Italy, December 1943. The farmhouse has no roof left. The walls are pocked through with shell holes, and somewhere behind them, in the olive groves and the smoking ruins of the outbuildings, German infantry are moving. Captain Paul Tri is the only officer still on his feet. He has 17 men. He has four tanks.

Three sides of his position are held by the enemy. The nearest Canadian unit is somewhere back across the gully. They crossed four hours ago through the machine gun fire and the mortar rounds and the mud that swallowed two of his tanks whole and no one has come through since. The Germans have already counterattacked once.

They will come again. His men are watching him. Some are wounded and fighting anyway. The ammunition count is low enough that they have started pulling weapons off the dead. A Sherman to his left is angled into a gap in the farmyard wall, its gun pointed at the treeine. The crew knows what’s out there. Trike knows, too.

He had known since the morning when Ca Company crossed the start line with 81 men and seven tanks and ran straight into a German line nobody had told them was there. He had watched his officers go down one by one. His sergeant, then his lieutenant, then the next one after that, until there were no more officers, and the company kept moving anyway because he told them to keep moving.

They are at the objective. Kasa Baradi, a farmhouse outside Ortona on the road that leads north through the entire German line. What happens in the next few hours will either open the road to Otona or end here in this farmyard with 17 men and four tanks that cannot hold forever.

Tri turns to the men closest to him. He has something to tell them about where the safe place is. Paul Tri was born in 1910 in Cabano, Quebec, a milltown in the Basan Lauron region where the main industry was lumber and the main institution in his family’s case was the army. His father founded the local cadet corps.

By age 11, Tri was drilling in it. At 15, he tried to enlist in the Royal 22nd Regimental, the Vand, the only French Canadian Infantry Regiment in the Canadian Permanent Force, and was turned away for being underage. He came back 2 years later, told them he was 19, and joined as a private in November 1927. He was 17.

He had found the only thing he wanted to do. By September 1939, when Canada entered the war, Triay was the regimental sergeant major of the Vando. He deployed with the regiment to England in December 1939 as part of the first Canadian Infantry Division. Returned to Canada briefly as an instructor, then went back overseas and followed the division into Sicily in July 1943 as part of Operation Hoski.

By late July, he held a field commission as a lieutenant. By August 5th, he had been elevated again to acting captain, commanding sea company. The promotions reflected the pace of the fighting in Sicily and then on the Italian mainland, the pace at which officers were dying. The first Canadian Infantry Division under Major General Chris Ves crossed the Morrow River south of Ortona on the night of December 5th to 6th, 1943.

Ortona was the objective. a port on the Adriatic coast that Montgomery’s eighth army wanted to use as a supply base for the winter push. The crossing went badly from the start. Three battalions attacked and only the Princess Patricia’s Canadian light infantry made any real headway, seizing the hamlet of Villa Regati before engineers failed to bridge the river and the unit was ordered back.

A permanent bridge head was not established until December 9th, 3 days and hundreds of casualties after the first attempt. What stopped the Canadians called was not Otona. It was a natural feature approximately 2 km north of the Morrow, a ravine the men simply called the Gully. It ran roughly east west across the coastal plateau, averaging 61 m deep with steep southern banks the Germans had spent weeks fortifying with gunpits, bunkers, and interconnected shelters.

When the shelling stopped, German infantry moved up to the rim and fired down into the advancing Canadians, crossing open ground through vineyards strung with barbed wire. The gully was not a position that could be reduced from the front. Vokes spent 10 days finding that out.

Between 10 and 13 December, eight separate battalion level attacks were thrown at it. Eight times the attackers were cut to pieces and pushed back. The loyal Edmonton regiment suffered some of the worst of it. One company managing to claw foothold onto the reverse slope before fresh German units arrived and forced them off.

