“A sight you couldn’t imagine”: Veteran remembers D-Day

The bloody 27-minute opening of the movie Saving Private Ryan is uncompromising and brutal.

But it serves to reveal the horror of armed combat and perhaps allow a person who wasn’t there to appreciate the bravery and loss.

Harold Hague doesn’t need a film. His memories of D-Day remain as vivid as if it happened yesterday. Every time he closes his eyes, he can still hear the loud booms of the battleship guns, the swooping of the aircraft overhead and the sounds of human suffering.

“It is scary,” Hague said in an interview on the 70th anniversary of D-Day in 2014. “A sight you could not imagine.”

Like so many young men at that time, Hague lied about his age in order to serve. He was just 15 and had spent three years fighting in the Battle of the Atlantic.

On June 6, 1944, Hague was part of the Canadian 31st minesweeping flotilla attached to the U.S. fleet that sent troops toward Omaha and Utah beaches.

The minesweepers’ job was to check for and detonate mines laid by the Germans. The English Channel was filled with them.

Without clearing the German mine barrier, the beach landings would never have been successful.

Now, 75 years later, Hague still can’t believe the scale of the operation.

“I often wonder how did we do it; the brains behind that was really something,” Hague said.

“There was never an armada, ever, like this and never will be as this. As far as you could see, ships, battleships, destroyers, float ships, cargo ships and they kept on coming and coming. Then you look up and the magnitude of aircraft, layers of aircraft, squadrons, seven, eight, 10 and can you imagine the noise.

“You know how big a battleship is and the shells how big they are, and that’s going over our heads, but when they fire, oh, the concussion. It would blow out our portholes.”

And as the D-Day operations continued, it became all too apparent to Hague the toll this tremendous onslaught was having.

“It wasn’t until our third run in that we actually saw the human carnage,” he said. “On the beach and in the water, there were bodies. There was one fellow, he was kind of swimming, you know, and I’ll be goddamned if he didn’t get hit by a sniper or whatever. I could see him and it hit him and he put his hands up, like this, and he said, ‘Oh Mama, Mama.’ You could hear him where it echoes.”

And with the blow from just one German shell, Hague received the visceral gutter punch no solider want to see — he saw some of his buddies go down. The flotilla lost three ships that day.

“All of a sudden, woosh, the ship that I was sailing to just blew right up. The minesweeper is small, you know; I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Hague remembered. “That’s how lucky we are. Five minutes sooner, we would have been in the position maybe. Maybe; you just don’t know.”

Now close to 100 years old, Hague, enveloped by these tragic memories, is still left to ponder the question so many veterans ask.

“When death is that close, when you see your buddy fall or you see the ship that your buddy is on sink, you say, ‘Thank God it’s not me.’ And then you say later on, you say, ‘How come I’m here and they’re gone?’ You are trying to figure it out; it is destiny.”

In the years since, Hague has ensured people in Saskatchewan never forget the sacrifice he and his fellow comrades made on D-Day.

He has been chair and co-chair of the Regina Remembrance Day Service and was instrumental in the popular indoor event at the Brandt Centre.

At 98 years old, Hague was the given the first ceremonial poppy of last year’s campaign.

And on D-Day 75, Hague looks back without any regrets. The Second World War gave him loss, tragedy and horror up close but he has a sense of pride that he played a role in changing history.

Said Hague: “If anything, when I came back I was more of a man than I would have been.”