Italian town honours Canadian liberators

A small town in Italy turned out in force Wednesday to honour its heroes: the Canadian veterans of the Second World War who liberated Ortona in one of the fiercest battles Canada fought on Italian soil.

• INDEPTH: The Italian campaign

The battle in December of 1943, known as Canada's Stalingrad, cost many Canadian soldiers their lives.

Governor General Adrienne Clarkson joined some of the men who survived the Italian campaign in a ceremony of remembrance Wednesday.

It took place in the Moro River War Cemetery in Ortona, where 1,375 Canadians are buried.

As a piper played a lament, veterans walked among the white marble headstones.

Scott Clark, a machine-gunner from Saskatchewan, carefully laid a poppy at the grave of each man he knew who died in the course of the battle.

Christmas has never seemed like Christmas to him since that long week at the end of December, 61 years ago, when the Canadian troops fought to seize control of Ortona from the Germans.

"I suppose maybe it's kind of like Remembrance Day," he said.

The conditions were horrible: the icy rain was relentless, olive groves had turned to muck and danger lurked at every turn in Ortona, a town of narrow buildings and narrower lanes perched on a cliff overlooking the Adriatic Sea.

As a brass band played Wednesday and balconies were draped with Canadian flags in the warm autumn sunshine, Clark walked to the site of a bombed-out church where he ate Christmas supper in 1943. It turned out to be only a brief respite from the war.

"When we were talking about Christmas, you know, the little group you went to Christmas with, maybe two days later, three of them would be gone or something like that. And it was pretty hard at times."

The government of Canada used the occasion of Wednesday's ceremony to thank the people of Ortona for the help they gave the soldiers during the Italian Campaign, which took nearly 5,200 Canadian lives between 1943 and 1945.

Clarkson presented a silver plaque to silver-haired Francesca Lasorda, who lives right beside the town's monument to Canada's war dead.

For months at the end of the Second World War, she and her sister laundered the young men's uniforms, cooked the occasional meal or just talked with them.

And five years ago, when the new monument was erected, Lasorda and her sister began placing fresh flowers at the foot of the monument almost every day.

Lasorda said it's a way of thanking all the young men who sacrificed their lives to give her family a chance to live.