The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - A Bridge Special - Remembering D-DAY

Episode Date: June 6, 2023

The great correspondent Brian Stewart has been with us almost every Tuesday for the past year.  His commentary has been about Ukraine but today we look back to another famous June 6 and that of course was in 1944, D-Day.  Both Brian and I have been to the Normandy beaches many times and today is all about remembering.  

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It is June 6. June 6 is D-Day. This is the 79th anniversary of D-Day. And we're going to remember. And hello there, welcome, Peter Mansbridge here, and Brian Stewart will be joining in a couple of moments. As we talk about the importance of June 6th, one of those days that will live forever, it's a part of history, It's a part of our history. June 6, 1944. D-Day. The invasion of Normandy. The beginning of the liberation of Western Europe from Nazi Germany. Canada was a part of that day and remains a part of that day in terms of our memories all these years later. Next year will be a big year in terms of remembering because it'll be the 80th anniversary. But we're going to get a jump on all those people who are planning the 80th by having our own little remembrance of the 79th. Brian was over there in 1984, which was the 40th anniversary of D-Day. We were both over there for 1994, which was a big deal.

It was the 50th. And then we were the 60th and the 70th just a couple of years ago. So we've got a lot of memories on those beaches in terms of the different moments, the different anniversaries, and the different remembrances. And we've seen a lot of people who were involved in those battles come to those celebrations in some ways. You can call it that. And we've lost them.

We've lost almost everybody who fought on that day, June 6, 1944. Time has marched on. There are still a few of the old fellas left and I'm sure a few of them will make their way next year I don't know, you know, they're going to be over 100 more than likely but there will be some there

maybe their last time around just before I bring Brian in a couple of things to remember about D-Day we tend to think of it because of Just before I bring Brian in, a couple of things to remember about D-Day. We tend to think of it because of movies and books and everything through the eyes of the British or the Americans. Well, there were three countries primarily involved in D-Day. The British, the Americans, and the Canadians. But there were also almost you know, almost 10 other countries as well

in smaller roles, minor roles, compared with the big three. And we don't want to forget those because, you know, the Australians were there, the Belgians were there, the Czechs, the Dutch, the French, the Greek, New Zealanders, Norwegians, Rhodesians, the Poles were there. So it was a multi-national force that landed on those beaches in huge numbers too you know this was the biggest land sea invasion in history at that time and it's important to remember just how big it was. There were somewhere between 150,000 and 160,000 Allied soldiers

on the beaches of Normandy by the end of that day, June 6th. Just think of that, 156,000 is usually the figure that's often used. 4,000 Allied troops were killed by German soldiers during that invasion. There were more than 300 Canadians who lost their lives that day. At the time, the D-Day invasion, as I said, was the largest naval, air, and land operation in history. And think of this. Within a few days, about 326,000 troops,

more than 50,000 vehicles, and some 100,000 tons of equipment had landed just in a matter of days. It's remarkable what happened in such a short period of time. Now, I want to bring Brian in, and we're going to go back through some of our memories of what we've witnessed over time and listening to the stories of the mostly men who were there on that day, on June 6, 1944. But I want to start, Brian, because Brian's such a student of history, as we all know from this past year and listening to his various commentaries on the Ukraine situation. But one of the remarkable things about that day was that somebody had to make the final decision, okay, we're going to do this. It had been planning

for months, if not years, the final move onto the breaking through the Atlantic wall and landing in Western Europe. It had been planned for a long time, multi-nation planning. But at the end of the day, somebody had to say, yes, we're going to do it.

And that somebody was general Dwight Eisenhower from the United States. It was the Supreme ally Commander for D-Day. And we tend to forget or not even think about the enormous pressure that must have been placed upon this one particular individual. I mean, obviously, he had other generals and various Air Force leaders, naval leaders, army leaders, and political leaders were a part of the discussions. But at the end of the day, he had to make the call. Talk about the pressure that Dwight Eisenhower was under, Brian.

