Eighteen Halifax heavy bombers left their base in Yorkshire about two hours after midnight, on their way to hit a German coastal gun battery in Normandy. No. 433 Squadron, Royal Canadian Air Force, had struck targets in Nazi-occupied France before. But this time, as they reached the English Channel, they realized they were on a very different mission.
Aboard aircraft serial LV-839, Flying Officer Edwin Widenoja noticed that dots had started to fill up his radar screen. He looked down through the plane’s nose window and saw what had been pinging his surface-mapping device. “There was a tremendous mass of ships all spaced out in rows to the horizon. We were flying at 15,000 feet and the view below was thrilling. We knew now that we were taking part in one of the biggest moments in history,” he remembered.
He called over the intercom to the rest of the crew: “It’s the invasion! It’s D-Day! At last!”
The Globe's edition from June 6, 1944, included embargoed details on how the Allies prepared for that day's D-Day landings.
It was the early hours of June 6, 1944. By the end of the day, 150,000 Allied soldiers, including 15,000 Canadians, would set foot in Normandy, opening a new front in the war against Nazi Germany.
Thursday, on the 80th anniversary of the landing, few of the Canadians who took part in that turning point of the Second World War are still among us.
But there is a place where their recollections can be found, in dozens of stories – heroic, poignant or comical – that were written down just a few years after the event.
A former war correspondent, Cornelius Ryan, had made a callout for testimonies from D-Day participants as he wrote his 1959 book about the invasion, The Longest Day. It became a best-seller later adapted into a Hollywood blockbuster.
Mr. Ryan only used a portion of the submissions he received from 116 Canadian veterans. The rest, along with testimonies from American, British, German and French witnesses, sat for decades in an archive at Ohio University.
Five years ago, the university began digitizing the Ryan papers. Geoff Osborne, a Toronto resident whose grandfather’s testimony is in the archive, helped spread word of the untold eyewitness accounts. Volunteers helped transcribe the papers. A not-for-profit group, the Canadian Research and Mapping Association, made a video where some of the Canadian stories were read by the likes of Peter Mansbridge, actor Jay Baruchel and others.
Among the archive’s Canadian contributions is Flying Officer Widenoja’s testimony. His recollection and those from two dozen other participants offer a vivid Canadian perspective into one of the decisive battles of the last century.
Canada's D-Day forces disembarked on a stretch of coast dubbed Juno Beach, one of five landing zones divvied up among Allied militaries as part of an operation codenamed Overlord. At the time, France and the Benelux countries had spent four years under Nazi occupation, but Overlord would soon change that.
25 km
English Channel
Cherbourg
American
British
Canadian
German coastal
batteries
UTAH
June 17
OMAHA
June 7
GOLD
JUNO
Pointe-du-Hoc
SWORD
Carentan
June 7
July 17
Caen
Front lines of
Allied troops
by date
FRANCE
Allied front line
June 6, 1944
August 1
Note: Axis and Allied were the two major alliances during the Second World War. The Axis powers were led by Germany, Italy, and Japan. The Allied powers were those allied in opposition to the Axis - Great Britain, France (except during the German occupation in 1940–44), the Soviet Union, the United States and China. The Axis-aligned countries supported the Axis powers in the war for economic or territorial gains.
Sources: Reuters; Maps4News; U.S. Department of Defense; Historical GIS of the Normandy Invasion: Oceanography Department, U.S. Naval Academy; The Spatial History Project, Stanford University; Encyclopedia Britannica.
25 km
English Channel
Cherbourg
American
British
Canadian
German coastal
batteries
UTAH
June 17
OMAHA
June 7
GOLD
JUNO
Pointe-du-Hoc
SWORD
Carentan
June 7
July 17
Caen
Front lines of
Allied troops
by date
FRANCE
Allied front line
June 6, 1944
August 1
Note: Axis and Allied were the two major alliances during the Second World War. The Axis powers were led by Germany, Italy, and Japan. The Allied powers were those allied in opposition to the Axis - Great Britain, France (except during the German occupation in 1940–44), the Soviet Union, the United States and China. The Axis-aligned countries supported the Axis powers in the war for economic or territorial gains.
Sources: Reuters; Maps4News; U.S. Department of Defense; Historical GIS of the Normandy Invasion: Oceanography Department, U.S. Naval Academy; The Spatial History Project, Stanford University; Encyclopedia Britannica.
Territorial control as of May 1944
25 km
English Channel
Allied
Cherbourg
Neutral
American
British
Canadian
Axis / Axis-aligned
Axis occupied
German coastal
batteries
UTAH
June 17
Norwegian
Sea
OMAHA
June 7
GOLD
JUNO
Pointe-du-Hoc
SWORD
Carentan
June 7
July 17
London
Caen
Front lines of
Allied troops
by date
Moscow
Berlin
FRANCE
Detail
Allied front line
June 6, 1944
August 1
Paris
Rome
Note: Axis and Allied were the two major alliances during the Second World War. The Axis powers were led by Germany, Italy, and Japan. The Allied powers were those allied in opposition to the Axis - Great Britain, France (except during the German occupation in 1940–44), the Soviet Union, the United States and China. The Axis-aligned countries supported the Axis powers in the war for economic or territorial gains.