The Carlton and York regiment tried on the 13th. By nightfall, they had nothing. The gully was eating battalions. Vogs changed approach. The first Canadian infantry brigade would try to outflank the whole position by pushing northeast along the road toward Ortona, bypassing the gully’s western end and seizing the road junction at a hamlet called Kasa Baratti.

If Kasa Baratti fell, the German line anchoring the gully would be turned, outflanked, and untenable. The task went to the Royal 22nd Regiment. On the morning of the 14th of December, C and D companies of the Vandeus supported by seven Sherman tanks from C squadron of the Ontario Regiment crossed the start line at 10:30.

C company’s strength was 81 men. Captain Tri was his only officer. The artillery had opened at 0600 and the barrage had been heavy enough that some of Tri’s men looked shaken at the start line. He moved them forward anyway. Almost immediately they overran a German platoon that chose to surrender and sent them back under guard.

The ground ahead was open, sloping, cut up by irrigation ditches and the ruins of stone farm buildings. The gully was behind them. Kasa Baratti was somewhere in front. Between them and it, the Germans were waiting. D Company is gone. Somewhere in the broken ground east of the road, disoriented in the smoke and the terrain, they have turned in the wrong direction.

Triquette doesn’t know this yet. He knows only that his flank is open and nobody is answering. The first serious contact comes at the gully approach. Machine guns open from fortified positions on the near bank, pre-sighted, interlocking fields of fire across the slope. Mortar rounds begin dropping.

One of the Ontario regimen Shermans takes a hit. A second bogs in the mud and cannot free itself. Then the officers start going down. Not one after another simultaneously in the same minutes of fire. By the time sea company clears the gully approach, every officer in the company except Tri is killed or wounded.

Half the enlisted men are down. The company that crossed the start line at 81 has been cut to fewer than 50 and they haven’t reached Kasa Baratti yet. Tri moves along the line. The men who are still standing are looking at him. He shouts, “Never mind them. They can’t shoot.” Then he points forward.

What was left of Sea Company moved. Tri pushed them northeast along the road. The surviving Shermans rolling alongside their tracks grinding through mud that in places came up to a man’s knees. The ground was a wasteland of split-limmed olive trees, burnt out farm buildings, and the carcasses of animals caught in the shelling.

Stone walls that had marked field boundaries were down to rubble. Drainage ditches cut across the route at irregular intervals. Each one a potential tank trap and a potential enemy position. The Germans were in the buildings. Machine gun crews had set up in the ground floors of farmhouses with the walls knocked through for better fields of fire.

Snipers worked from upper stories and from prepared positions in the tree lines. Every 100 meters of advance produced contact a burst from a window. A mortar adjustment dropping rounds closer as the German observers track the columns movement. Tri did not direct from behind. He moved with the lead elements close enough to make decisions in real time.

Close enough that when a position needed to be flanked, he could point two men left and go himself. The Shermans worked the buildings. A tank would pull to within close range of a fortified farmhouse and fire directly into the ground floor, not to suppress, but to collapse. The infantry moved in behind the shot, clearing what was left.

It was slow. Each position had to be reduced individually because bypassing one meant leaving a machine gun crew behind the advance, and there were not enough men left to leave anyone covering a bypass. Partway to Casta Baratti, Sea Company ran into German armor. A Panza emerged from a position in the treeine.

The lead Sherman engaged and knocked it out. A second German tank appeared from a different angle. Another Ontario regiment crew put a round into it before it could traverse its gun. The column kept moving. German infantry were also pulling back through the same ground, some inorganized, fighting withdrawal, others in small groups, moving parallel to the Canadians through the olive groves.

Several times, Triay’s men came within meters of enemy soldiers before the contact resolved into a firefight at almost point blank range. At some point in the afternoon, the company strength dropped below 30, then below 20. Men were being hit and left where they fell or dragged to what cover existed and left with a field dressing.

