Ortona 1943: A Bloody Christmas

Fabio Toncelli
2008-11-05

0
52 min

It was one of the bloodiest and most mysterious battles of the Second World War in Italy. In Ortona, a small seaside town in the Abruzzo region, Germans and Canadians literally fought street by street, house by house, even room by room. Why did everyone want to conquer Ortona in December 1943? What was so important about it? Why was it forgotten so quickly afterwards? And what secret does Ortona hide until this day? Amazing library footage, never before heard eyewitness accounts, documents that have remained secret until now, recently found German photographs and moving re-enactments help us to relive not only the political and military climate of the time, but take us back to the narrow alleys of the time, standing side-by-side with the soldiers to discover the embarrassing truth that has remained hidden for over half a century.