Sources: Reuters; Maps4News; U.S. Department of Defense; Historical GIS of the Normandy Invasion: Oceanography Department, U.S. Naval Academy; The Spatial History Project, Stanford University; Encyclopedia Britannica.
The night before
For those heading to Juno, the beach assigned to Canadian troops, the sea was very choppy during the nighttime crossing. It was bad enough that some men looked forward to fighting on dry land.
“The majority of men, including myself, were so seasick during the Channel crossing that we didn’t care what the Germans did, just as long as we could set foot on good Earth again,” Sapper Robert Graham, a combat engineer, wrote.
But the Canadians also carried the knowledge that their own army had suffered heavy losses during the disastrous 1942 raid at the French port of Dieppe. “Some of the boys talked about Dieppe, and hoped that we would have a better time of it, no matter where we landed,” recalled Gunner Arthur Boon of the 19th Field Regiment, Royal Canadian Artillery.
Members of the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion, along with American and British airborne soldiers, were the first to descend on French soil, dropping at night in the countryside behind the beaches. Private Percival Liggins was about to jump when his feet got caught in the parachute static lines snarled on the floor of his transport aircraft. He lost his rifle as he tumbled out head first. “My chute no sooner opened that I landed into a large tree. I went through the branches and landed on my butt on the ground.”
He was entangled in his harness but others helped him. Another paratrooper had touched down on an electrical transmission tower. One man tried to reach out to the stranded jumper by offering his Sten submachine gun to grab onto, but he still had his finger on the trigger and almost shot the other Canadian.
As they set out toward their objective, Pte. Liggins found his rifle, which was dangling from a tree and smacked him in the face.
U.S. paratroopers cross the English Channel to Normandy. Jumping into combat came with deadly risks, not just from German bullets but parachute malfunctions or landings in the wrong place.The Associated Press
Captain Colin Nichol Brebner, a medical officer, parachuted into a tall elm tree. He tried to swing toward a smaller tree below but missed and plummeted 15 metres, breaking his pelvis and his left wrist. Unable to walk, he had to stay on the ground.
In the morning, he could see bodies around him. He wanted to numb his pain with morphine but, with only one uninjured hand, he tried to open the syrette with his teeth and spilled its content.
A British airborne medical section later found him. They injected him with morphine and he fell asleep. He woke up to the sounds of a German patrol collecting the paratroopers’ guns and lining them up as prisoners. The British medics carried him on a makeshift stretcher as the Germans took them into captivity.
Other defenders were less effective. Many were Poles, Czechs or Russians dragooned into serving the Third Reich and now eager to surrender. Someone took a shot at Major Donald Wilkins, then a man came out from behind a hedge, threw down his gun and shouted, “Me Polska, me Polska.” The major took the man’s firearm and told him to go to a farmhouse nearby and wait.
Civilians also paid a price that night. Private Bill White said a French man volunteered to guide a handful of parachutists. “His wife did not want him to go. He was a young man and seemed to think that it was his duty. Shortly after, our group was jumped by an enemy patrol. He was killed instantly and none of us ever learned his name. We had to leave him there and continue.”
While the paratroopers fought in the dark, the invasion fleet drew close. It was still dark at 4 a.m. when the destroyer HMCS Algonquin, captained by Lieutenant-Commander Desmond Piers, arrived near the coast. “Flares, rockets and gunfire began to light up the sky from inshore. Probably the paratroops had landed, and the [air force] were doing some night bombing,” he wrote.
Lieutenant-Commander Desmond Piers looks out from HMCS Restigouche a few weeks before D-Day, when he commanded another Canadian destroyer, the Algonquin, to give cover fire to troops on land. He would spend more than three decades in the navy, rising to the rank of rear admiral, before his death in 2005.Lt John Daniel Mahoney/Dept. of National Defence/Library and Archives Canada
The landings
After the difficult cross-Channel journey, the dawn hours brought a dazzling sight to the seaborne assault troops. “Fighter planes were flying up and down over our boats. There were boats as far as the eye could see on all sides of us,” wrote Private Gordon Laing of the Highland Light Infantry of Canada.
Then the naval bombardment began. “We plastered the area with salvo after salvo … we set about demolishing any houses along the waterfront which looked like places for snipers,” said LCdr. Piers.
He saw sappers of the Royal Canadian Engineers clear the defensive barriers – metal beams, barbed wires and mines – ahead of the rest of the assault waves.
