Originally published November 9, 2011
TORONTO – Just before the D-Day landings, one of Alex Adair’s friends had a premonition.
“I’m not gonna make it,” he said.
Adair, one of the thousands of Canadian soldiers who would land on the beaches of Normandy, tried to reassure his friend.
But the premonition came true. “He didn’t make it. He was killed on the beach,” said Adair.
The 88-year old veteran of the Second World War still remembers storming Juno beach on June 6, 1944. He was 20 years old at the time, a farm boy from Tamworth, Ontario, and part of the Queen’s Own Rifles.
D-Day would be the first time he saw battle.
A few miles out from shore, the soldiers got into their landing craft. The seas were rough that day, remembers Adair. The craft was tossed around by the waves, and those aboard couldn’t see much of what was going on around them, aside from the occasional shell striking the shore.
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“When you’re aboard the landing craft, you don’t know what’s going on,” he said.
The boat went slowly at first, and eventually picked up speed. But then, they hit an obstacle. A mine blew away the whole front of the landing craft, killing all those who were unfortunate enough to be sitting on that side of the vessel.
“We were dead in the water,” said Adair.
Adair decided to head for shore. The water was deep enough that he couldn’t touch bottom, so he began to swim. And when he reached land, he kept going.
“One of the fellas who’d gotten ahead of me said, ‘Get down! Get down!’ I was standing up of course, and he told me to get down. I saw that was better than standing up, so down I went, and I crawled all the way to the seawall.”
When he got to the wall, he took a look around.
“I could see there was a lot of fellas laying on the beach out sort of behind me and to my left. And I said to somebody, ‘Why in the hell aren’t they heading for the wall?’ One of the guys says, ‘They’re done for.’ They had landed right in front of a pillbox which was spouting out machine gun fire.”
Many men from his platoon were killed in the initial assault, said Adair. There were so few of them left that they had to wait for the reserve companies to come ashore before making another move.
The reserve company took care of the German pillbox, and Adair followed them inland.
“Everything was quite peaceful,” he said. “The Germans had just given all they had on the beaches, then they laid back. And we didn’t do any fighting at all for the remainder of D-Day.”
Unlike some of his friends, Adair had no premonitions about D-Day, and he finished the day without a scratch.
But a few months later in Holland, he had a strange dream, he said. He dreamt he was talking to a man from his hometown who asked why he was limping.
The next day, Adair was wounded by a mortar bomb that shattered his leg and covered his femur in shrapnel. That was the end of the war for him.
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