TRENTON, Ontario
Prime Minister Stephen Harper and a few dozen remaining Canadian veterans were in the Netherlands on Monday, to salute Canada’s 7,600 soldiers who died liberating the Dutch.
This week also marks the 70th anniversary of the end of WWII and the successful finish of the nine-month campaign by the First Canadian Army to free the Netherlands from Nazi clutches.
On Mary 5, 1945, German Col.-Gen. Johannes Blaskowitz surrendered to Canadian Lt.-Gen. Charles Foulkes.
Harper acknowledged the sacrifice of the depleting ranks of WWII veterans and their dead comrades, saying they fought for something worthwhile, just like Canadians who fought in Afghanistan and are now part of the allied battle in Syria.
“The heroes who liberated the Netherlands, like the men and women who serve our country today understood that when there arises a great evil, a threat to all things that define our existence as a free and just people, such enemies have to be confronted,” he said, speaking at the Holten Canadian War Memorial Cemetery. The cemetery contains the graves of 1,350 Canadian soldiers.
Harper said the gravestones signaled that the battle for freedom often entails paying a heavy price.
“When tyranny threatens the free, when cruelty torments the innocent, when desperation overwhelms the human spirit, we choose to respond, we choose the high road forward not the easy way out,” he said, “We choose risk not for reward, but for righteousness, we choose fight for freedom, we choose to defend the innocent, we choose to bring hope to the world.”
In appreciation of the Canadian liberation, each year since the end of WWII, the Netherlands sends thousands of tulips to Ottawa.
The ceremonies in the Netherlands were also marked in Canada.
Aboard Her Majesty’s Canadian Ship Halifax in that city’s harbor, soldiers released the ashes of two dozen WWII veterans into the ocean.
“I thought it was very touching,” Lois Dunlop, 91, the widow of Lt.-Cmdr. Daniel Turbull Dunlop, told CVT News.
