A trip to Sicily is a reminder of our sacrifice

PALERMO, SICILY—The last time a member of my family came to Sicily was July 10, 1943. My father, Philip "Pip" Caddell, and several thousand Canadians arrived on the shores of Pachino to liberate Italy. It was the greatest wartime assault on a coast ever, even greater than D-Day. Luckily, thanks to intelligence operations like "Operation Mincemeat," the Germans believed the invasion force would come to Sardinia. So, by the time the Canadians disembarked, they waded on shore, and as my father recounted it, "a gruff old sergeant sitting at a card table handed me a ticket and told me to move on." A few days before, he had watched helplessly as three ships were sunk by German U-boats in the Mediterranean Sea. They were carrying troops and equipment from his Royal Canadian Artillery, First Anti-Tank regiment. Dozens died. It was Pip’s 30th birthday. Arriving in Sicily, they encountered little opposition from the Italians, and within two weeks, then-prime minister Benito Mussolini had been forced from office and jailed. Meanwhile, Italian troops were surrendering in significant numbers to the Allies, and it appeared as if the invasion of Sicily would be a cakewalk. Instead, Adolf Hitler took control of Italy, and crack German troops who retreated to the high ground of this mountainous island took up the fight. It was a brutal battle for four more weeks until the Germans escaped to the mainland in August. The Canadians travelled up the boot of Italy over the next two years, in fierce fighting that took place in devastating heat, bone-chilling cold, and slogging through mud in the wet Italian spring and fall. The war in Italy ended in February of 1945. My father was permitted leave the next month. He came home to Montreal on March 21, and two days later, married my mother. They had not seen one another since October of 1939. In 1996, I was living in Switzerland, and my father came to visit. Joined by his British cousin, we drove to Italy and stopped in Ortona, Cassino, and Florence. Places he remembered well. Ortona was the site of one of most brutal battles in the war. Dubbed "Little Stalingrad," it involved house-to-house fighting with the Germans. As a result, the largest Canadian war cemetery in Italy is in Ortona. It is the last resting place of about 1,500 Canadians. At the time, my father asked me if Leo Bédard, a comrade from his regiment, was buried there. I looked in the cemetery records and couldn’t find anything. Almost 28 years later, I found myself at another Canadian war cemetery in Italy, in the mountainous central region near the hilltop town of Agira. At a spectacular hillside location, lie 490 Canadians killed in Sicily. Surrounded by the mountains, I could see how difficult the fighting must have been. Looking through the list of the dead, I came across "Gunner Leo Bédard of Ville of La Salle, Québec." I then looked at a photo my father left me, of the first Canadian artillery troops in England in 1940. There is Pip, a lance bombardier, at the end of one row, and gunner Bédard, in another. They were two Montreal boys: my dad from Lachine and Leo from neighbouring La Salle. They would have trained together through three years in England, spent time together, and fought until Bédard’s war ended on Aug. 5, 1943. It struck me as remarkable that my father remembered Bédard more than half a century later. He might have been the first, but he was not the last of his comrades to die, of the almost 6,000 Canadians who perished in Italy. My father and his friends were not exceptional people, although they had experienced the Great Depression, and nothing in life was easy. They volunteered for war in the first wave to go to the United Kingdom, "because they needed us," as Pip later recalled. We have read and seen much of the tributes of these disappearing heroes, whom we refer to as "the greatest generation." Their sacrifice strikes home in places like the cemeteries in Agira and Ortona. As our world becomes more and more dangerous, I have to wonder if the generations that followed have the strength to endure a terrible conflict like the Second World War, whether our military has the means to fight as our parents and grandparents did, and if our leaders have the courage to lead us in a similar conflict. Andrew Caddell is retired from Global Affairs Canada, where he was a senior policy adviser. He previously worked as an adviser to Liberal governments. He is a town councillor in Kamouraska, Que. He can be reached at pipson52@hotmail.com. The Hill Times