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.
This is the first war cemetery that isn’t a dedicated memorial. This war cemetery is actually located within an existing cemetery. And what a huge cemetery, it had to be over a square mile. It took me almost 30 minutes just to walk from the entrance to the war cemetery. The war cemetery was also huge, and also for the first time this memorial wasn’t just to commonwealth soldiers. The majority of the graves here were Belgian, with some Dutch and French areas as well.
It was very interesting to see how the Belgian graves and memorials were different from the ones I had been seeing so far. Each grave had a coloured Belgian flag on it, which is interesting because most memorial shy away from using colour as it fades over time. One these however, each of the colours was bright and vibrant, which leads me to believe that these graves are very well kept and restored often.
When I was planning this trip, I figured that there might be some weird experiences because I was going to be spending the summer in cemeteries. But I never expected anything this weird, and I could even write down this story until I got to a place with lots of people. On my way to find the grave of Corperal Dummer from Regina, the only one in this cemetery from Regina, I found a gravestone with the name Hird on it.
Now this was bizarre and weirded me out quite a bit. Not that Hird is a unique name, but it’s also not exactly the most common of names. But as I got up and continued on my way I started to recognize other names, names of friends from Regina. Two graves down was one with the last name Semple, one of my best friends from High School. Right beside it was the name Duke. And in the row right behind them I saw Stinson(looking back at the pictures now I realize it says Tinson, but at the time I wasn’t necessarily the most level headed). After that I just stopped looking, and went to go do what I needed to do. Each of these men were the same age my friends and I are now. It really struck home just how young these soldiers really were. I started to ask myself if I could do what these men had done? How would it have felt to have my friends there beside me as we fought and died? I don’t know the answers to these questions much to the credit of these men. They fought so that our generation could grow up in a better world and I am incredibly lucky for the opportunities I have been able to have because men I never knew decided that the sacrifice was worth it. They left their family and friends, sometimes they even took their friends with them, in the hopes that they were creating a future without as many evils as the one they lived in.
What are the great evils that our generation faces? Global Climate Change is certainly one of them, but we seem only too happy to shrug and say it’s not our problem, why deal with it? Well that certainly worked during World War II. Chamberlain tried it for a while with his policy of appeasement towards the Nazis. That worked out well for everyone.
I can’t think of another thing that affects the future generation than the damage we do to the planet now. This is different, though, there is no one to fight against, no one to place the blame on accept ourselves. These men were willing to give up their lives, but we aren’t willing to give up our Hummers?
I have just spent the last 3 days here in England with my friend Mary. Important fact: As I write this I am sitting in our favourite Pub enjoying the greatest fish and chips ever made.
I had a fantastic time here in England. London is one of my favourite cities that I had been to. The food is amazing! I have had incredible food experiences everywhere I have been, but this seemed to take the cake. The city is amazing, there is stuff happening everywhere all the time. This morning I woke up accidentally at 5 am, and I couldn’t get to sleep for another hour, but it was the most amazing thing listening through my window as the city came alive during that time. Everyone was incredibly friendly, and just in three days we got to know the owner of our favourite local pub.
The highlight of our trip was the day trips to Oxford and Cambridge. Both Mary and I are considering school in the UK, and this experience completely sold me.Mary arranged for a professor in Physics to give us a tour of the labs at Oxford and I was amazed at the whole experience. We began with an hour and a half tour of the Clarendon labs, and then went to tea with the whole group, then we were given a tour of the university itself, and finally went to a pub with the professor and a few of the grad students. This was incredibly more than we expected and the whole experience really sold us one the idea of school here. To be honest, my first thought of Oxford is stuck up academics, but these were incredibly smart researchers who were also down to earth and funny, and after only a few hours I really felt like I had gotten to know these people.
