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.