A black sky masked the soldiers’ movement, but the early-morning stillness would betray them. As Allied troops scaled the Italian mountain, the clang of a tumbling helmet rang through the winter air. Wehrmacht men encamped on top suddenly realized they were not alone.

By the time Private Morris Lazarus hoisted himself up Monte La Difensa, the 25-year-old Torontonian would find several dead and a sergeant paralyzed by fear as the air ran thick with bullets.

“Which one of us is chickens--t now?” Lazarus gave the speechless first sergeant a quick taunt before charging into the carnage.

“He had never been in battle,” Lazarus, now 96, told the Star of his 1943 exploits. “But neither had I.”

Inexperience was no excuse. Despite losing the element of surprise, the 1,800 men of Lazarus’s First Special Service Force, trained for unconventional warfare, overwhelmed the Germans in just two hours to capture the mountain.

Informally called the Devil’s Brigade or Black Devils, the American-Canadian unit was instrumental in the liberation of Europe in the Second World War and would inspire the forming of the special forces units for both Canada and the United States. The unit won many honours, five U.S. campaign stars and eight Canadian battle honours, but on Tuesday it will receive its highest yet: the United States Congressional Gold Medal.

Lazarus and about 50 surviving veterans — including roughly 17 Canadians — have converged on Washington, D.C., for the ceremony for the U.S.’s highest civilian award. About 200 dead veterans are also expected to be represented through their relatives.

Organizers say a single medal will be awarded to the entire unit. Attending are U.S. Speaker of the House John Boehner, other leaders of the U.S. Congress, Canada’s Veterans Affairs Minister Erin O’Toole and Ambassador to the U.S. Gary Doer.

The push for the medal started with two senators from Montana — where the unit trained — who introduced a bill to grant the honour in 2011. That was followed by lobbying by the Canadian government before the bill was enacted last summer. The bill said the U.S. is “forever indebted” to the unit, noting the men’s dogged fighting and high casualty rates.

By the time the Devil’s Brigade left the area of La Difensa in central Italy, after capturing more mountains and never failing a mission, they numbered fewer than 500.

The dead were buried and the injured taken away. Among them was Lazarus, known to friends as Moe, who, with shrapnel in his right hand, stayed at a hospital in North Africa before rejoining his unit at the next battlefield in 1944.

Anzio stood northwest of La Difensa, about 35 km south of Italy’s capital. It represented the last line of German defence in Italy — the gate to Rome — and it was the battlefield on which the brigade would make its name.

With returnees such as Lazarus and supplements from other units, the special service force would become 1,800 men once more. With faces darkened by shoe polish, the men crept far into enemy territory, conducting aggressive raids, slitting throats by moonlight and leaving behind calling cards that read, in German, “Das Dicke Ende Kommt Noch” — “The worst is yet to come.”

They pushed back enemy lines by one kilometre and instilled fear into the Germans, who estimated the small unit was up to 10 times its size.

Those black faces would become infamous, and legend has it a Wehrmacht officer would label the soldiers “Black Devils.”

Anzio was where Lazarus would experience his closest brush with death, when he found himself alone staring down five German gun barrels. Lazarus did the only thing he thought could save him. “Ich bin Hans,” Lazarus introduced himself with a stereotypical German name.

The Wehrmacht men were not amused. The lead German immediately branded him an “Amerikaner,” and having firmly established Lazarus’s identity, switched from the informal form of address, du, to the formal sie, and ordered Lazarus to raise his hands. That German would die that night in a moment that till this day Lazarus cannot explain.

Members of his unit had crept up behind Lazarus by then and a firefight ensued. Struck point-blank by a German MP40 bullet, Lazarus spun three rounds before hitting the Italian mud. As he rose, he found himself only grazed — but all of the Germans dead; Lazarus and a man who had shared his foxhole were the only two unscathed.

The Black Devils fought on in Anzio for 99 days until summer, when a co-ordinated Allied effort broke out of the German line and, with them in the lead, the Allies took Rome on June 4, 1944, two days before D-Day.

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The unit was disbanded on Dec. 5 that year, after suffering 2,314 casualties, 134 per cent of its original 1,800, and capturing more than 30,000 prisoners.

The unit’s training and strategies were used to form the current special forces units of both Canada and the U.S. Its exploits lived on books and cinema; Brad Pitt would don the devils’ insignia in the movie Inglourious Basterds. The soldiers themselves typically wanted no more of army glory, however; most returned to civilian life and only an estimated one-third stayed in the military by the war’s end.

“Their type of battles, they were very close and personal,” said John Hart, president of the First Special Service Force Association. “Bayonet, hand-to-hand combat, that sort of stuff . . . I can’t even imagine how you would want to carry on in the military once you’ve carried out those duties.”

Even among those who remained, many moved onto vocations far removed from the field. Hart’s father, Geoffrey Hart, who was in the unit, worked in intelligence, spending his days interviewing prisoners of war.

Lazarus was born in Wood Mountain, Sask., but grew up in Regina and Toronto; he ended the war a sergeant and returned here, marrying Ruth Wolfstod in 1948. They had four daughters. Lazarus went on to operate a clothing store in Kingston, before moving back to Toronto, where he took on a variety of jobs, including dabbling in real estate.

He is among the 46 living Canadian veterans, most of whom will not be going to Washington. There are also hundreds of dead veterans not represented. Hart said not everyone is healthy enough to travel, and while every effort has been made to contact veterans and relatives, some simply cannot be reached.

“A lot of them — there’s no forwarding phone number. And a lot of the towns have disappeared along with the veterans,” Hart said.

After Tuesday, there will likely never be such a gathering again. While the unit gets together every year, at last year’s reunion there were only 14.

“This will be the last great gathering,” Hart said. “It’s going to be sad to see, to say our farewells.”

Even Lazarus, who would go often to local schools to talk about his experience, has been going out progressively less. Last year Lazarus developed mild dementia; as he spoke to the Star in his North York home, days before the ceremony, he had trouble with names and places and mixed up dates.

But Lazarus recalled the capture of La Difensa vividly. That day, in two hours, 1,800 young men on their first battle scaled a one-kilometre cliff to secure a victory that had eluded tens of thousands of regular soldiers for weeks.

“We climbed a mountain that should never have been allowed to be climbed,” Lazarus said.