REGINA – It’s now been 82 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.
Nearly half a century 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 and died in Victoria in 2013, signed up with the Cape Breton Highlanders at 16, and 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 English 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 even 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 night there was barely a mention in the news of the impending anniversary. Apparently, D-Day is almost as distant a memory to the diminished ranks of Canada’s media as the battles of Agincourt or Hastings, neither of which unlike the beaches of Normandy had any Canadians in the thick of the action.
The only D-Day stories with Canadian place-lines last night were about students in the Saskatchewan town of Yorkton cleaning up the graves of World War II veterans in preparation for today’s anniversary, notice of a service in Pickering, Ont., and an interview by a radio reporter with the vice-president of the Kamloops branch of the Royal Canadian Legion. One wonders if the prime minister and various Canadian premiers will have something to say today. Or even if we’ll see a time-stamped movie review!
Back in 2019, then Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, now another almost forgotten story except here on the Prairies, said in France that “only those who threw themselves against the walls of the fortress of Europe in Normandy know the full extent of what unfolded here … 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 we are so forgetful. We need to remember D-Day, and also that the walls of Fortress Europe weren’t just in Normandy.
UPDATE AT 9:30 P.M., JUNE 6, 2026: Neither the prime minister of Canada nor the premier of Alberta saw fit to commemorate, or even mention, the anniversary of the D-Day landing at Juno Beach on this day in 1944. The Prime Minister’s Office issued a statement noting Mr. Carney’s meeting with the President of Indonesia, Prabowo Subianto. Ms. Smith had nothing at all to say. I note that members of the Royal Regina Rifles held a dignified ceremony marking the occasion at the city’s cenotaph, attended by a few local dignitaries, this afternoon. Members of the regiment landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944, and continued to fight until the end of the war. DJC
Thank you for this. Like many others, I have relatives who fought in WW2. They will not be forgotten for their services.
Here here! My father served during the Blitz in which he was seriously injured. It was during the Blitz that much footwork was accomplished through intelligence that allowed the Allies to ensure the success of the D-Day landings and some military operations. Upon his return to Canada. He had a supportive government that was helpful at the time. As a WW2 veteran, he had a bevy of benefits to support his family upon his return to Canada. Even his children had benefits through DVA. If his children maintained an honours average in university, then their tuition was covered through bursaries. Two of five children completed degrees – much thanks to the DVA and the people who supported veterans at the time. Harper has gutted the benefit package that veterans receive to the extent that some unfortunate veterans end up being unhoused and living on the street.
Is it possible that some are steer heading a vision of our past that refutes the defeat of the Third Reich? Sure seems that way with the dearth of media coverage about D-Day.
Imagine the outrage of our veterans long dead and buried to note that we have premier who is wrapping herself up in the Canadian flag all the while trying to destroy the country. Would the soldiers of the past allow Smith to destroy Canada? I think not. The absurdity of things happening in today’s world is unfathomable except to say that the oligarchs have taken control and they are merciless. Their fascist underpinnings have not changed since the Nazis got many of their most cruel policies from their American business friends. And here we are with the most dangerous cabal of miscreants in the history of humanity leading us down a path of unbridled greed, avarice, chaos, and death – death to the planet through global warming denial, the expedient gutting of our resources, wars, human climate change refugees, and ensuing global water shortages. In order to survive we must vote the current cabal of history denying miscreants out of office. To note that we have 3 more years of Trump, as one of the worst people on the planet, and more of the UCP does not bode well for our collective futures.
May you live during in interesting times. Still, my father and his compatriots are rolling over in their graves because of the likes of Harper, Smith and Trump to name but a few deniers.
Thanks for mentioning the Russians.
The Chinese also get left out of the story when the Americans, who think they were such heroes in Asia, kept Japanese forces occupied, well, by being horrifically occupied. That was how Mao rose to prominence–fighting the Japanese after the communist forces already lost 90% of their forces to Chiang Kai-shek –just before the Japanese slaughtered an estimated 10M Chinese. Yet America rebuilt both their enemies while they permanently destroyed England’s economy with massive debt repayment and left the Chinese to rot–well what they couldn’t steal, anyway. To this day, Japan has never had a reckoning on what they did to China. Not so much as a peep of an apology.
