Robert Engen

English

Scholars Commons

Canadian Military History
Volume 22 | Issue 3 Article 5
4-17-2015
A Retrospective from Sicily’s Battlefields The 2012
Canadian-American Battlefield Study Tour
Robert Engen
This Feature is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in Canadian Military
History by an authorized administrator of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.
Recommended Citation
Robert Engen (2015) "A Retrospective from Sicily’s Battlefields The 2012 Canadian-American Battlefield Study Tour," Canadian
Military History: Vol. 22: Iss. 3, Article 5.
Available at: http://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol22/iss3/5
65
Abstract: Every year since 2006, the 
Gregg Centre and its partners have 
offered a unique study tour option for 
civilian graduate students, teachers, 
and Canadian and American army 
officers. The tour focuses on the sea, 
air, and ground campaign waged on 
the island of Sicily in July and August 
1943 to force Italy’s surrender and 
defection from the Axis. Robert Engen 
was a participant on the 2012 tour 
and describes his impressions of the 
experience.
On 9 June 2012, 69 years less a month since the beginning 
of Operation Husky in July 1943, 
another invasion of the island of 
Sicily commenced. This time it was 
a vanguard of academics, teachers, 
Canadian and American army 
officers, and museum researchers 
who touched down in Catania, 
intent on following in the footsteps 
of the Allied armies that liberated 
the island. This annual Canadian-
American Battlefield Study Tour to 
Sicily was spearheaded by academics 
at the University of New Brunswick’s 
Gregg Centre and supported by 
the Canadian Forces, the US Army 
Command and Staff  College’s 
Department of Military History, 
the US First Division Museum at 
Cantigny, and numerous university 
centres for the study of war. I had the 
privilege of being supported by the 
Laurier Centre for Military Strategic 
and Disarmament Studies to join this 
tour on its exploration of the island, 
and returned home a week later with 
the impression that this is powerful, 
important tour.
The seven days of active touring 
and lectures followed the Allied 
Husky landings and subsequent 
campaign geographically in order 
to mirror the narrative of the war in 
Sicily. Emphasis was placed upon the 
paths of the 1st Canadian Infantry 
Division and the US 1st Division, but 
due to the nature of the country and 
the spectacular vistas afforded us 
it was possible to conceptualize the 
operations of the entire 15th Army 
Group in Sicily. The tour went from 
the Canadian landings at Pachino 
beach up through Syracusa to the 
edge of the Catania Plain, where we 
discussed 13 Corps’ fierce battles. 
From there, the four-vehicle tour 
convoy traced the inland route of 
the Canadians, made stops at the 
American landing zone at Gela and 
battlefield of Barrafranca, walked 
the ground at Piazza Armerina, 
Valguarnera, Assoro, Leonforte and 
Agira, and spent a day examining the 
American fight at Troina. Side-trips 
were also made to Catenanuova, 
the Museo Storico Sbarco in Sicilia in 
Catania, and the Straits of Messina.
The roadside and hilltop lectures 
alone made the trip worthwhile. 
These were delivered with energy by 
the tour historians, Lee Windsor, Greg 
Hospodor, John Curatola, and Cindy 
Brown, and reflected their emerging 
research on the Sicilian and Italian 
campaigns. This new interpretation 
challenges the established narratives 
of historians like Bill McAndrew, 
Douglas Porch, and Carlo D’Este, 
who have seen the Sicilian campaign 
as a bitter victory, noteworthy more 
for its lost opportunities and the 
graceful German withdrawal than for 
any real competence or flair on the 
Allied side. Study tour participants 
tested those assertions on the ground. 
For seven days the group explored 
the tactical, operational and strategic 
dimensions and objectives of the 
campaign in direct relation to the 
physical and human spaces of the 
island of Sicily. Based on their own 
research, the tour historians argued 
that the campaign’s detractors were 
stuck in a 1980s manoeuvre warfare 
mindset; in 1943 the battle for Sicily 
was not about racing to Messina, 
but was instead about getting 
ashore, defeating the inevitable 
counterattacks, and coming to grips 
with the Germans and Italians in 
order to win the force-on-force battle. 
The battles were more attritional and 
based on maximizing enemy losses, 
and this, the instructors argue, was 
accomplished successfully even 
though Allied commanders initially 
hoped for a quick mobile victory. 
