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the question, What are the great events in Canadian history?
responded by travelling into the past to discover the moments,
both familiar and unexpected, that shaped our nation. This is
an excerpt from John Ralston Saul's contribution, "D-Day":
Perhaps
the oddest thing about D-Day was how long so many soldiers had
to wait to die so fast.
Most had been in Britain two, three, even four years, leading
a strange, unreal yet real life of waiting.
Of course they trained while they waited. They prepared. And they
were together in a way adults never are in civilian life. Doubly
so. After all, they were in a foreign/not-foreign land as participants
and yet observers of a great social drama. And they were in regiments
that were usually miniature reconstitutions of their hometowns
and regions.
There were several regiments to pick from in Winnipeg. The volunteers
all chose in the hope of getting overseas quickly. The lucky ones,
it turned out, were the unluckiest, because they chose the Winnipeg
Grenadiers and found themselves in Hong Kong. And then the survivors
found themselves in Japanese camps.
My father, with many of his friends, went into the Royal Winnipeg
Rifles, an old regiment that had been at Fish Creek and Batoche
— that short tragedy of internal Canadian war — and
in South Africa and through the worst of the First World War.
The Little Black Devils was what they were called, and still are,
after a Sioux witness at Fish Creek had been surprised to see
soldiers in dark-green uniforms, not bright red, and had asked
who those little black devils were. The Winnipeg Rifles were among
the regiments that trained and waited and trained as the 1940s
wore on.
Of course, Canadians who were in the air force and navy were permanently
part of an ongoing battle. And along the way, the army itself
suffered a major catastrophe at Dieppe, raising the question of
that classic division between the efforts, sacrifice and courage
of the men and officers on the ground versus what you might call
“bad generalling.” The inadequate generals and admirals
in the case of Dieppe were British, a strangely reassuring factor.
There were also unexpected interludes over those years. In 1942,
some officers — my father among them — were transferred
temporarily to British regiments fighting in North Africa. They
were sent to get battlefield experience. Those who were chosen
to go considered themselves lucky. Lucky? Well, what do words
mean in war? Since volunteering, the central desire of all these
men had been not to wait but to fight. Whatever that might eventually
mean. And so, in North Africa, they stopped waiting for a few
months.
PHOTO:
NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF CANADA PA-132467 |
PHOTO:
COURTESY JOHN RALSTON SAUL |
And then, a few months later, thousands of others, including my
father’s postwar regiment—the Princess Patricias—were
thrown into the impossible Italian campaign. Starting from the
southern tip of Sicily, they were required to fight their way
from one end to the other, over a few plains and a lot of hills,
mountains and rivers. With time, that strategy has come to seem
increasingly odd.
It was a long and questionably generalled ordeal, which, in the
First World War manner, killed many for each little bit of progress.
But the soldiers and field officers did what was asked of them
and stubbornly fought their way north.
All that, you’ll say, is far from D-Day. Well, what’s
the rush? We know the story. The grand, swashbuckling story that
still crowds our imaginations. The great armada. The five beaches.
Juno. The Canadian task somehow reminding us of Vimy. The men
rushing through the water, across the sand, through minefields,
around obstacles. Breaking through.
And then our imaginations, as if in a miracle, fly over Normandy.
Paris is taken. And we liberate Dieppe—revenge for the earlier
disaster. Then Hitler is dead in his bunker and it’s all
over and the citizen soldiers mysteriously are reabsorbed back
into their families, farms and desk jobs across the ocean.
So it goes. Or so the grand story of history goes.
Copyright
2001 by John Ralston Saul. Excerpted from Story of a Nation.
Excerpted by permission of Doubleday Canada, a division of Random
House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be
reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the
publisher.
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