Dunkirk, Normandy and The Brave

My mother was a keeper of personal old photographs. I took a few of those to be framed. One was of her as a melancholy orphan in the 1930’s and another was of her looking pretty and confident in her new WREN uniform in England during WWII. Another was of her brother (my uncle) Tom who was killed in 1944 and is buried in France. He was a Lancaster bomber top machine gunner, an orphan and barely 20. The other was of Edward, my dad a CPO in the British navy. I was watching the movie Dunkirk and was reminded of a story my dad told, He served on a destroyer at Dunkirk. He didn’t say much about the war even though he served from 1939-1945 and retired from the Royal Navy in 1960. He was a Newfoundlander.

April 19th was my fathers-in-law 96th birthday. He landed in Normandy in 1944 as a young Canadian serving as a sapper of the Royal Canadian Engineers, 1st Canadian Army Mechanical Equipment Company, 21st Allied Army Group.

They are of a passed time and place with Tom paying the ultimate sacrifice. They fought for beliefs that are expressed in our Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.