“Mighty bulldozers were plowing up the masses of shore obstacles, racing against the incoming tide. Sappers were disposing of land mines. The German pillboxes and strong points which had withstood the bombardment were subjecting the shoreline to incessant fire. Buildings were ablaze.”
John Schaupmeyer, shown at right with brother Charlie, was a combat engineer who took part in the D-Day landing.Courtesy of Berdien Johnson
Sapper John Schaupmeyer was among the combat engineers who landed, in the sector code-named Nan Red. They were supposed to destroy obstacles at low tide. However, the rough sea delayed them and now the cold rising water made it harder to set off explosive charges.
“We did our best, opened a small gap before the tide took over and covered these mined obstacles,” he wrote.
With the infantry coming behind them, Sapper Schaupmeyer and his fellow engineers ran to a seawall to shelter from the German shelling. “We were pinned down at this point. We carried no rifles, only long knives as rifles hindered our work on landing. We could have used them now but they were all hung on our armoured bulldozer.”
He saw a large infantry landing craft approach under enemy fire. However, its passengers couldn’t disembark quickly because the waves had entangled the gangplanks. One sapper, Walter Coveyduck, waded into the water to hold down the ramps and help the soldiers get off the ship, “away from that deadly spray of bullets.”
In the Nan Green sector, Sapper Gene Velux arrived with the first wave near Courseulles-sur-Mer. He remembered one fatalistic sapper was convinced that he wouldn’t come home. “He didn’t. I saw him being killed as soon as he hit the beach.”
Sapper Velux himself had a close call when a bullet struck his canteen. “The water was running down my legs and I thought it was blood. I was lucky.”
Troops from the Royal Winnipeg Rifles and Regina Rifles land on the Normandy coast, where they came under heavy fire.Ken Bell/Dept. of National Defence /National Archives of Canada
Following the sappers came waves of infantry. The Royal Winnipeg Rifles came ashore in the Mike sector. “Mortar and small arms fire was very heavy and our platoon was pretty well cut up and separated right on the beach,” said Lance Corporal John H. Hamilton.
He saw one soldier, Rifleman Phillip Genaille, killed by a bullet to the stomach. Another, Rifleman Andy Mutch, was swept to his death by the waves washing over their landing craft. (Two days later, Rifleman Mutch’s younger brother, Robert, was one of the 156 Canadian prisoners of war murdered by the Waffen SS.)
Cpl. Hamilton was struck by mortar shrapnel – “a sharp stinging sensation as though hit in the face with a baseball bat, then blood flowing down.” He ended up in a group of wounded stragglers and didn’t catch up with his unit until late that evening.
Those in later waves were confronted by the carnage that unfolded before their arrival. Mr. Ryan’s papers include ghastly descriptions of bodies bobbing in the waves, badly burned tank crews, a man with his guts spilling out of a belly wound.
Corporal George Fraser of the Cameron Highlanders of Ottawa noticed bodies of soldiers of the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada laying in the water a few yards off the beach.
A chaplain with the Camerons, Major John Forth, saw a private of the Regina Rifle Regiment trying to dig a grave with his hands for a dead comrade. “I consoled him in his grief – promised to see his chum was buried and sent the lad forward to join his unit. "
Brian O’Regan, at middle with two Russian gunners, rescued a film canister full of invaluable footage of the D-Day assault.Frank L. Duberville/National Archives of Canada/CP
Gunner Brian O’Regan belonged to the Canadian Army Film and Photo Unit, which documented the operation with their cameras. He found on the beach a sealed film canister with a label showing that it belonged to another unit member who had landed earlier, Sergeant Bill Grant.
Thinking that his friend had been hit, “I searched the faces of the dead and wounded on the beach for him, and not until much later, did I discover him alive and well,” Gunner O’Regan said.
In a memoir shared with The Globe and Mail by his son, James, Gunner O’Regan explained that he put the film into a bag and made sure it was sent back to England.
The film was the first footage to come back from the Normandy beaches. In the following days, it would be projected in newsreels around the world and is still frequently seen today, showing iconic images of Canadian soldiers scrambling out of their landing craft toward the beach.
A.A. Stewart, a private with No. 22 Field Ambulance, came with the North Shore (New Brunswick) Regiment to give first-aid to the wounded at Juno. According to the unit’s war diary, they worked under constant German fire that killed two stretcher bearers, severely injured a corporal and struck Pte. Stewart in the nose.
He saw a rushing Canadian tank run over several soldiers, and tear off an officer’s arm at the shoulder. Propped up against the seawall, the officer asked someone to retrieve a quart of whisky from his pack and share it. “He took a drink and passed it to me,” Pte. Stewart wrote. “I was fixing a guy up so I took the bottle and passed it onto the next fellow … I was so excited I didn’t look at the bottle.”