It's hard, Peter, to really sum it all up, to even imagine what it would be like. I remember once talking to an old British editor. I was asking him, you know, what was it like on the weeks leading up to D-Day? What was the mood like? And he said, we were an island of nervous wrecks. If every civilian was a nervous wreck, what was the pressure like on the one, as you pointed out, the one officer, the Supreme Allied Commander for the liberation of Western Europe that had to make that call when the weather

was very bad. There was a very small opening in the weather that he could risk it. He had to say himself it was a gamble. He had to make the decision. And he said to an the decision and he said to an aide as he watched the first paratroopers heading off to parachute into normandy i hope to god i know what i'm doing imagine that really it's not just the landing it was whether going to be a success or not of course that was obviously the giant gamble well he called it a gamble um A gamble that had to be taken. He said, I don't like it, but it's the only thing we can do. We have to make a decision. I'm the one who makes the decision.

We're going to go. Had D-Day failed, and I've never attended a D-Day anniversary without my palms getting still a little bit sweaty when I start to think of the odds. What if the great invasion of Normandy, the landings had failed that day? What it would have meant not just to the war, but to civilization itself. Certainly the Western allies could not have come up with another invasion for years to come. The mood at home may have been, never try that again.

We just lost, who knows, 30,000, 50,000 men. You're not going to do that again. The war would have dragged on. Nazism would have taken ever more dark turns into the hellish, the absolute hellish. We don't know how the war would have gone in the Soviet Union and Germany. Excuse me. I think the Western allies would have used the atomic bomb to bring it to an end. I think they were really working on it for Germany at first,

and Germany fell into the war, and they used it on Japan. But we would have had a nuclear weapon dropped in Central Europe to just try and end the war. But everything had to succeed that day. I mean, you couldn't face the thought of what would happen if it failed. And therefore, again, the decision made by this commander, General Dwight Eisenhower, is just mind-boggling. Perhaps one of the great decisions made in the entire 20th century, if not in the last millennia, in terms of the impact it had on the world.

I mean, civilization was restored to Europe with the invasion of Normandy and the recapture of Western Europe and eventually the end of the Cold War and an end of the Cold War. But we got out of that with civilization intact. We couldn't really say for sure that civilization would come out intact had D-Day failed that day. You know, when I try to imagine what it must have been like sitting around that table with all those other officers and leaders and input from some of the leaders, like Churchill and FDR, were there any saying, no, this is just too much of a gamble? I think nobody was saying no.

There was somebody saying no to the dropping of the airborne. The three divisions, the two American and one British, with some Canadians including the British, dropping in Normandy is altogether too risky. But it was Lee Mallory, the air marshal, but he was overruled by the others who said we simply have to have it. However grave a gamble this is to parachute 18,000 parachuters in the dark of night under German anti-aircraft fire and fire all kinds into a landing in the pitch dark and fight like crazy to try and keep the Germans from getting to the beaches. That was the fake thing. But there were a lot of people, I think, more than we know from

history, really, probably, who were nervous as blazes that night and thought the worst might happen. One of them was Field Marshal Brooke. He was the senior general of all in Britain. He was the chief of the imperial general staff. He was Monty's boss. He was all the other generals' boss. And he wrote in his diary, so this was written hours before the D-Day. This is the actual words of the top commander hours before the troops went in. And he's writing, it is very hard to believe that in a few hours the cross-channel invasion starts. I am very uneasy about the whole operation. At the best, it will fall far short of expectations of the bulk of people. At the worst, it may well be the most ghastly disaster of the whole war.

