By 22 Wing Heritage Officer, Doug Newman.
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Four area soldiers played roles in D-Day, two from Sturgeon Falls and two from North Bay.
First, from Sturgeon Falls, is Private Joseph Ernest Albert Aubin, of the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion. He was killed on D-Day, the only North Bay and Area person to die that day.
Second, from Sturgeon Falls, is Gunner Oscar Galipeau, of the Royal Canadian Artillery. Oscar managed to survive the D-Day landings, only to be killed two days later, on 8 June 1944.
Third, from North Bay, Rifleman Gordon Hogan, a member of the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada (QOR). The QOR, an infantry regiment based in Toronto, was in the first wave of the Canadian assault. The QOR suffered horrendous casualties; Hogan survived the landings—but lived only five days, killed in a terrible battle on 11 June 1944. (Rifleman is the same rank as Private.)
Fourth, from North Bay, Rifleman William Ryall, was a member of the Regina Rifle Regiment. The Reginas, another infantry regiment, was also in the first wave of the Canadians assault, and suffered heavy casualties. Ryall got through the landings in one piece, but was killed in action 10 days later.
Due to the passage of time—75 years--none of the local Legions have any members left who were part of the Allied invasion.
Joseph Ernest Albert Aubin, The only person from the North Bay area killed on D-Day.
Generally known as Ernest Aubin, he was born and raised in Sturgeon Falls, trained as an apprentice mechanic in a three-month course in North Bay, then moved to Montreal.
He was living in Montreal when he joined the Canadian Army in November 1942, at age 19.
At enlistment, he was 5 feet 5 inches tall and weighed 124 pounds.
An idea of his character---30 days after he enlisted, he received 14 days Confined to Barracks (military house-arrest) for going AWOL and breaking out of his barracks while under open arrest. (Close arrest, you’re locked in jail, under watch of the military police. Open arrest, you are allowed to go to your daily work and training—but the rest of the time, you are forbidden from leaving your barracks.)
Two and a half months later, while in basic training, he forfeited 10 days’ pay for being AWOL. Four months later, while training as signaller in England, he received seven days Confined to Barracks and loss of a day’s pay for again going AWOL.
Two months after that, September 1943, he volunteered for the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion.
Ernest had been originally recruited as infantry. He was intended as a replacement, to help fill the battle losses suffered by one of our infantry regiments overseas.
However while in England he trained for a new job: signaller. Essentially he became a radioman, but he was also skilled in semaphore (using lights and mirrors and the sun to pass coded messages) and was trained in the use of carrier pigeons.
1st Canadian Parachute Battalion was Canada’s elite army unit. Because as paratroopers they were expected to land, fight and survive behind enemy lines, completely cut off their army, their physical and psychological training and testing was extreme. They were superb hand-to-hand combat artists, endowed with razor-sharp wits, maintained an Olympics-level fitness regime, and supremely courageous. The failure rate of soldiers who tried out for the battalion was as high as 60 per cent.
Nonetheless, in October 1943, despite his small size, Ernest Aubin passed his training and was accepted into the battalion. He qualified both as a paratrooper and signaller.
D-Day and what happened to him:
Just after midnight on 6 June 1944, two American airborne divisions would drop into France and secure the western flank of the invasion area. Simultaneously the British 6th Airborne Division would drop in by parachute and gliders to secure the eastern flank.
“Secure”: destroy selected targets, seize certain towns and bridges, and block the German Army outside the invasion area from getting at the beaches.
The 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion was assigned to the 6th Airborne Division.
Ernest Aubin was a member of the battalion’s headquarters. His airplane took off on 5 June 1944, about a half-hour before midnight, one of 26 transport airplanes carrying the main body of the battalion to France.
A small part of the battalion had gone on ahead, to prepare the drop zone.
Between 0100 and 0130 hours, the main body of the battalion jumped. Between clouds, the poor visibility of night, and German anti-aircraft gunfire, which laced the night sky with explosions and bullets, the airplanes became wildly scattered, spreading the battalion over a vast area. Most of the Canadians landed miles from their intended drop zone. Most had no idea where they were.
