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Tag: D-Day

D-Day: heroism, horror

D-Day: heroism, horror

The fear, bloodshed and massive loss of life in the cause of freedom are illustrated through remarkable – and convincing – dramatic reenactments in D-Day in 14 Stories. (photo from YAP Films and the History Channel)

The horrors and heroism of D-Day took place 75 years ago June 6. A remarkable new documentary, with distinct Canadian and Jewish connections, will air on the History Channel June 1. D-Day in 14 Stories includes firsthand recollections from Allied and German soldiers and French civilians – many of them kids or teenagers at the time of the conflict.

The massive battle of the Second World War saw more than 150,000 Canadian, American, British and other Allied soldiers storm the beaches of France, marking the turning point of Nazi – and Allied – fortunes.

D-Day in 14 Stories is a social history of D-Day, a joint production of YAP Films and the History Channel. The events on that long-ago day in 1944 are illuminated by eyewitness accounts from some of the few remaining veterans of that historic battle.

On D-Day alone, 359 Canadian soldiers were killed. More than 5,000 Canadian soldiers died during the succeeding weeks of fighting in Normandy. The fear, bloodshed and massive loss of life in the cause of freedom are illustrated through remarkable – and convincing – dramatic reenactments, visual effects and historical footage, including a trove of colour film taken by a soldier using an early Bell and Howell handheld movie camera.

Many soldiers on both sides were just following orders but, as Morton Waitzman recounts in the documentary, some Jewish soldiers felt a particular motivation.

“Being of the Jewish faith myself, and so many of my comrades, we knew we had to get over there as soon as possible to do whatever we could to stop this terrible curse,” he said. As a communications specialist, he connected American and British forces with members of the French Underground to help coordinate the battle.

photo - D-Day in 14 Stories makes the effort to capture the particular experiences of African-American and First Nations soldiers
D-Day in 14 Stories makes the effort to capture the particular experiences of African-American and First Nations soldiers. (photo from YAP Films and the History Channel)

The Germans were anticipating an attack, but had no idea when, where or how large a force the Allies would assemble. The documentary follows a wall of soldiers parachuting through a cascade of tracers. In all, 13,000 Americans dropped inland by air to support the amphibious landing and undermine the German response.

While one Allied soldier says, “Anybody who says they weren’t afraid is not telling the truth,” a German soldier recounts, tellingly: “We had no fear. We were convinced that we would win.”

Until D-Day, the British Air Force had strafed the Normandy coast, but returned to their island redoubt. French residents of the area were familiar with the routine: take shelter when the alarms go off and come back out when they ring again.

Bernard Marie was a 5-year-old child in Normandy at the time.

“The big difference is that, on June 6th, the siren never came back,” he said.

In all, 7,000 vessels embarked from Britain to the French coast. The Allies had no illusions about the cost of the operation. Casualties were anticipated to reach 25 to 30%.

Emotionally powerful dramatizations follow 16- and 17-year-olds as they face the life-and-death moment for themselves and the free world.

“Some never got off the boat,” recalled one soldier. “They were shot, bodies laid all over, boats turned upside down, real chaos. We still kept going forward.… Soldiers.”

One survivor remembers that, despite the explosions all around him, his sole consideration when coming ashore at Normandy was that his socks were soaked through.

The average soldier was carrying 35 kilograms on his back and, for those whose vessels did not manage to make it close to shore, jumping off the ship, in many cases, led to almost instantaneous drowning.

If they survived the initial landing, the soldiers had to confront the German enemy firing down from above at Allied soldiers who were effectively sitting ducks. A German soldier recalls: “We merely had to point that machine gun and it was like cutting wheat with a scythe. For the odd miss, we had a thousand hits.”

The film admirably makes the effort to capture the particular experiences of African-American and First Nations soldiers.

Waitzman, the Jewish American soldier, went on to fight in Europe and participated in the liberation of concentration camps.

“We became eyewitnesses to the Holocaust by what we saw,” he says in the film. “We were very compelled to tell the details to young people. We had to talk, to fight this as much as possible.”