I wish to God it were safely over. That's a nervous man. That is somebody almost at his wits end. Eisenhower at this time, we should remember from his own diaries and people who knew him, was living on coffee, scotch, and four packs of non-filtered cigarettes a day. I mean, he was just literally chain smoking. The nerves were so bad. And he's saying on the night of the invasion,

I hope to God I know what I'm doing. That gives you some sense. I got another indication. Well, actually, once I was looking at some old film archives of D-Day, and they had some outtakes, you know, the film that was never used, but you see a clapboard clapping, the newsreel cameraman, and it says June the 6th, 0500 hours, or 5 o'clock, sorry, 5 o'clock in the afternoon.

And it's at the headquarters of all the officers, and they're coming out. You have Ramsey, the admiral, and a couple of the air marshals are coming out. And they look like kids being let out of school almost. Their faces look unbelievably relaxed, like almost they're breathing for the first time, not just in days, but in months. The tension these people have been under for really 11 months solid and six months of very heavy preparation. I once talked to a Canadian officer, a senior general, who was in charge of the Canadian fire support on D-Day.

That means to hammer at the German defenses and try to knock them out. And he had been put under what he claimed was close arrest for nine months. He'd been part of the real planners of D-Day at a time, remember, when they didn't really have computers. Like now they're working on slide rules

and stuff like that most of the time. Anyways, he was going over the night of the invasion with the troops, and he had all his plans worked out. And I said, what were you feeling? And he said, you know, at one stage, I walked to the back of the landing craft, and there was nobody at the back, at the stern. It was all by myself. And I felt an overwhelming temptation to just step off and disappear into the channel and be gone.

I found I can't take this stress any longer, not knowing whether my calculations, or maybe one small flaw in the calculations could get a thousand men killed before noon. I've really felt suicidal, and I have no doubt that there were many officers that night going over with their men who felt a strong urge to simply put an end to it all, because they were living not only with this tension minute by minute, but they'd been living with it for months. And, of course, the men themselves were feeling extraordinary nerves. So it's one of the things civilization was saved by tremendous courage in the face of fierce enemy fire and very skilled enemy fire. But it was restored with people holding their nerve.

I think we always have to remember that. It's a big lesson of D-Day. It took military commanders, military privates, and civilians, everybody, to hold their nerve for an awful long time and pull this off. Let me mention Churchill for a moment because the more there are movies and dramas made about Churchill during the Second World War, one thing has kind of crept into the storyline is the sense that he was really nervous about what might happen. He'd seen the worst in the First World War. He'd been blamed for some of the worst in the First World War. He'd been blamed for some of the worst in the First World War,

the deaths of thousands of young British soldiers, that he was having these dreams of water coming ashore along the Normandy coast, blood soaked, and that he was nervous. He never said, don't do it, but that he was really worried about what the consequences could be. Indeed, that's true. And two years before, he had argued against any landing in Western Europe as too dangerous. He's had nightmare dreams of blood flowing in the waves,

the shore waves. And he had really had to fight down his own terror of that failure that I've described what would it mean and what would, you know, it would make some of the butchery of the First World War look almost tame by comparison, if really bad. And so his nerves were showing and blowing his top a lot. He got quite angry. He had a particular reason to be angry because one of the strangest things about D-Day is right on the eve of the battle, Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French, chose to come in and

start messing everything up, saying that he would not go to France under the orders of Eisenhower. It'd have to be a separate French command. And Churchill was so annoyed, he threatened to one stage to have him thrown in arms and shipped off to Algiers. He was so furious. So, I mean, part of that, I'm sure, was Churchill's nerves just exploding. And once again, this miraculous figure of General Eisenhower was able to calm everything down. Eisenhower was a superb organizer, but he was also an almost magical dealer of people with strong differences. So at the very top, normal jealousies break loose.

There was de Gaulle making everybody else angry. As somebody said at the time, you have to forgive de Gaulle. After all, his standard diet is the hand that fed him, the human hand that fed him. So there was that going on the other thing about Eisenhower that one tends to forget because he's looked upon as this incredible

military strategist as a result of D-Day and yet he himself had never been to battle at least he'd never faced the front he'd never faced the front. He'd never faced it in the First World War, and he hadn't faced it in the Second World War.