There were no stretcherbears. There was no rear. D Company had never appeared, which meant C Company’s eastern flank was open the entire advance, and Traay kept the Shermans positioned to cover it. They reached Kasa Baratti in the late afternoon. The farmhouse was a two-story structure partially collapsed from earlier shelling surrounded by outbuildings and a stone ward yard.

The road to the Otona OA junction ran past it to the north. Tri pushed the company onto the outskirts and stopped. He had two sergeants and 15 men, had four tanks with ammunition running low. The objective was in his hands. Then the Germans came back. The first counterattack came almost immediately. German infantry with tank support moved out of the tree line north of the farmhouse.

Probing the perimeter Triay had begun to establish around the surviving Shermans and the broken walls of the yard. This was a different problem from the advance. Moving forward, the initiative had been Triay’s. He chose the pace, chose the route, chose when to engage. Now the initiative belonged to whoever was commanding the German force outside the walls and that force was larger.

Tri got his men into the best positions the ground allowed. The four tanks were placed to cover the open approaches. One into the gap in the north wall, one angled to cover the lane running east, two positioned to watch the tree line. The infantry, 15 men and two sergeants, filled the spaces between.

There were not enough of them to cover everything. There were gaps in the perimeter that a determined push could exploit and Tri knew it. Theo Germans hit the north side first. The Sherman in the war gap fired and the attack stalled. German infantry pulled back into the trees. A second probe came from the east through the outbuildings.

Infantry moving low between the ruined structures. Tri’s men on that side opened fire at close range and pushed it back. The fighting was at distances measured in meters, not hundreds of meters. A man firing from the corner of a stone wall could see the faces of the men he was shooting at. Between contacts, Tri moved, not to one position and then another, continuously all the way around the perimeter, checking ammunition, repositioning men as gaps opened, making sure every sector knew what was happening in the sectors beside it. He had no radio operator to manage. He was the communications net. When a man on the west side needed to know that the tree line to the north had just produced movement, Tri was the one who brought that information. The ammunition problem worsened through the afternoon and into the evening. Rounds for the Shermans were finite, and each counterattack spent more of them. The infantry had started collecting weapons

from the German dead during the advance. Now they were doing it inside the perimeter, pulling usable ammunition from their own casualties. Tri was using whatever came to hand, fighting with the weapons available rather than the weapons he’d started with. A second major counterattack came in.

German infantry in larger numbers, better coordinated, hitting two sides of the perimeter at once. This one pressed harder than the first. The Shermans fired at close range into the advancing infantry. Tri’s men held their positions. The attack was beaten back, but it had taken more ammunition to do it, and there had been more of them.

This time it was dark now. Reinforcements had not come. The battalion knew where sea company was. Tri had radioed his position, but nothing had broken through yet. The Germans controlled the approaches. They would come again. There were 15 men, four tanks, a stone farmyard in the Italian winter, and three sides of it facing the enemy.

Sometime after dark, Tri passed the order around the perimeter. Is noa. They shall not pass. The phrase had a history before Casta Baradi. It came from Verdun from 1916 from French soldiers holding a line that should not have held. Tri’s men knew what it meant. It was not an instruction about tactics.

It was a statement about what was going to happen regardless of how many times the Germans came back. The night attacks were different from the daylight probes. In daylight, the Germans could coordinate visually, read the ground, identify the weak points in the perimeter before committing. At night, they were working on what they knew of the positions layout, which walls were standing, where the tanks had been placed, where the infantry gaps were.

They came in tighter, using the darkness to get close before opening fire, trying to get men inside the perimeter before the Shermans could depress their guns far enough to be useful. Traaye’s men had one advantage. They knew exactly where every gap was because they had spent the afternoon staring at those gaps and thinking about what would come through them.

When German infantry came through an outbuilding opening on the east side, the men covering that sector were already watching it. The range was close enough that the muzzle flash lit the yard. Triate moved through it all. Through the firing, through the moments between firing when the yard went quiet and both sides were reloading and repositioning.

