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Beginning December 21, 1943, troops from Canada fought a savage battle to oust German soldiers from the Italian coastal port of Ortona, on Italy’s Adriatic coast. To put that struggle into context, the exhibit follows a Canadian unit through the preliminary stages of the war–forming in Edmonton, then spending frustratingly long years of training and waiting in Britain. Finally the mostly young soldiers are blooded in the invasion of Sicily, their first experience of actual combat, where casualties bleed and die. The exhibit next tracks the Canadian army through the easy days following the invasion of the Italian mainland, as “Tedeschi” — the Germans –fought to delay but not seriously to stop the advancing Allied troops. Then the Canadians were ordered to cross the Moro River, a scant eight miles south of Ortona. At the Moro they began to learn what it was like to be locked in full combat against a determined, first-rate opponent. Finally, on December 21, the Edmonton troops were part of a force sent to secure the town of Ortona. The next eight days saw the vicious struggle which accompanying media correspondents dubbed “Little Stalingrad.”
