One, one was fire proof, the other was for the Graves Commission, and the other one was if you were shot and killed or blown up, your buddies would take off your tag and leave one in your mouth so that the Graves Commission would come along and know who you were. We were just left with our identification discs, which of course in those days there was three of them.

We were, our pay books were taken away from us. Robert Graham : And we were issued French francs. Raymond Tanner : When we got ready for D-Day, we were given photographs of where we would land and where we had to, as soon as we landed, which way to go. Geoff Corry : When you're 19, or 20, or 21 you know that, you believe that you're invincible.Īlbert Clevette : We had been warned quite extensively that we would suffer some pretty horrendous casualties. Transcription - Heroes Remember D-Day Video In the process, Canada's troops had been forged into a highly effective army. By the third week in August, when the campaign in Normandy at last came to its end, the armies of the Nazi regime had suffered a resounding defeat, one in which Canadian regiments played a major role.

Over a brutal ten-week period in the stifling heat of that terrible summer, the inexperienced soldiers of the First Canadian Army fought against a powerful enemy, suffering and inflicting heavy casualties. Many even fail to remember that young Canadian men and women played a major role in the greatest seaborne invasion of all time, the Allied assault on Normandy on June 6, 1944, and in the long, wearying struggle that followed in the Norman countryside. Living in their greatly favoured land, Canadians often seem all too ready to forget the great events that let them develop and prosper in freedom. A half century is a long time in a world that moves quickly from one fad to the next.

D day naval armada