It’s the 70th anniversary of D-Day this week — longer than most of us have been alive, yesterday to Earl Clark.
At 97, his memories of the battle are vivid: the mortar bombs exploding among the landing craft on Juno Beach, the hidden machine guns that mowed men down like wheat, the desperate need to keep churning forward, forward, forward through the carnage to survive. “It was just a sea of dead and dying.”
Vancouver Island sacrificed disproportionately on June 6, 1944. The Victoria-based Canadian Scottish, to which Clark belonged, were one of a dozen Canadian regiments — 14,000 men — to land in Normandy that day. Other Islanders piloted landing craft through the mine-strewn surf, or parachuted into the blackness of the pre-invasion night.
The few who remain are old men now. “We got through it,” shrugs Clark. Got through it, but never forgot.
There’s no bravado to Earl Clark’s story, no flag-waving.
The opposite, in fact. The 97-year-old reddens and trembles a bit, has to pause while reliving the day, June 6, 1944.
Behind him in their room at Saanich’s Lodge at Broadmead, his wife Margaret, her posture perfect, listens to her husband’s story in silence.
This isn’t John Wayne in The Longest Day or Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan. Clark is a salt-of-the-earth guy from Vancouver Island, not an actor, and what is Hollywood — or history — to the rest of us was real life to him.
Real life to a lot of other Islanders, too. The Victoria-based Canadian Scottish were among the first ashore when 14,000 Canadian soldiers from a dozen regiments stormed Juno Beach 70 years ago.
It has been a source of national pride ever since, Canada being assigned one of the five invasion beaches (Sword and Gold went to the British, Omaha and Utah to the U.S.) for one of the most significant battles in history.
The Royal Canadian Navy was there, too, 10,000 sailors in 109 ships bombarding the French coastline and ferrying troops and supplies through the heavily mined waters. The Royal Canadian Air Force also had a hand in Operation Overlord, the official name of the invasion of western Europe.
The thing is, as famous as the battle was, and as much as we mark it today as a significant milestone in Canada’s past, only a few of those who lived through it survive today.
Ken Byron, who was wounded within moments of his landing craft dropping its ramp, remains on his Saltspring Island farm, not far from brother Terry, another veteran of the Normandy campaign. Robby Robson, who parachuted into France the night before D-Day (and who later jumped into Germany from a burning airplane) had a Colwood street named after him last year. A dozen B.C. D-Day veterans were honoured at a Vancouver dinner hosted by Finance Minister Mike de Jong in May.
Others disappear. Ten years ago last week, when then-prime minister Paul Martin brought his election campaign to Broadmead Lodge, he was greeted by a handful of D-Day vets. They’re all gone now. Today, only Clark is around to tell his story.
Clark was a logger before the war, part of a hard-working pioneer family in Shirley, past Sooke, where he grew up with eight brothers and a sister.
He was a logger during the war, too, serving in the Canadian Forestry Corps in northern Scotland. That’s where he met Margaret (who retains a lovely brogue) at a dance. “At least I didn’t step on her toes,” he says. They’ll celebrate their 72nd anniversary a month from today.
Clark was shifted to the Canadian Scottish just before D-Day.
A Polish ship ferried his company across the English Channel. They scrambled down netting hanging from its hull to get to the landing craft that ran them to Juno Beach. He remembers that a Major English was in charge. He remembers another officer, too. “His tank got hit and he lost both his legs.”
By the end of the day, the regiment was six miles inland, farther than anyone else.
The Canadian Scottish experience that day was well-documented in Ready for the Fray, the regimental history written by Reg Roy in 1957.
The infantry unit lost 87 soldiers on D-Day. More than 200, almost a third of the battalion’s pre-invasion strength, had become casualties by the fourth day of fighting.
The battle for the town of Putot-en-Bessin alone saw 45 Canadian Scottish killed and another 80 wounded. (The Royal Winnipeg Rifles suffered there, too, including a couple of dozen men who were flat-out murdered by SS troops after being taken prisoner.)
Some of the Canadian Scottish had been ferried across the English Channel aboard the Prince Henry, which in peacetime served the B.C. coast as a Canadian National steamship. That resulted in some halfway-around-the-world reunions: As Canadian Scottish Lt. Stewart Ross marched up the gangplank in England, he dropped the 80 pounds of gear on his back and embraced 23-year-old Lt. Jack Davie, the leader of the ship’s flotilla of assault craft. “Then Ross took Davie to a shipboard reunion with Maj. Dick Lendrum, who used to teach them both in the high school at Duncan, B.C.,” reported a newspaper journalist aboard Prince Henry.
(Ross did not survive the war, but Davie and Lendrum remained friends. “After the war I used to say to Dick that putting him on the beach in Normandy was my revenge for him trying to teach me Latin,” Davie recalled in a Times Colonist interview in 2001.)
