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A forty-five-ton Panther tank rolls down a village street at midnight. Fifteen metres away, a Canadian rifleman with a spring-loaded tube waits for it to get closer.
June 1944. Bretteville-l'Orgueilleuse, Normandy. Twenty-two Panthers of the 12th SS Panzer Division funnel into a village held by the Regina Rifles — men who had been on French soil for exactly two days. The tank crews expected infantry to scatter. The infantry had other plans.
By autumn 1944, a phrase kept appearing in German after-action reports and prisoner interrogations. Tank crews — veterans of Kursk and Kharkov — were saying that Canadian infantry was harder to deal with than enemy armour. Armour had weak spots you could study. These men in the hedgerows were invisible, unpredictable, and carried a weapon that gave no flash, no smoke, no sound.
What made Canadian infantry different from every other Allied force the Germans had faced — and why did it break the one advantage tanks had held on every front since Poland?
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