Ernest Smith, everyone called him Smokey, stood in a ditch in Italy in the pouring rain and knocked out a German Panther tank with a shoulder-fired anti-tank weapon from about thirty feet away, then drove off the tank's crew and a swarm of infantry to protect his wounded friend, and kept fighting until he had wrecked two tanks and two self-propelled guns almost single-handed. He was the only private soldier to win the Victoria Cross in the whole Second World War, and the last surviving Canadian VC, and he was a magnificent, incorrigible troublemaker. Smith was a Canadian, and a genuine handful, a soldier who was promoted and busted back down to private so many times that it became a running joke, a man who spent as much time in trouble as out of it. Fittingly, he won the highest award for valor in the world while holding the lowest rank. On the night of October 21st, 1944, in the Italian campaign, his unit was trying to establish a bridgehead across the Savio River in the north of Italy. The river had risen in torrential rain, which meant the Allied tanks and anti-tank guns could not get across to support the infantry. So when the Germans counterattacked with three Panther tanks and about thirty infantry, Smith and his fellow soldiers were out there on the far bank with nothing heavy to stop them. Smith did not run. A comrade was wounded, and Smith was determined to protect him. As a Panther clanked toward him in the dark, Smith stood in the open with his PIAT, a clumsy, short-ranged, shoulder-fired anti-tank weapon, and held his fire until the tank was almost on top of him, about thirty feet away, and then knocked it out. When the German infantry riding the tank and following it leapt off and came at him, and a second Panther loomed up, Smith stood his ground in the middle of the road, firing his submachine gun, driving the enemy back, protecting the wounded man behind him. Through the fight he destroyed a tank and helped account for a second tank and two self-propelled guns, and routed the German infantry, holding the position by himself. They gave Smokey Smith the Victoria Cross, and he remained exactly who he was: when he was sent home a hero and told he would meet dignitaries, he reportedly celebrated by getting into trouble one more time. He lived a long life, dying in 2005 as the last living Canadian holder of the Victoria Cross, the irrepressible private who stood in a ditch and killed a Panther at thirty feet.