This is what killed Ernest Aubin.
Every paratrooper on board Aubin’s airplane was reported missing. The exact details of his death are unknown—his body wasn’t found until late December 1944, over six months after the battle.
A large portion of the region had been flooded by the Germans before the invasion, as a countermeasure to defeat paratroopers. Nine of the airplanes dropped their paratroopers over the flooding. None of these men knew what awaited them until they landed. Aubin was one, and drowned to death.
He was buried 29 December 1944 by the Canadian Army at a roadside near where he died. Later, his body was moved to the Ranville War Cemetery in Normandy, where it now lies.
Over that whole period of June to December 1944 his family had lived on the faint hope that he was still alive, that perhaps he had been taken prisoner of war by the Germans.
Compounding their grief, 3 ½ months before Ernest Aubin’s death, his brother, Gilbert Aubin, a pilot with 425 Squadron, Royal Canadian Air Force, had been killed when his bomber crashed in England during a navigation exercise.
Ernest Aubin was unmarried and didn’t have children.
Oscar Galipeau. Death a mystery.
Oscar was an unmarried labourer from Sturgeon Falls. Born in 1916, he left school in the middle of Grade 8 and worked as a lumberman, on a farm, in mines and in a munitions plant. In fact, he had a particular liking for mining, and told a Canadian Army officer in an interview assessing his personal qualities, that mining was what he wanted to do after the war was over. He was a fairly quiet man, slightly submissive, but good-natured, solid, and reliable.
He also had a liking for the army. In late 1941, as part of a program to ready Canadian men to be called up for war, he did a month’s military training in Quebec.
Then in February 1942, the Japanese having attacked Pearl Harbor, and threatening the Canadian Pacific coast, Oscar (now living in Nobel) was called to service in North Bay, in the Royal Canadian Artillery, given training here and elsewhere in the country, then posted to an anti-aircraft gun unit in Prince Rupert, BC. His unit’s job was to help defend the West Coast from a Japanese air attack.
But Oscar was still basically a part-time soldier.
In April 1943, he officially enlisted for Active Duty—became a full-time member of the Canadian Army, to go overseas and fight the war.
In January 1944, six months before the Normandy invasion, he arrived in England.
On 30 March 1944, just 10 weeks before D-Day, he was assigned to the 3rd Anti-Tank Regiment, of the Royal Canadian Artillery. His unit had a formidable job. German tanks were huge, fast and famously lethal. One type of tank, in particular, the Tiger, had a cannon that could annihilate Allied tanks like Kleenex, and was so heavily armoured that, unless the Allied tanks got in close, their own cannon shells would bounce off like tennis balls. Example: on 13 June 1944, one week after D-Day, a single German Tiger tank destroyed 29 British tanks and vehicles in just 15 minutes, then its crew drove away unharmed.
It was up to Oscar and his 3rd Anti-Tank Regiment to protect the Canadians at D-Day, by finding and destroying the German tanks, including the Tigers.
Part of the regiment landed at Juno Beach on D-Day. The situation on the beach was so chaotic and crowded with dead, wounded and unwounded soldiers as well as wrecked and working vehicles—plus the seas grew rougher while the regiment was trying to land--that rest of the regiment had to wait until the next day, 7 June, to land.
However, Oscar was in the part that landed on D-Day, in the middle of the chaos on the beach.
On D-Day and 7 June, Oscar and his regiment didn’t encounter any German tanks, so they used their guns to destroy German pillboxes (thick concrete, steel-reinforced emplacements containing soldiers, machine guns and sometimes artillery), and to provide cover fire for the attacking Canadian infantry.
On 8 June a mass of German SS soldiers and tanks counterattacked the Canadians near the French town of Bretteville. Oscar and his regiment were thrown into the thick of the fighting—and he was killed.
What happened to him, how he was killed, I haven’t been able to find out. The regiment’s war diary is at the Library & Archives of Canada, not openly available for reading. Nor is the diary available online. And Oscar’s records don’t give details.
