,
he takes the initiative and people follow him.
Smith’s natural fighting instincts have been
rewarded with numerous promotions. But they don’t seem to stick.
Private Smith earned a reputation for being a troublemaker. Being insubordinate.
He was promoted to Corporal nine times and demoted to Private nine times.
He clearly had a problem with authority,
but there was no question that he was a hell of a soldier.
With his Commander and fellow Tank Hunters occupied
with the German self-propelled gun;
Smith has his eyes on the Panther tank further ahead.
He directs his PIAT team into a ditch with a view of the road.
But as the tank creeps closer, he decides that a single PIAT isn’t enough.
With the operator set, Smith and Private James Tennant hurry to fetch another.
Leaving that one operator by himself is a risky move.
When you are firing a PIAT half of your vision is blocked by the weapon.
Normally they work in twos so that if a German does sneak up on you,
you have someone watching your back to defend you.
Smith’s company needs to reach the main highway
to cut off German reinforcements to the city of Cesena to the south.
But instead, they encountered part of a German tank Kampfgruppe.
To coordinate their action, C company has established
a headquarters in the rural parish church.
With the tank closing in, Smith and Tennant must be quick.
They locate another PIAT at the headquarters.
With the weapon in tow, the duo races back to their position.
As they near the road...
...machine gun bullets rip into the ground around them.
From the protection of a ditch,
Canadian Private Ernest Smith gets his bearings.
He sneaks a peek over the edge and sees the tank getting closer.
The Panther sweeps the road with its machine gun.
Smith is probably worried about two things,
first of all his own position with his friend James Tennant
but also the lone PIAT operator that he left behind.
A minefield like the one which stopped the self-propelled gun earlier
would have been helpful. But it’s too late now.
James Tennant must get the PIAT charged and ready to fire.
Private James Tennant is one of Smith's closest friends in the Regiment.
The sources identify them as thick as thieves.
A machine gun blast strikes Tennant.
He’s alive but seriously wounded, and can no longer operate the PIAT.
Smith likely considers his options.
He can hide in the ditch with Tennant and hope he doesn't get shot.
He can bring Tennant to a medical aid station and
expose themselves to German fire, or he can take matters into his own hands.
He has a split second to make the choice and he decides to engage the Germans.
Smith grabs the PIAT and readies himself at the edge of the ditch.
At this moment, Smith is one man,
against perhaps one of the most powerful tanks of
the entire Second World War.
If he misses his shot, it's unlikely he will survive.
He charges the weapon as he waits for the German Mark V Panther tank.
Smith has no back up, and while the PIAT has armor piercing capabilities,
its reputation with soldiers is mixed.
It was really first used by the Canadians in Sicily and it wasn't yet perfected.
The shells would hit the sides of tanks and not explode,
of course this meant it was still very dangerous
and so the initial use of the PIAT was not really
inspiring a lot of confidence.
And even as reliability increases,
one thing stays the same; the range.
The maximum range of a PIAT is 100 yards.
And worse, the Tank Hunters determined
the optimal distance for a hit, to be only 20 yards at night.
You had to practically stand right up in front of the tank in order to hit it.
And so, it's an absolutely terrifying ordeal
and it really required heroism from these Canadian soldiers.
Tank Hunters even customize their PIATs
by drilling new sights to accommodate the tight range.
Smith waits until the tank is 30 feet, or just ten yards, away.
Then jumps from the ditch and into the road.
With a bomb in the spigot and barely time to aim,
Smith launches his attack on the Panther.
As they fight for control of the sector,
the Germans begin to appreciate the scale of the Canadian offensive.
Captain Ekkehard Maurer is forced to further bolster defenses.
To the north, the Canadians are overrunning the German lines
so that the Germans are in such a desperate position
that they need to deploy their battalion HQ into the battle.
Maurer finds himself under attack.
If headquarter troops are deployed into fighting,
it means the situation is extremely critical.
And this is actually one of the last resorts for the defenders.
The Canadians storm his position,
and Maurer is injured by a hand grenade.
He must withdraw from the fight.
