“Today is for the ones that aren’t there”: D-Day remembered

Three distinctive stacks of chalk rise majestically about eight storeys high from the western edge of the Isle of Wight, off the south coast of England.

Known locally as The Needles, they would have been the last major detail the soldiers of D-Day would have seen before the early morning mist encased them.

Only the choppy, grey waters of the English Channel stood between the soldiers and the unknown horror of what awaited them on the beaches of Normandy.

“You are about to embark upon the great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you,” General Dwight D. Eisenhower said in an address to the troops before the invasion.

Known as Operation Overlord, it was a military task never seen before. On June 6, 1944, Allied forces launched a combined naval, air and land assault.

In the early morning, airborne forces parachuted into drop zones across northern France and minesweeper flotillas found and detonated the masses of German mines that littered the English Channel.

It was then that 155,000 troops, 14,000 of them Canadians, supported by squadrons in the air and battleships behind them, made the run of their lives onto the sand.

“The fighting is certain to be heavy, bitter and costly,” Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King said in his D-Day address at home.

For those on the beaches, it was more than words. Seventy-five years later, their recollections paint the picture of the brutal and uncompromising task they had to achieve and how they did it so young and with such bravery and courage.

“When I ran out (into the water), I went right in over my head. And I was thinking it wouldn’t be a bad idea if I stayed down because you could hear the bullets pinging on the boat and splashing in the water. But that didn’t work because when the wave went out, I was only knee deep. So, me, Johnson and Peter went across that beach and we probably would have passed Ben Johnson, steroids and all,” Regina Rifle Regiment veteran Jerry Molson described on the 50th anniversary of D-Day.

Molson’s colleague, Jim Scott, didn’t think. He just ran.

“We heard the rockets go but I don’t remember anything else. I can just tell you that when we went over that sand, I don’t know how the heck I got across that,” Scott explained. “I went back in 1984 and that seems a long, long ways. We must have flew across it.”

All of them express disbelief in the size of the operation.

As the waves lapped against the boats and the shells fell around them, Regina Rifles veteran Peter Matiwy describes a steely resolve and thoughtful silence before the ramps went down.

“The feeling was a very strong feeling of resentment towards the enemy: ‘If it wasn’t for you, goddamn it, I wouldn’t be here,’ ” Matiwy said. “You got madder, and the madder you got, you wanted to get off that ship and go chase (the Germans) down the beach.”

As the water turned blood red, the Rifles were all of a sudden awash with the realization of those they’d lost.

“All of a sudden the action stopped right there and I can just see him yet, (Molson slapped the desk) just going down,” the veteran recalled of the moment one of his comrades was hit. “And then of course we didn’t stop. We kept going, but that is like a still frame in a movie, (he slaps the desk again), that was it.”

And when the Regina Rifles came to a stop, the furthest inland of any unit on D-Day, they turned to see the human carnage spread out in front of them.

“The most glorious feeling in the world is when an attack is over and you’ve lived through it and there is nobody shooting at you at the moment,” Molson said. “That’s the most wonderful feeling. You are absolutely on top of the world.”

Sadly, the veterans of D-Day have lived in the shadow of their fallen comrades, the men who never made it off those beaches.

“Today is for the ones that aren’t there, it’s not for the ones of us who are,” Molson said. “We see each other, say hello and that’s it, then you talk about the ones that aren’t there. They’re the ones we’re remembering, the ones that aren’t there.”

Of the 14,000 Canadians who stormed Juno Beach, 359 died that day.

We cannot repay them. All we can do is remember.