Kevin Mitchell
Saskatoon StarPhoenix
The box of soldiers looks ready to storm a beach.
Kevin Hicks has just pulled their lid back, and offered a peek — plastic men carrying little backpacks, wearing army-issue tunics and boots.
Hicks spent 16 months building a 24-foot scale replica of Juno Beach — Canada’s D-Day landing point — and now on this busy Thursday afternoon, he holds a man up for inspection.
Each soldier was assembled by hand, then painted, and assigned a fate. Hicks notes that the soldiers in this particular box carry rifles.
“I’ve got a box of them with Bren guns,” he says. “And Sten guns.”
And then quickly, without pause:
“And I’ve got a box of dead ones.”
He’s got boxes filled with little Germans, too, and he shows one to the visitor. They’re beautifully and realistically hand-painted. That box of Canadians sits a few feet away. Soon they’ll be at Juno Beach together, in houses or behind cover, locked in frozen combat.
Hicks wants visitors to the Saskatoon Museum of Military Artifacts — where Juno Beach was recreated, and where he’s project manager — to picture the plastic men with bones, with skin, with roving eyes and busy brains and blood and hearts that beat until they’re stopped.
“I hate to think that if I had been killed somewhere, I would just be forgotten,” says Hicks, who served in the British military — and received a British Empire Medal from Queen Elizabeth — long before moving to Canada. “That’s why we keep memories alive. It’s a museum of artifacts, yeah. But it’s actually a museum of memories. Stories.
“Doing the model thing, it’s going to evoke people. Granddad was here. This is what he had to face. Every window was a machine gun; was a sniper.”
This was Thursday in Saskatoon. On Friday they were going to publicly unveil the replica. Two teenaged volunteers, among five who have been there since the start, work on the model’s right side — gluing, buffing, building. They’re getting ready for D-Day, and Hicks points to a bare strip of sandy beach.
“Just on this piece alone — here — there was 60 Canadians killed within the first few minutes,” he says. “We’re going to put them in the sand. It’s not going to be a nice, air-brushed scene.”
On June 6, 1944, Canadian soldiers spilled out of landing crafts and met their fates. Three hundred and forty died; 574 were wounded; 47 captured by Germans.
D-Day was history’s largest amphibious invasion — five divisions, five beaches, one reserved for the Canadians. The Allies gained a coastal foothold, the Germans wobbled, and the end of the war moved closer.
Eighty-one years later, little plastic figures — each representing men of Juno Beach — spill out of boxes at this Saskatoon museum, assigned to guns and locales. Some are given a spot to die.
“My best friend was shot dead right next to me, and part of you is lonely for the rest of your life because you don’t get a chance to say bye. He’s simply gone,” says Hicks, who served in both Communist East Germany and with an anti-terrorist squad in Belfast.
“It’s quite difficult. Sometimes you can hear it — I stutter. I’ve got PTSD. And I make sure the kids completely and totally understand that this is blood, flesh and bone.”
* * * * *
Saskatchewan’s blood ties to that French beach are hard-won. The Regina Rifles landed at Juno en masse, many of them sea-sick, tumbling into water and then — hopefully — up to the sand and onward, as far as they could go.
The beach, if they got there, was strewn with mines, obstacles, barbed wire. German artillery and bullets raked the sand.
Cpl. Mike Soltys of Goodeve took mortar wounds to the left arm and left thigh at Juno. He later returned to action and suffered a war-ending right shoulder wound at Leopold Canal.
“(D-Day) was an experience I won’t forget in a hurry,” Soltys told the StarPhoenix after returning to Saskatchewan in March of 1945. “The coastal guns pounded us from the front, German mortars went all out, and we seemed to be completely surrounded. I’m not sure yet how I got out after I was hit.”
Those recreating that place wanted to make it look as much like the real thing as possible. They pored over books, photographs, video clips and maps, drilling down to every little detail — the location of the barbed wire, a beached tank that had been caught in cross-fire, houses spread across the landscape.