A Retrospective from 
Sicily’s Battlefields
The 2012 Canadian-American Battlefield Study Tour
Robert Engen
© Canadian Military History, Volume 22, Number 3, Summer 2013, pp.65-69. 1
: A Retrospective from Sicily’s Battlefields The 2012 Canadian-American Battlefield Study Tour
Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2015
66
Instead the Allies – and especially 
the Canadians – devastated the Axis 
forces arrayed against them, and 
utterly bankrupted German plans to 
establish their 1943 “winter line” in 
the rugged hills surrounding Mount 
Etna and hold the Allied 15th Army 
Group in Sicily indefinitely. Those 
German and Italian units that escaped 
the island in August 1943 were 
broken, and consisted of shattered 
divisions of walking wounded that 
needed to be completely rebuilt 
before returning to battle.
This nascent interpretation of the 
Sicilian campaign was punctuated 
by seeing the physical environment 
in which the battles unfolded, a 
breathtaking experience for any 
historian of Operation Husky. It 
is one thing to condemn the slow 
progress of the British Eighth Army 
on maps; but quite another to stare 
out across the flat, river-run Catania 
Plain (bristling with anti-tank guns 
and most of five Axis divisions in 
mid-July 1943) as General Bernard 
Montgomery did and to see, just as he 
did, echoes of the Somme battlefields 
of the First World War and the 
perils surrounding a frontal assault 
over such terrain. While the tour 
did not allow free-form exploration 
of the battlefields (nor would such 
be available on private property) a 
remarkable job was done of setting 
up “stands” for the lectures from 
which participants could oversee and 
judge the terrain. 
T h e  h i s t o r i a n  i n s t r u c t o r s 
are presently working on a new 
transnational history of the battle for 
Sicily, and I have no doubt that their 
findings will completely change how 
the Allied and Canadian performance 
in Sicily is assessed. Presently the 
best studies of the campaign, such 
as D’Este’s Bitter Victory, are the 
ones that stand most at odds with the 
new interpretations, giving the tour 
a two-fisted, combative approach to 
the extant scholarship. Criticisms of 
Allied decision-making and combat 
effectiveness were largely absent, but 
most prior historical judgments of the 
Allies and Canadians in Sicily have 
been extremely dour, so the tour’s 
interpretation was clearly aimed 
at redress. Particularly important 
was the revelation that most of the 
postwar historical assessment of 
Sicilian operations was based upon 
the German propaganda machine’s 
own attempts to put a positive 
spin on what, for them, was quite 
simply a disastrous campaign. The 
tour’s main argument therefore 
Top: Cindy Brown introduces the group 
to the extensive planning put into Allied 
civil affairs on Sicily.
Middle: The Canadian landing beaches 
at Pachino.
Bottom: Greg Hospodor, associate 
Professor at Fort Leavenworth, lectures 
next to a German pillbox near Gela.
Ph
ot
os
 b
y 
N
or
m
 B
et
ts
2
Canadian Military History, Vol. 22 [2015], Iss. 3, Art. 5
http://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol22/iss3/5
67
fits well with the work of other 
scholars such as Ronald Smelser 
and Edward Davies, whose book 
The Myth of the Eastern Front points 
out just how much of our historical 
understanding of the Second World 
War is based upon the German 
reckoning of how the war unfolded. 
Such views are controversial and 
will find detractors, but in coming 
years will also breathe new life into 
the study of the Mediterranean front 
during the war.
The tour was also comfortably 
and consciously situated within the 
adage that all history is contemporary 
history. Coalition warfare in the 
1943 campaign was the most 
prominent theme, and during the 
daily stands and lectures the contours 
of Kandahar began to emerge in the 
rolling Sicilian landscape. German 
“booby-traps” and “demolitions” 
became “roadside IEDs.” The assault 
on Assoro and the bloody Canadian 
battles between Nissoria and Agira 
were cast as reminiscent of mountain 
operations in northern Kandahar 
province. The tasks faced by the 
Allied Military Government set up 
in the wake of the Husky landings 
were the same challenges now faced 
by ISAF, the International Security 
Assistance Force in Afghanistan. 
The message was that what we are 
doing now on overseas battlefields 
has been done before, on this 
Mediterranean island 70 years earlier. 
