‘We were happy to see them’: Children of D-Day remember the Canadians who landed on Normandy’s shores

The first Canadian troops six-year-old Maryvonne Morin met on D-Day nearly killed her.

It was only a few hours after the start of the largest seaborne invasion in history, and by that time, her family had already escaped several brushes with death. The day before their home had been requisitioned by the Germans. Ms. Morin, her father and mother – then several months pregnant – were forced to spend the night of June 5 in a little house to the west. The family later found out that had they stayed at their own house, they likely would have been killed when bombs hit the protective trench dug as a shelter in the backyard.

Ms. Morin awoke in their new home shortly after dawn to the sound of the ceiling falling on her head. In the room next door, a chimney pipe fell right on her mother’s pillow. Somehow both survived unscathed.

Safe but scared, Ms. Morin hid under her sheets until, moments later, her father came to grab her. Her mother was exhausted from her pregnancy and refused to get up at first. Her husband had to pull her away from the bed to show her what was visible from the window: an armada the size of which the world had never seen.

“We couldn’t see the sea,” Ms. Morin, now 86, told The Globe and Mail. “All we saw were boats.”

The family quickly realized the house where they had spent the night was too heavily damaged to serve as a shelter. So they braved the open streets, filled with the deafening cacophony of those countless ships, planes overhead, bombs falling everywhere and gunfire between German and Allied troops, in search of a safe haven.

“There was shooting everywhere,” Ms. Morin said.

The family eventually made their way to a basement where about 20 people were hunkered down. But with the cellar’s double doors facing the water, the sound of ferocious battle and bursts of gunfire were still piercing. Through small skylights they could see nearby German troops, too.

While men such as her father braved the outside world in search of the wounded, children such as Ms. Morin sat inside, waiting for the danger to pass.

Some time later – Ms. Morin no longer remembers how long – the basement dwellers were startled by the sound of someone kicking in the doors.

Several soldiers, faced smeared with either dirt or war paint, emerged with their rifles drawn and fingers on their triggers. They were Canadian troops, and fortunately for Ms. Morin, they immediately realized they were dealing with children, women and others seeking refuge from the fighting.

Of the 156,115 troops who landed in Normandy on D-Day, 14,000 were Canadian fighters headed for what Allied war planners called Juno Beach – a 10-kilometre stretch of coastline between the small towns of Courseulles-sur-Mer and Saint Aubin-sur-Mer. An estimated 381 Canadian soldiers and airmen were killed and more than 584 were wounded that day, while 131 were captured.

It would take Canadian and Allied troops several more weeks to reach their main target, the city of Caen.

The fact that Canada was responsible for one of the five Allied beach landings – the others being Gold, Omaha, Sword and Utah – was considered a “huge contribution” given the country’s small population and that its military was made up of only volunteers, according to Marie-Eve Vaillancourt, a historian who works with the Juno Beach Centre.

Canadian troops made it farther inland than either the Americans or British did on D-Day, though their success exposed their flanks and made them vulnerable to German counterattacks, Ms. Vaillancourt explained. Their casualty rate – less than 10 per cent – was also considered a good result.

Those veterans will be honoured at various ceremonies this year to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day, in one of the most elaborate celebrations in French history. Organizers are going all-out because they recognize it could be the last major commemorations to involve living Allied troops who fought on June 6, Canadian or otherwise.

Each year there are fewer witnesses who can recount the landings on the Normandy coast. More than a million Canadians served in the Second World War, but there were just 9,297 living Canadian veterans who had served in either the Second World War or the Korean War as of March 31 last year – the most recent figures available from Veterans Affairs Canada.

As the number of servicemen who participated in D-Day dwindles, a greater proportion of living witnesses are the French children who survived the onslaught. Decades later, they recall with clarity the near-death experiences they lived through that day. Many are reminded of the violent noises they heard with every storm that passes or plane that flies overhead.

Those who met Canadians soldiers often remember friendly or tired faces handing out chocolate and chewing gum, sweets children did not usually enjoy under the German occupation. Some were pleasantly surprised to encounter French-Canadians with whom they could communicate.

On both sides of these encounters were strangers from far away, sometimes without a shared language. But these French children and Canadian troops were bound by sacrifice and small but impactful acts of kindness.

“You have the countless stories of soldiers, who as soon as they have a little bit of time and they’re not fighting, they interact with the local population. They share drinks and flowers and kisses,” Ms. Vaillancourt said. “But all these contacts are short and ephemeral.”

The Globe and Mail spoke to six living witnesses including Ms. Morin, now in their eighties and nineties, who encountered Canadian troops on June 6, 1944.

Bernard Notteau

Bernarnd Notteau was five years old, living just 400 metres away from the beach at Bernières-sur-Mer, right in the middle of Juno Beach, on D-Day. He was born in Lille in 1939 and his mother had moved the family to their small home on the Normandy coast before the war because she feared the German invasion would pass through Belgium and then Lille.

The night of June 5, Mr. Notteau’s family had invited their neighbours to take refuge with them. The ceiling collapsed on both families the next day.

Mr. Notteau was lucky. With only so much room in the small house, he slept against a load-bearing wall in between the kitchen and the living room. His neighbours, who were situated comfortably in the middle of the room, were crushed to death by the rubble. In a cruel twist of fate, their house was untouched in the bombardment.

A Canadian soldier, whom Mr. Notteau recognized by his helmet, dug him and his family out several minutes later. His parents tried, unsuccessfully, to shield him from the dead bodies.

“I was happy to be alive,” Mr. Notteau said.

