What German Soldiers Were Told Before Facing Canadians for the First Time

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[00:00:00]June 7th, 1944. Northern France. A 33-year-old SS Colonel named Kurt Meyer stands in the bell tower of the Abbe Darden, a medieval stone church 6 milesi from the Normandy coast. Through his binoculars, he watches a column of Canadian tanks and infantry moving south from the beaches. They are heading straight toward him. Meyer has been a soldier since he was 18. He has fought in Poland, in France, in Greece, in the Soviet Union. He has been wounded. He has been decorated. He commands the 25th Panzer Grenadier Regiment of the 12th SS Panzer Division, Hitler Yugand. 20,000 young men, most of them 17 years old, trained by veterans of the Eastern Front, and not one of them has ever heard a shot fired in anger. His boys are ready. They are eager. And they have been told exactly what to expect from the force now rolling toward them through the Norman hedge. colonial troops, amateurs, men from a country with no standing army to speak of, no military tradition worth respecting, and no combat experience in this war beyond a single catastrophic raid on DEP two years earlier. A raid the Vermach crushed in 6 hours. Meyer himself refers to the approaching Canadians with a phrase his staff will later recall. He calls them Canadian fishes, little fish swimming into a net. What happens next will last 48 hours, cost Meer 300 of his teenage soldiers and 15 tanks and end with Canadian prisoners being marched into the garden of this very abbey and shot in the back of the head. But that is not the story. Not yet. The story is what Meyer's boys were told, what they believed, and how spectacularly wrong all of it turned out to be. If you find this channel's work valuable, a like and a subscription help these stories reach the people who need to hear them.

[00:01:56]Because here is what most people do not realize about the German experience of fighting Canadians in the Second World War. It was not one encounter. It was not one lesson. It was a series of warnings. Each one issued after the previous warning proved fatally insufficient.

[00:02:17]Every time a German unit faced Canadians for the first time, those soldiers had been briefed. They had been given intelligence assessments, afteraction reports from the units that came before them, sometimes explicit verbal warnings from officers who had survived the experience. And every single time the briefing was wrong, not because the intelligence was fabricated, but because it was always based on the last battle.

[00:02:43]And by the time it reached the next unit, the Canadians had already become something the briefing could not describe. To understand what Meyer's teenagers were told on the morning of June 7th, 1944, and why it was so dangerously incomplete, you need to understand where the German file on Canadian soldiers began. Because there was a file. It was 26 years old by the time the Hitler Yugand opened it. And the men who wrote it were not intelligence analysts sitting behind desks. They were German soldiers who had fought Canadians in the trenches of the First World War. And what they wrote should have been a warning that no one in Meer's chain of command took seriously enough. Remember that phrase, Canadian fishes, because before this story is over, you will hear what German officers called Canadians after they actually fought them. And the distance between those two phrases is the distance between a briefing and a battlefield. The German army's institutional memory of Canadian soldiers begins in 1916 on the psalm and it begins with the word the Germans did not use lightly tupin storm troops. It was a term the German army reserved for its own elite assault units. Small groups of specially trained soldiers who led attacks into the most heavily defended positions. To be called stormtroopin was not a compliment you handed out to an enemy.

[00:04:06]It was an admission. And after the battle of the psalm in 1916, German soldiers began using it to describe the Canadians. Not the British, not the Australians, the Canadians. Here is what made the Canadian Corps different. And here is what German soldiers on the Western Front learned the hard way. The Canadian Expeditionary Force was from top to bottom, a volunteer army. Every man in it had chosen to be there. Canada had no conscription until 1917. And even then the volunteers outnumbered the conscripts by a wide margin. These were not professional soldiers following a career. They were farmers from Saskatchewan, loggers from British Columbia, miners from Nova Scotia, bank clerks from Toronto, men who had crossed an ocean to fight a war that was not on their doorstep. And they fought with a ferocity that unsettled both their allies and their enemies. The Germans noticed something specific. Canadian units conducted trench raids, violent short-d distanceance attacks across no man's land with a frequency and an aggression that no other force on the Western Front matched. These raids were not defensive. They were predatory.

[00:05:17]Canadian soldiers would cross into German trenches at night, kill everyone they found, destroy what they could, take prisoners for intelligence, and vanish before dawn. The psychological effect was devastating. German units stationed opposite Canadians stopped sleeping. And then came Vimemy Ridge.

[00:05:37]April 9th, 1917.

[00:05:39]Four Canadian divisions attacked together for the first time in the war.

