It's the seventy-fifth anniversary of D-Day, the largest seaborne invasion in history and an event that is widely described as the beginning of the end of the second world war. But look for the Okanagan contribution to the effort, and you encounter this interesting fact. Our local BC Dragoons were not there. So where were they? We paid a visit to the Okanagan Military Museum for the answer.
The answer is Italy. The B.C. Dragoons were fighting alongside British, Polish and other allied forces cutting through German and Italian defences to secure a path to Rome. And there was some heavy resistance. During the eight weeks around the D-Day invasion, the Dragoons took their share of casualties.
"For the B.C. D's part, for May and June, those eight weeks, we lost 18 men all ranks, officers and below," said Okanagan Military Museum historian Keith Boehmer.
In the aftermath, the Dragoons and other regiments involved in campaigns away from Normandy found themselves criticized, and even called names for it.
"Yeah, the D-Day Dodgers term is connected to a parliamentarian, Lady Nancy Aster," said Boehmer. "She said something in parliament that put the Eighth Army, British Eighth Army and the Canadians and the Polish and everybody else associated with it in a lesser light."
But instead of fighting the slur, the Dragoons and others took ownership of the name.
"They took that term on as a badge of honour. And they even created lyrics, various versions of lyrics some risque, some others related to the tune of Lili Marlene called the D-Day Dodgers," he said.
Still, there were many Okanagan men who did land in Normandy that day. They did so by joining other regiments that got them into battle sooner.
"Because the BCD's were not mobilized immediately in 1939," explained Boehmer, "some of the men who were eager to get into service, into uniform following the dirty '30s would leave their local regiments behind and go join somebody else."
Rome was liberated in the fall of 1944.
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