Several days after our arrival in Normandy, I took one of the best organized tours I think I’ve ever been on in my life. (I say “I” because I suspect Leslie was feeling a little “warred out” and opted to let me do this one – Canada’s Normandy experience – by myself.)
I almost missed its start. I had been armed with instructions that our gite hostess had told me were pretty much foolproof, but obviously she was unfamiliar with the full scope of fool with whom she was dealing here. They were really quite simple: take the road to Bayeux and park by the cathedral near the Tapestry exhibit. “Bayeux / cathedral / thousand-year-old Tapestry” – pretty hard to screw that up, you’d think.
For starters, I drove the entire distance in the early morning in complete darkness. The sun on Normandy doesn’t so much rise as it does “appear”. And in October, its appearance in the Normandy sky is a rather abrupt illumination at about 7:45 am. Even though I had left myself (I thought) plenty of time to cover what our hostess said was about a 30-minute drive, I entered Bayeux and promptly took a wrong turn.
Here’s why. She indicated the first turn would be onto “boul Marachel LeClerc”. (Philippe LeClerc was a French WWII commander whose Second Armoured Division was the first unit into Paris when that city was liberated. Just about every town in France with a population of more than 20 has a street named after him.) So I dutifully turned when a rather large neon “LeClerc” sign appeared at a corner – only later discovering that LeClerc is also the name of a vast network of French department stores, jewelry stores and gas stations spread across a good chunk of Europe and there just happened to be one located at that particular intersection on my way into central Bayeux. (That it never occurred to me to wonder why there was only one street sign in all of Bayeux rendered in billboard-sized neon was testament to the absence of caffeine in my brain at this early point in my day.)
Still in the dark – literally and figuratively – after several minutes of twisting and turning through Bayeux’s hilariously narrow streets, I happened on a very active parking lot guarded by a phalanx of security guards. Apparently a trade show of some kind was in the process of setting up in a nearby display hall and they were tasked with keeping the public’s vehicles out of the lot until the exhibit transports had departed. Once they determined from my map where I wanted to be – and showed me just how far I had strayed – they steered me correctly.
And as it turned out, my “generous” time cushion turned out to have been reduced to no more than about eight minutes by the time I did indeed get parked where I was supposed to be. (I had also completely missed a one-way sign in the darkness in my circular course around the cathedral. A lucky break, as it turned out, not only because of the absence of any watching gendarmes, but also because it dumped me a mere half block away from my destination.) But eight minutes was enough and almost as though waiting for me, a passenger tour van swung into the parking lot just moments after I did. Just as the sky was turning into full daylight with the speed of a switch coming on.
At this point, I have to pass along a hearty plug for a Normandy tour company called Battlebus. I’ll describe my day over many coming paragraphs, but let me start by summing up: the guide, a fellow named Sean Claxton, had more in his head than I have in an entire shelf of WWII books at home. Throughout the day, he would manoeuvre us through more Canada-related D-Day places – both renowned and obscure – than I could possibly have found on my own, even given a month to do so. His running description was hallmarked by a perfectly balanced blend of information and sensitivity. He carried with him a large album of heavily laminated pages that, over the course of the tour, revealed themselves to be dozens of maps and photos. As the day went on, his album pages either augmented what we were looking at – or placed us in a given setting as it appeared in June, 1944. There may be shorter or perhaps slightly less expensive battlefield tours you can grab in Normandy. But I cannot possibly imagine any better.
Also at this point – a bit of an alert for readers who might already be “warred out”. I plan to relate my Canada-on-D-Day tour in this single post. (And in the process, of course, also relate a great deal of what happened in 1944.) So the above introductory description of my struggling entry into Bayeux notwithstanding, this post will be almost entirely devoted to the battle that brought Canada into France in WWII. For anyone not interested in that much history at one go – abandon hope all ye who enter here. (Come to think of it, for that matter, I might even wear down the history buffs.) But with that disclaimer... all aboard the Battlebus under the more than able guidance of Sean.
