By Trelle Burdeniuk

Remembering D-Day: Saskatoon vet moved to tears

Jun 6, 2014 | 7:20 AM

In a small room at a Saskatoon care home, a framed picture on the wall shows a handsome young man in a military uniform during the Second World War.

Now, 70 years later, that man is 95-year-old Roy Armstrong who said as a young man, he saw too much on D-Day.

“Trying to forget was the big trick,” Armstrong said.

Armstrong has not forgotten what he saw and who he lost while working as a dispatch rider and ambulance driver with the Regina Rifles on D-Day.

“I do quite often sit down and have a little cry,” Armstrong said as tears roll down his cheeks.

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“People who were friends and you never see them again. Where did they go? Blew them all to smithereens.”

D-Day involved a massive allied invasion of France that through its success, marked the beginning of the end of the Second World War. Canada had the most deaths of any division in the British Army with more than 5,400 Canadian graves in Normandy.

Armstrong, who was born and raised in Regina, joined the Regina Rifles when he couldn't find a job because of the Great Depression.

“I enlisted in Regina in 1939. I didn't want to kill anybody. I told them I would join the army if they could find a job for me,” he said.

“So they made me a dispatch rider for the Regina Rifles and the 14th Field Ambulance because I'd taken a little medical training.”

Armstrong was sent overseas about a year before D-Day to start getting ready. The night before D-Day, he was told to write a final letter home in case he didn't make it. Then, June 6, 1944 arrived.

“I got off the ship off the shore of France and I had the battleship, Rodney, behind me firing shells. Every time she recoiled, the waves just washed up. I didn't need any help getting on shore, the waves pushed you on shore. You had to go,” he said.

Today, Armstrong's identification tags, or dog tags as they were sometimes called, hang in his room as a reminder he made it back safely.

“If you came home, you brought that home with you. If you didn't, they knew that was buried wherever you were buried. But they didn't catch me,” he said.

Armstrong said D-Day memories are too painful to keep reliving, so this interview would be his last on the topic.

“I lost a lot of friends. That's the part that's hard to remember,” he said.

Armstrong smiles through his tears and said he proud of what he did as a young man so long ago in Normandy.

“I hope we don't have to do it again.”

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