commemoration

Thursday June 6, 2019

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday June 6, 2019

When the tide turned: Canadians hold massive D-Day event at Juno Beach

World leaders, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, gathered on France’s Normandy coast today to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the remarkable military and political achievement known as D-Day.

May 5, 2000

There have been two commemoration events along the 10-kilometre stretch of coastline that Canadians fought to liberate — one Canadian, one international.

As many as 5,000 people, including French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe, attended the Canadian event. Thursday’s commemoration in France follows another memorial, on Wednesday in the U.K., that was attended by leaders including U.S. President Donald Trump, U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May and Justin Trudeau.

Their chests laden with medals, Canadian veterans listened solemnly, overlooking the tall grass and sandy expanse below in Normandy on Thursday.

Naturally, the beach today looks entirely different from the one that greeted the invading allies on June 6, 1944. The three major communities along the coastline have regained in many respects the sleepy resort quality they enjoyed before the Germans came.

Three-quarters of a century ago today, Fred Turnbull was sitting in a landing craft plowing through the grey, choppy surf towards the shell-raked Normandy coast.

November 11, 2009

His landing craft took ashore a section of troops from the Régiment de la Chaudière, a reserve brigade.

His first hint of the invasion’s cost in blood was the sight of the bodies of military divers floating in the surf — killed as they tried to disarm metal obstacles booby-trapped by the Germans.

The rising tide carried the landing craft over the deadly traps, but all six boats — including Turnbull’s barge — were blown up after they had delivered their troops and turned back to sea to get more.

Turnbull and his men had to swim from the barge to the beach. There they waited as the battle raged around them for three hours before a larger landing ship came in and took them off.

“That was the worst part of it, waiting to be rescued,” said Turnbull.

The soldiers cracked jokes about their plight and tried to remain calm while waiting for retrieval. One enterprising sailor liberated a bottle of rum from the wreckage — which no doubt made the time pass more comfortably.

June 6, 2014

Canadian military planners had expected 1,800 casualties on D-Day — killed, wounded and captured. According to federal government records, the day saw 1,074 Canadian casualties during the taking of the beachhead.

D-Day was just the beginning, though. By the end of the Normandy campaign, more than 5,000 troops had been killed out of roughly 18,000 Canadian casualties. (CBC)

A crazy amount of social media shares on this one…


 

Wednesday April 18, 2012

By Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator, Wednesday April 18, 2012

Canada’s last great step forward

There was no sunshine in Ottawa when they signed the Constitution Act on April 17, 1982. While the gunmetal grey skies above Parliament Hill opened with a deluge, demonstrators in Quebec City wore black armbands, waved the fleur-de-lis, and denounced their brethren as “vendus.”

No matter. In the shadow of the Peace Tower, the federal government had arranged a spray of flags, a fusillade of cannon, a flock of birds and a flight of fighter jets. Thirty thousand spectators cheered.

The Queen, seated on a canopied stage, gave the new Constitution legitimacy. Pierre Elliott Trudeau, in a morning suit and a top hat, gave it eloquence. Both gave it their signatures, and a sense of occasion, too.

To reporters who had spent some two years covering parliamentary debates, intergovernmental conferences, committee hearings and court challenges, all played out in the shrillest of tones, the ceremony on April 17 marked the end of a political season for the ages.

Surely, we thought, this was the last of the wasting battles over rights and powers between the federal government and the provinces, which had flared episodically since the mid-1960s.

Surely, we thought, this was the war to end all of Canada’s Constitutional Wars, “The Last Act,” as Ron Graham, the mellifluous chronicler, called his account of the feverish events that unfolded in November 1981.

Before Canada’s Thirty Years War did come to end, there would still be disastrous agreements at Meech Lake and Charlottetown, both intended to fix a Constitution that needed no fixing.(Source: Ottawa Citizen)