II went back out to Juno beach today for the commemorative ceremonies today and they were amazing. It was raining and ugly out until about 2 hours before the ceremony, and by the time we began it turned out to be a beautiful day.
One surprising part of the ceremony was how few veterans there were present. Only 3 or 4 veterans from Canada and maybe 10 veterans from France were in attendance. Now I know that it is a long way to come just for a ceremony, but I would have thought that more would be here. Still, though we honor them, the important part is that the current generation remembers the sacrifice they made, and in terms of that this ceremony was a huge success, with maybe 200 or more “young people” in attendance.
The highlight of the past two days was visiting the Juno Beach Center. This is a private museum that is run independent of the Canadian government, but it is the only monument to Juno beach. It was started by a veteran of the war in the nineties when he came back to visit the site where he landed and the only monument was a tank that had been left in place. It is extremely sad that it took this long for a museum to be put here, especially considering what an extremely well maintained site Vimy Ridge is (which is the biggest battle involving Canadians in WWI).
The building itself is spectacular. It is designed in a very modern style and really stands out against the rest of the scenery without being garish or awkward looking. The exhibits and museum itself are also incredible. Even though I have spent a while studying WWII history, and from a Canadian perspective too, I learned a ton by visiting this museum. I suppose one of the greatest benefits of the museum forming so recently is it has a very modern take on the war and its effects. Yes there are the original documents, uniform and pictures on display, but a major part of the museum is describing how the war impacted the Canada we live in today, and even a large section to teach non-Canadians(and even some Canadians, I’m looking at you Toronto People) what Canada is like today.
The one part of them museum that I was disappointed with the beach tour. The guides did a wonderful job, but they didn’t have much to work with. The only surviving part of the beach defenses was an old bunker that had sat unused for 55 years. When I go to the site of an actual battle, I would like to see either a monument to those who fell or a reconstructed or preserved part of the battlefield. Maybe it was just that Vimy spoiled me, but I came expecting either one or the other, and I got neither. The museum was awesome, but it could have just as easily been a museum in Canada. Perhaps I am just thinking wistfully, and I will see what the other beaches have, but if I come all the way to the actually beaches I would like to be able to understand what the soldiers went through more than just “imagine a line of trenches, with machine guns…” Right now Saving Private Ryan has done a better job of showing me what D-Day was like than actually being on Juno beach.
I also visited two of the largest Canadian cemeteries which are here in the Normandy area. On is the Beny-sur-mer war cemetery, and it is about 4 km away from the beach head and it houses those who died during the landing and immediately that day. The Canadians reached the farthest inland during the first 24 hours after the invasion, but no group met their goals.
The Bretteville-sur-laize War cemetery houses those who died in the next few days of the war, during the German counterattack on June 8, and the battle up until Caen. There were many Regina boys in these two cemeteries, 54 to be exact, because the Regina Rifle Regiment was in the first wave on D-Day and then held the lines during the counter attack. This accounts for nearly half of those from Regina who died in the war, which really underscores just how hard the fighting was those first few days of the Normandy invasion.
This is the place which first started my interest in taking a trip like this. Dieppe was the site of an ill fated raid in 1942, one which suffered casualties of over 50%. The planning of this raid was awful and lead to numerous errors. That said, the lessons learned at Dieppe saved thousands of lives at the Normandy landings. If the Normandy landings had gone as the Dieppe raid went, they undoubtedly would have been a failure.
In my last 2 years of high school, I wrote a rather lengthy essay detailing Operation Jubilee at Dieppe and showing how the lessons learned here were a huge part of the success of Normandy. I spent hours staring at maps and reading personal accounts of the battle, and I really had a visual image of Dieppe and how the operation took place. After I was all done, I said to myself that one day I would visit Dieppe and see how much the personal accounts gave one an idea of the battle location.
As it turns out, I was very nearly right on almost everything. What I didn’t get was the scale of the battle site. Watch this video to get a better understanding, but the odds they were up against, just looking at the battle site itself, were enormous.
In case you didn’t catch it in the video, the Hotel du Casino, the place I stayed at, was the farthest they got into the town. And though I stayed in the place that numerous men made their last stand in order to buy other men time to get off the beach, nothing supernatural occurred.
I also went to the Dieppe Canadian War cemetery, were most of the casualties from this raid are buried. It is a very interesting setup, and I am not sure it was designed by the same people as every other memorial so far. The grace are arranged back to back, rather than in individual rows, and it almost feels like the men were buried and then someone came after to add the rest of the memorial. Take a look:
The Vimy Ridge memorial is spectacular. So far this journey has been asbout WWII, but it wasn’t that far out of my way and I had to see it. This is the memorial to the actions of the Canadian division at the battle of Vimy Ridge and it is one of two Canadian Nation Heritage sites that are not in Canada. At the outbreak of World War I Canada was still a young nation, less than 50 years old. For the first two years of the war our men were split up into various British divisions. This however was the first time that the Canadian acted together as one unit, the Canadian first division. This was also the first battle for the Allies were everything went exactly by the plan and each objective was reached ahead of schedule. It cemented in the minds of world that Canada was its own nation and that it was not simply a colony of the British any longer. Obviously it is an important step in Canada’s history as a nation.
