The Normandy Veterans

 Canadians continued to fight their way through Normandy alongside Allied forces, driving the Germans back.

It was at great cost. This display case features medal sets for two men who didn't make it back. Private Oscar Beaudoin was killed on the second day of the campaign.

Corporal Arthur Wilkinson died on the 18th of June during the fight to drive the Germans out of Caen, days after sending a final letter to his mother.

First World War veteran Henry Duncan Graham Crerar rose to the rank of general, leading the First Canadian Army from early 1944 to the end of the war. He is buried with his men at Beechwood Cemetery here in Ottawa. Lieutenant George Blackburn saw action in Normandy and the rest of the war as a forward observation officer for the artillery, and after the war wrote three books on his wartime experiences.

Another Normandy veteran, and this one has its resting place in the museum. Forceful III is the name given to this Sherman tank by its crew of five, and the tank made it through the Normandy campaign and the end of the war. Its crew thought of it as home. While Shermans couldn't match a German Panzer individually, there were more of them, and that made the difference.

Major David Currie won the Victoria Cross for his actions late during the Normandy campaign, commanding a handful of men, holding a vital crossroads against repeated attacks by Germans. They captured over two thousand German soldiers.

What Germans could escape from Normandy did. The western Allies had won a significant but costly victory. But the war was not yet won.

As the Allies pushed further along, freeing Paris and going after the Germans, the Canadians got another assignment- clearing the Scheldt estuary of German forces. Doing that would allow Antwerp, which had come into Allied hands, to function as a port for resupply. It was a campaign that lasted weeks, with the Germans flooding the land as a delaying tactic.

This was the uniform of a soldier in the Scheldt Campaign.