Valour Canada hosts trip to Italy looking at Canadian WWII participation

The Canadian Armed Forces had a large presence in Italy during the Second World War. Valour Canada will host an Italian Battlefield Remembrance Tour in November

Valour Canada is hosting an immersive battlefield remembrance tour of Italy.

So far, many of the participants who’ve signed up for the journey have family members who were part of the Canadian campaign in some way and spent much of the Second World War moving north through Italy after landing in Sicily.

“I think having people that are connected attend the tour and want to learn about where their family participated … Will be very powerful,” said John Adams, Valour Canada president.

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Adams says the Italian campaign is likely not as well known by Canadians as battles in Normandy or D-Day, but the fighting there took a toll with many lives lost, especially in Ortona.

“This tour starts in Sicily and moves its way up the boot,” Adams said. “Our guests will be experiencing where Canadians actually fought and where the battles took place. We’ll be visiting cemeteries, historical sites and museums along the way and learning more about Canada’s involvement.”

Vicki Sotvedt has always been interested in history, and her grandfather’s career as a Canadian soldier was the focus of her doctoral studies.

Now, for the Italian Campaign, she’s retracing the steps of her great uncle.

“Peter Morgan was with the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment, he was an infantryman and he was fighting through southern Italy,” Sotvedt said “He was hiding in a cabinet, and the Italian owner of the property went and got the German patrol. He was actually taken prisoner in Italy and marched back to Germany from there.”

Sotvedt says many of the sites the tour will be taking are not typical tourist destinations.

“We’re going to a whole bunch of different sites, including a lot that aren’t really accessible as a general tourist,” she said. “There’s a lot of places that are really inland in Sicily or very small.”

“I’ve spent several years of my life cataloging what happened in all these very small places. so I’m really excited to get to share that with people.”

Sotvedt says it’s important to remember these historic events as fewer of the people who lived through them are still alive.

“Landscapes are still physically changed from battle, the land in some places looks almost goofy because the amount of artillery that was fired there,” she said. “I think seeing that firsthand can really drive home what a war is in a way learning in a classroom or watching a Hollywood movie doesn’t, and it’s through knowing that that you can make informed decisions about our men and women in uniform now and where we should be deploying them.”

Mark Illing signed up to take the tour along with a few family members.

He says his family has been impacted by WWII in many ways.

“My father was a war refugee from Czechoslovakia,” he said. “When he was 13 years old, the Soviets came into his town, grabbed everybody who was of the wrong political [view] and evicted them and they – with nothing – had to walk 500 kilometres and steal vegetables at a farmer’s field at night to survive.”

Illing says his father then made his way to Canada, but his Italian mother’s relatives weren’t so lucky.

“A nephew of her great uncle joined the Partisans at 19,” he said. “One of his neighbors revealed him as a Partisans, he was arrested and ended up dying in a German concentration camp two weeks before the war ended, and I just found that out just by looking up my family history after I’d signed up for this trip.”

The trip takes place Nov. 1 to 14, and Valour Canada is hosting an information session about the historic trip at the Military Museums on June 25 at 6:30 p.m.