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CALGARY, Alta. — Most of the great seaborne invasion of Normandy hadn’t even begun, but the Canadian paratrooper’s letter home already sounded like a deadly play-by-play.
“We are each of us, alone and terribly lonely. It is 0100 hours on the 6th of June. We are in Normandy.”'I miss him terribly': Remembrance Day is different this year for N.L. families following the passing of D-Day veterans But Griffin goes on to scold the pilots of Allied Spitfire fighter planes for mistakenly strafing his unit for 10 minutes, wounding one colleague with a 20-mm shell.
Hours after the two parachutists had touched ground, Calgarian George Couture was among the second wave of invaders to reach a beach code-named Juno, a 10-kilometre frontage flanked by four other sectors targeted by British and American troops. But it was good enough to put up a stout defence that claimed 359 Canadian lives on that first day, with another 574 wounded.
He spent the following weeks as a prisoner helping evacuate dead and wounded German soldiers while under withering Allied artillery and air attack.He’s among those in the fast-dwindling ranks of aging survivors of the amphibious assault and subsequent vicious battles of the Normandy campaign. “Dad was a good shot, that’s why he went to that regiment,” said the Calgarian, adding recruiters avoided placing too many men from a single village in one unit “so if they were all hit, the whole town wouldn’t be wiped out.”
Just before the war ended the following spring, possibly in the Netherlands, Lee was wounded again — this time shot in the leg. “We didn’t know exactly what the event build-up was, with all the secrecy, but everyone had a sense something was happening — there were encampments that were turning up in every green space,” said Phillips.
“I do remember being shocked to think that those friendly guys who let me climb on their vehicles may be dead.” “I would play on them and stand at the top of their dropped ramps imagining what it would have been like on D-Day when the ramp dropped and the machine gun bullets were flying,” he said.The Canadians’ ability to push farther inland on June 6 than any of the Allies quickly drew the enemy’s attention but the German troops who attempted to push the Canadians into the sea “were slaughtered, though they slaughtered us later,” said Dr.
Less than three weeks after the Normandy landings the Soviets, with considerable material help from the West, launched a steamrolling offensive in what’s now Belarus that destroyed the Wehrmacht’s eastern lynchpin, Army Group Centre. To showcase the triumph of their Operation Bagration, the victors in mid-July marched 57,000 German POWs through the streets of Moscow led by two dozen freshly captured generals.
“When the war ended, western forces were in control of Western Europe and ensured the Soviets wouldn’t be,” he said. He points to Calgarian James Blain, a telegrapher on the Royal Canadian Navy corvette HMCS Drumheller, which was tasked with warding off German U-boats during the assault and whose journey to that day is laid out in personal records supplied by his family.
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