But given that the study tour was 
partly a professional development 
exercise for serving Canadian Army 
personnel, it is understandable that 
the shadow of Afghanistan would 
hang overhead. The mileage of these 
parallels may vary for historians, but 
they still provide a rich, thought-
provoking context for the writing 
of the campaign’s new history. The 
frankness of the tour instructors in 
laying out the influence of modern 
Ph
ot
os
 b
y 
N
or
m
 B
et
ts
Top: Looking from the German point 
of view.
Middle: A group picture with a friend 
of the Can-Am tour, Cristoforo Venturi. 
Venturi was a young boy during the 
invasion.
Bottom: The kindness of Sicilians. Can-
Am tours are often invited to enjoy the 
hospitality of Sicilian civilians during 
the course of the tour. Here the group is 
sitting at the table of friend, Cristoforo 
Venturi. 
3
: A Retrospective from Sicily’s Battlefields The 2012 Canadian-American Battlefield Study Tour
Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2015
68
ops on the study of history was 
appreciated.
Beyond the academic experience, 
the best elements of the tour were 
the interactions with the land and 
with the memories of the campaign. 
Lunch at the house of a local farmer 
between Vittoria and Gela, around 
which bloody fighting took place 
between American paratroopers 
and Axis defenders, where we had a 
chance to crawl through some of the 
well-preserved concrete bunkers. A 
tour of the Masseria Mandrascate 
villa outside Valguarnera; soldiers 
of the Princess Patricias had fought 
their way through the villa’s fields 
on their way to the assault on 
Leonforte. Telling stories about the 
fallen soldiers by their gravesites in 
the Agira Canadian War Cemetery; 
each tour participant researched 
and shared what they knew about 
the life of an Allied soldier who died 
in Sicily. Personal moments such as 
these connected the war to the land, 
to its people, and to those left behind 
at the end of the war.
Just as advertised, the 
tour sticks closely to the 
1943 Sicilian campaign and 
makes few digressions into 
pre-Second World War 
history, a focus which is 
all the more noteworthy given just 
how much history Sicily wears on its 
sleeve, seeing as the island has been 
the crossroads of the Mediterranean 
for 2,500 years. It would have been 
easy to get caught up in tangents 
about the island’s Greek, Roman, 
Arab, or Norman conquerors or 
its role in the Risorgimento (Italian 
unification) but this tour was 
professionally run and maintained 
its stated objective throughout with 
a practised determination. That 
said, tour leaders acknowledge that 
centuries and deep layers of Sicilian 
history cannot help but shape the 1943 
campaign from the location of major 
cities and towns, to the pattern of 
roads and agricultural practice.  The 
connection between historical epochs 
was made especially apparent during 
a point-of-interest lecture given at 
Syracusa on the Peloponnesian Wars. 
The tour generated surprising 
amounts of debate and discussion 
even “off the clock”: in constant 
chatter on the road in the tour vans, 
while wandering the streets and back 
alleys of Sicilian towns, and over 
pitchers of the casa vino at the nightly 
meals in Syracusa and Enna. A 
challenging and energetic academic 
environment was swiftly created, 
harmonizing with the breathtaking 
Sicilian vistas that we explored.  It 
was a delight to get to know the array 
of teachers, students, researchers, 
and soldiers who were on the trip, 
an intersection of knowledge and 
expertise that complemented the 
formal content beautifully.
The  S i c i ly  S tud y  Tour  i s 
important. The content is intellectually 
challenging and the experience of 
Sicilian culture and society is eye-
opening, as the tour takes one far 
from the island’s normal tourist-
worn paths. Academically there 
are still rough edges and points of 
contention, but these are small issues 
against the backdrop of a remarkable 
and unique experience, invaluable 
for any military historian and vital 
for scholars of the Second World 
War and the war in Italy. Currently 
the tour is primarily a professional 
development exercise for serving 
officers, but further support and 
contributions from private and 
scholarly institutions can help to 
expand the academic dimensions 
and participation in what is already a 
Left: The Can-Am tour gets around in nine passenger vans to enable the group 
to get to the out of the way points that offer the best view of the battlefield.
Above: Lee Windsor lectures about the end of the campaign while crossing 
the Messina Straits. 