[00:05:43]100,000 men moving uphill into sleet and machine gun fire against the German fortress that had already cost the French 150,000 casualties in failed attempts to take it. The Canadians took it in 3 days. The cost was 3,500 dead and 7,000 wounded, but they took what no one else could. Pay attention to what happened next because it matters for everything that follows in this story.

[00:06:10]After Vimei, the Canadian Corps was never again used as an ordinary lineholding formation. The British High Command began deploying them as a concentrated strike force sent to the hardest point of the line used to break what could not be broken. By 1918, when the German army saw Canadians arriving in a sector, they knew an attack was coming. The Canadians became, in effect, a signal. Their presence was the warning. A German colonel captured late in the war spoke to a Canadian prisoner named Fred Hamilton. The colonel did not mince words. I do not care for the English, the Scotch, the French, the Australians, or the Belgians, he said.

[00:06:51]But damn you Canadians. you take no prisoners and you kill our wounded. That accusation was not entirely fair, but it was not entirely wrong either.

[00:07:01]Historians have since documented numerous cases of Canadian soldiers killing Germans who were attempting to surrender. Not as policy, but as a pattern born of close quarters violence and an institutional culture that rewarded aggression above restraint. The Canadian Corps earned its reputation honestly, and the German army remembered. This is the critical point.

[00:07:24]Remember it. By the end of the First World War, the German military had a clear documented institutional understanding of Canadian soldiers. The file read, "Volunteer army, exceptionally aggressive, expert at close combat, dangerous at night, willing to take casualties and keep advancing, elite troops by any measure."

[00:07:46]That file did not disappear when the war ended. It lived in staff colleges, in doctrinal manuals, in the memories of officers who had survived the Western Front and were now training the next generation.

[00:07:58]When the Second World War began in 1939, every senior German officer knew what Canadians had been in the last war. And then something happened that rewrote the file entirely. On August 19th, 1942, the Canadians came back to France for the first time in 24 years.

[00:08:17]They came to a town called DEP on the English Channel coast. And in the space of a single morning, the German army watched 6,000 Canadian soldiers walk into a trap so complete, so catastrophic that by noon, more than half of them were dead, wounded, or in prisoner of war cages. The raid was a disaster by any measure, and German propagandists made sure every soldier in the Vermacht knew it. News reels showed burning Canadian tanks on the beach. Newspapers printed photographs of endless columns of prisoners with their hands above their heads. The message was clear and it was deliberate. These are not the stormtroop and your fathers warned you about. These are amateurs led by incompetent officers and they have just proven it. The old file was closed. A new one was opened. and what it said would shape every German briefing about Canadian soldiers for the next 16 months until a small town on the Adriatic coast of Italy proved the new file catastrophically wrong. The name of that town was Ortona and what the German paratroopers defending it were told about the Canadians heading their way contained a mistake so fundamental that it would cost them the battle, the town, and the single most devastating week of urban combat. the Italian front had ever seen. December 1943, the Adriatic coast of Italy, a place most people have never heard of, unless they are Canadian or German. Ortona was a medieval port town built on a cliff above the sea. Narrow streets, stone buildings with walls 3 ft thick, a cathedral on the high ground.

[00:09:57]It was the kind of place that looked beautiful in peace time and became a fortress the moment someone decided to defend it. and the German first parachute division had decided to defend it. These were not ordinary soldiers.

[00:10:09]The men of the first parachute division were among the most experienced combat troops in the German military. They had fought in Cree, in North Africa, in Sicily. Their commander, General Lieutenant Richard Hydrickch, was a tactician who understood urban warfare instinctively. His men had turned Ortona into a killing ground, collapsing buildings across intersections to create barricades, mining every doorway, stringing wire across streets at throat height, booby trapping the bodies of their own dead. Every alley was a firing lane, every window was a gunport, and Hydrick's paratroopers had been briefed on the force approaching them from the south. The briefing drew from the file that DEP had rewritten. First Canadian Infantry Division. Volunteers, yes, but with no combat experience before Sicily five months earlier. Colonial troops from a Dominion Army. Not British regulars, not Americans with industrial resources, but Canadians. Men from a country that had produced exactly one notable military action in this war, and that action had been a catastrophe on a French beach. The briefing was not worried. Hydrick's men were. What the briefing failed to mention because German intelligence in Italy had not yet fully registered it was what the first Canadian division had done in the five months between Sicily and Ortona. They had fought their way up the Italian boot through some of the worst terrain in the Mediterranean theater. They had crossed the Mororrow River under fire in December, taken three days and heavy casualties to clear a ravine the Canadians themselves called the Gully, and arrived at the outskirts of Ortona with a very specific kind of education.

