06/04/2026
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They were called the Cape Breton Highlanders.
A Canadian infantry regiment recruited almost entirely from the small mining towns and fishing villages of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia.
When they were called to active service in WWII, they were not the most prestigious unit in the Canadian Army. They were not flush with the newest equipment. They were not full of professional soldiers.
They were coal miners. Steelworkers. Fishermen. Farm boys from villages like Glace Bay, North Sydney, Inverness, Baddeck. Most of them had never been more than 50 kilometres from where they were born.
In November 1943, they shipped out to Italy.
What followed was one of the most brutal and least-remembered chapters of Canadian WWII history.
The Cape Breton Highlanders fought through the Italian campaign for 19 straight months. They were part of the 5th Canadian Armoured Division. They fought up the Adriatic coast, through the Liri Valley, into the Apennine Mountains in winter.
They were almost continuously in combat.
The Italian campaign is sometimes called Canada's forgotten war. The European theatre after D-Day eclipsed it. The Pacific belonged mostly to the Americans. The Italian campaign became the long, exhausting middle act that nobody back home wanted to read about.
92,000 Canadians served in Italy. Nearly 6,000 died there.
The Cape Breton Highlanders took some of the worst of it.
The Battle of the Hi**er Line in May 1944. The battles for the Liri Valley. The crossing of the Foglia and Marecchia rivers. The brutal mountain fighting in the Apennines in late 1944.
In one stretch, they suffered over 40% casualties — meaning that 4 out of every 10 men in the regiment were killed, wounded, or captured.
They kept fighting.
Cape Breton was a small island. Small towns. Tight communities. When the casualty telegrams started arriving in 1944, almost every village on the island received at least one. Many received two, three, four.
In some Cape Breton coal mining towns, the war memorial that was built after WWII lists more names than the town had unmarried young men in 1939. It's the kind of math that breaks your heart if you stop and do it.
The Highlanders fought on.
By the end of the Italian campaign, the regiment had liberated dozens of Italian towns. Their casualties were among the highest in the Canadian Army.
When the war ended in 1945, they came home.
Cape Breton hadn't changed much. The coal mines still ran. The fishing boats still went out. The towns waited for their sons.
Some came back.
Many didn't.
In Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, there is a small Highlanders Museum today. It preserves the regiment's history. Volunteers run it. There are uniforms in glass cases. There are letters from soldiers to their mothers. There are photographs of young men standing in front of tanks in Italian villages whose names most modern Canadians cannot pronounce.
The Cape Breton Highlanders regiment was officially disbanded as a regular force unit in the post-war restructuring. It continues to exist as a reserve regiment in the Canadian Armed Forces.
Most Canadians have never heard of them.
In Italy, the towns they liberated still remember.
Italian schoolchildren in Coriano and Cattolica and San Lorenzo in Correggiano are still told that Canadians liberated their villages in 1944. The local museums display Cape Breton Highlanders artifacts. Italian veterans of WWII — those few who remain — still raise glasses to the Canadians who came over the mountains and across the rivers and took their towns back from the Germans, one terrible kilometre at a time.
A Cape Breton coal miner.
A 19-month war in Italy.
40% casualties.
A regiment most Canadians have never heard of.
They were not glamorous.
They were not famous.
They were just a small Nova Scotian island's worth of working men who went and fought a war for 19 months in someone else's country.
Then most of them came home and never talked about it.
The ones who didn't come home are still in Italy.
They liberated towns that Canadians have forgotten the names of.
We should learn the names.
We should remember the Highlanders.
We should remember Cape Breton's war. 🍁
Share if Cape Breton's wartime sacrifice deserves to be remembered. 👇