Perhaps one of those tiny painted people in the beach can be Mike Soltys, with two parents back in Goodeve, sisters Olga and Mary wondering how he’s faring, and mortar wounds in his arm and leg.
A retaining wall is blown in, rocky debris scattered on the ground.
“Those naughty Canadians blew it up, all because those naughty Germans were trying to kill them,” Hicks says wryly.
The creators will soon add dead bodies to that scene, place Canadians and Germans close enough to see each other’s eyes.
Eighteen-year-old Petr Pavuk, an immigrant from Siberia, worked at Courseulles-sur-Mer on the model’s right side over the last year and a half. He landscaped; painted landing craft and Canadian soldiers. He talks about a book they used extensively.
“It had a map,” Pavuk says, “and there were all the German fortifications, and where they were located on the beaches, how far away, and even what guns they had inside them. I used that to place all the German bunkers.”
Hicks holds battered photos up to various parts of the model, and you see just how diligently they mirrored reality on the ground. Piece by piece, inch by inch, they rebuilt 1944 Juno Beach. Saint-Aubin is on the left, Bernieres in the middle, Courseulles-sur-Mer to the right.
There’s a flail tank exploding a mine, with Canadian infantrymen following right behind, using it as cover. In the front, a mine erupts into smoke and flame.
A Spitfire flies overhead.
Hicks places his finger on a photo that shows a gun poking from a concrete bunker, and points to the same gun on the model, same bunker, with the same tank in the background.
“We didn’t focus on the landings themselves. It’s looking at what happened in the following hours that we don’t talk about as much,” says Liam Noble, a 19-year-old education student at the University of Saskatchewan whose role with this project included painting tanks and armoured vehicles, weathering houses, and assembling soldiers and vehicles.
“Juno Beach is one of the less-represented beaches in media. You see a lot of the American beaches, which had a lot more bunker fortifications. This expanded my understanding of what Juno Beach was like specifically.”
Adds Pavuk, who started working at the museum as part of a school project and never left: “I had knowledge of D-Day, just because if you watch a lot of war movies they cover the subject. Not as much Juno Beach, because it’s a niche compared to something like Omaha, which we see covered a lot in Hollywood.”
So what was it like that day, as Canadians moved onto the beach and deeper into the fire?
Hicks paints a little verbal picture.
“On D-Day … people just think of the beach and the landing craft,” he says. “They don’t know that the Canadians, out of all the allies, had one beach but three towns — actually, 3 1/2 towns. And they had to take every one. The Germans actually tunnelled from house-to-house.
“I’ve done house-clearing, anti-terrorist stuff when I was a British soldier, and I can imagine nothing worse than to clear a house and somebody comes in behind you. That’s what the Canadians had to do. They had to clear these three towns, and make sure those coming in at 12 o’clock and 2 o’clock could actually move on through. It was quite something.”
It was also “horrible,” he says, mentioning those tunnels again and adding “you can clear one house, move through, and then you’re shot in the back.
“So what we decided, me and the kids, was we would do the towns and a little bit of beach.”
Prominent on the model, like in real life, is picturesque Canada House — later given that name because it was a landmark for incoming soldiers, and because it was the first place they liberated, expelling hunkered-down German troops.
That was the first house Hicks made, from scratch, followed by another one further down.
“The rest, we started to 3D print in Germany, and then we thought ‘hang on a second; this is costing a fortune,’ ” Hicks says. “We’d raised funds through GoFundMe, the Legion, and personal donations.
“People have been fantastic, and we had enough to buy a 3D printer. So we printed our own houses, and our own tanks, and of course we’ll have that for the future, for other models we’ve got planned.”
The overall project budget is $6,000. The labour is volunteer — all 1,800 hours of it, from conception and research to the intricate work of building up a beach and townsites immersed in death. They raised $3,500 through crowd funding, and the rest from private donations. Legion members helped out, and aid came from as far away as the UK.