He was, as you said, an organizer. Right. Indeed, and he was so brilliant an organizer. He was top of his class in the Leavenworth officer training. He was the head of the American planning for the Second World War in 1940-41. He was thought to be so bright, but he had never been in battle, and he was very conscious of this all along.

And Montgomery always rubbed it in whenever he got a chance because Montgomery was almost as evil-tempered as de Gaulle at times in laying slanders around. But he obviously had enormous courage and i think nobody ever doubted certainly after these events his his courage um yeah one of the things that i think history doesn't really at least the movie versions the popular culture version show enough of the difficulty of planning these operations and how much effort has to go into it. And this was at a time when, remember,

the simple cell phone that we carry in our hands, mobile, had more computer power than all of Eisenhower and all of the Pentagon and all of the British military computer power put together. So a lot of it did come down to people literally working with, you know, rules on paper and adding things up and subtracting them as it goes over my head. All of that had to be done with a complexity that today we can't really even imagine, I think. I mean, how do you get 7,000 vessels to cross the English Channel through minefields in some kind of order?

I mean, it's hard enough to get one vessel across some days when the weather's not so good. 7,000 vessels with something like 40 German U-boats were supposedly supposed to cut off any invasion. All of that has to be coordinated down to the absolute minimum. And just thousands and thousands of people went into the planning of this. Of course, you know, one of the great thrills of covering D-Day we both had a lot of, and that is be able to talk and actually walk along the beach with these guys that came ashore. And the way they took nothing for granted. They very well knew what their officers had gone through getting them to this place. They knew

what their buddies had gone through, and they knew what they they had to withstand. And it was just sort of, it was a moment, you set it up well at the beginning, because I once did a stand-up where I mentioned that I had never run across a vet who really said anything. The standard line tended to be, I would not do D-Day again for a million dollars, but I would not have missed it for 10 million. Because of the very fact you mentioned at the beginning, this went into history. 10,000 years from now, I have no doubt, people will still be reading about D-Day the same way that people read about, you know, the ancient battles of Gallipoli and ancient Greece and Rome and the rest of it. They just became part of history because they altered history. And I think there was a great pride in the people who managed to come through it and did their duty.

And I think they had that pride with them for the rest of their lives as well they should have. And I'm glad they did. We're going to take our middle-of-the-show break here in a second, but I just wanted one last thing about Eisenhower. He'd asked, as any good leader would ask, give me a sense of what might happen here. What kind of casualties could we be facing? And if I recall correctly, the rule of thumb in those days was,

you know, you should expect 10% casualties. I'm not talking about just wounded and dead, but 10% could be dead at the end of this day, and you could still claim that to be a victory. Well, as we said, they landed 156,000 troops on D-Day. The list of dead amounted to 4,000, which is a horrible number. It's a terribly high number, but nowhere near what they were worried they could face on that day going in. So that's kind of one point. The other point is Eisenhower, once again, like any good leader, had to be prepared for defeat, had to be prepared for his commanders on the ground to say,

we can't do this, we're going to have to pull out. You know, the opposition is just too fierce, too well organized, and they clearly, you know, they knew we were coming or something, but we can't deal with it. So he had to be prepared for that, and he was prepared for it to the point where he wrote out, it's all on, you know, it's part of the history books now, but he wrote out what he would say if the landings were a failure. And as you've pointed out many times in the various shows, the last line of it is, this was my decision and my decision alone to do this.