On the road beside the parish church at Pieve Sestina,
Private Ernest Smith...
...scores a direct hit on the German Panther tank.
The giant beast grinds to a halt.
The wrecked Panther V tries to reverse.
When Smith hits the Panther he immobilizes it.
The problem is he now has to deal with about ten Germans
who were riding on the back,
who now hop off and start moving forward towards him.
At very close range and all alone,
Smith doesn’t have a lot of options.
The PIAT that Canadian Private Ernest Smith had used against the tank,
is useless against multiple advancing enemy soldiers.
He reaches for his Thompson submachine gun.
Here, Smith does something kind of incredible.
Instead of retreating, he moves out farther on the road and engages
the German Grenadiers with his Tommy Gun.
Arguably the most notorious firearm ever,
the Thompson submachine gun was designed as an automatic weapon
that could be operated by a single soldier.
The sub of submachine refers to compact bullet caliber relative
to those fired by rifles. New box magazines deliver 30 rounds,
with a staggering rate of fire up to 700 rounds per minute.
The American weapon was first sold to the British military for
about $225 per unit in 1940.
Winston Churchill himself would quip;
“General Thompson’s gun may be, pound for pound,
the most devastating weapon devised for war.”
Efficiencies to lower the cost make
the Thompson ubiquitous among the allies in Europe.
Smith fires into the attacking German soldiers at very close range.
In the firefight, he kills four. The others fall back in disarray.
As Smith continues to hold the line...
...a 75 millimeter tank shell explodes nearby.
He sees another tank approach, while more German infantry charge through
- the fields in his direction. - Well at this point,
Smith figures that the second German tank is out of range.
So, in fact the most pressing problem are the German grenadiers bearing down on him.
Smith maintains a steady stream of fire against the soldiers...
Until he runs out of bullets. He returns to the ditch to find more,
and locates a spare magazine near Private James Tennant.
Smith is certainly fighting to defend
the Seaforths hard won position, but he's also fighting to defend
his friend James Tennant, who's lying there wounded.
Smith reloads and jumps back on the road, staying close to Tennant.
The German infantry retreats.
But once again the advancing tank opens fire.
And forces Smith to re-focus.
At this point in the battle, he decides to grab his friend and take him to
a medical aide post at a nearby church.
Often when we think of battles, we think of faceless soldiers
sort of firing at each other in a melee of combat and chaos,
but in reality, a lot of battles are made up
of these little human moments. And this is one of those.
Smith needs to be patient. He must wait for a lull
that will allow him to assist Tennant.
When the tank pauses its attack, Smith uses the opportunity to
help his friend out of the relative safety of the ditch.
The battle continues in the surrounding fields and
along the road, as the rest of C Company and the Tank Hunters
try to stave off the German counterattack.
The two move as quickly as they can to the nearby church.
The Seaforth Highlanders C Company Commander, Major Stewart Lynch,
has established his headquarters with an aid post at the crossroads.
Smith arrives with the injured Private James Tennant to get help from the medics.
When a soldier is injured in battle, he's normally taken to the rear,
taken care of either in a temporary medical facility
or brought back to hospital. But when they were at the Savio River,
the river was so swollen there was so much water going through
it that it was simply impossible to get the wounded back and so
they were left there, uh, in terribly vulnerable situations.
With no way to cross the river, the wounded can’t be evacuated.
And the flooding creates other difficulties for Lynch.
At this point, Major Lynch's biggest concern is reinforcements or
the lack thereof. The simple fact is the Savio river water levels have
risen so rapidly that he can't get any reinforcements across.
This has been a re-current problem for
the allies throughout their fighting in Italy.
Proper Italian bridges were built high above potential flood waters.
But many have been destroyed. Some by allied aerial attacks
to prevent German retreat, others blown up by the Germans to cut off
access to the other bank. Either way, civilians pay the price.
The allies must often rebuild during the rainy season when
the rushing waters complicate the job.
As before, allied forces battle the weather and the Germans.
With the Savio flooding...
The banks are so muddy the engineers can't find
a good spot to build a bridge. So no infantry's coming across.
