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http://www.canadaatwar.ca/page44.html

From the linked source:

...At dawn on Dec. 21, two understrength companies and a half-squadron of Three Rivers Regt. tanks moved cautiously up the main street towards the first of three large public squares. By mid-afternoon the advance had slowed to a halt, and Hoffmeister sent a company of Seaforths to help. The next morning it was apparent the German resistance had stiffened and Hoffmeister committed the balance of the Seaforths, assigning each battalion to half the town.

The Canadians now fought for Ortona house by house, often fighting from the top floor down. They used a “mouse-holing” technique–blasting through walls, lobbing grenades through the gaps and then using more grenades to move down the stairs. Here the Canadians wrote the book on street-fighting. After the war, former Seaforths commander Colonel S.W. Thomson recalled that the standard training film for British and Commonwealth forces, Fighting In Built-up Areas, was based on interviews with Seaforth and Edmonton veterans.

War correspondents anxious to cover the last phase of a month-long campaign arrived in Ortona and quickly revised their initial optimistic reports. Ortona became “little Stalingrad” as radio journalist Matthew Halton and reporter Ralph Allen wrote feature stories on the battle. Christopher Buckley, a British correspondent whose beautifully written 1945 book The Road To Rome should be reprinted, insisted “a painter of genius, Goya perhaps” was needed to record the poignant images of Ortona. In one “half-darkened room,” he wrote, “there were five or six Canadian soldiers, there were old women and there were innumerable children. The children clambered over the Canadian soldiers and clutched them convulsively every time one of our anti- tank guns fired down the street…. Soon each of us had a squirming, terrified child in our arms.”

Most of the vets I knew as a B.C. boy in the ‘40s and ‘50s were Seaforth Highlanders. In 1973 I worked in the bush with such a man who had five exit wounds the size of hen’s eggs from German machine-gun fire in that battle across his upper back. He was agile as a cat and strong as a bear...

Every day is Remembrance Day to me - God bless them all!