He checked every position. He relocated men when a sector went quiet and another heated up. He directed the Shermans by voice which ark to cover, when to fire, when to hold rounds. The tank crews were working in near total darkness, firing on the captain’s instructions at targets he could hear, and they could not see.

A third major counterattack came before midnight. This was the largest German infantry hitting the north and west sides simultaneously, supported by at least one tank moving up the lane from the north. The Sherman covering the north wall fired first and stopped the German tank before it could bring its gun to bear.

The infantry assault pushed against the west wall hard enough that two of Triay’s men were fighting from the same position, back to back, covering different directions at once. It broke. The German infantry pulled back again. After that, the contacts became shorter, more sporadic. Probes to find whether the perimeter had weakened, whether the tanks were still there, whether the men inside were still capable of resistance.

Each time, the answer came back in gunfire. The night was cold. The Italian December coast brought temperatures close to freezing, and the men who were not moving were fighting off the chill on top of everything else. Some of the wounded from the advance were still inside the perimeter.

Those who could hold a weapon doing so. Triay did not stop moving. At some point, before dawn, the battalion broke through. B. Company of the Royal 22nd Regimen pushed up the road and made contact with the perimeter. Then the rest of the battalion came through behind them. The relief was not loud. There were not enough men left inside for loud. Kasa Baratti was held.

Sea company crossed the start line on the 14th of December with 81 men and seven tanks. When the battalion relieved them on the 15th of December, Tri had two sergeants and 15 men still on their feet. Every other officer in the company had been killed or wounded during the advance. Five of the seven Ontario regiment Shermans were gone.

Two bogged in the mud before reaching the objective. Three knocked out or disabled during the fighting. The Royal 22nd Regiments December losses across the full Morrow River operation ran to several hundred casualties. The broader first Canadian Infantry Division campaign from the Mororrow crossing on December 5th through the fall of Otona on December 28th cost 2,339 casualties in total, including 502 killed.

The German forces opposing the Vandos at Kasa Baratti included elements of the 90th Pansa Grenadier Division and by mid December units of the first German parachute division, the same elite formation that would conduct the defense of Otona itself in the days. Following Tri was not evacuated. He remained with the regiment.

On the 21st of December, one week after the battle, he was promoted to major. Kasa Baratti did what Vokes needed it to do. With the farmhouse in Canadian hands and the road junction within reach, the German position anchoring the gully became untenable. Four more days of fighting followed.

The Royal Canadian Regiment pushing through on the 18th of December to seize the Cider Crossroads north of the Gully. The operations supported by a massed artillery barrage from 13 Allied regiments that the planners called morning glory. By the evening of the 18th of December, the Germans had withdrawn from the gully entirely, falling back into Autotona to prepare the defense they had been building all week.

Ortona itself took eight more days. The loyal Edmonton Regiment and the Seforth Highlanders of Canada went into the town on the 20th of December and did not come out until the 28th of December, fighting through rubble block streets against the first German parachute division in what war correspondents were already calling Little Stalingrad.

The Canadians developed mouse hauling, blasting through interior walls from house to house because moving in the open was fatal. On Christmas Day, companies rotated out of the line in shifts to a church on the town’s outskirts, ate a hot meal, and went back. By the night of the 27th of December, the German paratroopers had slipped out of Otona quietly, and the Canadians walked into silence the following morning.

Tri was not part of that battle. He was in England. On the 27th of March 1944, King George V 6th presented him with the Victoria Cross at Buckingham Palace. The citation described his conduct as reflecting determined leadership and example. 4 days later, Tri was back in Canada, flown to Montreal to begin a victory loan tour, the Army’s practice of sending decorated veterans across the country to support war bond fundraising.

On April 22nd, 1944, he spoke at the opening of the sixth victory loan campaign in Ottawa with Prime Minister McKenzie King seated behind him on the stage. In Montreal in April, the ambassador of the Free French to the United States presided over a separate ceremony awarding Tri the Shiovalier of the Legion of Honor, the first Canadian to receive the decoration in the Second World War.

