Approximately 14,000 Canadian soldiers landed on Juno Beach in Normandy, France on June 6, 1944.
It’s believed 359 of them died that day. More than 5,000 Canadian soldiers would perish by the time the Battle of Normandy was over three days later.
Joseph Young of Lacombe County, who turned 100 on April 13, was there.
After joining the Army in Saskatoon in January 1940, the Saskatchewan native found himself headed to war in 1944 for the now infamous battle.
“On actual D-Day, we were on board a tagged landing ship headed for the beaches of Normandy,” Young recounts. “Our regiment invaded from the ocean – the English Channel. We were all armour, so we had to have a good landing place.”
Young recalls the mood amongst his troop of about 40 soldiers as one of anticipation before taking the shore.
“We had no idea what the real thing would be like,” he admits. “Nobody was afraid, I don’t think. We weren’t afraid of what was going to happen, and nothing did happen to our regiment.”
Young says fighting on the beach was over by the time his regiment came ashore, but that members of his troop, including his best friend, later perished in battle.
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Looking back on his five-year military career, Young says he’s most proud of simply surviving the war, despite being wounded in Normandy.
“We had just taken over from another regiment, a territory that they were fighting in, and a bomb was dropped and I was a little too close to it,” he says. “A piece of it went through my shoulder, so I ended up in hospital. I had to walk about a half-mile I guess to get a Jeep and was driven to a first-aid station where they treated me and put me on a stretcher and I was driven to a field hospital where they operated on my shoulder.”
Following his discharge from the Army in 1946, Young turned to farming in the Carrot River area of Saskatchewan before moving to the Red Deer area in 1965. He then resumed his farming career near Joffre in 1970 before retiring in 2009.
Now, Young says he’s happy to see Canadians still taking the time on June 6 to remember D-Day and the sacrifices that were made.
“It’s something we should remember but I don’t think we should always be talking about it,” he exclaims. “We grew from boys to men I think from the experience of war. It’s too bad you lose so many men, they never had a chance at life really.”
Young has returned to Europe multiple times since the WWII ended, including for the 70th anniversary of D-Day where he received France’s highest national order– a nomination to the rank of Knight of the National Order of the Legion of Honour – as a testament to ‘courage and devotion to the ideals of liberty and peace.’
On Thursday, the Red Deer Legion Branch 35 is holding a remembrance ceremony for those men and women, as well as those lost in other conflicts, at Alto Reste Cemetery east of Red Deer.
The ceremony is scheduled for a half-hour starting at 11 a.m. and is open to the public.
“One of the Legion’s missions is to keep remembrance of our conflicts in the world, and make sure that we do remember the soldiers, the ones who came back and those who didn’t,” says Legion President Bev Hanes.
“The further we get away from these conflicts, the more remembrance is being forgotten by the public, and they should be taking the time to remember these people and what they did to give us the freedoms we have today.”
According to local historian Michael Dawe, several soldiers from Red Deer and District did take part in D-Day, in such units as 2-78 Battery of the Royal Canadian Artillery, but it’s not known if anyone from the region was killed on the beaches of Normandy.
Dawe says seven people from the Red Deer area lost their lives during fighting following the D-Day invasion.