Oxford is scattered all throughout the city, and there is no real ‘campus’ to speak of which means that the academic buildings are scattered with shops and restaurants and gives a great community feel. Oxford and Cambridge are built upon the college system, where you live and eat within a community of 200-1000, equipped with its own faculty, common rooms and other facilities. One of my biggest concerns about pursuing a PhD is that I will go off and only associate with Physics students, and lose touch with my poli sci, history or language interests. Here, however, the college system forces you to live and eat with people of every discipline. Also, any lecture is open to every student, so it would be possible for me to attend lectures that interested me no matter the subject.
Cambridge was much the same story. It has very similar attractive features to Cambridge, and we got a great tour from Zoe, one of Austin’s good friends who attends school here. Some of the differences that I found were that Oxford is in a city, with many people who do not work at the Uni, but the town of Cambridge is essentially all University, or people who provide services for the Uni. I will also have to look into what research areas I am interested in at each school before I choose a favorite, but this visit completely sold me on the College system, the schools themselves and the cities they are located in. And as if I could turn either one of them down anyway.
I didn’t take much pictures or video while I was there mostly because I would have felt like an uber tourist. However, here is a quick video to show you what the inside of a college looks like. They are walled off and then you have to get past a porter to get in, and it was even more difficult to get in because it was exams time as well. I may have snuck it while no one was looking.
Well today was the worst day of the trip so far, until the last 3 hours, which have made it the best day so far, or at least countered all the bad to bring it back to a neutral day.
So I began the day in Bielefeld, and took 3 trains to get to Arnhem. The second and longest train I had to stand the entire way because there was no other spot for me. Note to self: reserve train spots for weekend journeys. Okay, standing for an hour and a half with 45 pounds on my back sounds awful, but it was only mildly uncomfortable due to the epic awesomeness that is my back pack. So then the train from Arnhem to Nijmegen is cancelled for the next few weeks so I have to take a bus. A bus that takes 2 hours to go the 20 km to Nijmegen. Okay I can deal with that I have some nice scenery to look at.
But then I get to Nijmegen and there is some sort of convention going on, and so every hotel is booked. Believe me, I checked, which means walking for an hour and a half all over town (with my backpack) to talk to every hotel, even bed in breakfasts. In Holland a Bed and Breakfast is someone who rents you the top room of their house and feeds you breakfast in the morning. Kinda weird, I know, so I have tried to avoid it until today when I was really desperate, but no, each of them was full as well. The only room was at a 4 star hotel so far out of my price range it might of well been a hotel on the moon.
Well okay so I resign myself to just visiting the location and then taking a train to another city to stay the night. After getting information from the tourist information booth, I get on another bus, for another hour, as it winds it way through small towns and eventually dumps me near a museum. So I take a guess based on my impeccable sense of direction, which has served me remarkably well so far, and start walking. Nearly 10 minutes later, I find my first sign. Aha! I guessed right. Well then I continue walking and it turns out this sign deals with distances a car would be experiencing. Half an hour later, and I am still walking. Keep in mind this is hour 5 or 6 with my backpack on and kilometer 15 or 20 that I have walked, and the charm is starting to wear off.
And now for the good. I arrive at Groesbeek and this is the largest and nicest memorial I have been to thus far. All of a sudden I remembered the reason I was here. It wasn’t to get angry at trains or hotels, it was to visit these sites and see how the soldiers from my hometown are remembered.
This war cemetery has over 2000 graves and is home to 16 fallen soldiers from Regina. At first I had the impression that there was a lot of graves, but I didn’t really get a sense of it before I began walking around and finding each individual. There are an incredible amount of graves, and even walking amongst them doesn’t give you the sense of scale. It isn’t until you start going through and trying to find certain people that you realize just how many grave you are walking past. For each person that I found, and I found over 10% or the people from Regina who died in the war, I was walking past over a hundred that I was looking for. The sheer number of graves was astounding, and I know that this isn’t the largest commonwealth grave location nor is it the only. Saying the words “there are 2000 people in this cemetery” doesn’t really convey how many people that is.
