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German intelligence had a name for positions Canadians had just left. They called them gift packages. By late 1944, experienced German NCOs would rather dig new holes in frozen ground than sit in a warm trench that Canadian soldiers had walked away from minutes earlier.
At Woensdrecht in October 1944, elite German paratroopers overran a Canadian company in a textbook counterattack. They occupied the trenches. Five minutes later, 168 artillery pieces fired simultaneously on those exact positions. The counterattack force ceased to exist.
This wasn't luck. From Ortona to the Scheldt to the Rhineland, the same pattern repeated — and German intelligence could identify it but never solve it. The answer wasn't about explosives or engineering. It was about a system built on a single question that the Canadian army answered differently than every other army in the war.
A captured German officer from the 84th Infantry Division said he had never encountered an army more dangerous after it retreated than before. This is the story of how that became possible.
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