So it's a Monday morning in the middle of October and here I am today studying the battle

of autona and I've got a real kind of excitement about this one because I've been reading

reading about this battle which I've come a little bit obsessed about, I don't mind

it, I'm not even admitting this epic by the Canadians against first the 90th Panzer

Grenadier division and then Battalion of the Falscher Mieger and you know you look at

all these maps, you look at all these two dimensional drawn maps and whatnot and you've got

a sort of a sense of it and you have a picture in your mind but until you actually hear

you just you don't get a sense of the scale or you know how big these gullies are and

these ridges are and what I've decided to realise having sort of driven around here

a little bit this morning is that what you've got here is you've got against 90 degrees

against the flow of the advance up the coast, sort of roughly kind of north south, it's

a little bit more kind of north west I would say the direction. You've got these huge

valleys that are kind of heading straight to the coast then you've got a sort of flat

plateau and then you've got the next one and I'm now looking at the edge of the Morro

valley and the banks on the southern side it's really really high ridge, so fantastic

from the point of view of firing your artillery and having your artillery behind you but

absolutely awful if you're trying to get to if you're infantry and you're trying to

get across this place and it's interesting in all the accounts of the battle people are

always talking about endless sort of scrambling through for vineyards and olive grows and

literally every spare yard of the countryside around here which hasn't been built on by roads

or by buildings is covered with either trees and little woods and copses or olive groves and vineyards

and the vineyards and the olive groves are kind of side by side so right now I'm standing between a

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