Everybody hates “the commies” but let’s face it, if it wasn’t for the Reds–we’d be living in Philip Dick’s dystopian fascist empire.
Somewhat related, I urge everyone interested in world political and military affairs to read Zelensky’s brilliantly crafted letter to Putin this week:
https://www.president.gov.ua/en/news/vidkritij-list-prezidentu-rosijskoyi-federaciyi-vid-preziden-104769
Putin rejected the truce proposal, but I hope other Russian leaders and citizens saw the letter. It is essentially a plea for a coup.
The one he threw in the trash and responded to with “work brothers” ? Are we allowed to point out Z is an embezzling cocaine addict on the verge of complete insanity now that the Tucker piece came out? Asking for a friend….
“A Little Bird” sounds like a Russian bot (no relation).
Robert: I am confident that Little Bird is not a Russian Bot. DJC
I wish. Unfortunately I am forced to work for a living like the rest of us, I’m just a glutton for punishment.
I had an uncle who fought in the Second World War in Italy and he said it was a terrible experience. The Italian soldiers that they fought with had been fighting for Hitler two weeks before and they weren’t certain that they wouldn’t eventually turn on them. That was their biggest fear. Luckily it didn’t happen and he met an English Nurse that he brought home to Canada and married after the war. They had two sons before she died from cancer at a young age. He remarried years later.
No one under forty remembers it. History is a foreign land to them. Their minds are set on tv shows and the stock market.
Thanks for your thoughtful column, David.
Canadians need to be reminded of D-Day these days, especially when our direct connections to that momentous event — veterans who took part in the Normandy landings and civilians who lived through the Second World War — have disappeared. Like you, I’m surprised that the federal government has said almost nothing about it. I’m also disappointed by the lack of media attention.
I wholeheartedly agree with your history prof’s assessment. Like it or not, the Soviet Union played a huge part in the Allies’ eventual victory. That fact should not be forgotten or glossed over.
We also can’t forget that the Eastern Front of the Second World War was really a war between two equally brutal, murdering, genocidal dictatorships — Hitler’s Nazi Germany against Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Stalin’s genocide was the Holodomor, also known as the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 — although there appears to be some disagreement amongst modern historians about how much of the carnage was the result of a deliberate plan by the Stalinist regime, and how much an intended byproduct of their collectivization project. Nevertheless, millions of Ukrainians starved to death or died of starvation-related diseases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
So, while we do need to remember the sacrifice of those millions of Soviet Red Army soldiers who died in what the USSR called the “Great Patriotic War”, we also should not sugarcoat the regime that sent them to the front.
And, we also should not neglect the fact that Hitler only invaded Poland in September 1939 after he’d signed that cynical “Non-Aggression Pact” with Stalin in August, divvying up Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union.
Not like dear old democratic Blighty, eh?, which for imperial and ideological reasons (exporting grain to the home island and laissez-faire economics) starved between 30 and 60 million human beings to death on the Indian subcontinent between 1876 and 1902. And unlike Stalin, warts and all, I don’t recall Messrs. Disraeli, Gladstone, Salisbury, Rosebery, or Balfour facing an existential threat from a foreign invader to either the empire or the home island. Correct me if I’m wrong. This was done, by the way, with the complete support of Canadian governments during those years.
There was one catastrophic famine after the soviets took over ukraine, which was exacerbated by the Kulaks setting their crops on fire rather than collectivize. They enjoyed their privileged class and ability to gouge the peasant class for seeds and tools, and they resented the soviets usurping their power. There was resistance in ukraine (notably Mahkno and his anarchists) but they weren’t pro kulak either. The class with the most deprivation and starvation turned out to be … the Kulaks.
It’s interesting to note that under the tsar ukraine had revolving famines and starvation that primarily decimated the peasant class, you know the ones that rose up and seized the land….
Holodomor means genocide famine, which in itself flies in the face of recorded history. The whole point of the Soviets was to organize different classes of workers into councils that represented each other at the Soviet, the USSR being a union of these Soviets. Being that the peasant class in ukraine survived (and whether you like it or not many of their descendents voted to rejoin Russia after 2022) ukraine was organized into a agricultural powerhouse that it remains to this day serves as a healthy rebuttal to any idea of an intentional genocidal famine. There is also a scholarly work published by a prominent Ukrainian scholar from the U of A ; I think it’s called the holodomor myth, I can’t remember I read it in 2020. Have a go at his footnotes if you don’t believe me.