[00:11:50]They were no longer green. They were no longer amateurs, and they were angry.

[00:11:56]The battle began on December 20th and lasted 7 days. What happened inside Ortona during that week would become one of the defining episodes of the entire Italian campaign and it would rewrite the German file on Canadian soldiers for the second time in 2 years. Here is what Hydrick's paratroopers encountered. On the first day, the Canadians advanced down Ortona's main street and were cut to pieces by machine gun fire from barricaded intersections. This was expected. This was what the defenses were designed to do. What was not expected was what the Canadians did next. They stopped going down the streets entirely.

[00:12:37]Soldiers of the Loyal Edmonton Regiment and the Seforth Highlanders of Canada began blasting holes through the interior walls of buildings, moving from house to house without ever stepping outside. They called it mouse holeing. A section would place a charge against an interior wall, blow a hole large enough for a man to crawl through, and pour into the next room, firing. Then they would do it again and again. They advanced through entire city blocks without ever appearing on the street.

[00:13:07]The German paratroopers had prepared for an enemy who would fight in the open.

[00:13:11]They got an enemy who came through the walls. Think about what this means from the German side. You are a paratrooper.

[00:13:19]You are in a stone building. Your machine gun covers the street. You are watching the intersection. And then behind you, from a wall that was solid 5 seconds ago, there is an explosion. And Canadian soldiers are inside your building, firing at close range before you can turn around. The fighting went room to room, floor to floor, building to building. Canadians cleared houses with grenades and bayonets. At one point, the Seforth Highlanders fought for a single building for an entire day.

[00:13:50]When it was over, 23 men held what had cost them half their platoon. Christmas dinner was eaten in a church while mortar shells hit the roof. The Canadians did not stop. They did not pause. They adapted faster than the defenders could respond. By December 27th, the German paratroopers, the men who had held Cree, who had fought across North Africa, withdrew from Mortona. The town was in Canadian hands. The cost was 2,300 Canadian casualties in a single week. The media called it Little Stalenrad. And this is where the German file changed again. After Ortona, German intelligence assessments of Canadian troops in Italy were revised. The first Canadian division was no longer listed as an inexperienced colonial formation.

[00:14:38]The new assessment was quieter, more clinical, and far more respectful. The men who had fought them knew something that the men writing briefings in France did not yet understand. But here is the problem, and here is why what happened next was so costly. The Italian theater and the Northwest European theater were separate command structures.

[00:14:57]Intelligence flowed slowly between them when it flowed at all. What Hydrick's paratroopers learned about Canadians in December 1943 did not reach the officers writing briefings in Normandy in time for June 1944.

[00:15:11]Which means that six months later, when the 12,000 teenage soldiers of the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitler Yugand were told what to expect from the Canadian Third Division landing on the beaches of Normandy, the briefing they received was still based on the old file, the DEP file, the one that said Canadians were amateurs, and those 17-year-old boys believed every word of it. June 6th, 1944. 5:45 in the morning. The men of the German 716th Infantry Division are in their bunkers along the Normandy coast, staring out at the English Channel through the slits of concrete casemates that have taken 3 years to build. These are not elite soldiers. The 716th is a static division. Older men, many in their 30s and 40s, assigned to garrison duty because they are not fit enough for mobile combat. Mixed in among them are soldiers of the 441st Ost Battalion, Eastern European conscripts, former Soviet prisoners of war who chose German uniform over starvation. Their weapons are adequate. Their fortifications are strong. Their morale is middling. They have been told that if the invasion comes, the Atlantic Wall will hold long enough for the Panza reserves to counterattack and drive the Allies back into the sea. Nobody has told them anything specific about who is coming. The briefings say British probably on this stretch of coast. Maybe Canadians. The distinction in the eyes of the German command does not matter much. What matters is the concrete and the machine guns and the minefields and the beach obstacles. Thousands of steel hedgehogs and wooden stakes tipped with teller mines designed to rip landing craft apart before they reach the sand.

[00:16:59]What matters, in other words, is the wall, not the men behind it. At 7:55 that morning, the first wave of the Canadian Third Infantry Division hits the beach at what the Allies have designated Juno. The Royal Winnipeg Rifles on the right, the Reginaina Rifles in the center, the Queen's Own Rifles of Canada on the left. They are landing 10 minutes late because of rough seas and offshore reefs, which means the tide has risen above the beach obstacles, which means the landing craft cannot see the mines until they hit them. Dozens of boats are torn open. Men drown in the surf carrying 80 lb of equipment. Those who make it to the sand find the preliminary bombardment has failed. The casemates are intact. The machine guns are intact. The Germans behind the wall are firing. And then something happens that the garrison troops of the 716th are not prepared for. The Canadians do not stop on the beach. They do not take cover and wait for support. They get off the killing ground. Sergeant majors and lieutenants, 22, 23 years old, are screaming at their men to move forward into the wire, into the mines, into the gun imp placements.