Ph
ot
os
 b
y 
N
or
m
 B
et
ts
4
Canadian Military History, Vol. 22 [2015], Iss. 3, Art. 5
http://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol22/iss3/5
69
top-notch field seminar. It is my sincere hope that, with 
the 70th anniversary of the Husky landings occurring 
this year, that more students, academics, and historians 
will have the opportunity to experience this unique and 
eminently worthwhile tour.
Above: Assoro dominates the background as the tour wraps 
up for the day. 
Right: The author, Robert Engen, on the battlefield. The home 
base for the Can-Am tour, is Enna, in the background.
Robert Engen teaches history at Queen’s University, and is the 
author of Canadians Under Fire: Infantry Effectiveness in the 
Second World War.
Ph
ot
o 
by
 N
or
m
 B
et
ts
Ph
ot
o 
su
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lie
d 
by
 a
ut
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r
5
: A Retrospective from Sicily’s Battlefields The 2012 Canadian-American Battlefield Study Tour
Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2015


A Retrospective from Sicily’s Battlefields The 2012 Canadian-American Battlefield Study Tour

Wilfrid Laurier University

Canadian Military HistoryVolume 22 | Issue 3 Article 54-17-2015A Retrospective from Sicily’s Battlefields The 2012Canadian-American Battlefield Study TourRobert EngenThis Feature is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in Canadian MilitaryHistory by an authorized administrator of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.Recommended CitationRobert Engen (2015) "A Retrospective from Sicily’s Battlefields The 2012 Canadian-American Battlefield Study Tour," CanadianMilitary History: Vol. 22: Iss. 3, Article 5.Available at: http://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol22/iss3/565Abstract: Every year since 2006, the Gregg Centre and its partners have offered a unique study tour option for civilian graduate students, teachers, and Canadian and American army officers. The tour focuses on the sea, air, and ground campaign waged on the island of Sicily in July and August 1943 to force Italy’s surrender and defection from the Axis. Robert Engen was a participant on the 2012 tour and describes his impressions of the experience.On 9 June 2012, 69 years less a month since the beginning of Operation Husky in July 1943, another invasion of the island of Sicily commenced. This time it was a vanguard of academics, teachers, Canadian and American army officers, and museum researchers who touched down in Catania, intent on following in the footsteps of the Allied armies that liberated the island. This annual Canadian-American Battlefield Study Tour to Sicily was spearheaded by academics at the University of New Brunswick’s Gregg Centre and supported by the Canadian Forces, the US Army Command and Staff  College’s Department of Military History, the US First Division Museum at Cantigny, and numerous university centres for the study of war. I had the privilege of being supported by the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies to join this tour on its exploration of the island, and returned home a week later with the impression that this is powerful, important tour.The seven days of active touring and lectures followed the Allied Husky landings and subsequent campaign geographically in order to mirror the narrative of the war in Sicily. Emphasis was placed upon the paths of the 1st Canadian Infantry Division and the US 1st Division, but due to the nature of the country and the spectacular vistas afforded us it was possible to conceptualize the operations of the entire 15th Army Group in Sicily. The tour went from the Canadian landings at Pachino beach up through Syracusa to the edge of the Catania Plain, where we discussed 13 Corps’ fierce battles. From there, the four-vehicle tour convoy traced the inland route of the Canadians, made stops at the American landing zone at Gela and battlefield of Barrafranca, walked the ground at Piazza Armerina, Valguarnera, Assoro, Leonforte and Agira, and spent a day examining the American fight at Troina. Side-trips were also made to Catenanuova, the Museo Storico Sbarco in Sicilia in Catania, and the Straits of Messina.The roadside and hilltop lectures alone made the trip worthwhile. These were delivered with energy by the tour historians, Lee Windsor, Greg Hospodor, John Curatola, and Cindy Brown, and reflected their emerging research on the Sicilian and Italian campaigns. This new interpretation challenges the established narratives of historians like Bill McAndrew, Douglas Porch, and Carlo D’Este, who have seen the Sicilian campaign as a bitter victory, noteworthy more for its lost opportunities and the graceful German withdrawal than for any real competence or flair on the Allied side. Study tour participants tested those assertions on the ground. For seven days the group explored the tactical, operational and strategic dimensions and objectives of the campaign in direct relation to the physical and human spaces of the island of Sicily. Based on their own research, the tour historians argued that the campaign’s detractors were stuck in a 1980s manoeuvre warfare mindset; in 1943 the battle for Sicily was not about racing to Messina, but was instead about getting ashore, defeating the inevitable counterattacks, and coming to grips with the Germans and Italians in order to win the force-on-force battle. The battles were more attritional and based on maximizing enemy losses, and this, the instructors argue, was accomplished successfully even though Allied commanders initially hoped for a quick mobile victory. A Retrospective from Sicily’s BattlefieldsThe 2012 Canadian-American Battlefield Study TourRobert Engen© Canadian Military History, Volume 22, Number 3, Summer 2013, pp.65-69. 