Canada at War, 1943–1945: Italy, D-Day, the Netherlands and the Atomic Age

Hook: tulips in Ottawa

Every spring, Ottawa's Canadian Tulip Festival fills the city with tulips. The tradition began with a gift: after the war, the Dutch royal family sent thousands of tulip bulbs to Canada in thanks for Canada's role in liberating the Netherlands, and for sheltering Princess Juliana and her daughters in Ottawa during the war. The Netherlands still sends tulips every year. How did Canadian soldiers end up liberating the Netherlands?

Italy, 1943 to 1945

On July 10, 1943, Canadian troops landed in Sicily with British and American forces. They then fought up the mountainous Italian peninsula, against strong German defences.

• At Ortona in December 1943, Canadians fought a bitter battle, street by street, that lasted more than a week. Near Ortona, Captain Paul Triquet of the Royal 22e Régiment earned the Victoria Cross.
• In 1944, Canadians broke through German defence lines in the Liri Valley and later the Gothic Line.
• Some Canadian soldiers in Italy joked bitterly that they were the "D-Day Dodgers", because the public's attention moved to France after June 1944, even though their fighting was just as hard.

In early 1945, the Canadians in Italy moved to northwest Europe to join the rest of the First Canadian Army.

D-Day and Normandy, 1944

On June 6, 1944, the Allies launched the largest seaborne invasion in history on the coast of Normandy, France. Five beaches were assigned: Utah and Omaha (American), Gold and Sword (British) and Juno (Canadian).

• About 14,000 Canadians came ashore at Juno Beach, and about 450 Canadian paratroopers landed before dawn inland.
• The Royal Canadian Navy and RCAF also took part.
• 359 Canadians were killed on D-Day. By the end of the day, Canadians had pushed farther inland than most other Allied forces, though they did not reach all of their objectives.
• In the 11-week Battle of Normandy that followed, more than 5,000 Canadian soldiers died, including in the battles around Caen and the Falaise Gap, where Allied forces trapped much of the German army in August 1944.

D-Day was a turning point: it opened a second front in the west, while the Soviet Union pushed from the east.

The Scheldt and the liberation of the Netherlands, 1944 to 1945

• In October and November 1944, the First Canadian Army fought the Battle of the Scheldt in flooded, muddy country in Belgium and the Netherlands. The victory opened the port of Antwerp, which the Allies badly needed for supplies.
• In the winter of 1944 to 1945, people in the German-occupied western Netherlands suffered a terrible famine, the "Hunger Winter".
• In the spring of 1945, Canadians led the liberation of the Netherlands, freeing many towns and cities. A truce allowed Allied aircraft to drop food to the starving population before the war ended.
• Germany surrendered, and VE Day was celebrated on May 8, 1945.

The Dutch people's gratitude to Canada remains strong: many Dutch communities tend the graves of Canadian soldiers, and the tulips still arrive in Ottawa.

The war against Japan and the atomic age (C3.2, C1.2)

The war in the Pacific continued after VE Day. In 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9). Japan announced its surrender on August 15, and signed it on September 2, 1945.

Canada was a partner in the Manhattan Project, which built the bombs:

• Uranium came from the Eldorado mine at Port Radium, on Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories, and was refined at Port Hope, Ontario. The mine had opened in the 1930s to produce radium, used in medicine.
• Men from the Sahtú Dene community of Délı̨nę worked carrying sacks of ore for transport, without being told of the health risks of radioactive material. Decades later, the community linked cancers among former workers to this exposure and called for recognition.
• Scientists at a secret Montreal Laboratory worked on nuclear reactors, leading to the research centre at Chalk River, Ontario. In September 1945 Chalk River's small ZEEP reactor became the first nuclear reactor operating outside the United States.

The atomic bombs killed tens of thousands of people instantly and many more later. Historians debate whether they were necessary to end the war. They also began the nuclear age and the arms race of the Cold War, which you will study in Unit D.