[00:18:13]Individual soldiers begin breaching the seaw wall with Bangalore torpedoes, blowing gaps in concrete, climbing over obstacles while machine gun fire stitches the sand around them. Within 90 minutes, the forward companies have broken through the first line of German defenses and are fighting inside the beach towns of Corsel, Bernier, and Santob. The 716th Division effectively ceases to exist as a fighting force before noon, and the Canadians keep going. By nightfall on June 6th, the third Canadian division has pushed further inland than any other Allied force on any of the five invasion beaches, further than the Americans at Omaha or Utah, further than the British at Gold or Sword. They have not reached their final objective, Karpik airfield, but they have driven a wedge 7 mi deep into the German line. This is the context Curt Meyer does not have when he climbs the bell tower of the Abbe Darden the following morning and watches Canadian tanks rolling toward him. He knows the Canadians landed. He knows the 716th is gone. But his briefing, the briefing delivered to the 12th SS before D-Day tells him the Canadians achieved this against a third rate garrison division on a fixed defensive line. Not a real fight, not a test. His Hitler Yugan trained for a year by Eastern Front veterans equipped with Panzer 4s and 88s are a different proposition entirely. He watches the Canadian column advance past his concealed positions and says to his staff, "I have them." At 3:00 in the afternoon, Meyer launches his counterattack. The 25th Panzer Grenadier Regiment, his teenage soldiers, hit the North Nova Scotia Highlanders and the Sherbrook Fuseliers from three sides simultaneously.

[00:20:04]Panzers emerging from tree lines, infantry surging through wheat fields.

[00:20:09]It is a textbook ambush executed by troops who have never been in combat, but have rehearsed this moment for months. The Canadians are pushed back.

[00:20:19]The North Novas lose men in clusters.

[00:20:22]Whole sections cut off, surrounded, overrun. By evening, the Canadian advance has been halted. Meyer holds Burine and Authie. But hold on, look at the numbers before you decide who won this day. Meer's regiment has lost over 300 dead and 15 tanks against a single Canadian brigade that was caught in the open. his untouchable Hitler Yugand in their very first battle have taken casualties that an Eastern Front veteran would call alarming. The Canadians were pushed back, yes, but they were not broken. They reformed, dug in, and by the next morning, they were still there.

[00:21:02]Meyer does not use the phrase Canadian fishes again. Nobody on his staff recalls him using it after June 7th.

[00:21:09]What he does instead is something that will follow him for the rest of his life and beyond it. That evening, Canadian prisoners taken at AI and Biron are brought to the Abbe Dalden. By the next morning, at least 18 of them are dead, shot in the back of the head in the Abbey Garden. Over the following days, the number of murdered Canadian prisoners reaches 156. And the killing tells you something that no briefing ever will. Because armies that feel in control do not execute prisoners. Armies that feel certain of victory do not need to. What happened at the Abbe Dalden was not confidence. It was the first crack.

[00:21:50]The moment the briefing metal and reality won. But the German command did not see it that way. Not yet. Because what they wrote in their reports after that first week in Normandy would become the next briefing, the next warning delivered to the next German unit about to face Canadians. And that warning still was not enough. For the next 30 days, Kurt Meyer's 12th SS Panzer Division and the Canadian Third Division fought each other without pause across a strip of Norman farmland barely 10 mi wide. And during those 30 days, the German file on Canadian soldiers was rewritten in real time, not by intelligence analysts, but by the men doing the dying. Here is what the Hitler Yugan learned. And here is what began appearing in German afteraction reports from the con sector during the summer of 1944.

[00:22:46]First, the artillery. German officers had faced British and American guns before. They understood mass fire. What they did not understand was the Canadian system. A single Canadian forward observation officer, often a young lieutenant crouching in a ditch with a radio, could call a mic target and within minutes have every gun in his regiment firing at a single point. If he called an uncle target, every gun in the entire division converged. And if the situation was desperate enough for a victor target, every gun within range, sometimes more than 200 barrels, would fire simultaneously at one grid reference. The shells arrived together.

