Sitting up against rocks and boulders, wounded men were slowly losing their lives, their bodies stained red from blood.
The Allied forces were tasked to take the eight-kilometre stretch of land from the Germans, leaving many soldiers vulnerable on Omaha Beach, waiting, row by row.
No poppies were blowing in the wind and no larks were singing in the sky. Just the battered, beleaguered, exhausted and bleeding soldiers stranded across the beach after storming it in one of the most gruesome and infamous battles of the Second World War.
The soldiers who did survive the onslaught of bullets, mines and grenades needed aid, and it was coming. A carrier filled with nurses and doctors was pulling up on shore to help those entrenched in the sand. And one local man was on that ship. He has the black-and-white photograph, approaching the beach from the carrier, to prove it.
Signs of mortar shells, tanks and billowing smoke are nowhere to be seen in a quiet South Burnaby neighbourhood where a Battle of Normandy veteran and a Freeman of the City calls home. The freeman title is an honour bestowed upon distinguished persons in public service, and Burnaby had five, part of the city and Simon Fraser University’s Freeman Legacy project.
George H.F. McLean has lived in Burnaby for more than 60 years, raising a family and serving the public.
On his dining room table, a large scrapbook filled with memories is splayed open with black-and white-photographs – some even falling out. Many have McLean in them but most he took himself during the war and mailed to a cousin in Scotland to have developed – including a snapshot of the chaotic Omaha Beach from the water.
“I was on the landing craft that delivered the … doctors and nurses to Omaha Beach,” he said. “We were doing special duty … because Omaha had badly shot up a lot of wounded that they were just sitting against the rocks, bleeding and it was heart-wrenching to see all these young guys wounded, waiting for attention.”
They were stuck on the beach because the captain ordered the ship to land far up on it so the nurses wouldn’t get their feet wet.
“We spent the night with the Germans threatening us from above, and we had a guy who was really nervous,” McLean said. “He was crying. He was a grown man, you know? We were the last landing craft ever to leave the shores. It was quite an ordeal when you’re not sure what happens to the ship.”
McLean was 16 when he fibbed his way into the Royal Canadian Navy a few years after war was declared. He was trained as an engineer and volunteered for a combined operation unit that would respond to any crisis. He was shipped off to Toronto, then Detroit to receive the necessary training.
“I was a big kid at that time,” he noted. “And quite muscular, I weighed about 200 pounds.”
The next thing he knew, he was boarding a landing craft in Orange, New Jersey as a member of the crew.
“We headed out for Africa,” McLean, now 88, said. “We landed in Morocco. We were delivering a number of soldiers that would back up the British regiment that was pushing the Germans out of Africa at the time.”
Tunisia was the destination, which is where a German stronghold was waiting for them.
“They (German military) had built a base,” he said. “I think they expected it to be there forever. So we took their base and it was a mistake because they kept bombing us. One night, they came over and they dropped a series of bombs and they killed 28 British seamen.”
McLean’s first taste of war, identifying blown up bodies of men still brings tears to his eyes as he retells it.
“We had to go identify the bodies,” he added. “And here we are, pulling people out … it was a terrible experience for a young fella. One guy lost his head. How do you identify him? The war had its ups and downs. We were widely exposed.”
As a crew member, McLean travelled to Gibraltar, North Africa, Malta, Sicily, Britain and France.
“Everywhere we went, there were wounded soldiers waiting,” McLean said. “We had 12 nurses and an entire roll of doctors that were transported on D-Day.”
However, being on a ship travelling the waters did not mean the ship McLean was on was immune from attack.
“When that German plane dropped that bomb the impact lifted us out of the water, and we were a 20,000-ton ship,” he said. “And it threw me to the deck.”
That incident almost cost them their lives, but the injury he sustained instead took a toll on McLean’s hearing.
“I hit my head on the deck there,” he added. “The German plane, I could see the pilot, they were 200 feet above my head and they just kept going. They were over the mast. He didn’t realize his bomb missed us, and we were lucky because we have 1,150 American soldiers aboard and 1,000 Dutch men. He could’ve really scored.”
After the war, McLean moved to his South Burnaby home at a time when the house he built was surrounded by farms. His wife died in 2006, but he’s left with his five children, eight grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren.
He entered into municipal affairs in 1957 and stayed for the next 30 years. He sat on many civic committees, coached minor hockey and is involved with many organizations such as the Royal Canadian Legion, Rotary Club and Burnaby Hospital Society.
He’s also an active participant in the Memory Project, which is a Veterans Affairs of Canada program bringing veterans who share their stories into the classroom. By the end of the war, he was awarded many medals, including the North Africa Star, France/Germany Star, the Italian Star and the Malta Star.
Despite the sounds of war far behind him and a life filled with volunteering and raising a family, not a day goes by that McLean doesn’t relive the memories of battles and fallen friends.
“No, never,” he said about ever forgetting the experience, while choking back tears. “I wake up thinking about it.”
May 25, 2015: Correction: A previous version of this article indicated that George McLean was the last living Freeman of Burnaby at the time. It has since been brought to the NOW's attention that this is not the case.
