veteran

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 November 11, 2009

We pause, we remember

“Freedom is never free.” — author unknown

We pause today to remember the price many have paid for our freedom.

Much of what we mark in our moments of silence occurred before many of us were born. But that should not — does not — make it any less meaningful for us all to honour those who sacrificed their lives for an ideal of freedom, whether they did so early in the last century in Europe or earlier this month in Afghanistan.

More than 1.5 million Canadians have served our country in war; more than 100,000 have died.

Remembrance Day was established to mark the end of the First World War — the major hostilities of that war formally ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, when the Germans signed the Armistice. Nov. 11 has also become the day we remember those who served in the Second World War and the Korean War — as well as the military missions that have followed.

And it is a day when we see, most markedly, the changing face of the Canadian war veteran.

John Babcock is the last surviving Canadian soldier from the First World War. He is 109 years old. The ranks of Second World War veterans are dwindling; those who survive are in their 80s and 90s. Greater numbers of Korean vets still survive, but they too are aging.

The wrinkled, weathered faces of our elderly veterans are giving way to the smoother, but barely less weathered, faces of our younger veterans who have come home more recently from the Afghan mission. (Source: Hamilton Spectator)