No supplies and no armor.
The Seaforths are on their own.
Men are taking a beating.
Smith would later recall how dire things were.
According to Smith, in the church Major Lynch turned
to him and said, "We're surrounded, what should we do?"
And Smith replies, "Take a window and get your head down."
Whether it happened exactly like that or not,
there's no question that Smith was a good guy to listen to and
a good guy to rely on for advice in such a hot situation.
But Smith himself leaves the sanctuary
to be ready for more enemy activity.
The Canadians have slowed down the German’s armored column,
but they need to destroy it.
Just outside the church, Sergeant Keith Thompson and
other Tank Hunters hold off German infantry who pour across
the fields and down the road...
When a German self-propelled gun swerves towards them.
As the rain continues, Canadian Sergeant Keith Thompson
confronts yet another threat in the dark.
A German self-propelled gun needs to avoid the wreckage of the Kampfgruppe.
The next German self-propelled gun is kind of stuck at the road.
There's wrecked vehicles, there's bodies.
So the Germans attempt to out flank the Canadians by moving towards the church.
As the teams ready their PIATS, the supporting Tank Hunters
open fire with their Thompson machine guns.
But the bullets ricochet harmlessly off the armor.
As the self-propelled gun comes into range the Tank Hunters unleash their PIAT bombs.
There’s a direct hit and a second SPG is put out of action.
With Captain Ekkehard Maurer injured, first Lieutenant Strangen is the
only German officer available to assume control of the battalion.
Maurer is wounded by a grenade blast, his adjutant, a First Lieutenant,
takes over command. And this is quite rare that
a First Lieutenant takes command over an entire battalion.
It just shows you what a desperate situation the Germans found themselves.
But while the Canadians prove tenacious...
...the battle isn’t over yet.
Sergeant Thompson and his men mop up from the earlier attack on the SPG.
They strain to see what will emerge next from the darkness.
In time, another Panther tank crawls forward
also trying to move around the back of the church.
Thompson’s PIAT teams resight and reload.
The tank slows as it reaches the destroyed self-propelled gun blocking its path.
Operating a 45 ton Panther tank at the best of times would be difficult.
But in this situation, it's dark out.
It would've been extremely difficult to navigate around
this battlefield that was strewn with so much debris.
The conditions prove disastrous.
It's wet, it's muddy and the Panther ends up sliding into a ditch.
Thompson seizes the opportunity and motions his PIAT team forward...
- Tank! Tank! - PIAT! PIAT!
Flanked by the machine gunners.
They knock out the tank with their PIATS.
As the German crew tries to flee, two are killed.
Others escape into the darkness.
By 0-600, the Germans withdraw after losing over 100 men and many vehicles,
including the two self-propelled guns and two Panther tanks.
Casualties for the Seaforth Highlanders during the operation amount to 106 men;
including 18 killed and 61 wounded.
The Canadian victory is so quick and so complete...
Hey!
A group of German soldiers who had been bypassed in the dark,
turn up at their former command post for breakfast,
not aware it had been captured overnight.
56 are rounded up and taken as prisoners of war.
For his coolness and tenacity,
Sergeant Keith Thompson earns a distinguished conduct medal.
He’s credited with the preservation of the Canadians’ bridgehead
in the face of a determined and strongly supported counterattack.
Ernest Smith earns the Commonwealth’s highest military honor;
The Victoria Cross.
Smith was the only Canadian Private to earn
the Victoria Cross during the Second World War.
And this is an incredible achievement, but he was also a very colorful character.
For instance, before he was to meet King George VI
they supposedly locked him in jail with a few beers to
make sure that he would show up the next day. And when he did he refused to bow.
He saluted instead. And I think this was a testament to his
rather complicated relationship with authority.
Smith was Canada’s last living Victoria Cross recipient
when he passed away in 2005. He was honored as a national hero.
Despite allied hopes for a quick victory in northern Italy,
after the breakout from the Apennine mountains,
Bologna wouldn’t be liberated until April 1945.
And by then, Seaforth Highlanders of Canada would be
fighting the Germans in the Netherlands.