So I would say, you know. You know, hard to imagine a modern day general writing a note like that and putting it in his pocket. And he would be thinking, here come the Senate inquiries. Here I'm going to be lashed in public for the rest of my life. There's no way I'm going to put my name down to something like this. And I, you know, just again, he was a remarkable moral character. And not only did he write it out, and it's an amazing note to look at, but he signed it the day,uly 5th june 5th

no he signed it this is that he got the date wrong july 5th because he was so nervous and jittery you can tell his handwriting he was so nervous and jittery the time he wrote it that he put down july instead of june that's all marked by a lot of the psychologists who've looked at the pressure of command as one sign of his distraction at the time. Wow. Between the four packs of cigarettes puffing away. I mean, honest to God. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll get back and talk specifically about the Canadian involvement on that day because it was significant and sometimes we as Canadians

don't recognize just how significant it was. So we'll get back to that right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to a special edition of The Bridge for this June 6th. It's the anniversary of D-Day, the 79th anniversary of D-Day. You're listening on Sirius XM channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. With me, Brian Stewart. The two of us have covered a number of the anniversaries of D-Day on the scene in France,

along the Normandy coast, usually around the communities of Courcelles-sur-Mer and Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer, where the Canadians landed. So let's talk about the Canadians for a moment. For those of you who've been there and have gone to the little cemetery at Béni-sur-Mer where there's a couple of thousand Canadians buried who were part of the Normandy campaign, not just the day of, but beyond. And it's a very, you know, obviously it's a cemetery, so it's an emotional place to be there, but it feels so much like Canada. It's surrounded by maple trees.

France, you know, has given the land to Canada, so technically it's a part of Canada. But those are all young Canadian lads. They're not all young, but most of them are young, and they're late teens or early 20s. And for those who died on June 6th, and the date's right there on the headstones, you have this sense that they didn know, they didn't know. They didn't know what happened, right? They didn't know whether they'd succeeded in their invasion.

They'd rushed ashore, in some cases were cut down before they got their feet out of the water, you know, running next to their buddies who they'd been in training and being told repeatedly, don't stop, don't stop for anything, don't stop for your buddy. When the shooting starts, just get as far inland as you can, and you've got to start knocking out those German positions. And how hard that must have been. A lot of these young guys, you know, it was their best friend they were running beside.

Anyway, Brian talked to me about the Canadian, you know, there were five beaches. Golden Sword were the two British beaches. Juneau was the Canadian beach. And Utah and Omaha were the American beaches. The one perhaps most famous is Omaha because it was a bloodbath. The fiercest opposition came along Omaha Beach, and if you've walked that stretch, I have and I'm sure you have, Brian, it can be a lonely stretch of beach as you walk along there.

But talk to me about the Canadians and the significance that we were one of the main three partners on that invasion and just how we did on that day. Yeah, imagine the responsibility on Canada's shoulders that day. We were right smack in the middle of the biggest invasion, naval invasion in history upon which the war depended. We had, you know, two years earlier had a disaster at Dieppe. I mean, you know, what if the Canadian had been the sole beach not to succeed, you know? I mean, there was enormous national importance for Canada as well, well understood, and it was given an enormous responsibility, and really it conducted it brilliantly well,

given all that it had to face. I didn't realize until I once measured it one day that, I mean, the beach front that the Canadians landed on was eight kilometers wide. It's, you know, it's not a small beach you're landing on, like you might see in a movie. This is a very jumbled area of small houses on the beach front and cluttered rock formations and then another beach and another beach, and all of that has to be coordinated under ferocious fire from the very well-trained German troops, very well-armed German troops as well.

Just going up against that and then having to break through this remarkably cluttered, if you see pictures of it, front, breakthrough, and then start moving inland, where you're supposed to get is 12 miles or so inland. The Canadians, as we well know, penetrated the furthest that day. Well, it can sound pretty easy, like they got, what, 11 miles or so inland. Start walking that and see what they had to fight through. Or go in a very small moving car, just a few miles an hour, and see the number of fields and hedgerahs and clops of buildings and trees where enemies can be lurking and you wonder how anyone could get that far inland of course

they had massive support from the air including many Canadian squadrons were going in ground support and they had area naval support as well firing so they were very well backed up with fire support but what made it very difficult for all of the invading troops, and certainly the Canadian ones, was the Germans had been particularly well trained at concealed firing. And the Germans had this particular combat skill that nobody ever matched. I think it was pretty well agreed they were the best professional troops or the best troops, let's call it, in the Second World War. Certainly were the best officers. They're very well trained that if you have to retreat any, immediately counterattack.

