Canada's Holy Roller

 

It's a tough story to get to the bottom of. I guess it's the  D-Day anniversary today and the Yanks have the exploits of their ancestor's doings right down to a tee. Many of my fellow Canadians have an inferiority complex about such events: "Oh listen to those American braggarts, always tooting their own horns! Canadians hit the beaches just as hard as they did and no one says anything about it!!!" And then our shitlib historical revisionists go to work, with theories that Juno beach was so well fortified that the Yanks and the Brits didn't want to touch it and get their people killed - so the tough job was given to the heroic Canucks to do. When I hear these assholes talking I just want to punch them right  out. What they actually know about the Canadian involvement in the entire war would fit in a paragraph shorter than this one. 

I myself know so little. A hundred years ago I saw a little mini-documentary (crockumentary?) about Canadian tread heads that landed at Juno. They had the old geezer tank vet in an interview and I can only remember fragments of it... but according to him, the Canadians were able to put together a small tank force to accompany the squaddies when they stormed the beach. They had something like around a dozen tanks, maybe a few more. According to him, all the Canadian tanks were dead 45 minutes later except for one - his.

I thought I'd go and do some fact checking before poasting any of this but finding an account is difficult and some contradict others. I am not finished digging into this - it's going to take longer than your standard 15 minute web search to find out what truly happened. It may be there is nothing to find and that any reputable accounting of those men and their deeds are lost to the ages with so many other accounts. One account says that the sole survivor of the Canadian 6th Armoured Regiment was the Holy Roller pictured above. (Some accounts say he survived not only D Day, but the entire war).

There are so many heroes. How many of them will never have their stories told? Or will have their exploits turned into legendary mythical nonsense that would be right at home in a comic book? As an outhouse hobbyist historian... for me trying to look at this stuff is like the astronomers trying to peer across millions of light years back to the dawn of time and suss out what actually happened, what forces were involved, and what it was actually like back then.

Over on Blab... the memes are merciless. They get period pics of the squaddies in the landing crafts dodging bullets and artillery shells and thinking to themselves, "I am fighting here so that my grandson will have the freedom to be a transgendered faggot!" or "If I survive this, I hope I live long enough to see my mixed race goblin grandchildren...!" Then kooks, lunatics and geniuses come out to posit that the wrong guys won that war - and even worse things. There was a time when such talk would have made me angry enough to kill - but now? I am reserving judgement pending more information that, in all honesty, may never come. Was that info lost? Or buried? Or pozzed? We may never know.

In these days of madness all we can do is remember their courage, honour their sacrifices... and try to be worthy of them.

Cheers!

Filthie