Heather Latter
It was a trip of a lifetime for Blake Yatchuk and his son, Tyler.
The pair spent nearly a month travelling through Europe last fall to explore many of the museums, monuments, and battlefields pertaining to Canadian history.
“I’ve always been interested in WWI and WWII for as long as I can remember,” noted Tyler Yatchuk.
“Remembrance Day always got to me.”
“It’s something my son wanted to do and that was the best thing for me, going with my son,” said Blake Yatchuk, adding his son has watched plenty of shows and movies on the subject, as well as read books.
They saved for the trip and booked a tour with the History Channel’s Norm Christie, whose “Battlefield Tours” are deemed as “personalized journeys to the old Canadian battlefields of the First and Second World Wars.”
“They are more of a pilgrimage than a tour as Norm, using his expertise, adds and alters each tour to accommodate the personal interests of each pilgrim,” the website adds.
“The focus is on remembering and honouring the sacrifice and courage of Canadians who earned tremendous respect and a reputation for efficiency and victory.”
With Christie, the Yatchuks visited sites in Normandy, Holland, and Belgium, such as Ypres, Passchendaele, Vimy, Arras, Cambrai, The Somme, and Juno Beach.
And then on their own, they went to England, Germany, and Poland, visiting everything from the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre to the Berlin Wall and the Auschwitz concentration camp.
“We went through the WWI, WWII graves,” Blake Yatchuk recalled, saying they saw the final resting place of Lt.-Col. John Alexander McCrae, a surgeon during the second battle of Ypres in Belgium and author of the famous war memorial poem, “In Flanders Fields.”
“And we saw where he operated on the soldiers, in a little bunker,” he added, noting the room was very small with low ceilings.
Yatchuk said they spent each day of their trip—from early in the morning and into the evening—out and about learning about the history.
One of his favourite stops was visiting the Imperial War Museums, Churchill War Rooms, and HMS Belfast in London.
“It’s the exact same since they closed the doors in 1945,” he noted. “They put glass up and mannequins to operate the communications.
“We got to see where Churchill sat all the time—that was really interesting.”
In Normandy, they saw where Canadian troops landed on D-Day.
“And that was totally different than I expected,” Yatchuk admitted, saying he had pictured it like the beach at the Point here.
“But it was 100 feet. No wonder so many guys got killed there.”
Meanwhile, one of Tyler Yatchuk’s favourite stops was Vimy Ridge.
“It was the first time all four Canadian divisions attacked together,” he explained, noting they stormed the ridge at 5:30 a.m. on April 9, 1917.
“More than 15,000 Canadian infantry overran the Germans all along the front,” he added.
“Incredible bravery and discipline allowed the infantry to continue moving forward under heavy fire, even when their officers were killed.”
The younger Yatchuk noted that “Hill 145,” the highest and most important feature of the ridge where the Vimy monument now stands, was captured in a frontal bayonet charge against machine-gun positions.
“The Canadian operation was an important success, even if the larger British and French offensive, of which it had been a part, had failed,” he stressed.
But he added it was victory at a heavy cost with 3,598 Canadians killed and another 7,000 wounded.
With the twin pylons rising 30 metres above the memorial’s stone platform, the pair were impressed by the size of it.
“You look at a picture and think, ‘Oh ya, no big deal,’” said Blake Yatchuk. “But then you get up to it and it’s in this great big field—it’s humongous and just beautiful.”
“I felt as though we didn’t know anything because we learned so much,” reasoned Tyler Yatchuk.
“I thought I knew a lot about the Second World War, then we went on this tour . . . and it’s just unreal,” his dad added, noting they were able to see the tanks and bunkers, many of which were a lot larger than he expected.
For instance, some of the railway guns, such as the German Krupp K5, has a barrel length of more than 70 feet.
“You just don’t get a sense of how big some of these things are until you see them up close,” he remarked, adding books and television programs don’t do them justice.
His son, meanwhile, said he feels he learned a lot about what Canadians contributed to the war.
“I understand a lot more—what they had to deal with,” Tyler Yatchuk noted, adding he wants to go back again.
“And I want local veterans to know that they are appreciated for what they did over there,” he stressed.
“That their sacrifices are not forgotten.”