So every time the Canadians would take a position, they thought they had somewhat secured a position. The next thing they knew, they were facing a pretty skilled German counterattack right on that spot. By these very well trained troops, many of them had fought on the Eastern Front for years. Their officers were extremely well-trained. So that made it all very difficult as well. And basically, I think the Canadian performance was absolutely as good as anybody on D-Day and really was outstanding

in the depth that got inland and really could mark the day down as a very significant success, not just to the day but for the country, for the country's effort in the Second World War. That would be probably our most outstanding feat. And there were regiments, you know, from across Canada, from the prairies, from Atlantic Canada, from Central Canada, both Ontario and Quebec. I mean, they were, it was a very representative Canadian group. And you're quite correct in mentioning, you know, it wasn't like one beach.

It was named one beach, right? But as you said, it was, what, 8 or 10 kilometers wide. But that encompassed, like, three different, at least three different communities, right? They had to take each one of these towns from German hands. And the Germans, I mean, they were caught off guard, right? They didn't expect the landing was going to take place in Normandy. They had good troops in some places.

They certainly had good troops on the Omaha Beach, but in other cases they weren't so good, but they moved in new troops fairly quickly within a couple of days, and the fight became hellish i mean the landing landing was one thing but then moving forward inland took forever much longer than they thought it was going to take for weeks and it was brutally hot weather incredibly uncomfortable and uh so i some veterans remember the heat is almost as bad as a battle at times here. And it was just a terrible fight.

And beyond that, of course, lay the liberation of northern France and then the liberation of Holland. They were still 11 months away from the end of the war. So, I mean, talk about having to climb Mount Everest three times in a row or something. But the exhaustion factor that this would put on people who never got a decent night's sleep, were constantly under stress and nerves and the rest of it, it's quite remarkable that they could hold all that together as well as they did.

And it's just something to remember. D-Day was the one day, but it was the day that kicked the door open for the liberation of all of Europe because the ones that came in on the second wave or the third wave were by no means facing an easy task whatsoever. They were coming in facing troops, German troops already

reorganizing, getting some reinforcements from the rear, digging into better positions. So the fight in many ways just gets, as you well said, gets harder and harder and longer and longer. And the casualties, I forget the figure now, but over the first six days were really quite horrifying, the casualty figures. One thing that I think one of the what-ifs of history, historians are giving more thought now to asking the question, what if this had happened? What if that had happened?

We were blessed on D-Day by, first of all, the secrecy which the Allies managed to retain right up until D-Day, which would be almost impossible to do today. In fact, it would be impossible today, so we'll never see the likes of

that again. But also the mistakes the Germans made at high command. They had a huge fight between their two generals. I mean, a theoretical fight. They liked each other personally. Rommel, who was the commander of all the beach defenses, and von Rundstedt, who was the commander in chief of the Western forces, whether they should meet the invading army wherever it came right on the beaches which rommel wanted to do or fall back and meet inland as von rundstedt wanted to do and rommel was overruled he argued all along look we're if we let them get through the d-day and get inland we're done for because the Air Force above,

their Air Force above will completely dominate us. We have to defeat them on the beaches. Had Rommel won that argument, Canadians would have gone ashore, Americans and Brits would have gone ashore, running into three, four, five times as much enemy resistance as we actually did. So thank heavens for that, that falling out between the German generals as well. You know, Rommel, of course, is an interesting character from his heroics in North Africa. But that summer, the summer of 1944, was not a good one for Rommel, obviously. On June 6th, he wasn't there at his station as the head of the German forces along the Atlantic Wall. He was back in Germany celebrating either his