[00:23:29]Not a barrage that walked toward you. A single instantaneous detonation that erased whatever was standing on that spot. German soldiers in the con sector reported that they could endure the bombing, endure the naval gunfire, endure the fighter bombers. But the Canadian artillery was different. It was not louder. It was faster. A request went in and 3 minutes later, the world ended. No other Allied force they faced could coordinate fire at that speed.

[00:23:59]This detail appeared in German reports.

[00:24:01]Remember it because it will come back.

[00:24:04]Second, the night fighting. Canadian infantry attacked in darkness with a regularity that no other Allied formation matched. German units opposite the Canadian sector could not rest. They could not rotate. They could not sleep.

[00:24:19]The Canadians would raid at 2 in the morning, probe at 4, attack at dawn, and do it again the next night. Meyer's teenage soldiers, who had been trained to attack with fury, were ground down not by a single blow, but by relentless, methodical pressure that never let them recover.

[00:24:38]Third, and this is the detail that mattered most, the Canadians did not break. At Bonau, at OT, at Capik, at K itself, Meyer threw his best troops at Canadian positions and pushed them back.

[00:24:53]But they reformed. They counterattacked.

[00:24:56]They retook ground they had lost hours earlier. An enemy who retreats and does not come back is defeated. An enemy who retreats and comes back at 3:00 in the morning is something else entirely.

[00:25:10]On July 4th, the Canadians attacked the fortified airfield at Kpik just west of K. The Hitler Yugan defended it with everything they had. The fighting was so close that at one point Canadian and German soldiers were in adjacent hangers firing through walls. The Canadians took part of the airfield. Meyers men held part of it. Neither side gave ground.

[00:25:33]The casualty reports from that single day read like a ledger of mutual destruction.

[00:25:39]Four days later on July 8th, the Canadians entered Con itself, the objective they had been assigned on D-Day 32 days earlier. The city was rubble. The Hitler Yugan fought for every block, but the Canadians kept coming street by street, ruin by ruin, until Meyer's division was pushed south of the Or River. By now, think about what has happened to the briefing. 30 days earlier, Meyer called them fishes.

[00:26:06]Now, his division, which began the campaign with over 20,000 men, is a fraction of its original strength. The teenage soldiers who believe they would sweep the Canadians back into the sea, are dead, wounded, or staring at their hands in a way that no 17-year-old should ever have to. And the war in Normandy is not over. In August, the Canadians under General Guy Simmons launched Operation Totalize, a night attack using armored columns guided by search lights and radio beams, a tactical innovation that no one in the German command had seen before. Then Operation Tractable. Then the closing of the Filet's pocket where 24 German divisions were trapped and crushed between Canadian, British, Polish, and American forces. The 12th SS was ordered to hold the northern edge of the pocket open so that other German units could escape. They did barely. When the remnants of the Hitler Yugan finally staggered out of Normandy, the division that had entered the campaign with 20,000 soldiers, dozens of Panzer 4s, and absolute certainty in its own superiority, could barely muster a few hundred men. The Normandy campaign was the crucible that produced the next generation of German warnings about Canadian soldiers. And those warnings were no longer vague. They were specific. They named the artillery system. They described the night attacks. They noted the refusal to break under counterattack. They identified Canadian formations by name, third division, second division, fourth armored, and classified them as dangerous opponents who required the commitment of firstline German troops.

[00:27:49]But there was a problem. By the autumn of 1944, the Vermacht did not have many firstline troops left. The units being sent to face the Canadians next were not panzer divisions with teenage fanatics and eastern front veterans. They were hastily assembled formations built from men on leave, men recovering from wounds, men scraped together from rear area positions and thrown into the line.

[00:28:13]And these men were about to receive a briefing about Canadians that would for the first time accurately describe what they were about to face. They would hear the warning. They would understand it and it would not save them. The place was the Shelt Estuary. The month was October and the water was already rising. October 1944, the Shelt Estuary, where the North Sea pushes inland through the low countries of Belgium and the Netherlands. A landscape of water, mud, dikes, and flooded fields stretching to the horizon in every direction. The Allies have captured the port of Antwerp, one of the largest in Europe, but they cannot use it. German forces still control both banks of the 60-mi estuary leading to the harbor. Until those banks are cleared, not a single supply ship can reach the docks. And without Antwerp, the entire Allied advance will starve.

[00:29:11]The job of clearing the Shelt falls to the First Canadian Army. On the South Bank, in what the Germans have designated Shelt Fortress South, sits Major General Kurt Ebering and his 64th Infantry Division. Ebering's men are not teenagers. They are not garrison troops.

