Sonia and Guy d’Artois. [Wikimedia]

Love behind enemy lines: An Anglo-Canadian couple’s D-day exploits

STORY BY ALEX BOWERS

“Tell 14 the Queen’s terrace is wide,” said the BBC presenter over radio airwaves on June 1, 1944. To most listeners in occupied France, the strange statement would have meant little. To Guy d’Artois, a 27-year-old Canadian agent of the Special Operations Executive (SOE)—together with French Resistance fighters of the DITCHER circuit—the cryptic code signified the news they had been waiting for: D-Day would begin within the next 15 days.

There was no time to lose.

d’Artois’ duties, alongside the Maquis groups he led behind enemy lines, were to hamper German movements in advance of Operation Neptune. Whether sabotaging rail lines, cutting communications or ambushing convoys, it was his job to occupy the occupiers around Charolles and the wider Saône-et-Loire region of France while the Allied invasion proceeded in Normandy.

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The Lancaster bomber of the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum, one of only two airworthy Lancs in the world. [Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum]

An armchair tour of Canada’s only airworthy Lancaster bomber, Part 1

STORY BY ALEX BOWERS

They call her Vera—and she sings.

Her voice may not carry through the sky like bluebirds, for bluebirds cannot roar. Her stature may seldom tower above the white cliffs of Dover, for her heart lies across an ocean. An English sweetheart she is not—although the late, great Vera Lynn did surely approve.

For a few months each year—a mere 50 hours in total—a very different icon leaves its hangar at the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Mount Hope near Hamilton, Ont., as the sound of its four Packard Merlin 224 engines churns the air. Capable of reaching speeds of 443 kilometres per hour, the beloved beast is a true sight to behold when it graces the heavens, its roughly 21-metre-long frame looming large amidst the clouds.

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