“I’m sure that all the attention I’m getting isn’t because of anything spectacular I’ve done,” Canada’s last Great War veteran John Babcock told his local newspaper in Spokane, Wash., a few years before his death in 2010. Government officials keep track of the group as best they can, monitoring obituaries and keeping in touch with families and health-care providers as the group becomes smaller. The last veteran of a conflict is a symbolic milestone of collective sacrifice - and their death marks the end of an era. Veterans Affairs Canada estimates it will be “a little over a decade” before the inevitable passing of the last known Second World War veteran in Canada. They have long been relied upon to speak at schools, talk with historians, and share their stories about the lived experience of war. More than 1 million Canadians served in the Second World War, and around 20,000 remain, most in their late 90s. The last known D-Day veteran of the Queen’s Own Rifles regiment.
His good friend Jack Hadley was gone by 2018. Adair sent Christmas cards to his D-Day comrades, and he attended their funerals when he was able to, collecting their commemorative programs in a folder. Those who survived kept fighting, into France, Belgium and Holland, and a life after the war. D-Day was a strong and traumatic memory for the men of the Queen’s Own Rifles, a crucial part of the regimental DNA.
Running was the only way to survive, but it was no guarantee.Īdair would talk about it if you asked him, but he didn’t bring it up. Adair, drenched in cold saltwater, ran through the bullets and explosions. The tanks and mine-clearing technology that were supposed to help were waylaid in the choppy English Channel. The rough sea and strong winds blew Adair’s company right in front of a German pillbox. Of the hundreds of men who landed that morning, 61 died, and many more were injured. Adair’s regiment, the Toronto-based Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada, had the worst morning of any Canadian outfit.
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