Thirty million Soviets died in WW2 not just the troops. The entirety of Soviet society gave everything they absolutely had to defeat the Reich. The fact that you would take this moment to engage in anti communist propaganda is shameful, ahistorical, and makes you look foolish.
Oh and btw, In 1943 the Soviets prisons were primarily filled with organized criminals, fascists, and White Russians. All of whom engaged in crimes against the state: I’ll also remind you that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote fiction, and he was also a rabid anti communist.
It is essential to the separatists and Alberta-first types that we forget WWII and the sacrifices made by Canadians from every part of the country, and especially to forget how Canada and the world pulled together in an act of unity to defeat fascism, a term which must never be spoken these days, although the acts of fascism leading up to actual fascism are fine, apparently, especially in democratic nations like — gasp — Canada, in Conservative provinces. That is a run-on sentence, but it’s nowhere near as bad as the grave mistake we are making in forgetting the war-to-end-all-wars, for now we are surely heading down the path of repeating history. We see what is happening south of the border. A certain no-name Alberta premier is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It’s now or never if we are going to stop this power-hungry madness. Decide if you are willing to lose everything including your freedom or fight back. Freedom isn’t free. We need to call fascism by its name and do something about it now or live with the consequences forever.
How sad that the WWII veterans begged us never to forget and we did.
Thanks for this post.
One of my uncles was part of that hammer. I don’t forget.
My paternal grandfather, who grew up in Sedgewick, fought in WWII. His father (Wainwright) fought in WWI and, along with his wife, was an army cook at one of the Alberta bases in WWII. My maternal grandfather (Edmonton) also fought in WWII, and my maternal grandmother’s brother died while fighting as a pilot for the Air Force. My grannie was scared of Alberta thunderstorms as they reminded her of the Blitz in London. I don’t forget either. I’m in my 50s, but traumatic war stories were all around. Grandpa belonged to the Sedgewick Legion until the day he died and dressed up every year for the parade.
Hello DJC and fellow commenters,
Thank you for a great column. Goethe and commenters in a similar vein are right. For example, we are living in a province whose leader wants to break up the country, which is appalling.
My Dad landed on Juno Beach near the beginning of the assault, with Caen as the objective. He was awarded the Military Medal, which is a decoration. He was cited by his superiors for bravery and calmness under fire, and the decoration was presented by King George VI. Sadly, my Dad’s cousin in the RAF died at the age of 26.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Order of the Day (June 6 1944)
SUPREME HEADQUARTERS
ALLIED EXPEDITIONARY FORCE
Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!
You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hope and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.
Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely.
But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!
I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory!
Good luck! And let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.
Walter Robert Jones (Bob), my father, soldier and newspaper man, fought in WWII, up through into Holland until he was wounded. Kenneth Warne, My father in-law. He fought in the Battle of Britain, then with the British 8th in North Africa. They, like all, were good men. RIP
Things are different now. My son probably never heard my WWII veteran father’s brief observation (as all his recollections of the War were) that, “We never woulda won without the Rooskies,” as he called the Soviet-ally, and surely my grandchildren never did. But I did, usually on “Armistice Day,” as he called it, because my brother and I always attended Remembrance Day with him at the Cenotaph in Pickering or Markham, Ontario, back when there were WWI vets attending as well. My dad seemed to hold these old duffers in higher esteem as the real heroes, even though he saw much, much greater destruction in the sequel to their terrible ordeal.
He was born in 1918, used to say he was the reincarnation of the last Allied soldier killed in The Great War. I never knew if he was joking or not. It took many years for me to realize it was his way of putting his own war experience on the other side of the mythological River Lethe, into the realm of forgetfulness. My 94 year-old mother only recently told me that he and a bunch of his comrades were hospitalized when they got back—something about moving DPs around after Nazi Germany’s surrender, some from the death camps. Hell-shocked, you could say.
