NIAGARA FALLS, Ont. – It’s now been 81 years since our magnificent Canadian soldiers stormed ashore at Juno Beach in Normandy to play their part the grim and deadly task of sweeping Hitler and his odious empire out of Europe.
The landings on June 6, 1944, by 156,000 Canadian, British, U.S. and other Allied soldiers along the beaches of Normandy were the hammer with which we battered Germany.
Canadians need to remember, though, that the anvil, the first front in the war against Hitler, was in the East. It was against Russia that Adolf Hitler’s armies were eventually crushed in the vise created by the D-Day landings.
About 45 years ago my military history professor – soldier, scholar and author of 1944: The Canadians in Normandy, Reginald H. Roy – reminded my classmates and me that if it hadn’t been for the anvil of the Red Army in the East, the hammer of D-Day in the West likely would have amounted to much less.
Professor Roy, who was born in New Glasgow, N.S., in 1922, died in Victoria, B.C., in 2013. He signed up with the Cape Breton Highlanders at 16, was commissioned from the ranks in 1943. He served in Britain, Italy, France, Belgium, and Holland before the war had ended.
“We’d still be in Normandy,” was the way he put it, and he didn’t mean as tourists like the political supernumeraries from Canada that show up now and then on a French beach on June 6 of whatever year.
Speculative history being, well, speculative, it’s hard to say for sure. But notwithstanding the Allied invasion of Italy in September 1943 – the strike into “the soft underbelly of the Axis,” as Winston Churchill described it – without six million soldiers of the Red Army pressing Hitler’s Eastern flank in 1944, Canadians might not be in France at all, but for the dead and a few diplomats.
A fact, apparently now largely forgotten in the West, is that about 80 per cent of the German Army’s casualties were inflicted by the Red Army, which after June 1944 cleared the Wehrmacht from Eastern Europe, wiped out an entire German Army Group, and opened the road to Berlin.
Back in 2014, when then-prime minister Stephen Harper petulantly conceded that Russian President Vladimir Putin should be allowed to visit Normandy for the 70th anniversary ceremonies, a Postmedia writer wrote that “only one Soviet soldier is known to have been buried in a war grave on the Western Front.”
As I wrote at the time, that’s fine, as long as we don’t forget that there are something like 11 million of the poor bastards buried on the Eastern Front to make up for that. Without them we Canadians likely would have had to learn German as our second language in school, regardless of whether it turned out we answered to Washington or Berlin.
Francois Hollande, the president of France in 2014, hit the right note when he told French TV: “We may have differences with Vladimir Putin but I have not forgotten and will never forget that the Russian people gave millions of lives. I told Vladimir Putin that as the representative of the Russian people, he is welcome to the ceremonies.”
Since then, and especially since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, our historical memory has grown if anything foggier. Nowadays, you’d almost think that we’d been fighting Russia, and not Germany, in 1944. This is probably true in France, as well as Canada.
Last month, the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Netherlands by Canadian soldiers generated some upbeat headlines reminding us between the lines that Canadians were still fighting in Europe a year after D-Day.
Last night, though, there was hardly a mention in the news columns of the impending anniversary of D-Day. Yesterday, U.S. President Donald Trump told Freidrich Merz, the German chancellor, that D-Day “was not a great day,” rating a couple of headlines. Mr. Trump seems to have meant for Germany, not for everyone. Even so …
Veterans across the U.S. said they would use the anniversary to protest Mr. Trump’s cuts to programs that support them, and to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs generally. A few of the dwindling number of World War II vets were back in France to mark the occasion.
But the news desks of the West seem to have lost interest in the historical moment, struggling to come up with a few picayune sidebars – prime mister Churchill pushing to obtain penicillin to treat the expected injuries in France, the weather forecast on June 5, 1944.
Back in 2019, then Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, now another almost forgotten story, said that “only those who threw themselves against the walls of the fortress of Europe in Normandy know the full extent of what unfolded here 75 years ago. But it is the responsibility of all Canadians to ensure that their story, and their sacrifice, will never be forgotten.”
