This year, The Royal British Legion is asking for communities across Britain to 'Remember Together' the service and sacrifice, friendship and collaboration of the men and women of Britain, the Commonwealth and Allied nations who fought together in 1944.
75 years ago 61st Reconnaissance Regiment with the 50th (Northumbrian) Division joined 2 Canadian Corps.
2 Canadian Corps, under the leadership of their Commander, Lieutenant General Guy Simmonds, had spearheaded the British-Canadian advance from Caen to Falaise and then captured Dieppe, Boulogne, Calais and Ostend. Leading the First Canadian Army they had been heavily involved in the Battle of the Scheldt - opening up access to the critical port of Antwerp, since the beginning of October. German resistance on the Scheldt finally ended on 8th November 1944 and the Corps were then tasked with expelling German forces from the eastern provinces of the Netherlands and driving them out from the west bank of the Rhine. In November 1944 some were holding the front-line with 61st Reconnaissance around the notorious 'Island’ between Nijmegan on the Waal and Arnhem on the Lower Rhine.
"That winter of snow,frost and waterlogged trenches was terrible for Allied troops...Exposure and trench foot accounted for almost as many casualties as enemy action. The Canadian First Army, after its very nasty time clearing the Scheldt estuary, found winter along the Maas almost as unpleasant and deadly, with the Germans defending dykes which were three to four metres high. 'For the attacking Canadians the only other approach was across the sunken fields between the dykes "flat as the local beer" as one artillery punster put it. There really was no protection at all.'
That winter of mud and ice was the wettest since 1864. Sodden battledress and webbing equipment never dried out, boots simply rotted. Living conditions were unutterably squalid..." (From ‘The Second World War’ by Antony Beevor, published by Weidenfield and Nicolson 2012)
All the Canadian Army fighting in Europe were volunteers.
India fielded the largest volunteer army ever known to support the Allies in World War 2 - over 2.5 million.
'When You Go Home, Tell Them Of Us And Say,
For Your Tomorrow, We Gave Our Today.'
(The Kohima Epitaph,carved on the Memorial of the 2nd British Division in the cemetery of Kohima in North-East India)
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