I shudder now at what he just have thought about the post-war inundation of triumphant Hollywood and British war movies or Hogan’s Heroes or us saucy, spoiled little brats “playing guns” around the house. Plastic, camouflaged tommy-guns and rubber grenades were standard B-Day and X-Mass gifts for boys back then. His pain probably kept him from admonishing us mouthy teenaged punks and our dearth of appreciation for the sacrifices he and his comrades made; he didn’t talk about the war very much at all, not even when we became smart-ass “revolutionaries” condemning the Vietnam War in thoughtlessly overgeneralized terms that seethed with self-righteous hatred of the ‘war-mongers’ —which effectively included our own fathers whether we meant to or not.
First time I felt ashamed of that inconsideration was in college when our history teacher, attempting to express a personal aside whilst giving a potted lecture on D-Day, became overwhelmed with emotion and had to step out of the auditorium. He obviously felt it was his duty to commemorate his comrades, as he allowed he and they attempted the disastrous landing at Dieppe. It was like a stab in the heart. I never again called veterans “war-mongers” or, for that matter, ever again used the porcine insult we hurled at police.
When I saw self-styled “Freedumb” fighters refusing to comply with Covid protocols, I and many others immediately compared them to the cooperative, all-in patriotism of the War years. I still worry that we’ll never be able to muster such force again with that kind of radical “libertarianism” permeating society. Naturally I hope we never have another world war because, if we do, we’re probably toast on that count alone.
Our recollections of the two Wars became so cliché, so formalized, so semi-forgotten. Comparably, many immigrant Holocaust survivors assiduously sheltered their children from the horrors they experienced out of a sort of perverse, or ironic sense of shame which survivor Primo Levi so deftly analyzed. That’s the reality, the horrid conundrum of our evolution to the nuclear age: to both forget and to never forget.
North America is both cursed and blessed because although our total effort was devoted to fighting in Europe, our sacrifices were substantial, and our whole society irrevocably changed, we were never invaded, nor were our cities flattened, nor our civilian neighbours shocked and bewildered by fear, guilt, shame, and insufferable memories. The USA celebrated WWII for its promotion to superpower. Today it’s sometimes hard to remember that it was with an attitude of magnanimity, generosity, and principle.
Did it end because the USA thence lost every military engagement except nuclear detente (an intentional non-engagement for obvious reasons)? There was no post-war economic boom awaiting US soldiers when they returned home from Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, only an insidious Odyssean complex susceptible to the charge that they weren’t celebrated heroes, or that they were being laughed at. That of course is the same provocation that Hitler used—that the world was “ripping us off” and “laughing at us.”
I never believed that tRump kept a copy of Mein Kampf on his bedside table because, having read it myself, I know it’s way too disjointed, tedious, and stupefyingly boring for a guy who never even read his own book—so his ghost-writer plausibly claims—, but I can see how some might think it true given the similar demagogic tactic of riling the already disaffected. Still, no US GI ever returned to triple-digit inflation and mass unemployment like veterans of Germany’s last imperial War did.
But it’s different now. Even as recently as 2024 it was considered a faux pas to equate tRumpublicanism with Nazism (I had a post blocked at the Tyee for making a comment on certain economic policy because I that happened to mention it was practiced in, among other places, “Nazi Germany”). Since the advent of tRump 2.0 the fat’s in the fire as to the use—often accusatory tone—of every fascist trope imaginable, tRump’s ICE goons equated with SS stormtroopers or Nazi Gestapo, the demonization “Antifa,” the assaults on democracy, Alligator Alley and Central American torture prisons. But I hasten to remind that there is no real comparison between the Germany of the 1930s and tRumpublican USA. MAGA hyperbole increasingly frustrates any attempt at proportion and balance.
The somewhat stilted but essentially patriotic and humanitarian remembrances of the Wars have thus been subsumed by today’s “culture war,” —here and now, not “Over There.” The popular 1917 rallying song that assured “The Yanks are coming/The Yanks are coming/The drums rum-tumming everywhere” means something totally different today.