In the days that followed, he met a group of Canadian soldiers and was photographed with them, likely by his uncle. He still keeps the photograph with him in his wallet so he can recount his story to passersby – especially the English and Canadian visitors who come to Bernières-sur-Mer.

Therese Le Chevalier

Like Ms. Morin, D-Day began for Thérèse Le Chevalier with one of her parents waking to a near-death experience.

The family home was hit around midnight during the shelling of Bernières-sur-Mer. A piece of an unexploded shell fell on her father’s pillow.

“When we heard the noise, we knew it was the big day, so we escaped quickly to the backyard of the house where my father had dug out a trench,” Ms. Le Chevalier said. “It was a frightful night indeed.”

By the time the bombs stopped falling several hours later, an eerie calm took over. “Something was different,” she said.

The family found their home, as well as those of their neighbours, heavily damaged. But they realized they were being liberated. “We were free, and it was such a wonderful feeling,” she said.

Ms. Le Chevalier, 15 years old at the time, doesn’t believe she truly understood how close to death she came. She just remembers the feeling of elation, one that continued when Canadian troops emerged moments later with sweets and chewing gum.

Ms. Le Chevalier was handed a warm cup of hot chocolate, the first she had since the start of the war.

“I never tasted something that good. It was wonderful,” she said.

Colette Legouix

When Colette Legouix awoke on D-Day in the more inland town of Bény-sur-Mer, she noticed it was clear outside through the open windows. It was five or six in the morning and the house was shaking. Ms. Legouix, however, wasn’t scared. After getting up, she saw some neighbours had come over – which meant the mischievous eight-year-old girl could go about her day without anyone focusing on her, or so she thought.

The family soon decided they needed more adequate shelter. First they headed toward Ms. Legouix’s grandparents’, who had a small shed that seemed suitable. But the building was located alongside a big wall, which, if bombed, could bury those inside.

Ms. Legouix managed to slip away to a nearby field, where she found her father and brothers digging out a trench. Once it was finished, the children and the elderly used it for shelter until about noon.

Her father returned some time later with a Canadian soldier wearing khaki military fatigues.

“He asked for cider, eggs and water,” she said. “He was grateful. He was happy to be there and we were also happy that he was there.”

Unlike the towns closer to shore, there were no battles at Bény-sur-Mer. It was relatively spared. Canadian troops began arriving and setting up camp there shortly after the landing, and Ms. Legouix’s parents assisted by bringing alcohol – including Calvados, the local apple brandy, which they had made at home – to those who had been seriously wounded.

Eighty years later, Ms. Legouix still remembers not just the ear-piercing screams of shells and warplanes flying overhead, but the stench of death that wafted from a makeshift cemetery set up on June 7 just outside the village.

“It was the smell that followed me, for days and days,” she said.

Bodies, she was shocked to find, were being buried in shallow graves marked with crosses, some of which stayed there for a long time just wrapped in a blanket. A gravedigger would come by, scoop out a couple shovelfuls of earth, and then watch as a soldier lowered down the body. Sometimes their shoes were even visible.

“Then they’d put the helmet on the cross and do the same thing again,” she said.

After the war, Ms. Legouix took charge of maintaining two graves in the new permanent cemetery, laying flowers at them and trading letters with the parents of the two slain Canadian soldiers.

Michel and Solange Chirot

Michel and Solange Chirot lived through D-Day separately before meeting each other.

The couple, then 15 and 14 years old, respectively, each remember the roar of circling planes the night of June 5. The chaos prompted Ms. Chirot’s family to spend the night in the trench they had dug in their garden under some apple trees at their home in Bény-sur-Mer.

Near Mr. Chirot’s home in Banville, a few kilometres inland from Courseulles-sur-Mer, the noise began intensifying at dawn. “The houses, everything, was shaking everywhere because shells were falling not far from us. We were a bit scared,” he said.

However, the family needed water, and Mr. Chirot and his mother felt safe enough to go to a pump near the house. After they saw Germans fleeing, Mr. Chirot wanted to go inform the mayor.

So the teenage boy took off on foot, sprinting through the tiny streets and country roads of Banville. He came to a small intersection he knew and turned on a lane up toward a field.

“As I came around the bend, I found myself face-to-face with a unit of Canadian soldiers … rifles and machine guns at the ready,” Mr. Chirot said.

He quickly put on the brakes but stayed put. An officer in charge then told him in surprisingly good French to come over.

The officer was worried, as he thought villagers had been warned to leave Banville. Mr. Chirot said no one had heard such an order and Banville’s residents had remained in place. So the officer picked up his walkie-talkie and radioed something in English. The shelling then stopped some 50 metres from the town, leaving it relatively unscathed.

Whether Mr. Chirot’s chance encounter with the Canadian officer managed to save the lives of the 300 or so people who lived in Banville was, in his words, “a supposition.”

Ms. Vaillancourt, the historian, said it is quite possible Mr. Chriot’s actions spared the town from being bombarded. While there is no mention of the meeting in Canada’s official war diaries, she said that front line units didn’t always include every detail of who they ran into.

The regional daily, Ouest France, was convinced enough to credit Mr. Chirot with saving Banville when reporting his story earlier this year.

Mr. Chirot’s future wife, Solange, first encountered Canadian soldiers shortly after. The garden where she and her family had been hiding overlooked a road, which, later in the day, was filled with tanks headed toward Caen. Her father offered them cider, another Norman specialty.

“We fraternized with them right away,” Ms. Chirot said. “We were happy to see them, but these weren’t long conversations.”

Ms. Chirot said that like many other children, she was given chocolate. Mr. Chirot remembers a soldier signalling at him from a tank to come over, then handing him a box of cigarettes. Mr. Chirot passed them around but managed to stash a few for himself.