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These Stars Traded Hollywood Glamor for Wartime Glory

Khalid Elhassan March 31, 2022 37 min

24. “We Were More Afraid of Drowning Than We Were of the Germans“

Star Facts - Canadian troops hit Juno Beach on D-Day — Canadian troops hit Juno Beach on D-Day. Huffington Post Canada

Jimmy Doohan’s unit was shipped to England in 1940. Over the next few years, the Canadians garrisoned the British Isles against a threatened German onslaught and trained for an eventual invasion to retake Europe from the Nazis. Aside from a failed raid on Dieppe in 1942 that turned into a catastrophe, and which Doohan luckily missed, the Canadian ground forces saw next to no combat. Eventually, they began to get antsy after years of constant training with little action, and from the snide comments directed their way, that sarcastically referred to them as “the world’s best-trained soldiers“.

Doohan and the Canadian ground formations finally got their first taste of combat in the Normandy Invasion, when they landed at Juno Beach on D-Day, June 6^th, 1944. They were supposed to disembark in the predawn darkness, but rough sea conditions delayed their amphibious assault until well after sunrise. Doohan and his comrades were undaunted. Years later, the Star Trek engineer described the experience of being on a landing craft as it approached the enemy shore: “We were more afraid of drowning than we were of the Germans“.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.