D-Day: 78 Years After His Father Endured a Nazi Attack, a Canadian Man Travelled to France to Retrieve Remnants of His Harrowing Survival

The mere mention of “June 6” triggers images of Allied troops storming the iconic beaches of Normandy during D-Day, the greatest invasion gamble of the Second World War. And with all those years of research, analysis and interviewing of the battle’s veterans since 1944, it seems impossible that any stories remain unfound or untold. Freelance contributor and military historian Ted Barris contends there will always be new D-Day stories unearthed — such as this one, in which a son is gifted physical remnants of his father’s harrowing survival following a Nazi attack.

 

One day in April, almost 78 years to the anniversary of D-Day, at a farm kitchen table in Basseneville, France, Harvey Engelberg came face-to-face with his father’s June 6, 1944, war story. There, on a red-and-white plaid tablecloth, Thérèse Férey and her husband Ghyslaine opened a towel to reveal 42 pieces of wartime-era aluminum. The Féreys had recently salvaged the Second World War artifacts from a forgotten corner of their farm. The jagged bits were all that remained of a DC-3 transport aircraft that had carried RCAF wireless radio operator Cobby Engelberg and a plane-full of paratroops into the middle of the greatest amphibious invasion in military history — Operation Overlord.

“Here,” Madame Férey said to Engelberg, now 69, at that first-ever meeting of the two. “We found these, but they belong to you.”

 

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In 1942, 19-year-old Ronnie Egan read an advertisement that said, “You too can free a man to serve at sea,” and she knew the Royal Canadian Navy was the right place for her. She served in wartime Halifax and left an indelible mark on the city and the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service there. Historian and Centennial College professor Ted Barris offers a wartime glimpse of Wren Ronnie Egan.

The full tribute to Ronnie Egan appeared in the Jan. 22, 2016, edition of the National Post.

Airforce magazine published this feature about a father and daughter who both love to fly and how their experiences apart and together have made for extraordinary times in the air.

On June 6, 1944 — 69 years ago today — nearly 15,000 Canadians joined the long-anticipated D-Day invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe. They attacked overland, from the sea and through the air. The 10-kilometre stretch of Normandy beach which Canadians wrested from the German defenders that day was code-named “Juno.”

As those Canadians engaged the enemy in a fierce campaign that would, 11 months later, see the surrender of a defeated Germany, they had no idea that one of their countrymen had played a small but critical role in bringing D-Day about.

(Full story published in the National Post, June 6, 2013)

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By Katie Starr

Kitchener-Waterloo Record

KITCHENER — Harry Watts’ trip to Italy 70 years after serving as a motorcycle dispatch rider in the Second World War was agrodolce — bittersweet.

Bitter because he retraced his footsteps, visiting a cemetery where 61 Canadian soldiers were killed in just two hours of battle.

Sweet because he met new friends and reconnected with old ones, sharing with them stories, memories and bottles of wine.

(Full story by Katie Starr appears in Kitchener-Waterloo Record, May 30, 2013)

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In November 2010, Jeff Jeffery, a former Halifax bomber pilot with 432 Sqn RCAF, Distinguished Flying Cross winner, and founding director/president of the Halifax Aircraft Association, died after a brief illness in Toronto. In his tribute, author and broadcaster Ted Barris reflects on the life of a one-of-a-kind Canadian.

The very last time his hands gripped the controls of a Halifax bomber overseas, his aerial combat days were well behind him. It was mid-September 1995. A long lost Halifax bomber – ditched in Lake Mjosa, Norway, more than a half-century before – began to emerge from its watery grave. A salvage team and its undersea equipment had successfully raised the sunken warbird for RCAF veteran Jeff Jeffery to witness.

“The first thing I saw was her wingtip, then her ailerons, then the tip of the outer starboard engine propeller … rising up out of the lake,” Jeffery recalled during an interview in 1997.

For the full story, click here.

Canada’s wartime history was rewritten 13 years ago this autumn.

Not a lot of it. But three Canadian air crewmen listed as missing in action became war dead with names and a story Sept. 6, 1997. at day, an o -duty airline pilot led a salvage expedition at the crash site of a Second World War bomber, near Geraardsbergen, Belgium. Shot down the night of May 9, 1944, Halifax bomber LW682 took all eight crewmen to their deaths. German troops quickly removed ve of the bodies before the Halifax vanished into the mud, it seemed, forever.

For the full story, click here.

Photography courtesy Neville Palmer