In short, his death is a mystery.
Gordon Hogan, "The Kid"
Gordon Hogan was an 18-year-old auto mechanic, living on O’Brien Street in North Bay when he joined the Canadian Army in August 1942. He’d completed one year of high school but opted to get a job rather than work towards his diploma.
He was 5 foot 9 inches tall, and 126 pounds when he enlisted.
He lied about his age, falsifying the year of birth on his documents, saying he was 19 years old, afraid that he wouldn’t be accepted if the army knew the truth.
In February 1943, after basic training, he became a member of the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada, an infantry regiment based in Toronto.
Three months later the army discovered the lie about his age. He got a tongue-lashing but that was all. The army merely corrected his records.
In September 1943, Gordon Hogan and the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada (QOR) arrived in the United Kingdom. They were selected as one of five Canadian infantry regiments that would land first at Juno Beach leading the way for the Canadian contingent.
D-Day, the QOR landed face-first into a whirlwind of German artillery, mortar, machine gun, and rifle fire. On top of this, the beach was infested with mines that exploded when stepped on. If that wasn’t bad enough, half of the landing craft that Gordon Hogan’s group was in—D Company of the QOR, about 120 soldiers—were blown up by mines in the water, forcing the soldiers to swim to the beach.
Despite the bloodbath, the regiment quickly fought its way off Juno Beach and, by the end of the day, had pushed 11 kilometres into the Normandy countryside—a remarkable feat. But it cost the QOR 143 casualties, the highest losses of any Canadian regiment on D-Day.
To add a perspective of horror to this number—two beaches over from the Canadians, the entire United States contingent that landed at Utah Beach—21,000 troops--suffered a total of 197 casualties.
Gordon Hogan managed to get through all of this unscathed. However, on 11 June, four days after D-Day, his D Company was assigned to attack the Germans near the town of Creux.
It was another wild, terrible fight. D Company succeeded in its attack but suffered 96 soldiers killed, wounded and missing. The regiment’s war diary reported, “All in all it was a very sorry day …”
One of the dead was Gordon Hogan. He was, for real, just 19 years old.
William Ryall, "The Lucky"
William Ryall was a 23-year-old trucker, who joined the Canadian Army in July 1940, just 10 months after Canada declared war on Nazi Germany.
In April 1941 the Second Avenue East North Bay resident was assigned to the Regina Rifle Regiment, an infantry unit in Canada.
In September that year, the regiment arrived in England—and was immediately put “on hold” waiting year after year to be called into the fighting, watching the war pass them by.
William Ryall, meanwhile, was awarded the Good Conduct Badge, which he wore on his jacket sleeve--a reward bestowed for proving to be an outstanding soldier in every regard, from his temperament to his work ethic.
The Reginas finally got word that they would be one of the five infantry regiments leading the Canadians’ way onto Juno Beach.
On D-Day, they landed into the same kind of blast furnace hell of German artillery, mortar, machine gun and rifle fire that the Queen’s Own Rifles faced, plus mines planted in the beach and in the water that exploded at the slightest contact.
At one point William Ryall’s group—A Company of the regiment—was pinned down on the beach, unable to move. All around him, soldiers were being shot or blown up.
But luck was with William and the Reginas.
Canadian tanks landed on their beach. They blasted away at the Germans, destroying the defences piece by piece--enabling the Reginas to get up and fight their way off of Juno.
Over D-Day and the next nine days, William’s survival was considered a miracle: he was described as “The most shot at man in his (regiment)”.
Yet somehow, every time, he escaped in one piece.
Unfortunately, on 16 June 1944, his incredible luck turned on him. At 4 in the morning—on an otherwise quiet night--the Germans fired a few artillery shells and dropped two bombs on the Reginas. Only one of their troops—William--was killed.
Like the other three men, he was unmarried and didn’t have children.
Doug Newman, Captain (retired)
22 Wing Heritage Officer
Canadian Forces Base North Bay
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