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We started our tour where approximately 14,000 men of the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division and the 2nd Canadian Armoured Brigade did – at Courseulles-sur-mer.
One of the best-known photos of Canadians landing on D-Day shows troops disembarking right on the shoreline via gangway stairs bracketing the bow of their large landing craft. They are carrying bicycles. (Photo: TheMonarchist.blogspot.com)
Visible in the distance in the left of the photo just above the beach is a large half-timbered house that still stands today and is known as the Canada House.
Here’s a photo of a photo I took from a display mounted right at Juno Beach that shows the house as it looked on D-Day,
and here it is as it appears today.
It was windy and raining heavily as we stood on the seawall. Sean told us that the sea was running much as it was when the Canadians landed. One significant difference in our view vs what faced Canadian troops was that the seawall today rises barely five feet above the sand. During the war, the beach was significantly lower and scaling the wall required ladders or the use of boat launch ramps.
Courseulles-sur-mer is replete with monuments and memorials paying tribute to Canada in general, and individual regiments in particular. Sean was a consummate storyteller and had a vignette – heroic, touching, tragic, humourous – to associate with almost every piece of real estate on which we stood.
He showed us, for example, roadside kerbs that had regular triangular notches banged into them every ten inches or so along much of their length. The marks were made by Canadian tank treads as the armoured vehicles moved off the beach and began the drive inland. Details like that, which reduce the monumental invasion to the most mundane of impacts, repeatedly bring home the reality that this is a battlefield, with scars both simple and profound, and put little exclamation points to the fact that D-Day is still part of the living memory of thousands of local residents, Canadian veterans and their families alike.
The Juno Beach Centre
In a word, disappointment was my first reaction. Initially, I thought it might have been due to perhaps my having had too great an expectation but, in hindsight, I think what bothered me most about the Juno Beach Centre is that it is very much, almost painfully so, a Government of Canada project. Here on beaches where a great deal of Canadian blood was spilled in the first act of the WWII Liberation of France, visitors to the Centre that is ostensibly built to commemorate that event are being pitched what is largely a “Canada is a wonderfully diverse country” museum display. And for me, nothing drove that home as succinctly as when I stepped into the large, natural-light-illuminated hall at the end of the path through the Centre to find myself staring at a curling broom mounted on a pillar, with the happy message that Canada is a land that makes the most of winter.
Oh, there were D-Day associated displays, including this beautifully touching presentation of “For the Fallen”, Laurence Binyon’s Act of Remembrance that is read each year at the Ottawa Cenotaph during the November 11 observances (this year, for the first time ever in Inuit).
The wall-mounted cross beside it is a temporary metal grave marker that was spiked into the ground at one of thousands of Canadian war graves hastily dug in the heat of the battle until they could be more properly re-located to formal battle cemeteries after the war.
But where the US D-Day beach museums focus entirely on what happened in that setting on that day, Canada’s role on D-Day in this Centre is rendered more sporadically, even incidentally in places, in a display that bears all the signs of an “Invest in Canada” appeal that, to me, is more properly the stuff of a High Commission reading room or a trade show.
But on the grounds outside, I did find and photograph a commemorative plaque marking a contribution to the Centre’s construction by a colleague with whom I worked. When I returned, I e-mailed it to him and he was delighted to see it.
Our next stop was the Canadian cemetery just 3.5 km inland from Courceulles, officially at Beny-sur-mer. Here, no government sales pitch is required – the simple message is unequivocal. Over 2,000 men are buried here, 340 who died in the invasion, and the rest lost during subsequent battles in the larger Normandy campaign. Sean highlighted two graves in particular, the first showing us that a little bit of poignant humour is indeed possible in this garden of stone. Somewhere in the Beny cemetery, a man named Rifleman J Stewart lies.
But somehow, his specific location was misplaced when bodies in the many temporary graves throughout Normandy were re-interred in this cemetery after the war. So if you look closely at the text arching across the top of his marker, you read, “Known to be Buried in this Cemetery”. It’s quite a “whoops”, when you think of it. And his is the only stone to be placed out of synch with all the other meticulously lined-up headstones, as you see in this photo, where it stands all by itself in bottom centre.
