Amid the mud, blood and misery, Betty Brown found cause for pure joy.
The Second World War nursing sister, whose younger brother was believed killed in action, overheard he may be alive. The next day, Brown and brother David Nicolson had a teary reunion in the war zone of Sicily.
Now 92, she remembers that day in 1943 like it was yesterday.
While her brother looked “so thin and so dusty ... this was my highlight overseas, as you can imagine.”
Nicolson, a Royal Canadian fighter pilot whose plane was shot down seven times, had survived yet another attack.
The reunion was a rare day of celebration among many of trauma and bloodshed. Brown, who tended to the sick and wounded during the Italian campaign, arrived in Sicily from the U.K. to find the hospital supply ship had sunk.
Through the campaign, Brown worked under a canvas tent that served as a mobile hospital, helping patients with everything from gunshot wounds to malaria.
“We accepted the boys as they came in. The worst cases (went) straight to the hospital ships,” she recalled. “We wanted to help as much as we could. We were certainly necessary, not only in the nursing capacity but the fact the boys liked seeing us. I remember how thrilled they were even when they were sick, to get in a cot under canvas. It was very wet, muddy and cold. Miserable, miserable. So they were glad to get in to see Canadians to talk to.”
After landing at Sicily, Canadian troops pushed their way up the peninsula, enduring tough terrain, extreme weather conditions and intense combat, especially house-to-house fighting in Ortona. Of the 93,000 Canadians who took part in the 20-month Italian campaign, there were about 26,000 casualties, including 6,000 who were killed.
This campaign is often called “The Forgotten Front” because most attention was focused on France.
Bill Rawling, a historian with the Department of National Defence’s Directorate of History and Heritage, said the spectacular landings at Normandy on D-Day overshadowed the Italian Campaign. Even though Canadians were fighting some of the strongest German units, they didn’t get the equipment or reinforcements they needed.
And after the war, the fierce campaign did not feature prominently in books or movies.
“People who are interested in history will study the Italian campaign, but I don’t think it has resonated with popular culture in the same way as the Normandy landings have,” Rawling said.
But he added the significance of the campaign and the role of Canadians should not be underestimated. They waged some of the fiercest fights in some of the toughest conditions.
“In Italy, you have all the conditions imaginable; you land in July 1943 over beaches and rolling hills into a malaria-infested region. Rivers flooding and temperature dropping and you are fighting over mountains,” he said. “They covered almost every possible climate except possibly jungle and the Antarctic. The conditions covered the entire scale.”
Military historian Desmond Morton said the campaign was tough due to steep hills, swift streams and stone-built villages creating fortress after fortress with a strong German enemy that didn’t give up easily.
“One of the things we learned was that the simple principles of house-to-house fighting didn’t work,” he said. “The enemy did not fold up as it began to lose space, it just got meaner and tougher.”
In the end, Italy became “yesterday’s story” after the Normandy landings, Morton said. But history recalls the period as a significant but violent one.
“There were tough campaigns and battles and there were significant casualties in the end, but we gradually built up to it and got a feeling for what fighting Nazis was,” he said.
“We were there, we got involved in some of the mistakes, we learned as we did.”
