Speaking Notes for The Honourable Albina Guarnieri Minister of Veterans Affairs Cassino, Italy October 27, 2004 Please check against delivery Your Excellencies, Mayor Scitarellia, Ambassador Fowler, Veterans, Major General Arp, Senators, my colleagues, honoured guests, ladies and gentlemen: It might be said that after a war, monetary debts are rapidly repaid but the human cost lasts forever. Here at the largest Second World War cemetery in all of Italy, headstones mark the human cost to 4200 Commonwealth families. This is a silent and lonely place for the 855 Canadians buried so far from home. Many never visited by their families. Too rarely visited by their friends. And too soon visited only by a generation that never knew them in life. It was a decision made nearly a century ago that Canadians and other Commonwealth soldiers would be buried where they fell. At the time it was a practical necessity. Now, it attaches far greater significance to every village and town we visit. The poet TS Elliot wrote of men who fought, died, and were buried in foreign lands. He wrote that when a man dies bravely, at one with his destiny, that soil is his. The presence of these men in this soil remind us that the monuments to the glories of victory must always be quietly accompanied by a tribute to the great losses and suffering that always accompany war. Throughout Italy and Europe, these cemeteries mark the buried hopes and dreams of thousands who made our history. Many of you learned the history of this place up close and personal. You were here when the Gustav Line and the Adolf Hitler Line stood between the Allied armies and Rome. When Monte Cassino blocked the Liri corridor. You will always carry the history of those days sixty years gone. We share your memory through the accounts that you have shared with all Canadians. One of your fellow officers once wrote: "a thousand guns suddenly let go as one, and then they kept on firing... You could see the flashes of nearby guns and you could hear the thunder of dozens and hundreds more on every side and you could only imagine what sort of hell was falling on the German lines." Even back then, the good old CBC was our connection to our forces overseas. A young CBC reporter, Peter Stursberg, was also witness to a spectacle that still marks its image on the retina of our imagination: The night is lit by the flashes of the guns. It's just as though hundreds of arc lights were flickering and sputtering in the valley and behind the mountains too. The white flames bring the hills out black relief" The chaos of the Italian campaign was its own melting pot of forces from all over the world. It was the Polish troops who took the Cassino position and the battered monastery at the summit at a horrendous cost in lives and untold suffering. I feel privileged to have in our company a fellow Canadian, Zbigniew Gondex. But sixty years ago, he was a Sergeant with the Second Polish Corps here where one of the greatest battles of the war was fought and won by these Polish forces. Zbigniew Gondek represents the many Polish veterans who fought alongside the same Canadians as equal citizens in building the great nation we call home. The legendary Polish contribution in this region was paralleled by great individual sacrifices by Canadians. With Monte Cassino won, the tanks of the 5th Canadian Armoured Division poured through toward the next obstacle ¿ the Melfa River. Heroism was always a minimum standard in the Italian campaign. Major John Mahoney of the motorized Westminster Regiment aimed much higher. Though wounded in the head and twice in the leg, Mahoney led his dwindling troops to knock out a Panther tank and three self-propelled guns. For his actions, John Mahoney was one of an elite group of Canadians to be awarded the Victoria Cross. Individual Canadians, all of you veterans here today and like Mahoney, were the reason Canadians were able to breach the Hitler Line, and open the gateway for the allies to take Rome just two days before D-Day. Every grave in this cemetery communicates in the fewest of words the human cost of victory. The personal price paid for peace and the futures lost in war so that we could all live in peace. - 30 -