The second grave Sean pointed out is the cemetery’s only grave to be marked with a cross. R Guenard was a French civilian, a resistance fighter who helped Canadian troops by fighting alongside them during the Normandy campaign, and who died six weeks later for that cause. He had no known relatives and so was placed among the soldiers whose battle he shared. In addition to his name, the plaque on his cross reads simply, “Mort pour la France, 19-7-1944”.
As we left the Beny cemetery, Sean drew our attention to another recent (and peculiarly Canadian) custom – leaving Canadian $1 “loonie” coins across the top of the campaign map placed on a plaque at the cemetery’s entrance. Apparently, the practice only started with the wide publicity given to the embedding of another of those coins at centre ice in advance of the Canadian Olympic hockey games.
It was at about this point that Sean displayed one of his personal characteristics that, to my mind, places him among the gold medalists of tour guides. I had earlier happened to mention that Dan Darling, a late acquaintance of mine, who passed away fairly recently, had landed with the Canadians on D-Day, but had been badly wounded just a few days after the landing. “What unit was he with?” asked Sean. I told him the Stormont Dundas Glengarry Highlanders – the SDGs. So after leaving the cemetery, we paused at a plaque marking an intersection where a particularly fierce Canadian firefight had taken place, earning the junction and its environs forevermore the name of Hell’s Corners. From there, instead of heading back onto the road, Sean took us down a laneway, eventually drawing us up before a very large private home – not quite big enough to qualify as a Chateau, but close. Sean asked us to wait while he tried to roust someone from within the house, but no one answered his vigorous knocking.
“We’re not supposed to bring tours onto this property,” he said, “but the owner makes an occasional exception in special cases.” Then he took us all to a large plaque on the wall. It was a tribute to the SDGs, and its inscription read, “In memory of the Stormont Dundas Glengarry Highlanders, who fought in these fields they named ‘Hell’s Corners’ for the Liberty of France, 7-11 June 1944.”
“If your friend was wounded within a few days of the landing,” he said, “it likely was right around here, because the SDGs were held up here for several days of really hard fighting and they took a lot of casualties in the fields all around this house.”
In a similar aside a little later, he pulled us up to another plaque mounted on a stone cairn at the edge of a big empty field. It marked the site of a wartime airfield and Sean, who had earlier learned from the others on our tour – a family of three – that Dad’s grandfather had flown with a Canadian squadron in support of the landings from an airfield built close to the beaches. “It had to be this airfield,” said Sean, “because this was where the Canadian fighter squadrons were based right after D-Day.” They took several photos for Grandma back home, making us a unanimously astonished gang of tourists, amazed at just how thorough was Sean’s knowledge, and just how well he picked up on all the little details of casual conversation throughout the tour.
Our next stop was at a beautiful spot masking a terrible wartime atrocity. L’Abbaye d’Ardennes was used as a German observation post during the Battle of Normandy. It’s hardly surprising when you look at this photo of the now fully restored Abbey. It’s on the highest spot of land around and each of its corner towers is the landbound equivalent of a naval crow’s nest.
Sean showed us a wartime photo of German lookouts on one of the Abbey’s towers and it clearly showed the considerable field of view they had. But the Abbey was also the site of the summary execution of several Canadian soldiers who had surrendered to the German XIIth Panzer Brigade. The XIIth was under the command of a notorious Brigade Commander named Kurt Meyer,
who it seems bore a passing resemblance to Ralph Fiennes
(Photos: Meyer: LeMag ’44, a Webzine devoted to WWII; Fiennes: photo.net).
After the war, Meyer was convicted of war crimes on the strength of testimony from some of his own soldiers that he had specifically ordered “no prisoners”, and a witness – a soldier from another German army unit who was having his vehicle repaired in the Abbey’s maintenance shop – to the execution of the Canadian prisoners at the Abbey while it was occupied by troops under Meyer’s command.
In the Abbey yard today is a lovely memorial in the garden where the Canadians were shot.
