I originally published this as a series of tweets, but I'm happy enough with how it turned out that I'm re-publishing it as a blog post.
D-Day was 75 years ago. Compared to other engagements of WW2, it gets a significant amount of media attention, and is talked about in school. I thought it might be interesting to talk about some people from that day that don't often get recognition.
George Horse was a member of the Royal Canadian Engineers. He participated in the landings at Juno, specifically at Courseulles-sur-Mer.
(photo from cover of the Oct. 31 2005 Toronto Star)
"We travelled in open boats...We missed being hit by the black spiders, steel girders and mines hid under the water to trip flat bottom landing craft...It is strange to think we made the actual D-Day landing."
Horse served with the RCE for three months, defusing German bombs and setting Canadian ones. In Holland, one of those bombs ended his campaign:
"We had to destroy road obstacles in the Dutch town of Breskens where the Germans had holed up. After our charge blew, we took shelter in a bunker, as bombardment came in from the North Sea. Something landed and expoded in the bunker. We never knew what."
"The blast was so powerful that it knocked us out for several hours. Lance Corporal Neil discovered me many hours later. He twiddled one of my feet and said 'Chief, are you all right?' I moved my feet. They were still there. My ears were humming. I couldn't walk straight."
Horse was diagnosed with a severe concussion and was unable to return to the front. Yet his fighting days weren't done. After the war, and for decades later, he found himself battling with his own government for equitable veteran compensation.
Fellow veteran Howard Anderson described the return to Canada at a service Horse also attended in 2005: "We were forced right back onto the reserve...Indian Affairs wouldn't let us off, you couldn't go anywhere, you couldn't buy land off the reserve."
Another veteran of D-Day was American Student Waverly Woodson. Woodson was taking pre-med at Lincoln, and enlisted one year after the attack at Pearl Harbour.
Woodson took the notoriously white-favoured Officer Candidate exams, and passed them to be considered for Anti-Aircraft Artillery (AAA). Yet upon completion he was told there were "no positions." Certainly none for blacks to lead whites.
He instead enlisted in the segregated 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion, putting his skills in pre-med to use as a medic.
When the Battalion landed at Omaha, Woodson's LCT (Landing Craft Tank) hit a mine. Woodson was hit by shrapnel. He was patched up and continued on, subsequently giving medical aid to others wounded on the beach for thirty hours.
Woodson was hospitalized for three days, then asked to be sent back. Black press such as the Pittsburgh Courier hailed him as a "No. 1 Invasion Hero.” There was a note written, unbeknownst to Woodson, nominating him for the Medal of Honor:
The note reads: “Here is a Negro from Philadelphia who has been recommended for a suitable award. … This is a big enough award so that the President can give it personally, as he has in the case of some white boys.” It is not certain who wrote it, as the award never happened.
No Black American was given the Medal of Honor until 1997, when then-President Bill Clinton awarded seven black soldiers with the Medal. "History has been made whole today" said Clinton. Woodson was not among the seven soldiers awarded that day.
Waverley Woodson's widow continues to campaign for the recognition her late husband earned that day on Omaha Beach.
For Chinese-Canadian Frank Wong, serving on D-Day and in the military was a path to the sense of belonging he never had in civilian life.
Wong was born in Vancouver, 1919. In the time of the Exclusion Act (1923) and the Head Tax (1885-1923), Vancouver was ghettoized. His father moved the family to Alert Bay in search of a better life.
When Pearl Harbour was bombed, Wong recalls the reaction in Alert Bay: "I remember the Japanese fishing vessels were all rounded up and brought to Alert Bay and sent down to Vancouver. And then it was only then, that I said, 'Oh God, maybe I should go down and join the army.'"
Wong noted a change in behaviour from his fellow Canadians: "I remember when I was in the service, I used to get a lot of invitation into people’s home for dinner, and everything. Hard to believe, here I was Chinese and I’m supposed to be inferior to the Caucasian..."
Wong emphasizes the difference in treatment from his military peers and the general public: “I was accepted as one of the members of the corps, same as everyone else,” he recalls. “There was no discrimination whatsoever, I was just one of the boys."
Along with those boys, Wong landed at Juno Beach. "We landed on Juno Beach. And then the first thing they said to us was to keep on moving inland, don't linger on the beach, just move inland, because at that particular time there, the beach was still under enemy fire."
Wong continued with his unit into the city of Caen. He describes the experience: "I remember there are so many people, dead people around, you know, not buried and everything...You know, and that's the, that's the only time I ever vomited."
After the war, Wong co-founded the Chinese Canadian Military Museum. The Museum echoes Wong's spirit of WW2 helping to earn Chinese Canadians equal rights in Canada.
That said, the CCMM sees a lack of recognition for Chinese Canadian service, and hopes to remedy that situation by promoting stories like Wong's, and like that of Force 136, the Special Operations Executive group of Chinese Canadians operating in Japan.