So I was able to find everyone who I was supposed to at this cemetery. As I was leaving, an older man with two children asked me what I was placing on the graves. I explained what the poppy symbolizes to the people of Canada, and gave a poppy to him and each of his daughter. We got to talking about what I was doing (his English was very limited but we eventually got it figured out) and he was so impressed he offered me a ride back to town rather than take the bus. I took it and while we were driving we talked about why he came to the memorial and why he brought his daughters each year. He ended up even offering me a place to stay for the night, which I declined, but it meant a lot to me to see just how much it meant to the Dutch man what I was doing. He spoke about how grateful everyone in the town still was and the celebrations they have at the beginning of May to commemorate the end of the war and the sacrifices made.
I then got on a train and arrived in ‘s-Hertogenbosch( I have no idea how to say that) and found the only hotel in the entire town. It was a bit expensive, but it was the last room in town, and there is an incredible jazz festival going on here all night long. Did I mention it was named the best hotel in Europe in 2000. That’s pretty amazing for the price I got.
I learned an important lesson today: know when to plan ahead. I went into this with the idea that I would just wing it and find places to sleep and things to do right then and there. But I know realize that there is a time and place to plan ahead, particularly weekends, but that you still shouldn’t block out each timeslot of the entire trip. If I had planned everything to a T, I never would be here listening to dueling saxophones while drinking cappuchino and a ball of whipped cream, and chocolate. No literally a ball of whipped cream and chocolate:
So I have been on the train for the last 5 hours trying to get to Sage, and now that I am here I know why. The cemetery isn’t in the village of Sage, the village doesn’t really exist anymore except on maps, and the only way to get there is take a local train and then a cab. I learned my lesson yesterday, and once I saw a sign for the cemetery didn’t just start walking, I asked a local how far it was and then called a cab instead of walking 10 km there and back. A quick side note, talking to people has become incredibly easier now that I am in Germany. Too bad this is my only stop in Germany until I am back here for the month of July.
First of all, the cemetery is actually on the side of the highway. Its trees on both side of a single lane highway and then all of a sudden on one side there is the cemetery. This gives t a very different feel from what I imagined a memorial would have. I imagined peace and tranquility, like I found at Holten where the cemetery is located in the middle of a national park, but here there were cars going by constantly. Now thinking about it, I am not sure this is such of a bad thing. When designing a memorial I would think that one would try to account for a number of things. First and foremost the location and architecture should honor the fallen soldiers. But if a location is chosen that is very peaceful, but is also an hour drive into the middle of nowhere I would imagine no one would go to see it. On one hand having this memorial on the side of a highway seems disrespectful to me, but the more I think about it the most I like it. Think about how many people drive by that memorial every single day. Each of them has to see it and think at least a small amount about why it is there.
That said, there was very little traffic into the actual cemetery itself. I was walking through spider webs as I walked between the rows, which are over 6 feet between them. So you know it has been a while since the last traffic. Checking the visitor sign in book, it appears that someone would visit once every three days or so, which is very low traffic.
The design of the monument wasthe same as I found in Holten and Regina. Since I am now 3 out of 3 for having the same monument at each of the locations it seems that this will be a recurring theme. I will have to research what this monument symbolizes, who designed it and most importantly why it is used all over the place.
I came to this location for only 1 grave, that of Arthur Stein, who is a relative of mine. He grew up in Neudorf, the same town as my grandparents and my mom, and he was an air force pilot. Here his grave is shared by the 3 other members of his plane because their plane crashed and none of the bodies could be identified individually. It is actually jarring every time I see a large grave like this one, where it makes you think about the way they died, not just what they did for their country and the world.
Holten is a very small town about 2 hrs from Amsterdam. After arriving and eating a quick lunch, I ask my waiter how to get to the war cemetery. He describes, in broken English, to just walk north and I will find it “a little way down.” Well, for those of you who know how I give directions “a little way down” is anywhere from 1-30 minutes, and it seems like I'm not the only one. So I just start walking. Just north of Holten is an amazing national park, and so I get some spectacular scenery. That said it takes 25 minutes to even find any sign of the cemetery. So after an hour and a half hike, I end up at the cemetery. And it is beautiful.