Another veteran of the battle reflects on the loss of life, but ponders the alternative: “God knows what would’ve happened if we hadn’t done it.”

Format ImagePosted on May 24, 2019May 23, 2019Author Pat JohnsonCategories TV & FilmTags D-Day, history, Holocaust, Second World War, television
Part of Operation Overlord

Part of Operation Overlord

Bernard Jackson joined the British Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve in 1941, and landed on a Normandy beach on “D-Day plus one”: June 7, 1944. (photo by Shula Klinger)

Bernard Jackson joined the British Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve in 1941. The Second World War was in its second year and the Luftwaffe was bombing the centre of London. With Erwin Rommel’s army on the march toward Alexandria, Jackson was equipped and trained for desert warfare in North Africa. The RAF’s plans changed, however, and Jackson was sent to Portsmouth to board a ship bound for France, as part of Operation Overlord. He landed on a Normandy beach on “D-Day plus one,” he said: June 7, 1944. Seventy years after the end of the war, in 2015, Jackson was awarded France’s Légion d’Honneur.

Jackson took an active role in the war, right from the first bombings during the Blitz. “Young as I was,” he said, he was a firewatcher on the rooftops near his workplace in Charing Cross, in central London. Gazing at the sky, a teenage Jackson observed “the RAF and the Germans fighting overhead. It was very interesting.”

With battle raging in the skies, below ground was a different story. “Most people went down into the subway. Everyone was friendly, they found things to do,” he said.

Jackson’s youthful fascination with the tools of the trade is still apparent. “We used stirrup pumps to put fires out, with water from a bucket. They were so ingenious. I often wondered what happened to those stirrup pumps.” He offered a useful tip: sand is actually more effective than water at putting out fires.

Jackson described civilian office workers picking their way through the flames, broken glass and shattered buildings after another nighttime bombing raid. Londoners must have been shocked, going to bed with an intact city and getting up amidst smoking ruins. “People get used to anything,” he said, speaking with the wisdom of experience.

Jackson’s vignettes of wartime military life are varied. Prior to D-Day, he was attached to the Navy for combined operations training, on a destroyer. He spoke enthusiastically about this 10-day period off the coast of England. He also served in the RAF Regiment, guarding airfields and anti-aircraft guns, in the event of enemy fire.

Recalling his June 7 arrival at Arromanches, Jackson described a “choppy” crossing. He saw “German soldiers, British wounded…. As far as the eye could see, there were tanks, landing craft, ships and battleships, and they’re firing over our heads. An incredible scene.”

Obstacles had been cleared from the beach by that point – the enemy had littered the beach with mines and “hedgehogs” (large constructions of iron and concrete) to slow down Allied progress, but the psychological impact of the battle was all too obvious in the men. They were “all grey and bent over, all weary – they were knocked out,” said Jackson. He describes reaching a pillbox (bunker) above the beach, “surrounded by dead German soldiers.” By the end of the landings, 156,000 men had been brought across the Channel. After one day of fighting, there were 10,000 casualties and 2,500 dead.

Raised in an observant Jewish home, Jackson became a bar mitzvah at a synagogue on Menetti Street, near Charing Cross. He was glad to find two other Jewish boys in his unit of more than 100 men. His stories, which are peppered with local details, often refer to their “mischief.”

Bernard Jackson (photo from Bernard Jackson)
Bernard Jackson (photo from Bernard Jackson)

Jackson recalled with a laugh, “never mind [Bernard] Montgomery [who forbade fraternization with locals], we’re living eight to a tent! I said to two or three of the boys, ‘France is known for its cheese, let’s see if we can get a decent meal.’” Off they went to the village of Arromanches, where they found a café managed by “Madame, on a high chair like a throne.” Having explained in “doggerel French” that they were hungry, the boys were served an omelette with crunchy bread, a delicious treat that was paid for with scrip, the money printed for servicemen to use overseas.

