Summary In mid-September 1944, the remnants of the battered 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion returned to England from Normandy. After their success on the continent, experiences detailed in Out of the Clouds: Paras in Normandy, the Canadian veterans felt they deserved a chance to rest and reorganize. However, their new commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Jeff Nicklin, a former star with the Western Canada Rugby Football Union's Winnipeg Blue Bombers, was a hard-driving disciplinarian. Worn down by a training regimen they regarded as punishing and unfair, the exhausted soldiers demonstrated their collective unhappiness with a three-day hunger strike. Their well-respected British Brigadier, James Hill, promptly straightened out the situation. Following an eventful interlude in Belgium and The Netherlands from 2 January to 23 February 1945 - making the battalion the only Canadian unit to fight in the Battle of the Bulge - the paras prepared for the final push into Germany itself. By March of 1945, the Nazis were reeling from combined Soviet and Western Allied offensives, but on the western front the Rhine River loomed as a daunting natural obstacle. On the morning of 24 March, the Allies launched the largest airborne operation in history, Varsity, with the Canadians dropping in the vicinity of Hamminkeln, Germany. The paras welcomed a daylight attack, even though this made them easy targets for Germans on the ground. Indeed, although they quickly met their objectives and took hundreds of German prisoners, Lieutenant-Colonel Nicklin was killed in action. The Canadians were then handpicked for an extraordinary operation - in the final days of the war, the Soviet Red Army's advance threatened to push all the way to Denmark, in spite of a prior agreement to the contrary. The paras raced to the Baltic Sea atop British tanks to stop their ostensible ally from seizing the port of Wismar. On the way, their route was clogged with small cells of Nazi fanatics who resisted to the end, armed German soldiers eager to surrender en masse, civilians desperate to escape the vengeful Soviets, and the emaciated survivors of Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp. On 2 May 1945, the Canadians reached Wismar, only two hours ahead of the Soviets, and promptly set up defensive positions. The initial contact proved extremely tense; any hot-headed move by either side could have started the Third World War. Thanks to a surfeit of resolve, careful diplomacy, Russian-speaking Canadian soldiers - and drinking - the paras settled things down. V-E Day, 8 May, brought celebratory swimming in the Baltic. On 21 June, the battalion returned to Canada, the first formed unit back from the fighting. Preparations soon began for the paras to take part in the war against Japan, but when that conflict ended in August, the men truly returned home, although they never forgot the pivotal role they played in Allied victory.

• War
• Documentary
• History