[00:29:28]They are soldiers on leave from the Eastern Front. Men who have survived Russia, Italy, Norway, scooped up and assembled into a division during the chaos of the German retreat from France.

[00:29:40]They do not know each other well, but every one of them has seen combat and most of them have seen worse than what they are expecting here. And they are expecting a great deal because for the first time in this story, the German briefing about Canadian soldiers is based on accurate recent intelligence.

[00:29:58]The Normandy reports have arrived.

[00:30:01]Ebering's officers have read the afteraction summaries from the con sector. They know about the artillery, the speed of the concentrations, the coordination of fire. They know the Canadians attack at night. They know they do not break easily. The file is no longer 26 years old, no longer tainted by DEP. It is current. It describes the third Canadian Infantry Division, the same division now moving toward the Shelt as a formation that has fought continuously since D-Day, taken heavy casualties, absorbed replacements, and emerged harder than before. Evering does something that no German commander in this story has done until now. He prepares for Canadians specifically. He orders the dikes breached, flooding the boulders and channeling any advance onto a handful of raised dyke roads that his men can cover with pre-registered fire.

[00:30:54]He fortifies the Leopold Canal, a straight, flat, 100 ft wide waterway with no cover on either bank as his main defensive line. He positions coastal artillery batteries with 15 cm guns that can reach anything within 12 mi. He turns the terrain itself into a weapon.

[00:31:12]The briefing says the Canadians are dangerous. Ebering believes it. He gives them the respect the briefing demands.

[00:31:19]On October 6th, the third Canadian division launches Operation Switchback.

[00:31:25]The Seventh Brigade attempts a frontal assault across the Leopold Canal.

[00:31:29]Soldiers in small boats paddle across open water under direct machine gun fire. Those who reach the far bank dig in on a strip of mud barely wider than a football field. For three days, that bridge head is in constant danger of being wiped out. German counterattacks hit it from three sides. The Canadians hold, but only by the width of a fingernail. And then the Canadians do something the briefing did not predict.

[00:31:56]3 days after the frontal assault, while Eberd's attention is fixed on the Leopold Canal, the 9inth Brigade launches an amphibious assault from the Brockman inlet behind the German defenses entirely. Alligator amphibious vehicles carrying Canadian infantry cross the shelt from the north and land on the coast near Hoof Plot in the rear of the 64th Division. The Germans have not expected an attack from the water.

[00:32:21]They have not fortified that direction.

[00:32:24]By the time Ebering understands what is happening, Canadian soldiers are already established behind his main line with mortars and heavy machine guns. For the next 3 weeks, the third Canadian division fights through the Brekin's pocket in conditions that are almost beyond description. The ground is flooded. Trenches fill with water as soon as they are dug. Every road is a dyke and every dyke is a shooting gallery. The Canadians advance through mud that reaches their waists under fire from coastal guns they cannot see. in rain that does not stop. They clear German positions one by one, farmhouse by farmhouse, dyke by dyke, poulder by poulder. On November 2nd, General Ebering himself is captured. The following day, the war diary of the third Canadian division records the end of Operation Switchback. Someone writes, "Operation Switchback now complete." And underneath in a different hand, two words, "Thank God." The numbers tell the rest. The Canadians suffered 2,077 casualties. The Germans lost 12,77, killed, wounded, missing, or captured.

[00:33:34]The Canadian intelligence summary written after the battle refers to Ebering's 64th Division as the best infantry division we have met. Think about what that means. The Canadians who have fought the 12th SS who have taken Khan who have closed the Filet's pocket call this division the best they have faced and they still beat them 6 to1.

[00:33:56]Montgomery gives the third Canadian division a new name. He calls them the water rats and now the German file on Canadian soldiers undergoes its final revision. The reports flowing back from the shelt say something that no previous report has said quite so plainly. It is no longer about respecting the Canadians. It is no longer about taking them seriously. The tone has shifted.

[00:34:20]The language is the language of men describing a force they do not know how to stop. The next unit to receive this warning will be the strongest defensive force left in the German West. First parachute army, the Sief Freed line, the Reichsv forest, and a man named Alfred Schlim, who has read every report and believes he is ready. He is not.

[00:34:41]February 8th, 1945. The Rhineland, the last major defensive line between the Allied armies and the heart of Germany.

[00:34:48]General Dal Sherm Troopa Alfred Schlim commands the first parachute army, the force tasked with holding the line between the Moss and the Ryan Rivers.

[00:34:57]Schlim is not a politician in uniform.