This is profoundly true, and it’s troubling that a year after the nice, round 80th anniversary, consumed with the troubles of the moment, we also seem to be forgetting.
We should remember D-Day, but also that the walls of Fortress Europe weren’t just in Normandy.
Thanks for this column. It ia a good reminder of the sacrifices of the Second World War. And, who were our allies.
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. This has never been more true.
I, too, was searching for news of the D-Day anniversary. I’ve been saying in my own circle for quite some time that it is profoundly shocking how quickly people forget. Here in a democracy like Canada, and Alberta in particular, growing numbers are eager to give up their freedom, gained at the sacrifice of so many Canadian lives. Just as the last of the generations that remember are laid to rest, citizens seem to have decided they’d rather follow leaders who will take away everything than think for themselves. They won’t stand up and fight for their rights and the rights of others. Blindly they go toward doom. And doom they will get, given the UCP’s recent legislation. They will suffer along with everyone else. Leopards don’t care whose face they eat.
Last night I looked up the obituaries of WWII soldiers I knew in the neighborhood where I grew up. They were there, soldiers who fought and never talked about it. One was a Lancaster tail gunner. I don’t know how he survived, given that the life expectancy of a tail gunner was five sorties, or six to eight weeks, but he did. He was an ordinary young man from small town Alberta who did extraordinary things in a time of crisis. He did what needed to be done. That is a lesson for all of us.
Here is one such story for anyone who wants to know just what those young men went through.
https://legionmagazine.com/ronald-moyes-tail-gunner/
Abs: A surviving tail gunner of my aquaintance, now long gone, once told me that in addition to luck in his opinion there were two secrets to his success: (1) Holding his fire until the German fighters were frighteningly close, then firing in long bursts right at ’em. (2) Getting noticed as a survivor, which resulted in getting picked by the best pilots. No idea if this is true or if he was just BS’ing me, but it sounds sort of credible. DJC
Thank you.
Prime Minister Churchill, surely.
I’ve been absolutely appalled at the treatment of the Russians lately when it comes to celebrating historical events. Not invited to Auschwitz? Just who do the Americans and Europeans think *liberated* it?
You’re not wrong in this DJC–without Russia, all of Europe would be speaking German. Eventually Germany might have fallen but with the Americans arming both sides for profit, there’s no telling the horrors that would have ensued had Russians not relentlessly thrown their bodies (however willingly or in some cases, unwillingly) on the front lines.
Every time I hear Americans saying how “we won WWII” I want to slap them upside the head. Dropping some A-bombs on a surrendering and losing people does not a hero, make you.
We also don’t take into account what the Japanese did to the Chinese who weren’t bought off with American armaments to fight back. They were just left there–millions dead and suffering.
I don’t blame Russia and China for not trusting The West. We never earned their trust and they’d be fools to trust us since we can’t even acknowledge their histories and the roles they played in the WWII arena of blood.
Without Stalin’s cynical “non-aggression pact” with Hitler in August 1939, the war might not have started at all. It was the knowledge that the USSR would not defend Poland, but in fact would invade it from the East, that gave Hitler and his generals the confidence to start the war in the first place.
It was only after Stalin’s own ox was gored by Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 that the Soviet Union became an “ally” of the western powers — which at that time, did not yet include the United States, who did not enter the conflict until it was itself attacked (just as the USSR did).
So let’s not whitewash the Soviet Union’s role in the Second World War. Yes, they made the greater sacrifice after 1941, but they also created the conditions for the thing to start in the first place.
