On Juno Beach, the past collides with a more dangerous future

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The waves on the English Channel are, on this sunny spring day, not quite as choppy as they appear to have been on D-Day, at least judging from the film footage of the Allied landing on view at the Juno Beach Centre – the 23-year-old museum in Courseulles-sur-Mer dedicated to memorializing the Canadian role in the Second World War. And yet, they are easily daunting enough to remind one of the bravery of those Canadian soldiers on June 6, 1944.

I think of how they sought to reach the shore amid enemy fire, only to be shot on the beach if they made it or, even worse, witness their friends blown up around them.

I had aimed to make it to Juno Beach for the 80th anniversary of D-Day, in 2024; circumstances dictated otherwise. Then, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was already into its third year, shattering the last illusions most of us held of a post-Cold War “permanent peace.”

Two years later, as the Ukraine war drags on and others get started, I am here on the eve of the 82nd anniversary of le débarquement, even more grateful for the sacrifices of Canadian soldiers on D-Day and during the Battle of Normandy and liberation of northwest Europe that followed.

“The dagger pointed at the heart of Berlin has been driven into the side of Nazi Europe,” CBC announcer Earl Cameron told Canadians as news of the D-Day invasion reached home just after midnight.

Maclean’s magazine correspondent Lionel Shapiro conveyed the gravity of the moment: “History is standing astride these rolling Norman fields and resolving its own direction for perhaps a thousand years to come. We mortals who sit below can only be awed by its mighty presence.”

My father, a rifleman with the Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry Highlanders, did not land in France on D-Day but arrived some weeks later as the liberation efforts continued in northwest Europe. I can only imagine what he experienced. He never spoke about it, at least not to his children. Perhaps that was to spare us the gory details.

“Like their Great War counterparts, Second World War veterans also often had trouble talking about the war,” the late military historian Tim Cook wrote in The Globe and Mail in 2020. “Even though they believed the fight against Nazism and fascism was necessary and unavoidable, the war had scarred many, leaving it difficult for them to share stories about what they had seen and done – and loved ones often did not know what questions to ask.”

My father was typical of the Second World War veterans who arrived home and moved on with their lives. What secrets he carried with him I can only surmise. But he did proudly wear his military decorations – among them the France and Germany Star and Canadian Voluntary Service Medal – at every Remembrance Day ceremony until he died in 1987.

For he knew that the liberation came at an enormous cost to Allied soldiers and European civilians alike. It allowed a few postwar generations, including my own, to enjoy the greatest freedoms and opportunities ever known to humankind.

Now, as I watch the waves from Juno Beach, I am seized by the possibility, if not the likelihood, that the postwar Pax Americana that for decades prevented other aspiring Hitlers from ever getting started was just a blip in history.

Opinion: Pax Americana is over. The rest of the Western alliance will have to pick up the burden of protecting peace

If the post-Cold War debate between scholars Francis (The End of History and the Last Man) Fukuyama and Samuel (The Clash of Civilizations) Huntington has been settled in favour of the latter, war threatens to be as much as part of the future as the past. Especially if the erstwhile guarantor of the Pax Americana is either unable (see the Strait of Hormuz) or unwilling (see the Ukraine War) to ensure that it is not.

“In place of the Pax Americana we are seeing a sort of Lax Americana, a world in which a careless and uninhibited and incurious U.S. superpower struts across the chess board, threatening old friends and enabling old rivals, seeking short-term gains, heedless of the dangers it is creating for itself and the world,” New York Times columnist Carlos Lozada wrote recently. “This is a historical aberration: a superpower that freely abdicates its leadership role, because it has concluded that leadership is for suckers.”

Either that, or because it is too divided and conflicted about whether it is or is not in its own interests to invest in upholding an international order that has allowed the emergence of a rival hegemon – China – that wants to replace it at the pinnacle of global power.

In 2026, a trip to Juno Beach has a way of concentrating the mind not just on the past, but on the more precarious future that awaits us.