We arrived in Normandy that spring in time for the anniversary observances of the liberation of France. Street posts, balconies and memorial parks were festooned in patriotic bunting, streamers and the national flags of France, Britain, America and Canada. And Germany!
“Why is the German flag with red, gold and black included?” I asked our tour guide on the trip.
“New theme this year,” she said. “Remembrance and reconciliation.” (more…)
Normally, I’d be feeling a bit nervous. But not this time. Last Tuesday morning, I just walked up a short set of stairs and onto a theatre stage, in St. Thomas, Ont. Unlike many times before, however, there was no audience, just the empty Princess Avenue Playhouse. Then, from the darkness in front of me, I heard the only other person in the theatre call to me.
“Camera’s rolling, Ted,” he said. “You can start anytime.”
And I began my annual Remembrance Day presentation for the Township of Southwold, this year with no audience, just a video camera. (more…)
Conditions gave him little cause for optimism. A large low-pressure weather cell had socked-in England and occupied France. Low clouds and high winds portended the worst circumstances for a crossing of the English Channel. The Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces commander chain-smoked his Camel cigarettes and shared stiff drinks with other SHAEF members at the back of the Red Lion public house in Southwick, England, waiting for better news.
It came on June 5, 1944. The rain let up. Winds abated. The Channel calmed. And Gen. Dwight Eisenhower reclaimed the element of surprise and unleashed “Operation Overlord” against Nazi-occupied Europe on June 6, 1944.
“You are about to embark upon a great crusade,” he wrote to Allied troops on the eve of D-Day. “The eyes of the world are upon you…” (more…)
Some things are just meant to happen. About five years ago, a woman in Port Perry made a decision about the artwork that had accumulated around her home for half a century. A large private collection of sketches, water colours and other paintings created by Carol Hodgkins-Smith’s father, Arnold Hodgkins, suddenly went public. The calendar was approaching Nov. 11, and Carol decided her father’s war art deserved a viewing right then and there in her home.
“I think it’s finally time to share my dad’s artwork with the rest of the world,” she told me. She even decided that she would allow some of the artwork to be sold as individual items. (more…)
It was a critical moment. My teacher friend Tish MacDonald stood behind the tombstone collecting her thoughts. Several dozen of her students from Uxbridge Secondary School quieted down in front of the headstone with the inscription, “Rifleman, Donald McKay Barnard,” etched into it. They waited for their teacher to offer testimony. They waited for Tish to speak her truth.
“This is why we come from Canada,” she said, barely holding back tears, “to respect what was lost here and to honour what men like Fred Barnard and his brother Donald sacrificed as young men.” (more…)
He sat down to rest. He sighed a long, audible sigh. And he smiled with a touch of satisfaction. Around Bill Novick, sat family and some of his fellow travellers gathered, this spring day, at a museum in Normandy, France. They all sensed that Bill had a story to tell: the time, just before D-Day, when his Halifax bomber was coned.
“Enemy gunners at Cologne (Germany) put up a box barrage (concentrated anti-aircraft fire) 3,000 feet high, two miles wide by 10 miles long,” he said. “Searchlights moved all over the sky … and we were coned by the lights. That required evasive action called a corkscrew.” That meant Pilot Officer Novick put the 18-tonne bomber into a violent dive one way, then another, at speeds up to 250 miles per hour to escape the lights and the anti-aircraft fire.
“It was four minutes of sheer terror,” he concluded. “If we were scared, it never entered my mind that I wasn’t going to make it.” (more…)
I know this sounds like a cliché, but I remember the day as if it were yesterday. It was 16 years ago, in the summer of 2003. I was standing in line at a bank in town waiting to pay my credit card bill. Ahead of me were an older man and, at the head of the line a friend of mine. My friend asked what I was doing these days.
“I’m writing a book about Canadians on D-Day,” I said.
“Big anniversary coming up,” my friend commented.
“Yes,” I said.
Then it was my friend’s turn for service at the teller’s wicket and he turned to the counter to do his banking. That left only the older man and me in the queue. That’s when the older fellow slowly turned to me and spoke.
“I was there,” he said quietly.
“A veteran, are you?”
“I was there,” he repeated and then continued, “on D-Day.” (more…)
He was supposedly the warm-up act. He was Tim Isberg, a singer-songwriter from Fort Macleod, Alberta. And I was supposedly the main event, offering a talk about veterans’ stories, and how I came by them. But, as I sat there waiting for Isberg to finish his set, I was mulling over a problem in my head. I wasn’t quite sure where to start my presentation. Suddenly, I paid attention to what Isberg was singing.
“Listen to the voice,” he sang in a calming sort of way. “Listen to the voice calling me … calling you.” (more…)
Early in 1943, the military planners in London, England, coped with the ebb and flow of the Second World War, but they did so secretly. Squirrelled away in his tiny office at the British War Office, an experienced Canadian-born artillery officer grappled with a logistics problem about an upcoming military operation. But the stress proved overwhelming for hm. He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t focus. To switch his mind off before bed, he tried reading detective stories. Then, he tried something completely different.
“I set up a fly-tying table,” Charles Falkland Loewen wrote in his memoirs, “and before going to bed sat down to tie a fly or two. I found that this absorbed one’s complete attention … and really unbuttoned my mind from current problems.” (more…)
A student pilot nearly killed him in a training accident in November 1942. While still an instructor in the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, during the Second World War here in Canada, he’d survived a head-on collision with another aircraft near Bagotville, Quebec. And overseas during combat operations flying Spitfires, RCAF airman Charley Fox also survived 234 combat sorties as a fighter pilot. And yet, it was a June evening in 2006, that Charley told me just about topped them all.
“Meeting Dame Vera Lynn,” Fox said, “was a highlight in my life.” (more…)