Today marks the 70th anniversary of D-Day
Posted Jun 6, 2014 04:56:09 AM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Today marks the 70th anniversary of the largest invasion in the history of warfare.
Hundreds of Thousands of soldiers landed on the shores of France on June 6th 1944.
That invasion marked the beginning of the end of the Second World War.
24 thousand of those were Canadians.
Mike Becthold is the Communication Director at the Laurier Military Center. He says everything was gambled on making the mission a success, failure was not an option.
If they had failed, it would have set allies back 2 or 3 years and who knows when the second world war would have ended.
Becthold says Canada had a huge role to play on that day.
“There were 5 main landing beaches, two were American, two were British, and one was Canadian…there were 359 Canadians killed on D-day and about 1000 casualties in total.”
He says a lot of Canadians know about D-day from recent movies like Private Ryan. But he cautions they don’t show any Canadian involvement.
