Canada declared war against Germany on September 10, 1939. Well before the U.S. declaration of war December 8, 1941, the day after the Pear Harbor attack.
April 1942 marked the largest combined operation that had taken place in WWII up to that point. Although Dieppe was a combined effort, the largest number of soldiers were Canadian and they paid a heavy price in this disastrous attack. 6,000 Canadians participated in the attack. 4,384 were killed, wounded, or missing--a loss of 73 percent. In the first wave of men who arrived on the beach, it is estimated there was a 50/50 chance of dying; German machine gun fire cut down the soldiers as they reached the beach. Many lessons were learned from Dieppe that helped the D-Day attacks be more effective.
On our last day in Normandy, we visited Juno Beach. On D-Day, June 6, 1944 the Canadians landed on Juno Beach. 21,400 soldiers participated and there were 1,200 casualties.
The Canadian cemetery is tucked back in the countryside and was not far from the farm where we stayed. It was a cold, windy day and it began to rain hard while we were at the cemetery, cutting short our visit.
The Juno Beach Centre, a new Canadian museum opened on Juno Beach on June 6, 2003. It is a very nice museum and has a lot of interactive displays and activities for kids. Canadian university students can apply to work at the museum. The girls were given a quiz to fill out while walking through the museum. Did you know that Canada is 16 times larger than France? During WWII the population of France was much larger than that of Canada.
I learned a lot of Canadian war history that I had never heard before; most of these are things I would have studied had I gone to school in Canada. I never knew there were U-boats in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. And I had never heard the story of the S.S. Caribou, a passenger ferry that was torpedoed in Canadian waters.
Juno, like Omaha, is a beautiful beach and it is hard to imagine that a battle took place here less than 70 years ago.
No comments:
Post a Comment