The public appearances did not last. Triay returned to the regiment and served out the remainder of the war. In 1947, after 20 years in the permanent force, he retired from active service and took a position as a district sales manager for a forest products company in Quebec. He rejoined the reserves in the early 1950s, eventually becoming commanding officer of the regime de Levy.

In 1954, he was appointed colonel commanding the eighth militia group. He retired from the reserves as a brigadier in 1960. He rarely spoke about Kasa Barardi in public. Regimental events brought him back to the Vandeus and he attended them, but the battle itself was not something he elaborated on. When pressed, he deflected.

The Victoria Cross he had won was held not by him, but by the Royal 22nd Regimental Museum at the Citadel in Quebec City where it remains. Paul Tri died on August 8th, 1980 in Quebec City at the age of 70. He was cremated at Mount Royal Crematorium in Montreal. His ashes were interred in the regimental memorial chapel at the Citadel, the home of the regiment he had tried to join when he was 15 years old.

The Italian campaign produced more Canadian casualties than D-Day and the subsequent campaign in Northwest Europe on a perday basis, and it is the least remembered of Canada’s major commitments in the Second World War. Between July 1943 and February 1945, more than 5,000 Canadians were killed in Italy, the first Canadian division and later the first Canadian core fought from Sicily to the Gothic line, through the Liry Valley, through the Hitler line, through the Winter Line and the Gustaf line in terrain that neutralized Allied advantages in armor and air power and reduced the fighting to the same close quarters attrition that had defined 1916 and 1917 when the Italian theater was shut down for Canadian forces in early 1945 and the core transferred to northwest Europe. Even that final move received little public attention. The Italian veterans arrived

in Holland to find that the war they had been fighting for nearly 2 years had been effectively invisible at home. They called themselves the D-Day Dodgers, a phrase borrowed from a dismissive comment attributed to a British politician and wore the name without warmth. Kasa Baratti sits inside that larger forgetting.

The battle unlocked Ortona. Ortona became Little Stalingrad and Little Stalingrad received the press coverage. Matthew Holton broadcasting for CBC photographs of mouse hauling and Christmas dinner in the ruined church circulating widely. The fight that made possible 12 days earlier on a road outside a farmhouse most people outside the regiment have never heard of was compressed into a footnote within the Royal 22nd regiment.

It was not a footnote. Tri’s two phrases, never mind them, they can’t shoot, and there is only one safe place that is on the objective, entered the regimental vocabulary and remain there. The Van Deuce carry both as part of their institutional memory taught during regimenal indoctrination courses by the regiment’s official historian.

The VC citation, the photographs from January 1944 at San Leonardo, the library and archives Canada images of Tri at the Victory Loan campaign with McKenzie King. These are accessible, documented, specific. The record exists. It is the audience that has been missing. The memorials are scattered and unconnected.

A bust in the Valiance Memorial in Ottawa’s Confederation Square. A plaque at the citadel in Quebec City. Another plaque at Casta Baratti itself in the Italian countryside outside Ortona where local memory of December 1943 has not faded the way Canadian memory has. Tri Island off the coast of British Columbia.

Mont Tr in the training area of CFB Valkcatier. The Victoria Cross in the regimental museum. None of these places are in conversation with each other and most Canadians have never encountered any of them. Tra was the only Quebecer to receive the Victoria Cross in the Second World War. The Royal 22nd Regiment was the only French Canadian regiment in the Canadian permanent force.

What happened at Kasa Baratti on the 14th of December 1943 was carried by 17 men and four tanks against a position that eight full battalion attacks had failed to break. And it worked. And 4 days later, the road to Atona was open. And 8 days after that, the battle that would define Canada’s Italian campaign was over.

The question the record leaves open is not whether it mattered. It is why a country that fought this hard at this cost in this specific place decided so thoroughly not to remember