NORMANDY REMEMBERS CANADIAN SACRIFICES

ABBAYE D’ARDENNE, NORMANDY. The day before, on D-Day, they had braved seasickness, mines, mortar-shells and a hail-storm of machine-gun bullets to crawl, cold and drenched, onto the pebbly Normandy beach. The next day, in the Nazis’ Abbey interrogation room, the 18 young Canadians shook hands with each other to say goodbye, then went outside one by one to the leafy church garden to take a bullet in the brain. Commanding fanatical, 17-year-old Hitler Youth, Waffen-SS Standartenführer Kurt Meyer didn’t want prisoners – unless he could make them betray their comrades. The Canadians all refused to give him a shred of useful military information, so he had them shot.
Sixty-six years later to the day, a Canadian aged 11 at war’s end had the heart-breaking honour of reading the names of the 18 (plus two others murdered later), as Canadian students placed a maple leaf for each on their memorial. This was the ninth ceremony we participated in this June 6 and 7.
Over two dizzying days, with eight students, two professors and Foundation ex-president/veteran Alec Douglas, I witnessed unforgettable outpourings of French gratitude for Canadian sacrifices. At the exact hour the Canadians landed at Bernières beach below us, we chatted with residents of the first house Canadians (or any Allied force) had liberated. Then at hillside Point 67, a crowd of hundreds, including children and pipers, helped us inaugurate a dramatic new memorial -- a command-post overlooking fields where 800 Canadians were “shot like rabbits” among stalks of wheat.
Officials and ordinary French citizens, often with children, attended all the ceremonies, repeating at all nine stops the Act of Remembrance’s Response: “We will remember them.” First, they came to Juno Beach Centre – Canada’s museum on its Normandy landing-beach. Then to two seas of headstones (totalling almost five thousand) at the main Canadian war cemeteries near Bény-sur-Mer and Bretteville-sur-Laize. Then to the stunning Canadian Garden behind Caen’s Mémorial museum, one of the world’s great war and peace museums.
Next we stood in the Caen street where disbelieving Caen residents crawled out of hiding to greet French-speaking Canadian soldiers a few meters from the tomb of William the Conqueror. Finally, we entered the intimate, shady Abbaye d’Ardenne. On a wall: large photos of the murdered soldiers, nearly all in their twenties, two of them 19.
Here the deaths of our young men shake the soul. This is not the long-ago, faraway ritual of our Nov. 11 Cenotaph commemorations. It’s up-close, immediate, personal, almost overwhelming. Strolling too among massed rows of Canadian headstones, you grieve at the tragic cost of Canada’s finding itself abroad. At how too-young men, nearly all volunteers, defended freedom with their lives.
. At Point 67, Cintheaux mayor Michel Le Baron, who as a child saw Nazi troops billeted in his house, confided what many others echoed: “We shall never forget that the Canadians liberated us. Never. Never. We cannot bear to think of where we would be if you Canadians had not come.”
Other Europeans shared this fidelity. Adele Bouman, a beautiful legless woman in a wheelchair, came here from Holland with her husband Evert Stieber “to thank Canada” again. A wonderful Dutch Last Post bugler -- a medical doctor -- came too.
Such intensity shames many visiting Canadians. It reminds us that we’re a nation absurdly indifferent to our own history. It hints we hold too cheaply our sacrifices in wars where we meant more to the world than now.
The Canadian Battlefields Foundation (CBF) aims to remind us how our nation forged its modern identity. It’s a volunteer group launched in 1992 by Ottawa’s late Hamilton Southam, father of both the National Arts Centre and Confederation Square’s Valiants statues of 14 Canadian heroes. That year, Southam noted that Caen’s grand new Mémorial war and peace museum drew no Canadian interest, despite Canada’s liberation of Caen. Americans dominated official memories. Only the local people remembered that Canadians had liberated 122 Norman towns.
Southam and his fellow-veterans decided to bring Canada back to support its dead. They lobbied the Canadian government to do more. Creating CBF to encourage remembrance and education, they initiated visitor sites, plaques and gardens.
But CBF’s main project is perpetuating knowledge of Canada’s military valour to future generations. Each year it brings to Normandy and other European sites eight to 12 Canadian university students. So far, it has brought some 300 students, with 23 professor-guides. The students, often future history teachers, return home eager to disseminate knowledge and pride to future youth.
They will tell of seas of headstones, of blood-soaked beaches and fields. They will tell of the Norman people’s everlasting fidelity. And, having heard 86-year-old murder witness Jacques Vico speak “with fierce passion,” they will tell of the 18 young men who died bravely in the beautiful garden at the Abbaye d’Ardenne.