Jerry: And Britain and France posed no threat to Russia, never having invaded the place – oh, except in 1807, 1812, and 1918? Look, I’m not here to make apologies for Stalin, but the Soviet non-aggression pact of 1939 was undoubtedly seen as an existential necessity in the face of the possibility, real, that Britain, France and Germany could have been all in on an invasion of Russia. And as we’re seeing right now, with Poland and Romania sniffing around parts of Ukraine made vulnerable by the Ukraine war, it wouldn’t take much to push Europe back into pre-WWI instability. It’s easy to call Stalin cynical (well, he often was) or Chamberlain a coward (he wasn’t, he was buying time to gun up). It’s not so easy for some reason to call Jean Chretien’s involvement of Canada in the pointless and tragic occupation of Afghanistan cynical, but that description is entirely apt as well. NATO, so called, got handed its collective ass by the Afghans eventually, so I guess we now pretend it never happened. Maybe, as we get into Mark Carney’s big rearmament project, we should think twice before we try the same stunt with Russia. That never seems to end well for anyone. The Soviet Union did not “create the conditions for the thing to start.” It made a bad mistake about whom it could trust when it tried to prevent it. Same mistake Mr. Chamberlain made, in fact. DJC
DC, thank you for that. Every time I hear a version of Robert Burns’s “A Man’s a Man for a’ That” I remember a story that an old Scottish/Canadian friend of my Dad’s related when he came back to Canada after visiting Normandy in June 1969 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of D-Day. It was of course the height of the Cold War but there were some Soviet officials and soldiers attending the events in France. One night at a bar my Dad’s friend found himself sitting with some of the Soviets. They communicated only with difficulty, but they were able to buy each other a few rounds. The Soviets discovered that he was a Scot, and to his amazement they knew some Burns they had been taught in school. They began to recite:
“For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
It’s comin yet for a’ that,
That Man to Man the warld o’er
Shall brithers be for a’ that.”
The major Allied powers were the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, the United States, and China.
We had heart but were bit players with 2 big bombs and an eye to participate in the disaster capitalism in the end.
The first casualty in war is truth and we have used that PR to convince us of former allies being enemies to be feared ever since. Part of the Big Lie to sell us endless wars, defence spending and austerity.
There is evil in the world, fear and governments tend to promote it for their own interests. Look at Canada go, right now, with an outside threat. People will pay in blood.
the bit players are at the bottom ….
Soviet Union: Estimated 24 million deaths, including both military and civilian casualties.
China: Estimated 19.5 million deaths.
Germany: Estimated 7.7 million deaths.
Poland: Estimated 5.6 million deaths.
Other Notable Casualties:
Japan: 2.85 million deaths.
India: 2.087 million deaths.
Dutch East Indies (Indonesia): 3.5 million deaths.
United States: 0.4 million military deaths.
Canada: 0.045 million military deaths.
Czechoslovakia: 0.345 million total deaths.
45,000 deaths in a country of twelve million people. 55,000 wounded, so casualties of 100,000 nearing about 1% of the population of the country either dead or crippled. Fwiw, the US was about the same percentage, a larger population means a greater number of fighting souls. Some towns in the prairies lost most of their young men; some families lost all of them.
Canada may have been a smaller player because of her size, but the fierceness of her troops was widely known, and the level of sacrifice speaks for itself.
Disparaging the sacrifice of both those who fought and those who sent their boys to die because we didn’t see the unholy carnage of 12 million dead civilians (as the ussr did) is frankly more than a little ghoulish.
Dare say I 100,000 war casualties would be noticeable TODAY in this country, forget 1945.
I would point out that instead of the “United Kingdom” we should consider using the term “Commonwealth”. Not considered today is that all the Commonwealth nations fought under an integrated structure, that allowed them to work together as National units within a single command (albeit, usually British). There were slight differences in each countries forces, and political restrictions (Canada was not the only country that required servicemen to volunteer to serve in some theatres, or need to change rules to allow use of conscripted soldiers in combat zones), but by and large the Commonwealth Armys, Navys and Air Forces were integrated and this made them very effective.
That cohesion was not an accident. That Canada (and others) had to fight politically to retain control over it’s forces is a fact, but the effect of the ability of the Commonwealth forces to integrate in that period should not be neglected. That this was taken for granted by England, and it’s effect on future development and allegiances, should also be noted. But at the time the Commonwealth military was a much larger and more effective force than just it’s individual countries.