1: A Retrospective from Sicily’s Battlefields The 2012 Canadian-American Battlefield Study TourPublished by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 201566Instead the Allies – and especially the Canadians – devastated the Axis forces arrayed against them, and utterly bankrupted German plans to establish their 1943 “winter line” in the rugged hills surrounding Mount Etna and hold the Allied 15th Army Group in Sicily indefinitely. Those German and Italian units that escaped the island in August 1943 were broken, and consisted of shattered divisions of walking wounded that needed to be completely rebuilt before returning to battle.This nascent interpretation of the Sicilian campaign was punctuated by seeing the physical environment in which the battles unfolded, a breathtaking experience for any historian of Operation Husky. It is one thing to condemn the slow progress of the British Eighth Army on maps; but quite another to stare out across the flat, river-run Catania Plain (bristling with anti-tank guns and most of five Axis divisions in mid-July 1943) as General Bernard Montgomery did and to see, just as he did, echoes of the Somme battlefields of the First World War and the perils surrounding a frontal assault over such terrain. While the tour did not allow free-form exploration of the battlefields (nor would such be available on private property) a remarkable job was done of setting up “stands” for the lectures from which participants could oversee and judge the terrain. T h e  h i s t o r i a n  i n s t r u c t o r s are presently working on a new transnational history of the battle for Sicily, and I have no doubt that their findings will completely change how the Allied and Canadian performance in Sicily is assessed. Presently the best studies of the campaign, such as D’Este’s Bitter Victory, are the ones that stand most at odds with the new interpretations, giving the tour a two-fisted, combative approach to the extant scholarship. Criticisms of Allied decision-making and combat effectiveness were largely absent, but most prior historical judgments of the Allies and Canadians in Sicily have been extremely dour, so the tour’s interpretation was clearly aimed at redress. Particularly important was the revelation that most of the postwar historical assessment of Sicilian operations was based upon the German propaganda machine’s own attempts to put a positive spin on what, for them, was quite simply a disastrous campaign. The tour’s main argument therefore Top: Cindy Brown introduces the group to the extensive planning put into Allied civil affairs on Sicily.Middle: The Canadian landing beaches at Pachino.Bottom: Greg Hospodor, associate Professor at Fort Leavenworth, lectures next to a German pillbox near Gela.Photos by Norm Betts2Canadian Military History, Vol. 22 [2015], Iss. 3, Art. 5http://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol22/iss3/567fits well with the work of other scholars such as Ronald Smelser and Edward Davies, whose book The Myth of the Eastern Front points out just how much of our historical understanding of the Second World War is based upon the German reckoning of how the war unfolded. Such views are controversial and will find detractors, but in coming years will also breathe new life into the study of the Mediterranean front during the war.The tour was also comfortably and consciously situated within the adage that all history is contemporary history. Coalition warfare in the 1943 campaign was the most prominent theme, and during the daily stands and lectures the contours of Kandahar began to emerge in the rolling Sicilian landscape. German “booby-traps” and “demolitions” became “roadside IEDs.” The assault on Assoro and the bloody Canadian battles between Nissoria and Agira were cast as reminiscent of mountain operations in northern Kandahar province. The tasks faced by the Allied Military Government set up in the wake of the Husky landings were the same challenges now faced by ISAF, the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. The message was that what we are doing now on overseas battlefields has been done before, on this Mediterranean island 70 years earlier. But given that the study tour was partly a professional development exercise for serving Canadian Army personnel, it is understandable that the shadow of Afghanistan would hang overhead. The mileage of these parallels may vary for historians, but they still provide a rich, thought-provoking context for the writing of the campaign’s new history. The frankness of the tour instructors in laying out the influence of modern Photos by Norm BettsTop: Looking from the German point of view.Middle: A group picture with a friend of the Can-Am tour, Cristoforo Venturi. Venturi was a young boy during the invasion.Bottom: The kindness of Sicilians. Can-Am tours are often invited to enjoy the hospitality of Sicilian civilians during the course of the tour. Here the group is sitting at the table of friend, Cristoforo Venturi. 