German Generals on Canadian Performance vs British & US in WW2

I keep reading/hearing about all the things the Canadians did in WW2 that was rather out of the ordinary. Apparently, stuff is coming out of the field reports kept by the German generals and officers. Enough time has passed that these records have probably been opened. I think it’s either fifty years or seventy-five years that serious stuff like this has to be kept locked away, but then it can be made public, or at least made accessible to the public. It is now eighty years since WW2 ended in 1945. This video paints a picture of the Canadian soldiers as experienced by the Germans.

Other reports have said the Germans used the term “Storm Troopers” to describe the Canadians. The term “Storm Trooper” does not appear in this video but the Canadians are described as “the perfect storm of training, motivation, and timing” that “struck with a hammer that was both heavy and incredibly sharp.”

I copy parts of the transcript below but by no means all of the interesting parts.

Why Germans Feared Canadian Infantry — But Not American or British Troops, Nov. 20 2025

Reported by German Officers

Narrator, Minute 0:00:

The Canadians fight like wild men. They attack in the dark. They attack in the rain. They do not stop for casualties.

0:18 These were the cold, calculated observations found in the field reports of veteran German officers during the height of the Second World War.

Three-pronged Trident: Americans, British, and Canadian

18:35 Allied invasion of Europe was a coalition effort, a massive trident thrust into the heart of the Third Reich. But to the German commanders observing from their bunkers, the three prongs of this trident, American, British, and Canadian, felt very different when they pierced the skin.

The Americans

18:55 First, consider the Americans. By 1944, the United States Army was a force of nature. To the German high command, the Americans represented the terrifying inevitability of industrial warfare. They possessed a logistical tale that was the envy of the world.

19:15 If a German Tiger tank destroyed a column of five American Shermans, the next day 10 more would appear on the horizon. The German fear of the Americans was a fear of suffocation. They knew they could not win a war of attrition against a nation that could manufacture tanks faster than Germany could manufacture bullets.

19:36 However, regarding the infantry specifically, the German assessment was often critical. In the internal memos of the Vermacht, American infantry units were frequently described as brave but inexperienced. The US Army expanded so rapidly that many units entering combat in 1944 were green.

19:59 They relied heavily on their overwhelming firepower to solve tactical problems. If an American unit encountered a machine gun nest, they would often halt and call in an air strike or a massive artillery barrage to level the entire grid square. It was effective, yes, but it was impersonal.

20:21 It lacked the tactical nuance of close quarters aggression. The German soldier feared the American machine, but he believed that man for man on a level playing field, he was superior to the American GI.

The British

20:37 Then consider the British. The British army was the seasoned veteran of the conflict. They had been fighting since 1939, enduring the humiliation of Dunkirk, the blitz of London, and the scorching sands of North Africa. By the time they reached Normandy, the British soldier was highly disciplined, stoic, and technically proficient. But the British army was also tired.

21:01 After 5 years of total war, Britain was running out of men. This demographic reality bled into their tactical doctrine. Field Marshall Montgomery and his commanders were notoriously cautious. They fought a bite and hold style of warfare designed to minimize casualties. They would take an objective and immediately dig in, refusing to overextend.

21:27 While the Germans respected the British Tommy for his tenacity and defense, they did not fear his unpredictability. They knew the British would rarely take insane risks. They were a known quantity, steady, dangerous, but methodical.

The Canadian

21:42 And then there was the Canadian. The Canadian Army occupied a terrifying middle ground that combined the strengths of both allies while discarding their perceived weaknesses. Like the British, they were equipped with the best of the Commonwealth’s doctrine and training.

21:59 They were disciplined and knew how to coordinate artillery and armor with a sophistication that matched the Royal Army. But unlike the British, they were not war-weary. They were fresh. They had the high morale and physical robustness of a volunteer force that had been training for this moment for years.

NOTE: In the part I skipped it said the Canadians had been kept off the battlefield and were training in Scotland until now. Only the British were fighting, is the way I understand it.

The Canadian continued

22:18 And like the Americans, they possessed an aggressive can-do spirit, a frontier mentality that valued initiative and improvisation. But unlike the Americans, they were not green.

22:33 The core of the Canadian Infantry was composed of long- serving volunteers who had honed their skills in the commando training grounds of Scotland before ever setting foot in France. This combination created a soldier that the Germans found impossible to categorize and thus impossible to counter.

22:51 The Canadians fought with the technical precision of the British, but attacked with the reckless abandon of a fresh American unit. German General Everhard Kinsel, analyzing the Allied forces, noted that while the British would stop to consolidate, the Canadians would keep coming. They practiced deep battle.

23:11 When they broke through a line, they didn’t just dig in. They swarmed into the rear areas, disrupting supply lines and command posts. They were shock troops in the truest sense of the word.

National Identity on the Line

23:25 Furthermore, there was a political dimension that translated into battlefield ferocity. The Canadian generals, like Guy Simons, were not just fighting for ground. They were fighting for national identity. Canada was a small nation trying to prove its worth on the global stage. They demanded complex, high prestige objectives to show the world what they could do. This filtered down to the common soldier.

23:52 They weren’t just fighting as a subordinate unit of the British Empire. They were fighting as Canadians. This nationalistic pride forged a unit cohesion that was incredibly difficult to break. The German soldier on the ground felt this difference visceral.

Fighting the Canadians Was Harder

24:10 Facing an American sector meant enduring an artillery storm. Facing a British sector meant a grinding battle of attrition. But facing a Canadian sector meant you were likely to be attacked at night in a rainstorm by men who knew exactly how to use their bayonets and who seemed to take a grim satisfaction in the intimate brutality of infantry combat.

24:33 As one captured officer from the 12th SS Panzer Division supposedly remarked during an interrogation, “We knew when we were fighting the Canadians, the fighting was harder, the shelling was closer, and there was no mercy.”

Canadians: Not Supermen but Perfect Storm

24:50 It wasn’t that the Canadians were supermen. It was that they were the perfect storm of training, motivation, and timing. They arrived on the battlefield when the Germans were vulnerable and they struck with a hammer that was both heavy and incredibly sharp.

25:09 So we return to the question that haunts the archives of the Second World War. Why did the mighty Vermacht, the conquerors of Europe, tremble at the sight of the Canadians?

Watch the video for some highlights of outstanding performance of our Canadian forebears.

Given how much the Americans like to brag about them being the ones who actually won WW2 for the rest of us, I couldn’t help but pick up on a few choice lines from this video that very specifically said it was the Canadians who did in the Germans.

• 17:52 In the meat grinder battles…the Canadians were the anvil upon which the German army was smashed.

• 28:08 When the Americans attack, we call for artillery. When the British attack, we call for reserves. But when the Canadians arrived, we knew the battle was over.