I may not have phrased this as well as it deserves, but I hope the arguement is clear.
Paul: It’s interesting to note that as the United Nations was being established, the Soviet Union argued that the nations of the British Commonwealth should get only one vote, as they were obviously (or so it seemed in Moscow) to be part of a single bloc. DJC
@Paul
Thus the axiom about the respect for courage gained by the “colonial troops”….
“Lions led by donkeys”
I think- as we work to safeguard a collective memory- that we need to keep close the knowledge that war is profoundly personal. The beaches of Normandy to me are lovely and wild spaces to rest and reflect – to my father-in-law, a memory of shrimp netting while perched on his father’s shoulders, a pastime taken away forever by German mines. For my old Ukrainian neighbour, Russia is a mind-shattering nightmare that pushes her screaming into the street at midnight. And as we split into comfortable, dispassionate factions over Gaza, someone, somewhere is still fondly singing the songs of their Hitler youth.
We need the historians, we need the journalists to tell the stories with truth and depth, to make us remember. We need above all to talk about whose stories we tell and why. So that we recognize the front and what we are fighting for and for whom.
Because, make no mistake, we are in the fog of war, right here, right now. Whether we choose to see it or not.
I had an uncle who landed on Juno Beach, and my son in law currently serves. I remember. They are why I vote. Every. Single. Election.
was that the same russia – led by psychotic B – that invaded finland, signed a non agression pact with psychotic A thus buying time for the aggression throughout europe, murdered 10’s of thousands of polish men after its concurrent invasion,
while ignoring the intelligence of its own pending invasion by psychotic A?
Gee I dunno maybe it has something to do with Finnish nationalists ? Finland was allied with Germany. As far as ignored their own intelligence, would be really weird if the soviets industrialized in the rear of the country, secretly, in the city named after a leader you called psychotic (not Churchill tho) in the most dramatic fashion not seen before in this world or since, to crush the Nazis, as our esteemed blogger has said, on the ANVIL of the SOVIET UNION OF SOCIALIST REPUBLICS.
Love how you lay the fault of the broader war in Europe at the feet of the soviets, not the British who supported and appeased Hitler, not the Americans (who also supported Hitler) who didn’t even bother joining the war until after Pearl Harbor and waited for Germany to declare war on THEM.
No it was all Stalins fault. Read a book dude.
Lads: Apropos of nothing, really, except the Finns, I recall sitting in a coffee shop in Tampere, Finland, in the 1980s when some airforce dudes showed up in uniform, ordered coffees, and sat down nearby. The all had little wings around little gold swastikas on their chests. Just checked, and the Finnish air force discreetly dropped that particular symbol only in 2020. DJC
Apparently the swastika was a common symbol in Finland long before that Austrian corporal co-opted it for his nascent movement.
Well, that’s true, and other paces and other movements. There’s still a town of that name in Ontario and there used to be hockey teams called the Swastikas in Windsor, Ont., and Fernie, B.C. Guess what they had on their jerseys. I once saw a swastika flag flying from an Indian registered freighter in the harbour of Ocean Falls, B.C. But sometimes history permanently wrecks a nice decorative device and makes it forever inappropriate for everyone everywhere. DJC
@Bird, you have reasonable points, there. @Brad, the lead-up to WWII was far more complex than the Russians were bad guys.
Also, much as I loathe Stalin, what do you do when your country is starving and is barely out of the feudal age? Spend money on armaments with resources you don’t have?
Or bargain and scheme and wait while you try to build up some semblance of a fighting force to take on an army that has superior fighting power?
The Americans were *arming* Germany. They rescued and recruited Nazis after the war as did the Soviet Union. The USA arms dealers are *still* arming anybody who can show up with the money, even if their own troops will be fighting against them and actively funding numerous insurgency groups against legitimate governments (we don’t have to like those governments but hey…it’s not our country to worry about). Weapons sales account for roughly 25% of America’s GDP.