In addition, the garden’s trees and one wall are stuck with poppies and on an adjacent wall is mounted a huge composite photograph of the victims of the execution.
Several years after his conviction, Meyer’s sentence was overturned on the grounds that the evidence used to convict him, while compelling, had been entirely circumstantial. No one could testify precisely that Meyer had ordered the prisoners’ execution and while, as commander, he was technically responsible for the actions of his men, the lack of a firm link from him to the actual shootings was enough to prompt clemency from a judge. Meyer became a post-war hero to his men in the Waffen SS when he fought vigorously to win them full veterans’ pensions after the war.
Our next stop was in a town named Bretteville-Orgueilleuse (which apparently will trigger the end of the world when someone actually pronounces its name correctly), where Sean showed us a photo to accompany an incredible story of three Canadian soldiers who had managed to knock out an advancing German Panther tank with a weapon called a PIAT (for Projector, Infantry, Anti-Tank). Here’s Sean holding up a photo of the Panther tank stopped – literally – in its tracks.
To be effective, the PIAT
– essentially a terrifyingly small tube with a handle and a trigger (Photo: www.militaryfactory.com) – had to be fired at really close range. These guys had the will to sit behind a stone wall and wait until this behemoth was no more than 15 metres away before shooting. And in another example of making the battlefield tales real for our small touring company, you’ll notice that in the background behind Sean is the same house today where the tank’s advance was abruptly halted by the Canadians’ fearless anti-tank shot on June 7, 1944. Sean, in fact, is standing on the street side of the wall at precisely the point where the Canadians were taking cover until the moment they fired their PIAT.
There were many more stories that Sean told us, and I can’t leave off without one last one. For us, it was probably the most touching of all. The town of Buron also lies on Canada’s route of post D-Day battles as they fought to expand their foothold in France. One Canadian unit, the Highland Light Infantry, was exceptionally well-served in its spiritual needs by a Scots-born Presbyterian named “Padre Jock” Anderson.
And in Buron, Padre Jock comforted many wounded men as they lay dying. So many, in fact, that when the HLIs moved on, Sean told us that the Padre is said to have told someone that a large measure of his soul was remaining behind in Buron, in the town square where a battlefield hospital had been set up and where so many men died, literally in Padre Jock’s arms. After the war, the Padre wrote to the town council, seeking permission for his ashes to be interred in the square when his own end came. He explained why, but the council was officially unmoved. Their reply to Padre Jock was on the order of, “We are genuinely sorry, but if we say yes to you we will be unable to refuse anyone else seeking permission for the same.”
Eventually, in his 80s, Padre Jock himself passed away and his wife repeated his request for interment of his ashes in the town square of Buron. Again the request was denied. And at this point in the story, Sean with masterful timing had slowed our tour van at a private home on one corner of the town’s square – the official address in fact, is Number 1 on the square. “But one of the councillors was so disgusted with the decision of his town colleagues,” said Sean, “that... well, look in the garden to your right.” And we did, and there, in a tiny plot no more than four feet by four feet at the very edge of the private garden bordering the square, was a beautiful little black marble stone with carved lettering filled in gold dedicated to the memory of Padre Jock. Under the stone lie his ashes, the tiny garden patch now a war grave. And Padre Jock, if not at rest in the precise place he left his soul, is certainly lying no more than a whisper away.
It was the icing on the cake for us. The day had been a truly memorable blend of all that the Battlebus brochure promised.
I have read about the feelings described by Canadians when they visit these places, and wondered when I read, “It made me feel proud to be Canadian”, was it truth or hubris speaking? And then I saw town after town with their squares renamed “Place du Canada” or “Place Canadienne”, and I saw monument after monument faced with the maple leaf and carved with unit names like Regina Rifles, Régiment de la Chaudière, the North Shore (New Brunswick), the Fort Garry Horse, and I scanned just some of the seemingly endless names on the headstones in the Beny cemetery...
And it made me feel proud to be Canadian.
Next... the Bayeux Tapestry and the Peace of War – the US and German Normandy cemeteries.
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