[00:34:59]He is a professional soldier who has commanded paratroopers in combat, who reads intelligence reports the way a surgeon reads scans, and who has spent the past weeks studying everything the German army knows about the force coming toward him. The first Canadian Army under the temporary command of Lieutenant General Guy Simons, the same officer who invented the armored knight attack at Totalize, the same officer whose core closed the Filet's pocket.

[00:35:24]Simons now has under his command the largest army ever led by a Canadian.

[00:35:29]Over 450,000 men, including British and Polish divisions, but with Canadian formations at the spear tip. Schllem has the complete file. Every report from Normandy, every assessment from the Shelt, every capture document, every interrogation transcript, every afteraction summary written by German officers who survived fighting Canadians and wanted to make sure the next man in line understood what was coming. The file is thick. It is detailed. It is accurate. And Schllem has something none of the previous German commanders in this story had. He has the Sig Freed line. Three belts of fortifications stretching through dense forest with concrete bunkers, anti-tank ditches, dragons teeth obstacles, and interlocking fields of fire. Behind it, the Reichvald, a vast pine forest where tanks cannot maneuver and infantry must fight at close range among the trees.

[00:36:26]Behind that, the Hulvald, another forest, another line of fortifications, another killing ground. And behind everything, the Rine itself. Three defensive lines and a river. The deepest defensive position the Canadians have ever been asked to break. Schllem does one more thing. He orders the dikes along the Rine destroyed. The floodwaters spread across the land plane, turning roads into rivers and fields into lakes. The Canadian advance will be channeled into narrow corridors of dry ground. corridors that Schllem's guns are already aimed at. The warning has been heard. The defenses are prepared. The terrain is weaponized.

[00:37:10]For the first time in this entire war, a German commander facing Canadians has accurate intelligence, strong fortifications, experienced troops, and a plan built specifically to counter everything the Canadian Army does well.

[00:37:24]Operation Veritable begins at 10:30 in the morning with the heaviest artillery bombardment of the entire Western Front.

[00:37:32]Over 1,400 guns firing simultaneously.

[00:37:35]The ground shakes for miles and then the Canadians move forward. The third Canadian division, the Water Rats, goes in aboard amphibious vehicles, driving straight through the flooded Ryan plane while German shells burst in the water around them. They are clearing positions that are half submerged, fighting through waistdeep water in February in temperatures that turn wet uniforms into sheets of ice. Soldiers of the regime de laier wade through flood water under mortar fire to reach German bunkers that are still shooting. To their south, British and Canadian infantry enter the Reichvald. The forest is dark, dense, and laced with mines. The sigfreed line fortifications inside the tree line are intact. German paratroopers, Schllem's best, fight for every bunker, every trench, every clearing. Progress is measured in hundreds of yards per day.

[00:38:29]The ground is mud so deep that tanks sink to their hulls and have to be abandoned. Infantrymen carry ammunition forward on their backs because no vehicle can reach the front. The Sigf freed line breaks on February 21st. Then comes the Hulkvald. Simons launches Operation Blockbuster, the Canadian Second and Third Divisions, the Fourth Canadian Armored Division, pushing through the forest corridor toward the last German line before the Rine. The fourth armored drives into what soldiers afterward call the Valley of Death, a narrow gap between the Hulvald and the Balberger Heights, where German anti-tank guns and artillery have perfect fields of fire. Canadian tanks burn in rows. Infantry advances over the bodies of the men who went before them.

[00:39:15]The Hawkwald falls.

[00:39:18]It takes days. It costs thousands. But it falls. By early March, Schllem's first parachute army is pulling back across the Rine. The last bridge is blown. The Rhineland is in Allied hands.

[00:39:33]The cost to the first Canadian army, 15,634 casualties. The cost to Schllem, over 22,000 casualties and tens of thousands captured. Schlem had the best warning any German commander ever received about Canadian soldiers. He had the terrain, the fortifications, the troops, and the time to prepare. And none of it was enough. Here is what the final German reports from the Rhineland say about the Canadians. They do not describe amateurs. They do not describe colonial troops. They do not use words like fish or amateur or inexperienced. The language is stripped down to something almost clinical, aggressive, relentless, highly effective in combined arms, exceptional artillery coordination, will advance regardless of casualties. That last phrase is the one that matters.

[00:40:29]Will advance regardless of casualties.

[00:40:32]It is the furthest possible point from where the German file on Canadian soldiers began from DEP, from the dismissal, from the contempt. It is the end of the briefing. There is nothing left to add. But there is one thing left to answer because the question this story began with, "What were German soldiers told before facing Canadians for the first time?" has a final chapter that no briefing could contain. And it does not take place on a battlefield.

