Vancouver Island sacrificed disproportionately on June 6, 1944 — soldiers of the Victoria-based Canadian Scottish Regiment were among the first ashore in Normandy on D-Day
“Every once in a while you wake up in the night and, boom, you’re right there,” he said, gripping the arms of his wheelchair.
It was awful. Fallen Canadians. Fallen Germans. “It was just a sea of dead and dying. You never forget it.” Real life to a lot of other Islanders, too. Vancouver Island sacrificed disproportionately on June 6, 1944. Bob Parlow was offshore aboard HMCS St. Laurent, which was firing at German positions. Frank Poole’s D-Day mission was to lead enemy fighters away from the Allied bombers. He was eventually shot down over Germany and ended up a prisoner of war.
Clark was transferred to the Canadian Scottish just before D-Day. A Polish ship ferried his company across the English Channel. They scrambled down netting hanging from its hull to get to the landing craft that ran them to Juno Beach. Some of the Canadian Scottish had been ferried across the English Channel aboard HMCS Prince Henry, which in peacetime served the B.C. coast as a Canadian National steamship.
A reporter interviewed Davie after he returned to the Prince Henry: “Davie said the flotilla sailed through many beach obstacles to reach shore. In addition to rusty-looking mines and concrete pickets, there were trip wires stretched along the water’s edge. A platoon led by Lt. Roger Schjelderup, a Canadian Scottish officer from Courtenay, ended the day with only 19 of 45 soldiers unscathed.
That’s a very stripped-down version of a harrowing story that would been made into a Hollywood movie were Schjelderup from another country. He would survive until 2014, when he went out the way he wanted: in his own bed on the Salt Spring farm where he stubbornly lived alone. Tough old guy, just like his little brother Terry, another Canadian Scottish sergeant who would heal from his own wounds and return to Salt Spring where, like Ken, he farmed alone into his nineties.
As the years went by, the D-Day story became exactly that — a story, a black-and-white photo in a history text, not quite real to most of us.
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