Introduction

The word arrived just after midnight on August 26, 1939. It reached Lieutenant-Colonel Keltie Kennedy in a Saint John, New Brunswick, hospital room, where he was recovering from surgery for the lingering effects of wounds received fighting the Germans in the Great War. In the twenty years since coming home to Hampton, NB, he had served in the Canadian Active Militia, the last five as commanding officer of the 8th Princess Louise’s (New Brunswick) Hussars. For more than a century, Kennedy’s regiment had built the spirit and substance of a mobile force of cavalry whose purpose was to serve Canada in time of crisis. Now, dark war clouds were gathering over Europe for the second time in a generation.

The message was a historic summons: the Hussars from southern New Brunswick were to muster immediately for emergency guard duty. Kennedy commandeered a hospital telephone and turned the place into a command post to assemble the regiment. Days later, Germany invaded Poland with masses of tanks, the new metal machines of war. Ten days after that, Canada declared war. If Canada and the world were to stop German aggression, they too needed a force of modern tanks and the skill to employ them. In the coming years, as factories in the Western democracies turned out these new machines of modern war, the New Brunswick Hussars’ tradition of a horsed cavalry mobile force would turn to steel.

The introduction of the tank changed the face of war. Improvements to internal combustion engines, radios, and weapons made the tank the centrepiece of a technologically advanced mode of waging war. Germany prepared for that new age of mechanized warfare for years as Hitler’s regime planned an aggressive war of conquest. In Canada, as in the other democracies, the Great Depression and searing memories of the losses in the Great War had dampened any appetite for building armies and machines of war. Now, with the outbreak of hostilities, there was a rush to create armed forces to match Germany’s military power. The 8th Hussars were part of Canada’s contribution to the international call to arms to stop Nazi Germany, but forming modern armies would take time.

Five years and five days after Keltie Kennedy called out the regiment, its squadrons marshalled behind the Foglia River in northern Italy. The sabres and spurs worn a short decade before had become ornamental: now, the Hussars checked radio frequencies and engine oil temperature, and removed muzzle covers from their 75-mm main guns. Before them lay a great belt of German defences collectively known as the Gothic Line. The regiment’s steel cavalry squadrons were not assembled alone for a massed tank charge — years of Allied experimentation and the Hussars’ own six months of combat experience near Monte Cassino had taught them otherwise. Instead, each of three fighting or “sabre” squadrons formed a critical part of three combat teams consisting of infantry, field engineers, and artillerymen from across Canada. They had all learned to harmonize their respective abilities and actions as part of the 5th Canadian Armoured Division team and, though no one yet realized it, they had become one of the best armoured divisions in the world. Their reputation was about to be forged in the fiercest and bloodiest two weeks in the regiment’s history. From August 30 to September 14, 1944, the 8th Hussars and the rest of their division attacked deep into the Gothic Line defences and defeated two of the best divisions in the German Army. The Hussars wrecked enemy forces in Italy so badly that they could not escape to interfere with the great Allied drive from the Normandy bridgehead to the German border.

The Hussars’ epic two-week struggle ended at the town of Coriano, atop a ridge of the same name that forms the eastern extension of the mighty Northern Apennines range and that marks the ancient boundary between central Italy and the plains of the Emilia-Romagna region of the Po River valley. The Hussars were thus just a few miles short of Caesar’s Rubicon. At the tip of Coriano Ridge lies a large Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery with the graves of 1,939 men. Close by are three more Commonwealth cemeteries, with 578 graves at Montecchio, 1,191 at Gradara, and 618 below San Marino. Combined, they hold more than the massive Commonwealth cemetery at the foot of the infamous Monte Cassino. The numbers indicate the savage intensity of the unknown battles for the Gothic Line and Coriano. Among the dead are twenty-nine New Brunswick Hussars. The regiment suffered more casualties in those two weeks than in all its other battles of the war combined. It was at Coriano that the mechanics who kept the Hussars’ steel horses running rescued a young, injured foal whose mother had been killed in the battle. The foal grew, like the reputation of the regiment, into a grand horse named Princess Louise. The Hussars who survived Coriano took Princess Louise with them through the last hard winter of war in northern Italy and the spring of liberation in the Netherlands in 1945. Their deeds and honours won were many, but most would tell you that the 8th (New Brunswick) Hussars earned their spurs on the ridge at Coriano.

The myriad books on the rise of armoured forces in the Second World War paint a picture of tank mastery by the Germans. The broad brush of history records that German tanks and the panzer (armoured) divisions they formed were the best of the best. In this view, the Allied armoured forces — including those of the Canadians — pale in comparison: inferior tanks supposedly crewed by insufficiently trained officers and men lacking the motivation, skill, daring, or imagination of their German counterparts. Kenneth Macksey, for example, writes that the panzer divisions stood “apart from the rest of the German Armed Forces and superior to most opponents,” and that they created “a unique brand of armoured warfare that remains, to this day, almost irresistible.”

Such sweeping generalizations, however, are based largely on German perspectives and on the most superficial investigation of how Allied tank units formed and then fought the war. Indeed, the story of the 8th (New Brunswick) Hussars does not fit the stereotype of Allied armoured forces. Their training, equipment, and operating procedures differed from those of the Germans, certainly, but their opponents, after all, lost the war. Following the path the Hussars took to Coriano, then, will add much to our knowledge of the men New Brunswick, and Canada, sent off to win the Second World War.