[00:41:02]In September 1945, 4 months after the war in Europe ended, Curt Meyer stood trial before the Canadian War Crimes Commission in Oric, Germany. He was charged on five counts related to the murder of Canadian prisoners at the Abbe Darden and in the villages of Bon and Oti. The court found him guilty on three of those counts, including inciting his troops to deny quarter to surrendering soldiers. Major General Harry Foster, the presiding officer, sentenced Meyer to death by firing squad. The sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.

[00:41:37]In 1954, Meyer was released. Several Canadian and British officers who had fought against him in Normandy had written in support of his release. He died in 1961 at the age of 51. He never spoke publicly about the phrase Canadian fishes. He never had to. The garden of the Abbe Daen spoke for him. The 12th SS Panzer Division Hitler Yugand the 20,000 teenagers who were told that Canadians were colonial amateurs lost over 80% of its strength in Normandy. Most of the boys who believed the briefing on June 7th did not live to hear the revised version. Those who survived the fillet's pocket were reformed, sent to the Ardens, and eventually surrendered to Allied forces in 1945 as a shattered remnant of what had once been the most fanatically confident division in the German West. General Curt Ebering, captured by the Canadians at the Shelt, spent the rest of the war in a prisoner of war camp. His 64th Division, the experienced Eastern Front soldiers who received the first accurate warning, ceased to exist on November 3rd, 1944.

[00:42:46]Everding had done everything the briefing told him to do. He had flooded the terrain, fortified the canal, positioned his guns. The briefing was correct. The outcome was the same.

[00:42:57]Alfred Schlam survived the war. His first parachute army, the force that held the strongest defensive position in the West with the most comprehensive intelligence file on Canadian soldiers ever compiled by the German military, was pushed across the Rine in 4 weeks.

[00:43:13]Schllem later said that the fighting in the Rhineland was among the most intense he had experienced in the entire war. So what were German soldiers told before facing Canadians for the first time? The answer changed five times in six years.

[00:43:27]After the first world war, the file said storm troops, elite, aggressive, dangerous. After DEP, the file said amateurs, colonial troops who had proven their incompetence on a French beach.

[00:43:40]After Ortona, the file said quietly and only in Italy that the first assessment may have been closer to the truth. After Normandy, the file said, "First rate infantry with devastating artillery and a refusal to stay down when hit." After the shelt, the file said something closer to a plea, that these soldiers would advance regardless of casualties, that their coordination was exceptional, that they were not to be underestimated under any circumstances. Each warning was based on the last battle. Each warning was issued to men who had never faced Canadians before. And each warning failed, not because it was wrong, but because it was always describing who the Canadians had been, never who they were becoming. That is the answer this story has been building toward. The German briefing system worked exactly as designed. Intelligence was gathered, analyzed, distributed. Officers read reports. Soldiers were told what to expect. The machine functioned and it did not matter because the briefings kept trying to describe what Canadians did, their tactics, their weapons, their methods, when the real answer was something no intelligence report could capture. Who they were. A volunteer army from a country of 11 million people fighting a war 4,000 m from home.

[00:44:58]Farmers and miners and clerks who had no military tradition to fall back on and no imperial pride to defend. only a choice they had made individually to cross an ocean and fight. They adapted faster than any file could track because they were not following a doctrine. They were building one in real time from the ground up, battle by battle, mistake by mistake, grave by grave. The Germans could describe the artillery. They could warn about the night attacks. They could note the aggression and the refusal to break. But they could not brief their soldiers on what it means to fight men who chose to be there, who had nothing to prove and nothing to protect except the man beside them. That is what no warning could contain.

[00:45:45]In April 1945, the first Canadian army swept north into the Netherlands. The Dutch people, starving after a winter without food or fuel, lined the roads as Canadian trucks rolled through. Children sat on the hoods of jeeps. Old women wept. Soldiers who had fought from Juno Beach to the Rine handed out chocolate and cigarettes to people who had not eaten properly in months.

[00:46:09]The war ended on May 5th in the Canadian sector. The men who had been called fishes who had been dismissed as amateurs who had been underestimated by every German unit that faced them for the first time. Those men liberated an entire country and that country has never forgotten. Thank you for staying with this story to the end. If it meant something to you, a like helps it reach people who might never have heard it otherwise. If you are not yet subscribed, now is the time, and the bell ensures you will not miss the next one. I would love to know where you are watching from. And if someone in your family served in the war, whether they landed on the beaches, flew over Germany, sailed the Atlantic, or waited at home, tell me about them in the comments. Every family has a story. This channel exists to make sure those stories are not lost.