Notorious for historical revisionism belying utter ignorance, and admirer of real dictators, tRump —probably unwittingly—also contrasts with Hitler who, unlike the Orange Osteopath, was not a territorial megalomaniac: the Nazi dictator was keen to convince the world his goals were limited, and to reason it was only fair High German culture should acquire Lebensraum—“living-space”— to the East like Low German Dutch and English did in the New World to the West. Adolph fancied the “Anglo-Saxon nations” would acquiesce or even collaborate with him as fellow Germanic peoples, as he imagined the North Germanic Scandinavians, with their Quislings, and the Frankish descendants of Northern France, or Vichy, would also do.
The Soviets, however, understood that the pretence of scattered German enclaves in the western Slavic world and Nazi race theory rationalized Lebensraum at their expense. Stalin, a natural paranoiac, bitterly complained to Churchill and Roosevelt that they were purposely dragging their heels about opening the Western Front. The Georgian genocidal maniac bluntly accused the West of perfidy, of allowing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops by tarrying; though Western leaders secretly approved whatever diminishment of a post-war communist threat might be achieved in this way, they understood that the profligate expenditure of men was always the Russian strategy: overwhelm the invader with its superior numbers of troops and slave-labour-produced planes, artillery and tanks (although of low-quality compared with the excellent German engineering and fine workmanship —also often built by slave labour—, the Soviets availed the vastness of their country to shift military manufacturing out of Germany’s tactical reach and achieve the most rapid industrialization in world history).
Stalin was constantly reminded that the West was suffering horrendous loses at sea to Nazi U-boats while supplying the Soviets materiel via Murmansk and Archangel, not to mention that Britain was also under attack, facts which Churchill and Roosevelt used to excuse that they preferred to wait until the buildup of overwhelming technological and tactical force assured victory —that is, the total, unconditional defeat of Nazism, the only thing Stalin concurred with them. It was simply impolitic for Western democracies to throw troops into the fray as attritive cannon fodder—something the dictator naturally could not understand.
Stalin might have looked at it another way: without the Western Allies, the Soviets might have been able to expel German troops from their federation, but probably not achieve the unconditional defeat and destruction of Nazism.
Nazi race theory considered Slavs to be one notch higher on the subhuman scale than Jews, but since they were combatants (most transported Jews were civilians) and communists to boot, the masses of captured Soviets were summarily executed whereas Jews fit enough were worked to death (while their elders and women with children were summarily executed). The Soviets were strategically willing to sacrifice any number of men (so too Hitler who in a snit cut a whole army off as it was encircled in the ruins of Stalingrad and inevitably destroyed or interned). Yet Western Allied POWs were interned in camps, not starved or frozen to death like millions of Soviet POWs were. Putin’s perfidy today is floated domestically, at least in part, on these facts. His profligate expenditure of troops in Ukraine is typical, historical Russian.
But the world is different today, his theories of national security and resurrected Nazism in Ukraine are as disappointing as they are outdated. But, because Russia is a harsh authoritarian state, it’s hard for him to know exactly how many of his citizens actually buys his strategic and historical theories. Donald tRump, on the other hand, has a pretty good idea how many US citizens buy his “strategic” and “historical” theories. It’s why he’s starting to panic that the only way to survive growing disaffection is to rig elections. Like his buddies Vlad and Kim.
Not only is today’s world a distraction, I think it also makes people reticent to remind of the Great Wars for fear that it might become a self-fulfilling prophecy, fear that we have already regressed, fear that “never again” will have to be learned all over again, if indeed we survive our 82 year-old capacity to nuke-fry the planet. Again I hasten to remind that fear is the thing itself we need to fear. There is no real present-day comparison to Nazi Germany or WWII except, naturally, that we should never forget.
Ukraine is literally press ganging people to go to the front, Russia has more volunteers than they need. Zelensky is saying in cabinet meetings that he needs “Goebbels propaganda” and that there is no “No” in a “dictatorship”. Give your head a shake, actually. Try reading press other than the rah rah west, seriously. For your own mental health, and mine.
This isn’t me saying this, it’s a former cabinet minister, herself a rabid anti Russian. As far as Nazis in Ukraine, they’re not exactly shy about it; when people tell you who they are you should listen. Whether you like it or not there is ONE COUNTRY at the forefront of white nationalism right now and it’s the Ukraine, if you don’t know that you don’t know much about it at all.
Scotty– Personally I don’t agree with the comparison of d’rump with A.H.