3: A Retrospective from Sicily’s Battlefields The 2012 Canadian-American Battlefield Study TourPublished by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 201568ops on the study of history was appreciated.Beyond the academic experience, the best elements of the tour were the interactions with the land and with the memories of the campaign. Lunch at the house of a local farmer between Vittoria and Gela, around which bloody fighting took place between American paratroopers and Axis defenders, where we had a chance to crawl through some of the well-preserved concrete bunkers. A tour of the Masseria Mandrascate villa outside Valguarnera; soldiers of the Princess Patricias had fought their way through the villa’s fields on their way to the assault on Leonforte. Telling stories about the fallen soldiers by their gravesites in the Agira Canadian War Cemetery; each tour participant researched and shared what they knew about the life of an Allied soldier who died in Sicily. Personal moments such as these connected the war to the land, to its people, and to those left behind at the end of the war.Just as advertised, the tour sticks closely to the 1943 Sicilian campaign and makes few digressions into pre-Second World War history, a focus which is all the more noteworthy given just how much history Sicily wears on its sleeve, seeing as the island has been the crossroads of the Mediterranean for 2,500 years. It would have been easy to get caught up in tangents about the island’s Greek, Roman, Arab, or Norman conquerors or its role in the Risorgimento (Italian unification) but this tour was professionally run and maintained its stated objective throughout with a practised determination. That said, tour leaders acknowledge that centuries and deep layers of Sicilian history cannot help but shape the 1943 campaign from the location of major cities and towns, to the pattern of roads and agricultural practice.  The connection between historical epochs was made especially apparent during a point-of-interest lecture given at Syracusa on the Peloponnesian Wars. The tour generated surprising amounts of debate and discussion even “off the clock”: in constant chatter on the road in the tour vans, while wandering the streets and back alleys of Sicilian towns, and over pitchers of the casa vino at the nightly meals in Syracusa and Enna. A challenging and energetic academic environment was swiftly created, harmonizing with the breathtaking Sicilian vistas that we explored.  It was a delight to get to know the array of teachers, students, researchers, and soldiers who were on the trip, an intersection of knowledge and expertise that complemented the formal content beautifully.The  S i c i ly  S tud y  Tour  i s important. The content is intellectually challenging and the experience of Sicilian culture and society is eye-opening, as the tour takes one far from the island’s normal tourist-worn paths. Academically there are still rough edges and points of contention, but these are small issues against the backdrop of a remarkable and unique experience, invaluable for any military historian and vital for scholars of the Second World War and the war in Italy. Currently the tour is primarily a professional development exercise for serving officers, but further support and contributions from private and scholarly institutions can help to expand the academic dimensions and participation in what is already a Left: The Can-Am tour gets around in nine passenger vans to enable the group to get to the out of the way points that offer the best view of the battlefield.Above: Lee Windsor lectures about the end of the campaign while crossing the Messina Straits. Photos by Norm Betts4Canadian Military History, Vol. 22 [2015], Iss. 3, Art. 5http://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol22/iss3/569top-notch field seminar. It is my sincere hope that, with the 70th anniversary of the Husky landings occurring this year, that more students, academics, and historians will have the opportunity to experience this unique and eminently worthwhile tour.Above: Assoro dominates the background as the tour wraps up for the day. Right: The author, Robert Engen, on the battlefield. The home base for the Can-Am tour, is Enna, in the background.Robert Engen teaches history at Queen’s University, and is the author of Canadians Under Fire: Infantry Effectiveness in the Second World War.Photo by Norm BettsPhoto supplied by author5: A Retrospective from Sicily’s Battlefields The 2012 Canadian-American Battlefield Study TourPublished by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2015

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A Retrospective from Sicily’s Battlefields The 2012 Canadian-American Battlefield Study Tour

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