Honouring those who landed on D-Day

Juno Beach has become embedded in Canadians’ collective consciousness, Serge Durflinger says.

I first visited Normandy in 1987 — the site of D-Day, the Allied invasion — and I’ve returned about 15 times. Visiting Juno Beach, where the Canadians landed, is an intensely personal experience permeated with an abiding sense of loss. Juno is more than a pilgrimage site; in 1999, the Canadian government declared the assault on Juno a National Historic Event. It is the Second World War equivalent of the battle for Vimy Ridge.

Thursday marks the 75th anniversary of D-Day.

On June 6, 1944, nearly 150,000 Allied troops landed on an 80-kilometre stretch of the Norman coast, signalling the beginning of the end of the brutal German occupation of France and Western Europe. More than 14,000 of those men were Canadian and no fewer than 1,074 were casualties, including 359 killed. Worse was yet to come. The gruelling 11-week campaign in Normandy cost Canada more than 18,000 casualties, 5,021 of which were fatal. Every Canadian province, region, city, and town was affected by the carnage that desperate summer.

So, what have Canadians done to recall their D-Day over the last 75 years? A lot, actually.

Canadians have long commemorated the event, memorialized the lost and lionized the survivors. For decades, tens of thousands of Canadians have travelled to Normandy every year. Juno Beach is embedded in Canadians’ collective consciousness. This year, Canada will host a massive anniversary ceremony at Juno Beach attended by world leaders, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

The first Canadian commemorative event in Normandy took place in June 1945, one month after the war’s end. Over the years, Canadian veterans and the bereaved visiting the Canadian Commonwealth War Cemeteries at Bény-sur-Mer and Bretteville-sur-Laize have relived moments of grief, recalling faces they refused to forget.

In 1992, the Canadian Battle of Normandy Foundation was created with the goal of heightening awareness of Canada’s major role in Normandy. In 1995, that organization, since renamed the Canadian Battlefields Foundation, inaugurated a massive and much-visited memorial garden attached to Le Mémorial, a museum in Caen, just beyond Juno. That same year, the foundation launched its annual study tours for promising university students. These continue to the present day and are a testament to Canadian youth’s engagement with the country’s military past.

There is much of Canada to see in Normandy. After the war, those Canadian regiments and units who had landed along the roughly eight kilometres of Juno Beach erected memorials, cairns or plaques always in close co-operation with local land-owners and officials. The D-Day villages named streets, public spaces, parks, and buildings in honour of Canadian regiments, sometimes individual soldiers, and even their hometowns. There are more than a few “Place du Canada” in Normandy. But the most recognizable locale might be the seaside “Maison des Canadiens” in Bernières, whose owners for decades have held an open house every June 6.

In this anniversary year, the local Comité Juno and the small town of Chambois, where the Battle for Normandy came to a close, is unveiling a monument dedicated to the Canadians.

Canadian visitors can find a “home away from home” at the Juno Beach Centre in Courseulles, sitting squarely on the very location of the Canadian assault. Opened in 2003 with private and public funds, the centre is part museum, part memorial, and part heritage site. No other country participating in the invasion has erected anything like it and it will be at the heart of one of this year’s international ceremonies. It embodies a tangible link between past and present, between those who made history and those who will never forget it. It demonstrates to the world that Canada is back in Normandy, permanently. In fact, it never left.

Serge Durflinger is a professor of history at the University of Ottawa. He is assisting the regional government of Normandy to have the landing beaches declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.