Today, of course, is the 81st anniversary of D-Day and the beginning of the end of Nazi horrors in Europe. More than 14,000 Canadians landed on the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944, with 340 of our servicemen making the supreme sacrifice for Canada and the Allied cause.
In Ottawa, Prime Minister Mackenzie King celebrated the landings in his diary.
“Tonight was so good it was hard to believe,” he wrote. “Indeed, I cannot understand at all how it was possible for the Allied airmen to land their forces to the extent they have with so little loss. It really looks as I the Germans do not have the power in the air they can spare, and if they have not, they are done for. It may be that our whole attack was much more terrific than anything we have been able to imagine and we have lost more heavily than we know at the moment but that all should have gone so well is beyond belief. It makes one feel that on top of the taking of Rome (by Allied forces previously) that the war will be brought to a conclusion before many months. The German people will become panic-stricken. They will begin to see how completely they have been deceived.”
King also delivered a national radio address on D-Day and you can listen to it at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuUf13nRgkk
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.