Battle Zone Normandy: Juno Beach

Canadian troops landing on Juno Beach on 6 June 1944 were fulfilling the promise made by their government in 1939, 'to take up arms against an aggressor state whose policy threatened to destroy free government everywhere.'

It was a noble cause about which the Canadian people remain extremely proud. Canadian 3rd Division, assaulting the Normandy beaches to help liberate the French people from Nazi tyranny, numbered many descendants of European forebears. Famous Canadian formations with European antecedents such as the New Brunswick Regiment, La Regiment de la Chaudiere, the Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry Highlanders and the Queen's Own Rifles of Canada overcame chaos on the beaches and endured heavy casualties.

Their determination and drive saw them progress further inland than troops from any other of the Allied beachheads. The Juno Beach landings were just the start of the Canadians' long struggle to Germany and victory. In the coming days they would face some of Hitler's toughest troops, including 12 SS-Panzer Division 'Hitlerjugend', in a war of ideals where duty faced fanaticism and surrender often led to massacre.

Ken Ford takes the reader back to the battlefields of June 1944, revisiting the scenes of the fighting in the green fields and lanes of Normandy, identifying the places that remain from the war and remembering the young men who fell in the service of Canada and the Allied cause.