How a ragtag bunch of ‘Farmer Johns’ changed the course of history on D-Day

Editor’s note: This article was first published on June 3, 2019, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of D-Day.

It was a day that changed the course of history and put the spotlight firmly on a bunch of “Farmer Johns.”

That’s what the Royal Regina Rifles were nicknamed during the Second World War. They were seen as a ragtag bunch of prairie boys with little money for equipment and training.

But on D-Day — the 75th anniversary of which is Thursday — they showed the world what heroes look like.

“The Winnipegs and the Rifles landed side by side on the beach, they were first in on D-Day and the Regina Rifles were the furthest inland and met their initial objects that night. Part of them were on a railway line and they held it,” Maj. Keith Inches explained.

Inches runs the Saskatchewan Military Museum housed at the Regina Armoury, where the Royal Regina Rifles continue to be based.

The Regina Rifle Regiment, as it was named at the time, was made up of four units, each landing within 10 minutes of each other beginning at 8:05 a.m. on June 6, 1944, at Nan Green Beach at Courseulles-Sur-Mer in Normandy.

The official war diary states, “A (company) report that they are held up by heavy fire … Two LCAs (Landing Craft Assault) of D (company) strike mines about 250 yds from beach and are blown up … A number of ORs (other ranks) are casualties. A number of others were rescued by (Royal Navy) craft, and some swam ashore.”

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It is that shock and horror that the men of D-Day experienced that is still hard for us today to even begin to imagine.

“It’s reality, seeing people fall and not get up and you can’t help them. If your buddy gets shot, you keep going, because if you stop to help him, a sniper’s probably likely to get you,” Inches said.

The bravery and courage of those men stands in contrast to the world from which they came.

The Great Depression hit the Prairies in the years prior to war being declared and there was little in the way of funding.

“They borrowed some trucks, they had a guy that had a quarter-section of land, they used his land for exercise and they hauled the guns out and then repacked the cartridges and did some firing. The government gave them nothing,” Inches said.

But Inches believes that helped. It forced the Rifles to utilize their “can-do” prairie spirit to get by when they needed to.

“One of the stories I was told by Lt. Smith was that they were advancing and there was a knocked-out Canadian tank and it had a .50-calibre machine gun mounted on it. And the sergeant said to him, ‘I’m going to take it with me,’ and (Smith) told him, ‘No, no, leave it, it’s just extra stuff. We don’t need it,’ ” Inches recalled.

“So they kept on going and when they go to this rail line that night, the sergeant had the machine gun with the ammunition, he had taken it off the tank, he carried it. Lt. Smith told me he was so glad that sergeant disobeyed his orders because that machine gun kept the Germans away that night.”

The regiment’s June 7 war diary states: “Thus the Regina Rifles were out in front with no protection on our left flank, a position which we refused to vacate until relieved 11 days later by the QOR (Queen’s Own Regiment).”

But it had come with a price.

The Operation Calvados statue will make its way to Juno Beach to commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day in 2024. (Daniel Reech/980 CJME)

It is written by the NATO Association of Canada that of a fighting force of 155,000 soldiers, 14,000 were Canadian troops who stormed ashore on Juno Beach. They were the only force to capture all of its initial objectives that day, but at a cost of 1,000 casualties — 369 of which were fatal. Forty-four of those were from the Regina Rifle Regiment.

These farmers, students and northern fur trappers had done more than enough to shake off the nickname of “Farmer Johns” and stake their claim to history.

And long have they been remembered.

“He came from Canwood in northern Saskatchewan, grew up in the Depression and had very little of this world’s goods. He landed in the assault wave, gave first aid on the beach and in the battle inland. On D-Plus-3, running to a chap he heard calling for help, he was cut down and killed,” Sgt. Alf Allen — speaking to reporters years later — remembered of his Regina Rifle Regiment comrade, Gilbert Boxall. Allen’s memories are recorded in The Canadians at war 1939-1945 volume 2.

“On his body we later found five dried shell dressings — he’d had five wounds prior to being killed. He never said a word to anybody, just crawled away somewhere, put a dressing on and went back in. People ask: Why does a man do this? Well, there are two quotations that might cover it. One was used by King George VI in a broadcast: ‘If I be called upon to suffer, let me like a well-bred beast that goes out into the forest to suffer alone and in silence.’ The other is from the Good Book: ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.’ ”