At dawn on June 6, 1944 — 70 years ago today — 14,000 Canadian soldiers took part in the greatest amphibious campaign in history, the D-Day landings in Normandy. By nightfall on that first day, 359 lay dead, 87 of them from Victoria’s own Canadian Scottish Regiment. The survival odds of the first wave ashore have been put at 50/50.
But in the early hours of the battle, when it counted most, Canadian troops fought their way off Juno Beach and moved inland farther and faster than any of the other Allied forces.
Of course, we know today how it all ended. The invasion succeeded beyond the greatest hopes of those in charge. Military planners had predicted Allied casualties (killed and wounded) as high as 40,000 in the first 24 hours. The chief of Britain’s war staff wrote in his diary the night before the landings: “It may well be the most ghastly disaster of the whole war. I wish to God it were safely over.”
Instead, grim as the carnage was, the casualties were much fewer than anticipated — an estimated 13,000 on the Allied side. The precise number of German troops killed and injured is not known, but might have approached 9,000.
Nevertheless, we can only imagine what went through our soldiers’ minds as they braced themselves for landing. We say today they were fighting for freedom and the overthrow of a brutal, inhuman regime. And so indeed they were.
But there is more to it than that. Of the 12 Allied nations represented on D-Day, eight were either occupied or directly threatened by Germany. The motives of those troops are easily understood.
The Canadians, and their comrades-in-arms from the U.S., Australia and New Zealand, waded ashore that day with a different purpose. In part, they came to support an ally, and in the case of Commonwealth troops, a besieged motherland.
But in its purest form, they also fought for an ideal and offered their lives. Those are convictions worth thinking about.
Our D-Day forces were all volunteers (conscription was introduced later in the war). They placed themselves in harm’s way by choice, and from a desire to serve.
The selflessness of those young men (in some instances mere boys) elevates their actions to a higher plane. Their backs weren’t against a wall; their homes and families weren’t in danger; there was no enemy at the gate. The countries they hoped to liberate — and ultimately did liberate — were thousands of kilometres away.
What were soldiers from Victoria and Moose Jaw and St. John’s doing in such far-off lands? Why were they fighting street by street through cities like Amsterdam, Caen and Antwerp?
The people of Holland, France and Belgium can answer that question. There are meticulously kept memorials throughout those countries to the Canadians who died to free them. And 45,000 war graves are an ever-present reminder of the sacrifice made by Canada’s armed forces in Europe.
Yet 70 years later, can we here at home answer that question as readily? For ours is a more self-centred generation. And if time cures all ills, it also mars our memories. The war, and Canada’s role in it, grow ever further from our minds.
Sadly, only a handful of the veterans who fought are left to remind us of their bravery. And very few of them will use that term. They were, they insist, just doing their duty.
But we can call them brave, and so we should. Their devotion to a cause larger than themselves is still an inspiration.
That is why the D-Day landings should never be forgotten.
