A Perfect Hell: The Forgotten Story of the Canadian Commandos of the Second World War

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

This engrossing popular history is a fine addition to the record for the
very reason it can at times be problematical: its extensive use of the
memories of veterans of events that took place decades ago. Hitler’s
war generated millions of individual stories, most lost forever, and
although every effort must be made to preserve survivors’ accounts,
recollections must be melded carefully with what can be known with
certainty. No soldier saw Humphrey Bogart in newly liberated Rome in
1945, because he was not there. It is ludicrous to write about officers
in Italy talking on June 4, 1944, about the invasion of France on June
6; even Eisenhower did not then know that that top-secret attack would
be postponed from June 5.

That said, the recollections of veterans enrich this story of the only
time when Americans and Canadians served in a distinct unit, wearing the
same specially designed uniforms and under the same command. That was
the First Special Service Force, born of a plan by Lord Mountbatten and
George Marshall, encouraged by Mackenzie King, to form a commando unit
to be parachuted into Norway. The merging of specially picked men from
the two countries was not always easy, but when the Norwegian campaign
was scrapped they stayed together to fight in Italy and southern France.


Journalist John Nadler tells the stories of these misfits and mavericks
who became a close fraternity of deadly fighters, from their months of
training in Montana (where many of them met women they would marry) to
their brutal baptism of fire in the Italian mountains (where they earned
fame immediately by scaling cliffs and taking a German defensive
position that the Allies had been trying for weeks to capture). These
men, who became known to the Germans and in a subsequent Hollywood movie
as “The Devil’s Brigade,” never lost a fight or gave an inch, but
they suffered many losses. They were disbanded in an emotional ceremony
in December 1944, when the Canadians were sent to join regular Canadian
units. A lengthy epilogue about the postwar lives and fates of the
survivors makes poignant reading.