Having watched the PBS series of “The Rise of Fascism” ,I’m much more inclined to think that he fashions himself around Mussolini.
From the time he ‘pushed’ the President of Montenegro out of his way, then chin up to the front of the line, he has a way of nudging himself in front of any foreign dignitary: he even did it with Xi.
With his “buildings” and the ‘machismo’ culture of the DoW, I wouldn’t be too surprised of who he wants to emulate.
The shirt colors are as much a personal choice as the “pretty ships”. To our own detriment, if we do not want to see.
Very Good Read. Thank-You.
To be fair, the PM did post a commemorate of D-day on his social media page yesterday.
With family who have served in the military; both army and navy, I appreciate first hand the sacrifices that our men and women have given to our country. I would also like to note that the PM also posted his thanks on this being Armed Forces Day.
Thank you for this important column David, may we all remember not only the brave Soviet soldiers who took Berlin, but their fellow countrymen who gave up their lives to defeat the Nazis. Thirty million souls. May they Rest in Peace and Glory.
Bird: Indeed. I am reminded of Paul Robeson’s translation of their national anthem, which says in part …
We fought for the future, destroyed the invader,
And brought to our homeland the laurels of fame!
Her glory will live in the memory of nations,
And all generations will honor her name!
DJC
Every year we should remember that the Red Army had suffered 7 million irrecoverable casualties by June, 1944. We should also remember that the Red Army was fighting bona fide German Nazis and Italian fascists in Spain in 1936. Likewise the Red Army was fighting the Imperial Japanese in 1935 and was in major combat with the Japanese in 1939 in Manchuria. Canada remained a racist, colonialist vassal of the British Empire throughout this period, which is why there is all this fuss about residential schools and what have you today. The British Empire signed the Anglo-German Naval agreement in 1935, in violation of the Versaille limitations on German armaments. The Soviet Union pleaded with the British and French and Polish through the late thirties for an alliance against the Nazis, and was rebuffed at every turn. The British then let the Nazis take Czechoslovakia and Poland helped themselves to a long-disputed Czech territory. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was signed by the Soviets after the under-handed behaviour of the British and the amidst ongoing belligerence of the Polish military dictatorship toward Nazi Germany. Subsequent to 1939 and the invasion of Poland, the British Empire, with its vassals like Canada, ran around the mediterranean and Asia once the Japanese went after the European empires, and left the Germans to launch the greatest bloodbath in history, the anti-communist crusade against the Soviet Union. The Anglo landings in France preserved a right-wing imperialist apparatus in Europe, freeing up the French, Belgian and Dutch Empires to get right after beating down their brown and yellow subjects. A great example being the Malagasay massacre of 1947 in which the French massacred perhaps 30 000 civilians. The West German state and financial apparatus were chock-a-block with unreformed Nazis, as were those of Italy. The post-war Japanese state and financial apparatus was loaded with war criminals from their Manchukuo puppet state in Manchurian China. The D-Day landings made sure that the US Empire would own Europe, a condition that prevails to this day. The entire accepted narrative of The Big One in the US Empire, which includes lackey Canada, is a silly fairy tale.
I find it hard to forget the Canadian contributions to the defeat of fascism in WW II. My great Aunt’s home was very close to the Ortona Barracks home to the Loyal Edmonton Regiment which had a bloody victory in the mountains of Italy. My father, born just outside of Coventry witnessed the destruction of the city centre. He served in the RAF servicing the top secret radar. The Russians were allies, and to paraphrase Churchill, he would have welcomed assistance from the devil, if the devil was against Hitler.
https://scholars.wlu.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=/context/cmh/article/1143/&path_info=2__The_Rock_of_Accomplishment__The_Loyal_Edmonton_Regiment_at_Ortona_Autumn_1993.pdf DJC
I do appreciate this historical post. Here’s a story I ran across which is unrelated, but interesting; Chinese workers in Russia to build railways were stranded by the Russian Revolution and recruited to fight by the British. Other Chinese and Korean workers were forced to join the Bolsheviks. Eventually both groups were evacuated and returned home the long way round, travelling west to Halifax then Vancouver Island then to China.
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/explore-the-collection/stories/forgotten-front-chinese-auxiliaries-in-northern-russia/