Most people will have heard of the Special Operations Executive from the stories of celebrities like Chrisopher Lee or Ian Fleming - romanticized further into Fleming's James Bond stories. But the SOE encompasses several untold stories of WW2, and D-Day.
The SOE was a branch of the Security Intelligence Service (better known as MI6). It employed tactics of sabotage, guerilla warfare, and other methods of "ungentlemanly warfare." This included the use of People of Colour and Women who otherwise couldn't enlist.
One such "unorthodox" member of the Special Operations Executive was Noor Inayat Khan. Khan was born in Moscow, 1914, the daughter of Hazrat Inayat Khan and his American Wife Ora Ray Baker.
Noor's father, Hazrat Inayat Khan, was the founder of the Sufi Order of the West in London. He brought Sufism to Britain after leaving France at the outbreak of WWI. His pacifism would be a source of tension for Noor's later work in the SOE.
Hazrat Inayat Khan passed away in 1927, in New Delhi. He had planned his daughter to marry an Indian boy, but in 1929, Noor, at the age of 15, instead got engaged to a young Jewish man. In 1939 this was also called off, as Noor said she "wanted to be free to go into action." (Fuller, Jean Overton, "Noor-un-nisa Inayat Khan" (London, 1971), p. 84.)
Noor abhorred violence, but felt she could serve in the war as a nurse. In Paris, she and her sister Khair worked at a hospital right up until the Germans were on the outskirts of the city. The family narrowly escaped to Britain.
It was in Britain, when Noor Inayat Khan was serving as a signals and radio operator for the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, that her skill both with communications and with languages caught the eye of the Special Operations Executive.
In October 1942, Khan was summoned by Captain Selwyn Jepson, who unbeknownst to Khan was a senior recruiting officer for the SOE. Jepson told Khan her skills would be indispensible overseas. But Khan was reluctant to leave her family.
Only after deep discussion with her family did Khan accept the post. She wrote to Captain Jepson: "how petty our family ties are when something in the way of winning this war is at stake." (The National Archive: SOE personnel files: Noor Inayat Khan, ref.: HS9/836/5.)
In training, instructors wrote of Khan's reluctance to deceive, bad reaction to mock interrogation, and poor security adherence. Col. Frank Spooner said "very doubtful whether she is really suited to work in the field." (The National Archive: SOE personnel files: Noor Inayat Khan, ref.: HS9/836/5.)
Khan was deployed to the PROSPER network in Paris. She was appointed to Emile Henri Garry to serve as the network's signal operator. The average life expectancy of an operator was two weeks. Noor served 3 months.
It might have been longer. But PROSPER network was sold out by double agents. Khan refused repeated offers of extraction, insisting she could keep ahead of the Gestapo. And she did. 1943, June-Oct, Khan not only evaded the Germans but continued to transmit details to the allies.
And then Khan was betrayed again. It is not 100% certain who the woman was that literally sold her to the Germans, but most sources indicate it was Renée Garry, the jealous sister of Khan's commander, Emile Henri Garry.
Renée was thought to be jealous of Khan, who had received the attentions of SOE agent France Antelme, who Renée was infatuated with. After the war, Renée was acquitted due to lack of evidence. Her brother, Emile, was executed by Germans in 1944.
As for Khan, she was taken for interrogation to Avenue Foch by Ernest Vogt, and Hans Kieffer. Khan attempted escape immediately, and refused to divulge anything. Kieffer wrote that Khan, "after her capture, showed great courage and we got no information whatsoever out of her."
Khan made a second escape, along with two male prisoners, that was nearly successful. Upon recapture, the officer demanded she sign a statement saying she would not attempt escape again. She refused, and was sent to Pforzheim prison. And later, to Dachau concentration camp.
It was at Dachau that Khan was murdered by the Nazis. There are conflicting accounts as to the exact manner of her death, but commonly say that Khan, along with three other female prisoners, was shot in the camp yard. Some accounts say Khan's last word was "liberté."
I talk about these stories specifically, the forgotten, the sidelined, the marginalized, because when we talk about remembrance, of #CanadaRemembers, and D-Day, and #JunoBeach, it is easy to be washed by sentiment without meaning.
These people served, and fought, and died...for dignity, equality, and freedom. I show their faces because the diversity that modern neo-nazis, alt-right personalities, and white ethno-nationalists rail against have ALWAYS BEEN A PART OF OUT HISTORY.
These people of colour were standing against fascism with their lives. In modern times, we honour them by defending equality and justice for all. That means standing against the hatred of today.
SOURCES:
George Horse
Waverly Woodson
Frank Wong
The Memory Project - "Frank Bing Wong"
Veteran Affairs Canada - "Frank Wong"
The Chinese Military Museum - "Frank Wong"
Noor Inayat Khan Messy Nessy Chic - "The Muslim WWII Heroine that Time Forgot"
Second World War Experience Centre - "Noor Inayat Khan"
The Ink Brain - "Noor Inayat Khan, SOE Hero"
"The Women Who Spied for Britain" by Robyn Walker, 2014. Amberly Publishing.