Allan Dick helped liberate France with two wheels and a rifle. “We had bicycles, airborne bicycles, but we didn’t use them,” he said. “We walked faster.” Dick, now 92, landed at Juno Beach on the Normandy coast on June 6, 1944. His regiment, Hamilton Light Infantry (HLI), operated as a reserve brigade during the invasion. Nevertheless, he was wounded in the leg on June 17, 1944 and sent back to England for treatment; he spent five days in hospital and then re-joined his regiment to finish the war. Unlike Dick, not all of his friends survived the war.

Around Remembrance Day, Michael Warren’s son recalls his father’s toughest wartime memory in Belgium during the Second World War. “My dad said the Germans knew exactly where they were,” Daniel Warren said. “Sometime during the night, (his father’s unit) started getting bombed and the commanding officer told everybody to ‘Stay in your trenches. Don’t get out.’ In the morning, my dad was the only one alive. He lost 19 of his friends. He said, ‘It’s just pure luck.’”