In Holland, they celebrate Remembrance Day at the beginning of May every year, and this year was the 65th anniversary of the end of the war. As such, there was a large ceremony held here at Holten with representatives from many Canadian organization. A local man also told me proudly that Princess Margaret, who was born in Canada, was here and laid the centermost wreath in thanks for everything that Canada had done for her and her people during the war.
One thing that was interesting is that the monument here seems to be the exact same as the monument in Regina. I don’t know if this was a standard design for a memorial at the time, or if these two monuments have a connection somehow and that’s why they are the same. I guess I will be able to tell in another few stops if this is a common monument design.
This was the first stop where I am finding the locations of people from Regina and fell during the war. I brought along a poppy to leave at each of the over 120 grave locations, as well as at each memorial I visit. At the very first memorial of trip, I am kneeling down, putting the poppy next the marker, and I felt like I needed to say something. I had no idea what to say. How can I properly sum up into words how thankful I am for what you did? Well, I looked to the next marker, and there was the inscription “We cannot clasp your hand, your face we cannot see, but let this little token tell that we remember thee”
That was a start. It’s actually quite easy to talk once you begin, but the difficult part is finding the words to begin. And saying this little poem really helps when me to begin.
The first stop on this journey was home. I will be finding all the Army service men and women who are buried in Europe from Regina, where I grew up, and from Neudorf, where my mom and her parents grew up, so the first stop was to see how they are memorialized here at home.
Neudorf
The wall of honour in Neudorf is a humble monument but one with great personal meaning to those who see it. I went to view it with my grandpa, and he grew up with most of the men on the wall. He knew personal stories about each one, and couldn’t help but tell me funny stories about some of them, and how I was related to others. This memorial is located in the seniors center, where it is viewable by those who still remember those who it is dedicated to. As a younger generation begins to move into this small town, the basement of the center has been converted into a gym for use by the community. Hopefully as those who actually remember these men move on and more space is dedicated for use by the younger generation, the space will remain dedicated in order to help educate all about the sacrifices made by these men.
Regina
Regina, as my provinces capital, has numerous monuments to the war dead from both world wars. The most prominent monument is dedicated to all of Saskatchewan’s war dead and is located on the grounds of the provincial legislature. This monument is in one of the most beautiful and heavily trafficked areas of Regina, and is a great monument to the war dead. As you can see it contains all the names of everyone from Saskatchewan who gave their life during the world wars.
However, in the Regina Cemetery there is a monument to the war dead solely from Regina. This was the first chance for me since I began planning this project to see this memorial without it covered in snow, and it was a very good start to the trip.
As you can see this is a very touching memorial, even if it is in a location that gets very little exposure. Especially interestingto me was the engraving on a part of the monument. Usually one sees phrases such as “There names shall live forever” or “Let us not forget their sacrifice” which convey a sense of action on the observer, but here I saw one of the clearest calls to action one a monument. Here is says “See to it that their names be not forgotten” and that is exactly what I am doing with this trip. It was especially meaningful that before I even left on the trip I should find such a strong call to action.
A few months ago the last Canadian veteran from the First World War passed away and this will soon be the case with all the veterans from the Second World War. As these living testaments to the war effort continue to disappear it is growing more important to investigate the ways in which we memorialize the sacrifices of all those who fought for freedom. I have seen how the Canadian war effort is memorialized in Canada, where almost every small town has a monument dedicated to those who did not come back from their time in the war. What I have no idea about is how these soldiers are remember in the place where they died fighting for their country. As such I am going to travel from memorial site to memorial site and document how these young men are remembered overseas as compared to in their home.
Specifically I will be finding every Army serviceman from Regina who gave their life and I will be finding their grave locations in the Europe to see how they are memorialized there. In all, there are 116 men from Regina who served in the Army and are interred in Europe. I will be travelling to the 23 different war cemetery and memorial locations where they are memorialized in Germany, Holland, Belgium, France, England and Italy.
This is going to be a very personal journey where I learn how the world has remembered the sacrifice of many and by looking into this I hope to create my own memorial for others to be able to see. So check back for updates, pictures and video from this journey.