Having managed to wangle the use of a truck once a week, the lads went on excursions together, said Jackson. “Being the boys that we were, we wanted to go and look at a château, and we found one! So, we were walking up the path to the château and saw a big horse in a field. It was the summer, and it was an apple orchard. There’d been fighting through the orchard, so the apples were on the ground; it was awful, there was a plague of flies. We saw the horse go into the forest. It trod on a land mine. Blew itself up. We turned around and went back.”

Jackson also described the accommodations made by troops, who slept in muddy ditches, with no bathing facilities. They used dissected gasoline cans as washbasins; the water was contaminated with arsenic, which gave the men impetigo. Even with proper medical care, this condition is extremely painful – and these boys had no antibiotics.

In spite of the immense hunger and hardship, Jackson spoke of the warm hospitality of locals in the months after the war. While his unit was stationed in Louvain, just outside Brussels, they were “parked in a field for a good while.” He recalled an impromptu but hectic social scene, which led to numerous interesting conversations.

“Us three Jewish boys managed to pal up with a husband and wife who owned an apartment block. They rented out rooms. This Belgian couple had hidden in their rooftop attic a Jewish couple, husband and wife, for two years. Quite a few air force fellas used to go there.”

The end of the story is bittersweet. “There was also a Jewish doctor and his wife, they had a beautiful girl, 18 or 20, who’d been in a concentration camp,” he said. “One of the boys proposed to this girl and they were going to marry, but she died very suddenly. She had picked up something in the camp.”

Jackson spoke animatedly of the war machinery that made the landing possible. In particular, he recounted how temporary “Mulberry Harbors” allowed Allied troops and vehicles to land in occupied France when all of the ports were held by enemy forces. When he drove back to the scene in his brand new Austin 10, one year later, he was dismayed to find the pride of British engineering “in bits, laying all over the beach. It’s buried in the sand, all rusty. It’s a disgrace.”

The trip was worth it nonetheless, he qualified. He and his pals attended a French celebration to mark the end of the war, which he described as “marvelous, marvelous.”

It’s clear from Jackson’s stories that – in his words – he “left home a boy and came back a man.” In any conversation with a storyteller of his calibre, there are many golden moments. It’s as if the air almost crackles with the immediacy of his memories, the descriptions of the grey-faced survivors of the D-Day landing, or his helpful instructions on how to boil water in a discarded German helmet. Quite apart from his resilient spirit and natural leadership, his candor is impressive. Speaking about such events – even 70 years later – can be difficult for many war veterans, not to mention that he actually went back only a year later.

“It’s a traumatic experience in many cases,” he said of why many people do not like to talk about their experiences in the war, or go back to where it took place. “I never talked about it to my children because, you see, my generation came out of the war saying there’ll never be another war after this one.” In other words, the information may have seemed redundant. But, Jackson added, “Look where we are today. It’s something in the human psyche. It’s greed. It’s power politics.”

Speaking to Jackson is a tremendous privilege; his vignettes of wartime – and postwar – Europe reveal a society in turmoil, where looting was common. He offered accounts of Russian dancing and vodka, gunfire and generosity, stolen yachts and black market cigarettes, hardship and hospitality.

Jackson is an astute observer of humankind and its many failings. But, as well as the stark and troubling stories, he has tales of compassion, generosity and the universal nature of the human experience. “People forget,” he said, “how the French suffered, on top of being occupied. They were short of food, coffee was unheard of, they hadn’t seen it in a long time – they used grass with acorns to give it body. They had no clothes; they stripped the dead for their clothes, even German soldiers, they just stripped off the epaulettes.”

Speaking of the Russian prisoners of war who insisted on sharing their meagre, greasy meals with Jackson and his comrades, he said, “They put dances on for us, someone played the accordion and they did these Russian dances.”

From peasants who could neither read nor write to highly educated ballet dancers or leading aircraft men like himself, Jackson said he realized, “they’re just like you, just like everyone else.”

Shula Klinger is an author, illustrator and journalist living in North Vancouver. Find out more at niftyscissors.com.

Format ImagePosted on November 4, 2016November 3, 2016Author Shula KlingerCategories LocalTags British army, D-Day, Second World War
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