The Canadian nursing sisters who arrived in Normandy had their work cut out for them, treating the wounded as Allied soldiers headed further inland.Harold G. Aikman/Dept. of National Defence/Library and Archives Canada via Reuters
Moving inland
Later waves brought more troops, such as the Canadian Scottish Regiment, the Régiment de la Chaudière and field artillery units riding M7 Priests, a self-propelled howitzer mounted on a tank frame.
Corporal Fraser of the Cameron Highlanders saw members of the Chaudière clearing out German pillboxes. They also faced a sniper located in a church steeple. Corporal Fraser said one Chaudière soldier knocked down the sniper using a PIAT, a portable anti-tank weapon. “One shot did the trick.”
For the North Shore troops, the move inland was marked by the death of a well-liked senior officer, Major Archie MacNaughton, a company commander who had already served in the First World War.
At Tailleville, a few kilometres inland, Captain Joseph Leblanc told Major MacNaughton of his soldiers’ difficulty in flushing out the Germans. “He smiled and in his fatherly way he said he would give us assistance. This was the last word spoken to me by this wonderful officer because he was killed shortly after.”
On their west side, the self-propelled guns of the 14th Field Artillery Regiment were advancing in their Priest tracked vehicles outside the village of Bernières-sur-mer when they were ambushed by a German 88-mm anti-tank gun.
Three Priest guns took direct hits, turning them into “a mess of flaming gasoline and exploding cartridge cases,” said Lance Bombardier Francis Davies of the 14th Field Regiment.
“Somewhere to my right was a lot of noise and three columns of black smoke going straight up over the trees. Out of all this floated a piece of paper, charred around the edges, and landed right beside me.”
The scorched paper came from an army-issue pocket-size New Testament. He said that it was inscribed with the name of a popular member of his unit, a gunner named Clark.
He appeared to have misremembered the name because no one from his unit called Clark died on June 6. It is likely he was referring to a 14th Field Regiment gunner killed that day, Alfred Clavelle, a Saskatchewan farmer.
A note in Gunner Clavelle’s personnel file said his belongings couldn’t be returned because they were “destroyed by the fire and explosion in which the above lost his life.”
Lance Bombardier Davies didn’t have time to ponder much after seeing his comrades’ vehicles blow up. A German machine gun fired at him from behind a haystack. “I was standing up in the turret, half exposed, when a few of the slugs bounced off the turret within a foot of me,” he wrote.
Captain Clinton Gammon of the North Shore Regiment, who was knocked out by a shell blast, remembered feeling serene, convinced that he was dead. “I thought how nice it was, no noise, no shells landing, no burning wheat fields and no worry.” He regained consciousness as a soldier from the Chaudière Regiment “was nearly drowning me by pouring water down my throat.”
Meanwhile, captured enemies were escorted to the rear by wounded Canadians. Corporal Jack Raich, who was attached to the Canadian Scottish Regiment, saw a man, his arm in a sling, riding on a white farm horse while ordering about 50 dishevelled Germans to hurry up.
Canadian troops hold some of their German counterparts captive at Juno Beach on June 6. As the day went on, fighting would remain fierce as each side brought in reinforcements.Frank L. Duberville/National Archives of Canada/CP
The evening
After Canadian soldiers dug in for the night, the fighting continued in the sky as both sides carried out bombing missions and more allied airborne troops flew in.
Aboard HMCS Algonquin, Lt.-Cdr. Piers witnessed the arrival of glider-borne reinforcements. “The full moon began to rise over the beaches on the eastern flank. It was about this time when the seaward horizon became black with aircraft. As they approached they could be identified as tow and glider planes, hundreds upon hundreds of them,” he wrote.
“As this huge armada approached the landing point, it was met with determined flak from German [anti-aircraft] batteries inshore. We watched four huge four-motored planes come down to destruction.”
Also in the air that night, Flying Officer Widenoja and No. 433 Squadron had returned to Normandy for a second mission, a low-altitude raid against a rail junction to delay German reinforcements.
He wrote that the bomb blasts shook his aircraft, sending it into a dive. However, the pilot managed to regain control. “We were very fortunate to get back up to a safe height and head for home. Below and behind us the target area was a sea of fire and smoke rose high in the air.”
On the ground, some soldiers were taking stock of what they had lived through. There would be another 11 months of fighting before the Third Reich would surrender, but they had made it through a historic day.
In a foxhole, Pte. Laing could see German planes coming over the treetops to bomb the beaches.
“The most memorable part of June 6th was that there was not a man who went ashore that morning that was not fully prepared and more than willing to give his life for his chum beside him,” he wrote. “That I believe was largely responsible for the great success of the Normandy invasion.”
On June 6, 1944, Jim Parks of the Royal Winnipeg Rifles was among those storming Juno Beach, and would go on to fight in numerous battles through to the end of the war. He shares his story.
The Globe and Mail