Now onto the memorial. This memorial is absolutely massive. I knew it was big but I could really imagine the scale of it until I was there. It is very powerful, and rather than go into detail of each aspect I have a small video tour of the area. I I couldn’t recall the symbolism in every aspect of the memorial when I was taking this video, but if you would like to find out more there is a wealth of information on the Veteran Affairs Canada website
Also, they have preserved some of the original trenches here at Vimy Ridge. I was able to take an awesome tour courtesy of some of the Canadian students who work here for the summer. We actually walked in the tunnel system that housed the men right before their attack. I say right before, but most of the men sat in these near dark, cramped tunnels for 36 hrs before they ran up to execute the plan. Even after they fixed them to make them more visitor friendly, I still had to keep my head down to not hit it on the ceiling.
Overall a great experience and I am incredibly happy to have made this little detour. I am still in awe of how wonderful that memorial is.
Did you know that May has 31 days? I apparently didn’t when I was planning this trip and so today is the one day off of the trip. Aside from going to the chocolate museum and eating fries, I thought I would take this time to do a quick update about some of the common features I am finding at each memorial location.
Cross of Sacrifice
This memorial is located at every cemetery that had more than 40 graves. This is why every single commonwealth cemetery I have been to has this cross. The cross is there to represent the faith of the majority of those interred there and the sword is the symbolize the military nature of the cemetery. The size of the cross also varies depending on the size of the memorial.
Stone of Remembrance
This memorial is located in every cemetery with over 1000 graves in it. It bears a quote from the book of Ecclesiastes “ Their Name Liveth For Everymore”
Headstone
Each headstone bears the name rank and other identifying information that could be acquired. If the religion of the casualty is known then it bears a symbol to identify it. Also, each headstone bears a symbol that represents the nationality of the casuality. For Canada the symbol is a maple leaf, for Britain it is a lion and so on. There is no uniform material that the headstones are made of.
So the very first thing I noticed here was this would be a very nice location, if they didn’t use the parking area right in front for trailer and semi storage. It is right on the main road between Gent and Brugge, and so there is a lot of traffic all the time.
One of the nicest things about this memorial are the 4 gigantic maple trees. Many of the memorials, while not the exact same, have very similar layouts, so I must have missed them previously. It was also quite windy here today, which meant there were maple leaves flying around the cemetery, which added a lot to the memorial itself. I don’t feel any affinity towards beavers or moose or any of the other symbols that some people use to label Canada, but the maple leaf always evokes a certain sense of pride. To be honest I don’t know if I have ever seen a beaver and my encounters with moose have not always been pleasant., but these are just tourist-y ways of identifying us. The maple leaf is different though, and I feel like it is the symbol that truly represents us.
Here at Adegem I also found a grave labeled J. Mcrae. Now this isn’t the grave of John McCrae, the sodier who wrote in Flanders’ Fields; it is in the wrong area(this is the German side of the trench during WWI), it is for the wrong war and it’s spelt incorrectly. But this is the Flanders and so it was fitting that I should find something that reminds me again of that poem.
Finally, here in the town of Adegem, a town of maybe 500 people, they have a Canada museum. I don’t know what it contains, and it was Sunday so I couldn’t go check for myself, but from what a local described to me it seems to be a museum of the Canadian war effort in the region.
This cemetery is located in the Dutch town of Bergen Op Zoom. It is about a 30 minute walk from the town and it is actually two different cemeteries. There is the Bergen Op Zoom War Cemetery, for any commonwealth soldier, and then there is the Bergen Op Zoom Canadian War Cemetery about 500 meter from the other cemetery. They are roughly the same size, and the only reason to have separate cemeteries is to emphasize the Canadian effort in the area. A good part of Belgium and most of the Netherlands were taken back by the Canadian 1st army, and this cemetery being separate emphasizes the fact that we had an entirely different army that the British armies. Other commonwealth countries had their own units and even division but they were a part of the British 2nd or 3rd Armies. The Canadians on the other had their own Army, and it was under an entirely Canadian command. At every other location I have come across, there were Canadian war cemeteries, but other commonwealth soldiers were also interred there. Here, however, it was entirely Canadians.
Most people, even most Canadians, think of the Canadian army as a joke but by the end of WWII we had the 4th largest Airforce, the 3rd largest Navy and 4th Largest Army in the world. This memorial, by being so close to another commonwealth memorial, yet being dedicated solely to Canadian reminded me just how much of a sacrifice Canadians in particular made to the war effort.
