WWII

Friday June 6 2014

Friday June 6 2014By Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday June 6 2014

Thousands of veterans, visitors mark 70th anniversary of D-Day

Ceremonies to commemorate the 70th anniversary of D-Day are drawing thousands of visitors to the cemeteries, beaches and stone-walled villages of Normandy this week, including some of the few remaining survivors of the largest sea-borne invasion ever mounted.

World leaders and dignitaries including President Barack Obama and Queen Elizabeth II will gather to honour the more than 150,000 American, British, Canadian and other Allied D-Day veterans who risked and gave their lives to defeat Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.

For many visitors, the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial with its 9,387 white marble tombstones on a bluff overlooking the site of the battle’s bloodiest fighting at Omaha Beach is the emotional centrepiece of pilgrimages to honour the tens of thousands of men killed on D-Day and the months of fighting afterward.

D-Day veteran Clair Martin, 93, said he’s come back to Omaha Beach three times in the last 70 years — “four if you count the time they were shooting at me.”

The San Diego, California resident landed on D-Day with the 29th Infantry Division and said he kept fighting until he reached the Elbe River in Germany the following April. “I praise God I made it and that we’ve never had another World War,” he said.

Ceremonies large and small are taking place across Normandy, ahead of an international summit on Friday in Ouistreham, a small port that was the site of a strategic battle on D-Day. French President Francois Hollande’s decision to invite Russian President Vladimir Putin to participate in the official ceremony despite his exclusion from the G-7 summit in Brussels is being seen by some as justified recognition of the Soviet Union’s great sacrifice in defeating Hitler, but by others as a distraction given the West’s dispute with Russia over Ukraine.

With many D-Day veterans now in their 90s, this year’s anniversary has the added poignancy of being the last time that many of those who took part in the battle will be able to make the long journey back to Normandy and tell their stories. (Source: Toronto Star)

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)