Lieutenant-Colonel Bruce Sutcliffe
Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment

From official information we have received your husband was killed in action against the enemy. You may be assured that any additional information received will be communicated to you without delay.

The Minister of National Defence and the members of the Army Council have asked me to express to you and your family their sincere sympathy in your bereavement.

(Gen. Letson to Nell Sutcliffe, 2 Aug 1943)

Born in Peterborough, Ontario on 27 October 1904, Bruce Albert Sutcliffe was a Toronto postal clerk and a sixteen-year member of the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment. On the promotion of Lieutenant-Colonel H.D. Graham to brigadier in September 1942, command of the regiment passed to Sutcliffe. Ten months later, on 10 July 1943, he landed with the regiment in Sicily as part of Operation Husky. Within ten days Sutcliffe was dead.

On 20 July, while on reconnaissance before a planned attack on Monte Assoro, a German 88-mm gun open fire. Sutcliffe was killed almost immediately and his intelligence officer, Captain Battle Cockin was mortally wounded. Lieutenant Farley Mowat, who called his former commander, “a gentleman and also a gentle man,” wrote of his death:

The loss of those who had been killed in the tumult and confusion of earlier actions had not yet been deeply perceived by us, but this new stroke of death was something else. It shredded the pale remnants of the illusion that real war was not much more than an exciting extension of battle games, and it fired us with rage against the enemy.

Sutcliffe posthumously received the Distinguished Service Order which was presented to his wife and son:

His coolness, courage and determination in the face of enemy small arms, artillery and mortar fire were an inspiration to all his men, and demonstrated also in an action before Grammichele on 15 July 43 when under mortar fire he continued to direct the attack with great skill and courage.

With Sutcliffe’s death, the successful attack on Assoro went ahead on 21 July 1943 under the command of Major John Buchan, Lord Tweedsmuir.