“War is a Racket”–Smedly Butler
B: Russia signed the famous pact with Hitler to buy time. They knew they were going to have to fight him eventually. Britain signed the Munich Agreement with Hitler for the same reason, with the same caveat. In this regard at least, the motives of both Stalin and Neville Chamberlain are frequently misrepresented in potted histories. DJC
That’s what I always believed from my limited knowledge and interest in WW2. I suspect from my father who served in Canada yet didn’t believe in war and certainly not in the way we are heading now.
So, I must thread the needle between right and wrong? It would seem so! History be my guide? Good grief!
At any point in the forseeable future will the absurd perception of the Second World War generated and modified with ninety years of propaganda be transformed by actual historical analysis? The war was not fought by the Anglo-American allies to defeat fascism, neither in the kooky German Nazi form, nor that of Japanese militarized imperialism. The Soviets broke the Nazi war machine at Smolensk and Moscow and countless other places in 1941 while the British Empire and their various vassals such as Canada ran around the Mediterranean. Almost one in five human beings were subjects of the British Empire in 1939 and it was all the British could do to flee France in 1940. Not a finger was lifted to meet the guarantee provided to the Polish military dictatorship earlier in 1939 once the Germans crossed the Polish frontier. The Soviets had 1.75 million dead by the end of 1941, by which time the British Empire had been at war with the Germans for over two years and hadn’t fought a major engagement since the fall of France.
Once upon a time people actually studied historical evidence and historians produced historical works. People such as AJP Taylor wrote nuanced work based in analysis of documents from the pre-war period, that, of course, indicated that the Big One followed the same kinds of patterns of any war in its development, rather than being a comic-book battle of good versus evil.
In the post-war period the US made sure to insert as many Nazis into the West German economic and political apparatus as they could possibly fit. The same was done in Japan, where men awaiting trial and execution in Sugamo Prison for the all-time degenerate crimes committed in Manchuria were freed and rehabilitated, including Nobusuke Kishi, the grandfather of the late Prime Minister Abe, who himself was made Prime Minister in 1957.
The British went so far as to use Imperial Japanese troops in Vietnam to keep the locals in line until such a time as the French could reimpose colonial mastery over the Vietnamese and kick off thirty years of bloodshed and mayhem. The US did the same in China, using Japanese troops to fight Mao after 1945. Apparently these people who were so indoctrinated with Japanese militarism that they had to be nuked were quite happy to side with their conquerors in the pursuit of killing Reds. In 1939 France was an empire, and as soon as they were sufficiently recovered from WW2, set about fighting horrendous colonial wars in Indochina and Africa. Likewise Holland, which did the same in the “Dutch West Indies”, culminating in the US overthrow of the government in 1965 and the murders of at least 800 000 Indonesians. The atrocities visited upon the people of the Congo by the Belgians can hardly be contemplated by civilized people. Which brings us of course to the immediate aftermath of the Big One, when the Good Guys killed one in every five North Koreans between 1950 and 1953. We are all prisoners of this elaborate Magical Thinking fantasy that took the place of a pursuit of understanding of how events developed to the point that 75-90 million human beings were rendered into a permanent subterranean state through state violence in a matter of a dozen years.
I find it interesting that one thing the Japanese said about their intention to create an Asian bloc to throw off western chains by invading…
…was that the countries they claimed they were “liberating” weren’t democracies in the first place–they were colonies with appointed overseers.
Much as I oppose the atrocities they committed in those countries, that much *is* true.
Nobody much seems to want to discuss that part, either.
Or talk about how the Americans used their financial leverage by advancing loans/cash after Europe and Japan were economically destroyed to become the world’s currency. Thus profiting off every major manufacturing base’s profits while subduing threats to those bases by force.
These countries (including Canada) didn’t have adequate defence systems (other than France, due to De Gaulle not trusting the USA) because the USA would have seen them as a direct threat. Only then to be blamed for not contributing enough to NATO to back up Imperialist American ambitions–when they were dragged into these conflicts.
