Nearly 150,000 Allied troops were landed on the beaches or parachuted into the Normandy invasion zone on June 6, 1944, including more than 14,000 Canadians at Juno Beach. The Royal Canadian Navy contributed 124 warships and 10,000 sailors to the largest armada in history. The Royal Canadian Air Force added 39 squadrons.
This D-Day alone claimed 10,000 lives, including 381 dead and 715 wounded from Canada. The Battle of Normandy continued until August 21, with a total of 209,000 Allied dead or wounded, including more than 18,700 Canadian soldiers.
Like monuments around the world or remembrance tourism in Normandy, film and television productions bear witness to the importance of this historic mega-event. The database of world audiovisual productions (IMDB) lists 870 on “D-Day” alone, the vast majority of American origin.
Documentaries dominate, but the immense lot also includes a lot of fiction. The D-Dayinfo.org site offers a list of the best productions on the subject. Series Band of Brothers (2001) comes first, followed by the film Saving Private Ryan (1998), two creations by the American Steven Spielberg.
The Canadian documentary Storming Juno appears in 9e place. The 2010 production directed by Tim Wolochatiuk is organized around three real characters, including Quebec tank sergeant Léo Gariépy (1912-1972). The production uses Canadian footage of D-Day filmed on the barges and on the beaches, released very quickly to cinemas across the country. The National Film Board (ONF), created in 1939, was quickly mobilized for patriotic efforts and “reckless propaganda”. The first commissioner of the Office, the Briton John Grierson, inventor of the term “documentary” applied to cinema, said that his Canadian institution served to “mobilize minds”.
The media mobilization was colossal, commensurate with the national war effort. Filmmaker Donald Brittain and his team of NFB editors drew on 4,000 km of accumulated film to produce the series of thirteen half-hour episodes Canada at war broadcast at the beginning of the 1960s, with, again, obviously, a section (the 9e titled A calm morning) on the Landing and the Normandy campaign by Canadian troops.
“The Second War is very visual,” explains Tim Cook, chief historian and director of research at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. Radio and newspapers were important media, but film gave visibility to the conflict. Did the images show the brutality of the fighting, the shattered bodies, the soldiers hit in the head, eviscerated by bombs? No. But they gave an idea of the movement of Canadian troops, the service of Canadians, and also the losses. »
Memory lapses
There’s pretty much nothing else to report from here except the very controversial The Valor and the Horror (1992), one of the three parts of which deals with the Battle of Normandy. Above all, there is simply no Canadian fiction film worthy of mention about this pivotal day of the 20th century.e century in which the country was involved very deeply and very intensively.
We repeat: Canada has produced thousands of filmed fiction films since 1945, but none directly deals with D-Day. In the national collective memory, the Hollywood perspective filters the monumental moment.
This was already the case at the Canadian premiere in Toronto in 1962 of the American film The Longest Dayin third place on the list on the D-Dayinfo.org site), presented in front of veterans of the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada, a Canadian regiment that landed on June 6. “They thought they would see the great story of the Americans, the British and the Canadians told together on D-Day,” summarizes museologist Tim Cook. The former soldiers were obviously very disappointed to see their absence from the filmed story. »
Mr. Cook recounts this illuminating anecdote in his book The Fight for History subtitled “75 years of forgetting, remembering and remaking the Second World War in Canada”. The central thesis of the essay published in 2020 says that the conflict gave rise to conflicts of interpretation between veterans and the rest of society and that the country’s participation was quickly obscured in the collective memory. In contrast, the battles of Vimy Ridge and Ypres at the end of the First World War played a major role in shaping Canadian national sentiment, with monuments and a fictional film (The Battle of Passchendaele2008) to testify to this.
“My book talks about how Canada did not do very well job to tell his own story about the Second World War, Mr. Cook summarizes. We have let the British and Americans take over the cultural field of films and documentaries. There is a strange prolonged absence of our common collective memory of this time when we nevertheless played a major role in liberating France, Belgium and the Netherlands. We paid almost no attention to the war for decades, until 1995, in the 50e anniversary of the end of the conflict. »
The lion’s share
Historian Béatrice Richard, of the Royal Military College of Saint-Jean, observes that her young apprentice officers often know neither more nor less than the rest of Canadian society about Canada’s role between 1939 and 1945. She also emphasizes that collective amnesia does not only concern D-Day.
“We commemorate the Landings and forget the rest, for example the landings in Sicily, which also served to divide the German forces on another front. The commemoration is very selective. Now, does Canada have a short memory more than other societies? I’m not sure. We should push the analysis further. It must also be admitted that a lot of work has been done by historians. There is some good material online. The Department of Veterans Affairs has a well-stocked site. »
Mme Richard herself directed an issue of Political History Bulletin dedicated to war cinema and the mark it left on collective memory. One of the conclusions of scholarly studies suggests that “despite propaganda efforts, the French-speaking public has never completely adhered to the patriotic rhetoric of British inspiration. Two films released here in 2008 illustrate this well. Passchendaele [sur la Première Guerre mondiale] renews the myth of the Great War as the birth certificate of Canada, while The deserter rehashes that of the French-Canadian antihero’s insubordination to conscription.”
There is a strange prolonged absence of our common collective memory of this time when we nevertheless played a major role in liberating France, Belgium and the Netherlands.
The failed Dieppe raid (August 1942), the first Canadian engagement in the conflict with nearly 5,000 local soldiers, stirs up the same ambiguous memory waters. Mme Richard studied the historical treatment of this event in his doctoral thesis. She discovered that the first newspaper reports spoke of a British raid. The lists of victims quickly revealed the scale of the disaster: 900 dead, thousands of wounded and prisoners and the Fusiliers Mont-Royal regiment almost wiped out.
“From the 1960s, nationalism and the context of decolonization, the reading of conscription and military operations has been colored by nationalism. French Canadians are described as cannon fodder in the service of England, of the Empire. »
This perspective focuses on pure sugar in The Molsons’ gardener (story set in 1917), aborted screenplay by Pierre Falardeau transformed into a comic. The Quebec series IXE-13 and the race for uranium (Illico), launched a few months ago, is set in the immediate post-war period, in 1945. It does not adopt this purely colonizing, miserabilist and victimizing reading, on the contrary. The series also shows the interest in treating rich historical material instead of always letting Hollywood colonize the minds of here and around the world.
Ms. Richard recently saw a report on Radio-Canada where French guides to the D-Day beaches spoke only about United States soldiers. “For the French, it is therefore also an American story, and that’s all. The Americans had greater potential to showcase their achievements and they succeeded. While liberating Paris, the Canadians attempted to destroy the V2 launch pads. Memory is really a question of balance of power. The most powerful takes on the big role, like the lion in the fable…”