“When it’s finished it’ll be done, and we’ll move onto another project,” Hicks said. “The most important thing to come out of this is the way it gelled these young people. It’s really impressive.
“It’s easy to lose faith in the young, isn’t it? ‘Oh, look at them. They’re lazy.’ What I’ve seen, and these are all individuals — they’re not sheep at all — is loyalty, and their own ability to get on and do stuff.”
He looked across at Noble and Pavuk working on the beach, eyes focused, fine-tuning while he talked to a reporter.
“As you can see,” he adds, “I’ve left them to it. They’re not waiting for me.”
* * * * *
And now it’s Friday afternoon at the museum — 81 years, to the day, from that massive-scale invasion — and a couple of big and very old flags cover up the beach as a crowd listens to assorted podium guests and dignitaries talk about the project and about D-Day.
The official unveiling is at hand.
The five teens who formed the project’s core are introduced — Noble, Pavuk, Linaya Taylor, Claire Cossette, Trygve Evjen.
Taylor, who recently wrapped up her first year at the U of S, tells the crowd about assembling and painting those hundreds of soldiers.
“It took a long time with very, very small brushes,” she says. “They came in parts and we had to glue on their arms and legs and heads and helmets and everything.”
Hicks tells the crowd that he has ancestors, both Canadian and British, buried at Dieppe, the Somme, Passchendaele. His military bloodline runs deep, and he tells them about the day the idea sparked.
“We had two shelves of hats (on display in the museum), and I hated them because they were just … Two. Shelves. Of. Hats. And I thought if we cleared the shelves, we could play. So we got together, and we said ‘let’s do a big model.’”
Taylor later corroborates that, saying “My first day here, we were taking down the hat wall.”
At the end, just before the unveiling, Hicks quips “If you don’t like it, you won’t get out alive,” and the crowd laughs and the flags part and the battle scene emerges and everybody breaks into applause.
Ray Jacobs, who served in spots around the world during 41 years with the Canadian military, wears an old Regina Rifles uniform on this introductory day — the same one they would have stormed the beach with. On his head is a steel turtle helmet.
The tunic is from the museum; the rest is part of his own collection. He notes that the footwear isn’t quite right.
“They had different boots,” he says. “They’re called ‘invasion boots.’ ”
Jacobs stopped by the project as it went along, helped assemble soldiers, attached little backpacks, worked men into various poses.
He’s been to Juno, and saw Canada House. Toured the memorials.
“And then I walked in the water, and on the beach, to see what they saw when they came in,” he says quietly. “You think about it, that moment in time, their moment … try to see what they saw.”
Back here, Hicks and those teenaged kids made their own beach, their own buildings, their own barbed wire and gun placements. A few of the landed tanks are draped with inflatable water-proof canvas skirts, which allowed them to “swim” off landing-craft decks. Details, details, details.
“In making it, as youth volunteers, we were able to do more research — especially more intensive research — into what happened,” Taylor said. “It makes it more interesting and interactive. We learn a lot more than if we were just learning it in a classroom setting.”
One day earlier, Hicks took a reporter to a different part of the museum, where a large framed poster filled with tiny pictures commemorates Canada’s war dead from Afghanistan. He worries that people are already forgetting. On the wall around that poster, stretching far, are more framed photos, deceased soldiers from previous conflicts, posing for the camera.
“His nephew is upstairs,” Hicks says, pointing to one soldier.
He points to another: “We don’t know who he is, but we know he died.”
And another: “He had three children.”
And another: “This guy, what a lovely young lad — lost.”
He looks around.
“And the rest speak for themselves.”
And then Hicks looks back at the Afghanistan poster, and those photos of young Canadians who might have found themselves at Juno Beach if they’d been born a few decades earlier.
“Cousins, nephews, brothers, one mother,” he said. “This is a place of memory.”
It’s where an old soldier with PTSD schemed with a group of precocious teens to construct a place of blood and sacrifice; a place to learn, to think, to be thankful.
kemitchell@postmedia.com