When the Canadian Scottish were lowered from the Prince Henry for their 10-kilometre run into the beach, they did so with bagpipes echoing in their ears and, according to Roy, a much-appreciated lunch of two boiled eggs and a cheese sandwich provided by the ship’s crew to add to their rations.
Heavy seas swamped tank landing craft several miles from shore. Many soldiers became seasick. Concentrated mortar fire from the shore knocked out many tanks before the landing craft even reached the beach. While only one of the Prince Henry’s eight landing craft was lost, all eight belonging to another ship, the Prince David, were destroyed.
A reporter interviewed Davie after he returned to the Prince Henry: “Davie said the flotilla sailed through many beach obstacles to reach shore. In addition to rusty-looking mines and concrete pickets, there were trip wires stretched nearly along the water’s edge.
“Davie’s holed craft was taken in tow by two other craft and brought back to the ship. The crew bailed furiously because they didn’t think they could make it.”
On shore, the fighting was relatively light in places, furious in others. An aboriginal soldier, Pte. B.M. Francis, killed two or three snipers, including one he shot from the hip without aiming from a distance of 50 metres, before himself being killed, Roy wrote. Ordered to take out a dangerous German gun emplacement, Lt. Bernie Clarke replied with the now-legendary “Who? ME?” before doing the job. A platoon led by Lt. Roger Schjelderup, a Canadian Scottish officer from Courtenay, ended the day with only 19 of 45 soldiers unscathed.
Schjelderup, among the wounded, was later photographed in a British hospital playing cards with Saltspring’s Ken Byron.
The latter relayed his own D-Day experience a few years ago: A bomb hit his landing craft the moment it dropped its ramp, badly wounding Lt. Hector Russell and leaving Byron, a sergeant, in charge.
“I was platoon commander as soon as I hit the beach,” Byron said.
The 23-year-old didn’t have to wait long for his own wound. “Mortar bombs started to drop. I dove into a tank trap. My mortar man dropped right in front of me, dead. He got a piece of shrapnel in his temple. I got a piece in my cheek, cut the artery.”
A doctor patched up Byron to the point that, while coated in a mixture of sand and blood, he was able to lead the platoon inland. “I stayed in the battle for the rest of the day.”
Back in Victoria, the time difference with France allowed the D-Day story to be reported on the date it happened. “INVASION BEGINS/CANADIANS IN ACTION” screamed the all-caps double-deck headline on the front of the June 6 Daily Colonist.
A day later, a story described the capital’s reaction: “News of the invasion of Europe by Allied forces did not burst like a bombshell on Victoria yesterday. It was received with sober calm. Many persons had expected it any day for a long time; others tuned in relays of frantic Nazi radio broadcasts. Some remained up until early hours of the morning to listen to official confirmation, and those who retired to bed in ignorance of the great event, heard the shrill, excited cries of newspaper carriers.”
Churches opened doors to hundreds who came to pray. Short prayer services were led by the principals of the elementary schools of the city. “At Victoria High School, Rev. Dr. A.E. Whitehouse addressed the students and read the radio address of the king.”
As the years went by, the D-Day story became exactly that: a story, a black-and-white photo in a history text, not quite real to most of us.
Those who were there were often reluctant to talk about it, turning to happier subjects instead. When Davie was joined in his Maple Bay home in 2001 for a reunion of half a dozen of those who had driven landing craft onto Juno Beach, getting them to talk about D-Day was like trying to teach a cat to fetch.
They talked about Greenberg, the Jewish crewmate who arrived at the Prince Henry wearing a German uniform. They talked about liberating a Jeep from the U.S. army and hoisting it aboard the ship, where it proved useful as a port runabout until it was discovered the American military police were still looking for it, at which point they traded it to some British 8th Army soldiers in Alexandria for a new vehicle, which itself had to be given a buoyancy test in the Thames after being involved in a car chase with some London cops ….
They would not talk about D-Day.
Every one of the old boys at Davie’s house that day is gone now, their stories gone with them.
Earl Clark was similarly reticent, says his daughter Christine. Growing up, she never knew how much he carried D-Day with him for all those years.
She knew about his other scars, though, the ones he picked up on Feb. 19, 1945, when, with the Canadians pushing into the Rhineland, a German threw a potato-masher grenade.
“I hit the ground, but I didn’t get down fast enough,” Clark says. “All of a sudden the lights went out.”
He awoke 17 days later in the 2 Canadian General Hospital in Ghent, Belgium. He was blind for six weeks. He still has shrapnel in one lung and behind one of his eyes.
After the war, Clark returned to Vancouver Island and, eventually, a life in forestry.
He turns 98 two weeks from today. The Britannia Legion is going to fete him then. Good for them.
Earl Clark doesn’t forget D-Day. We shouldn’t forget Earl Clark and all those like him.