Rye and remembrance

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/11/2023 (669 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The beaches of Normandy, France seem far away even today, but it is impossible to imagine how far away they seemed from the Canadian prairies during the Second World War.

Young men from small Manitoba towns enlisted to fight in the war from 1939-1945, deploying to distant lands to join the Allied forces. In farming communities like ours in Grandview, many were excused from serving because of the key role they played in agriculture.

But many chose to go overseas and many did not come back.

My grandparents were young adults during the war and they learned of places such as Normandy and other sites in Europe through the letters written home by soldiers to their anxious families.

These letters typically contained little of what the soldiers experienced but more often asking about family, or checking in on the progress of seeding or harvest. So much of the war and the places where they served and died remained little more than names on a map to those at home.

My grandparents wanted to visit Normandy and the places they had heard of during the war. But the demands of raising a family, farming, and managing a pig farm left them with little time and even less money.

When I visited my brother while he was living in Europe, Grandma asked us to find the grave of one of her friends who was killed, a young man named T. White. White died in September 1944 at the age of 23, likely during the crossing of the Seine River, and was buried in the Groesbeek Canadian War Cemetery in the Netherlands.

We found his gravesite and sent a photo to grandma. Seeing the grave of someone from our community, with the maple leaf at the top of his headstone, brought the war to me in a personal way I had not experienced before.

I wanted to take my grandparents to visit these sites, but sadly, that window of opportunity closed. So, earlier this year I decided to visit Normandy, the site of the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944. I needed to go, for them and for me.

I searched Canadian government records to find the names of those from our community who died during the invasion and the subsequent liberation of France and the Netherlands.

I found the name Gilbert Herbert Laverne Harkness, 20, who served with the Royal Winnipeg Rifles, the famed “Little Black Devils,” a reference to their dark green uniforms.

Incredibly, not only was Gilbert from Grandview, but he was related to me through my great-grandmother Louetta Shoemaker’s family and was someone I had not heard of before.

Gilbert was the son of Herbert and Mary Ellen Harkness and his occupation was listed as “farmer” on his enlistment application in July 1943. Gilbert died in the initial hours of the Allied offensive on June 6, 1944, after having spent time training in Canada and the United Kingdom. The invasion, code named Operation Overlord, began with the dawn landings of Allied troops, with the Royal Winnipeg Rifles landing on Juno Beach along with other Canadian regiments, including Manitoba’s Fort Garry Horse. They had limited support against the German army and their fortifications, with the beaches heavily mined and covered with stakes, metal tripods, and barbed wire. It must have been absolute chaos in those hours, as Gilbert’s initial date of death was listed as June 8.

Those who died in the early hours on the beaches were buried in temporary graves and then moved to the nearby, serene, Beny-sur-Mer Canadian War Cemetery in 1946, located near the village of Reviers.

There are over 2,000 graves, the majority of them Canadian, with 19 men unidentified. Many buried in this cemetery belonged to the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division, who died in the Normandy landings that day or in the days following the advance towards Caen, France, where they engaged the German front. The cemetery is surrounded by fields and is meticulously tended to by local volunteers and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. The region is so peaceful that it is possible to forget its horrible history.

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I arrived in early June, and the newly hung flags of the Allied forces who helped liberate France lined the streets, celebrated even 79 years later. I was not prepared for my visit to the Juno Beach Centre in Courseulles-sur-Mer, just off the beach where so many, including Gilbert, lost their lives. Many of the German army fortifications remain on and along the beaches, co-existing now with beach umbrellas and kids playing in the surf.

According to the online records from 1945, Gilbert’s parents received a war service gratuity of $114.64 and a notice that he had received several war service medals posthumously — the location of these medals has since been lost. It was painful to read his list of personal effects, compiled by someone in charge of the dead: fountain pen ‘Waltham,’ leather wallet, wrist strap, cigarette lighter, identification bracelet and handkerchief, and a receipt for a 6^th Victory Loan.

As I sat at his grave, I realized I had not brought anything to leave on his stone, with me possibly being the first family to visit him here. But then I looked at the fields blowing in the wind at the edge of the cemetery. I walked in and harvested a few stalks of rye — I didn’t think the farmer would mind — it seemed like the best tribute to Gilbert.

I left these on his tombstone, thinking about what his life as a farmer would have been like, had he lived and indeed, the lives of the thousands who did not make it home.

Lori Shoemaker is a neuroscientist in the department of Neurosurgery at Stanford and was born and raised on a farm in Grandview, Man.