or his wife's birthday. And then he had to rush to the front. But then a month later, in the July 20th plot against Hitler, Hitler was convinced that Rommel was a part of it. And eventually, even though Rommel was a part of it. And eventually, even though Rommel was this national hero, they convinced Rommel that he should take his own life, which he did, rather than go through a trial and humiliation for his family and everything else. And then Hitler had this huge huge huge funeral service for him in the fall of 44 and as you know um just four days before the plot he was injured he was shot up

and it was a staff officer's car on way to a meeting so he's actually injured the day of the plot and he was in hospital under treatment when they tried to kill Hitler. And the person who spotted him driving along the road or being driven along the road was none other than a very famous Canadian, a later general, but Air Force pilot, Romer. Richard Romer, absolutely. Richard Romer, who was up there firing on reconnaissance. In a spitfire, he looks down and he sees this,

what looked like a single staff car running along, and he gives the message into a Polish pilot, who's also up in that part of the sky as well, of officer staff car in sight, to advise you shoot it up, and the Polish pilot did shoot it up, and that was Ronald. So how history may have been changed had Richard Romer not been flying over. Right.

General Romer is an amazing character, and he never lets you forget that moment. You know, you're in conversation, which I've done many times with him. And, you know, one time he knew I was going over there for something, and he gave me all these maps. He said, this is where I flew, this is where I went, this is where I shot. You know, I arranged the shooting at Rommel's car. I mean, it's quite something, quite the guy. Okay, we're out of time, but I want to leave you with this opportunity

to say something about, you know, I mentioned earlier that, you know, it was mainly men and it was mainly men, obviously, who were landing in the beaches in those days. It was all men, but there were women involved in D-Day as well. And they, you know, whether they were in the tracking stations or the various airdromes and what have you. But those men who landed on the beaches, I remember standing with your old colleague, Tom Brokaw from NBC, in the cemetery at Omaha Beach, which takes your breath away because it's just row after row after row after row after row after row of crosses. It never stops.

And, you know, I asked him, you know, an unfair question, I guess, but we were standing under the trees at the side of the cemetery. We were looking out at that, and I said, when you look out there, you know, Tom, what do you think about? And, you know And he broke down. And there's the guy who wrote The Greatest Generation, associated in so many ways with telling the stories of the Second World War. But his point was these guys came from everywhere.

They were farmers' kids. They were from small towns and big cities. Some had jobs, some didn't have jobs, but they all felt this was the right thing to do, and they came to fight for their country. And they had extraordinary bravery, and it was a time when nobody questioned their desire to do what they did you know they were all proud of them they were proud of them in their towns they you know had had marches and

ceremonies and parades for them when they when they came back um but when you you know you and i met some of these guys in their in their later years but from what you know about them at the time, when you think about them, what do you think about? Well, I think it's much the same as you've just said. They were just a remarkable cross-section of usually young men. In the Canadian sense, I always have this one feeling that goes through me, that every single one of those who came ashore on D-Day and those who died and those who were wounded, some seriously for life, every single one of them could have been at home. They were volunteers. these are people who went in and signed on the line and joined to go across the ocean to fight

the foreign enemy that was imperiling civilization they were convinced and i think today we can still be convinced that's right but they were all volunteers they could have been sitting back home in front of a barbecue fishing in a lake doing something something else, and here they were, landing at D-Day. I mean, wow. Wow is right. Listen, thanks for the reminiscing. And, you know, I don't know where we'll be a year from now on the 80th, but I know wherever we are, we'll be thinking about those guys

and a day that changed history, uh, that changed history. Um, Brian, as usual, thanks so much for this. And we'll be back to your normal beat on Ukraine a week from now, but this was well worth taking the moment to think about all that. So thanks.

Okay. My pleasure. All right, Brian Stewart with us, um, as he is usually on Tuesdays, but a very different topic today. and I appreciate him being there. That's going to wrap it up for this special edition.

I'm Peter Mansbridge. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours.