Ortona

A masterful retelling one of the major victories of Canadian troops over the German army’s elite division during WWII. In one blood-soaked, furious week of fighting, from December 20 to December 27, 1943, the 1st Canadian Infantry Division took the town of Ortona, Italy, from elite German paratroopers ordered to hold the medieval port town at all costs. Infantrymen serving in the Loyal Edmonton Regiment and the Seaforth Highlanders, supported by tankers of the Three Rivers Regiment, moved from house to house in hand-to-hand combat amid heavy shelling and wrested the town from the grip of the fierce German defenders. Getting into Ortona had been a battle of its own. Ortona, the pearl of the Adriatic, stands on a promontory impregnable from three sides, with seacliffs on the north and east, and a deep ravine on the west. The Canadian infantrymen, drawn from virtually every corner of Canada, attacked from the south under the command of Major-General Chris Vokes, fighting across narrow gullies, mud-choked vineyards and olive groves, into the narrow streets of Ortona itself. When the vicious battle was over, 2605 Canadians were dead or wounded. But the town that had become known as "Little Stalingrad" was now in Allied hands.

A dramatic account of Canada's first major triumph of World War II, the December 1943 battle for Ortona, Italy.

A young Canadian soldier's account of the battle of Ortona, Italy! Seventeen-year-old Paul Baldassara lies about his age to enlist in the Canadian Army. He joins the Loyal Edmonton regiment, which is tasked with taking Italy's port town of Ortona. Little does he know the horrors of the battle that lie ahead . . . Paul soon finds himself in the midst of the fierce fighting that earned Ortona the name "the Italian Stalingrad," because of the massive casualties and deaths. He and his fellow Canadian soldiers resort to tactics such as "mouse-holing" -- blasting their way through the walls of houses which German snipers have made the streets and courtyards. Will Paul prevail and help the Canadians save Ortona, no matter what the risk?

"He died so Jewry should suffer no more." These words on a Canadian Jewish soldier's tombstone in Normandy inspired the author to explore the role of Canadian Jews in the war effort. As PM Mackenzie King wrote in 1947, Jewish servicemen faced a "double threat" - they were not only fighting against Fascism but for Jewish survival. At the same time, they encountered widespread antisemitism and the danger of being identified as Jews if captured. Bessner conducted hundreds of interviews and extensive archival research to paint a complex picture of the 17,000 Canadian Jews - about 10 per cent of the Jewish population in wartime Canada - who chose to enlist, including future Cabinet minister Barney Danson, future game-show host Monty Hall, and comedians Wayne and Shuster. Added to this fascinating account are Jews who were among the so-called "Zombies" - Canadians who were drafted, but chose to serve at home - the various perspectives of the Jewish community, and the participation of Canadian Jewish women.

Laurence Wilmot’s Second World War memoir is a rare thing: a first-hand account of front-line battle by an army officer who is a resolute non-combatant. And it is paradoxes such as this that also make Wilmot’s book a unique and compelling document. Wilmot, as an Anglican chaplain, is a priest dressed as a warrior, a man of peace in battle fatigues. He is an incongruous figure in a theatre of war, always vigilant for opportunities to partake of silent meditation and prayer, never failing to lose sight of the larger moral issues of the war. His compassion is boundless, his sensitivity acute, and one senses his mounting emotional and spiritual enervation as the death toll of his fellow serving men steadily mounts. At the centre of the book is Wilmot’s witness of the murderous battle at the Arielli. Wilmot’s compassion for the fighting men compels him to leave the safety of his ministry and join them at the front, at great personal risk. There, as an unarmed stretcher-bearer, he is kept busy transporting the wounded under enemy fire. In this crucible of battle we see the qualities that attest to Wilmot’s character and contribute to his memoir’s importance: an indefatigable devotion to his duty to save and comfort the wounded, and a resolve to resist despair in spite of the terrible carnage all around. In short, a singular triumph of the decency of one man in the midst of total war.

The second instalment in military historian Mark Zuehlke’s compelling World War II tales of Canadians overcoming insurmountable odds in Italy. For the allied armies fighting their way up the Italian boot in early 1944, Rome was the prize that could only be won through one of the greatest offensives of the war. Following upon his book about the battle of Ortona, Mark Zuehlke returns to the Mediterranean theatre of World War II with this gripping tribute to the valiant Canadians who opened the way for the Allies to take Rome. The Liri Valley is testament to the bravery of these Canadians, like the badly wounded Captain Pierre Potvin, who survived more than thirty hours alone in the hell of no man’s land. This book, like the battle it records, will live long in readers’ memories.

Mark Zuehlke is an expert at narrating the history of life on the battlefield for the Canadian army during World War II. In Terrible Victory, he provides a soldiers-eye-view account of Canada's bloody liberation of western Holland. Readers are there as soldiers fight in the muddy quagmire, enduring a battle that lasted three weeks and in which 6,000 soldiers perished. Terrible Victory is a powerful story of courage, survival, and skill.

With its trademark "you are there" style, Mark Zuehlke's tenth Canadian Battle Series volume tells the story of the 1942 Dieppe raid. Nicknamed "The Poor Man's Monte Carlo," Dieppe had no strategic importance, but with the Soviet Union thrown on the ropes by German invasion and America having just entered the war, Britain was under intense pressure to launch a major cross-Channel attack against France. Since 1939, Canadian troops had massed in Britain and trained for the inevitable day of the mass invasion of Europe that would finally occur in 1944. But the Canadian public and many politicians were impatient to see Canadian soldiers fight sooner. The first major rehearsal proved such a shambles the raid was pushed back to the end of July only to be cancelled by poor weather. Later, in a decision still shrouded in controversy, the operation was reborn. Dieppe however did not go smoothly. Drawing on rare archival documents and personal interviews, Mark Zuehlke examines how the raid came to be and why it went so tragically wrong. Ultimately, Tragedy at Dieppe honors the bravery and sacrifice of those who fought and died that fateful day on the beaches of Dieppe.