If there’s an Evil Empire in this…it’s America and the rest of us who keep falling for this “we’re spreading democracy and human rights” nonsense
And yet here we are, witnessing the rise of fascism again except this time it isn’t safely contained in Europe, it’s right on our doorstep. What’s the old saying? “Those who fail to learn from history”…..
Hello DJC and fellow commenters,
The reminder of the part played by people of a number of nationalities is important.
I think of D-Day especially as my Dad was part of the Canadian contingent arriving in France on June 6, 1944.
DC delivers a timely reminder that the Soviet Union was the major force propelling the defeat of Nazi Germany. The triumphalist USA and the always tiresome Churchillian falsifiers unduly celebrate a belated and, though sometimes striking, invasion from the west. This was recognized—at some great cost to humanity rights— by the agreements at Yalta and Potsdam that moulded the cast for the coming and incredibly destructive Cold War—fostered by the USA’s hegemony and incurable belief in their self-interest. This is showing in the increasing call for increased defense spending and the defense industries’ unsustainable search for any excuse for profiteering.
Do not forget the importance of Lend-Lease to Russia. Without the supply of aircraft the Soviet Air Forces might well have been annihilated before they could re-establish their production facilities in the Urals. The USA provided the trucks that were able make the Soviet Army mobile, and food to feed that Army. Even Canada played a large part in providing radio equipment the Soviets badly needed to co-ordinate their forces.
Your points and Daves are completely valid. I’m just pointing out that history isn’t a simple black and white divide.
As Marshall Zhukov famously said at the end of WWII, “We have liberated Europe from fascism, but they will never forgive us for it.”
WW2 complicated the world, as any conflict of that magnitude would have.
I was reminded, years ago, that was we lose our personal connection to that conflict, the memory out it will fade.
Okay, so now we have a German chancellor reminding a US president that his country was also liberated from fascism in the war’s aftermath. Of course, Trump was making a joke, right?
Then, Trump went on to yak about every great thing that came out of that war that was American, like “Saving Private Ryan” and the truth about space Nazis. Yeah, that Hitler guy was very smart — evil but smart.
Sixty million died in WWII. Twenty million of them were Russian/Soviet.
The WWII alliance between the USSR and the West was surely one of convenience, although one of good cause and principles. Of course this alliance quickly ended after the war and now largely forgotten or conveniently ignored by both sides. I doubt Russia celebrates D Day much if at all.
While it was an important part of that war, especially to the west, it is true there were a lot of other important aspects to the war as well. For instance, there were the key allied battles in Africa and Italy and the US battles in the far east. The US actually also fought a two front war, but the outcome was better for it probably in large part due to the strength and contribution of all the allies including Canada.
This lesson of history seems to also be forgotten now by the US, which seems inclined to a go it alone approach. We’ll see how well that goes. I suspect with less US military support, they will find their influence over other it allies and countries will diminish. Europe whose economy has been stagnant, seems to be picking up due to having spend more on military expenses now. Sadly, weapons production is still good for the economy, although their use may not be.
In my opinion, D Day is celebrated so much not just because it was important part of the war, but more because it was the beginning of the end of a long and terrible conflict and a sign that the allies would soon prevail. Of course, it was just one part of a long and very large conflict involving many countries.
Dave: We can endlessly argue about when the beginning of the end began. I would say Feb. 2, 1943, when the Germans surrendered at Stalingrad. Regardless, the Russians are aware of D-Day, obviously, but they celebrate Victory Day on May 9, which we used to call VE Day on May 8, owing to time zones, which is nowadays largely ignored in the West. DJC
Thanks Dave. This is important to remember when our friends on the right want to get the Cold War going again.
Ok then. You want to know what’s worth fighting for? The real that’s been obvious for centuries? Ok then! How many times do we need to be warned? We must be dim bulbs! https://youtu.be/cCOHlxTxCj0
Thanks for this blog. A very important time in our history that we should never forget.