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On the morning of the day he died, Lt.-Col. John MacIsaac donned his blue blazer, affixed a row of a dozen medals to his chest above his brass Royal Canadian Artillery badge, and headed out with other veterans to Rideau Hall for the launch of the 2015 Poppy Campaign.
MacIsaac got his poppy, sweet-talked his way into getting a short tour of Rideau Hall, then headed home to the Perley and Rideau Veterans’ Health Centre.
That night at dinner, he collapsed of a massive heart attack. The Juno Beach veteran died on Oct. 22, exactly one week after his 95th birthday.
“May we all be so lucky,” said his son, Shaun MacIsaac. “It’s nice to have smiled and enjoyed your last day.”
But there was another day the elder MacIsaac might have preferred to forget.
At dawn on June 6, 1944, then-Lt. John MacIsaac was steaming full speed toward the French coast aboard a landing craft tank. The Nova Scotia native was a gunnery placement officer on a Priest — a tracked, armoured vehicle nicknamed for its high, pulpit-like machine-gun mount.
For the next hour after the first Canadian troops landed on Juno Beach, MacIsaac and his unit bobbed offshore in their landing craft, lobbing 105-mm shells over the heads of the Canadians and onto the German defences.
MacIsaac’s craft finally made its run ashore at 9:25 a.m., about 90 minutes after the first assault. Normally, he would have been in charge of placing the guns in their firing position, but on D-Day he was pushed into duty as a forward observation officer, on the front line with the troops, calling back targets to the guns.
It likely saved his life, said Shaun MacIsaac. His Priest was hit, killing the entire crew.
“If he’d been with it, he would have been one of them. He sort of cheated death at the landing by taking the more-dangerous job of going ahead of it.”
Lt. John MacIsaac, left, and Bdr Charles Zerowel, 14th Field Regiment, Royal Canadian Artillery, England, June 4, 1944
John MacIsaac recalled the landing in a 2004 interview with the Citizen commemorating the 60th anniversary of D-Day.
“I saw people being wounded, taken off the beach,” he told the Citizen. “I saw a lot of dead soldiers lying around. I saw landing craft immobilized … like sitting ducks.”
Too busy to be frightened, MacIsaac and his battery of Priests eventually rolled off the beach and into the bitter fighting around the town of Bernières-sur-Mer. “You intentionally didn’t think too much about what was going on around you,” he told the Citizen.
Lt. John MacIsaac, foreground, watches as his landing craft tank heads toward France for the D-Day invasion at Juno Beach.
The war, of course, wasn’t over after D-Day. MacIsaac’s unit fought through Normandy and the ferocious Falaise Pocket, then across France, Belgium and the Netherlands and right into Germany itself. He told Shaun of how the troops shared their meagre supplies with Dutch families who had been starved during the Nazi occupation.
In November 2014, the French government made him a Chevalier de la Legion d’honneur for his wartime service to liberate France.
“The war had an impact of making him quieter than he should have been,” Shaun said. “He was just so happy to be alive, to have made it through it.”
John Francis Donald MacIsaac was born Oct. 15, 1920, in Inverness, N.S. He was just three when his father was killed in a coal-mining accident. His mother moved John and his younger brother, Hugh, to Halifax, where MacIsaac would eventually study at St. Mary’s University.
He enlisted in the army as soon as the war broke out.
“Until about age 70 he didn’t want to talk about it. He considered war a horror,” Shaun MacIsaac said. “He had respect for his opponents. He realized that a lot of young, brave Germans were dying along with a lot of young, brave Canadians, British and Americans. But he also had a sense of the need to defeat the enemy, which was truly evil, and that the cause was noble.”
MacIsaac returned to Halifax when the war ended, studying law at Dalhousie University. He later rejoined the army, serving with the Judge Advocate General branch, including service in Korea in 1952-53.
MacIsaac retired from the army in 1969 and took a position as legal adviser to the Atomic Energy Control Board, the federal watchdog of nuclear safety, where he assisted in drafting the laws and regulations governing Canada’s nuclear industry.
He married his wife, Mary, in 1950 and the couple had five children — Jane, Anne, Shaun, Hugh and Michael — and 13 grandchildren.
MacIsaac returned to Normandy in June 1984 for the 40th anniversary of D-Day and again in 2004 for the 60th, this time with the entire family in tow.
MacIsaac continued to serve after his retirement, volunteering with his parish, Our Lady of Mount Carmel on St. Laurent Boulevard, and at the Shepherds of Good Hope, where he sorted and packed groceries.
“He had to be contributing,” Shaun said. “He’d rather be being useful than sitting around.”
Always athletic — he had considered a pro baseball career as a young man — MacIsaac took daily walks and was an enthusiastic swimmer at MacKay Pond, usually the first person in the spring and the last one out in the fall.
Having survived combat, he couldn’t understand negativity in people, Shaun said.
“He just seemed so pleased with life and this wonderful Canada we built post-World war Two. They’d seen the horrors over there and then to come back to this truly golden age.”
bcrawford@ottawacitizen.com
Twitter.com/getBAC
查看原文...
MacIsaac got his poppy, sweet-talked his way into getting a short tour of Rideau Hall, then headed home to the Perley and Rideau Veterans’ Health Centre.
That night at dinner, he collapsed of a massive heart attack. The Juno Beach veteran died on Oct. 22, exactly one week after his 95th birthday.
“May we all be so lucky,” said his son, Shaun MacIsaac. “It’s nice to have smiled and enjoyed your last day.”
But there was another day the elder MacIsaac might have preferred to forget.
At dawn on June 6, 1944, then-Lt. John MacIsaac was steaming full speed toward the French coast aboard a landing craft tank. The Nova Scotia native was a gunnery placement officer on a Priest — a tracked, armoured vehicle nicknamed for its high, pulpit-like machine-gun mount.
For the next hour after the first Canadian troops landed on Juno Beach, MacIsaac and his unit bobbed offshore in their landing craft, lobbing 105-mm shells over the heads of the Canadians and onto the German defences.
MacIsaac’s craft finally made its run ashore at 9:25 a.m., about 90 minutes after the first assault. Normally, he would have been in charge of placing the guns in their firing position, but on D-Day he was pushed into duty as a forward observation officer, on the front line with the troops, calling back targets to the guns.
It likely saved his life, said Shaun MacIsaac. His Priest was hit, killing the entire crew.
“If he’d been with it, he would have been one of them. He sort of cheated death at the landing by taking the more-dangerous job of going ahead of it.”
Lt. John MacIsaac, left, and Bdr Charles Zerowel, 14th Field Regiment, Royal Canadian Artillery, England, June 4, 1944
John MacIsaac recalled the landing in a 2004 interview with the Citizen commemorating the 60th anniversary of D-Day.
“I saw people being wounded, taken off the beach,” he told the Citizen. “I saw a lot of dead soldiers lying around. I saw landing craft immobilized … like sitting ducks.”
Too busy to be frightened, MacIsaac and his battery of Priests eventually rolled off the beach and into the bitter fighting around the town of Bernières-sur-Mer. “You intentionally didn’t think too much about what was going on around you,” he told the Citizen.
Lt. John MacIsaac, foreground, watches as his landing craft tank heads toward France for the D-Day invasion at Juno Beach.
The war, of course, wasn’t over after D-Day. MacIsaac’s unit fought through Normandy and the ferocious Falaise Pocket, then across France, Belgium and the Netherlands and right into Germany itself. He told Shaun of how the troops shared their meagre supplies with Dutch families who had been starved during the Nazi occupation.
In November 2014, the French government made him a Chevalier de la Legion d’honneur for his wartime service to liberate France.
“The war had an impact of making him quieter than he should have been,” Shaun said. “He was just so happy to be alive, to have made it through it.”
John Francis Donald MacIsaac was born Oct. 15, 1920, in Inverness, N.S. He was just three when his father was killed in a coal-mining accident. His mother moved John and his younger brother, Hugh, to Halifax, where MacIsaac would eventually study at St. Mary’s University.
He enlisted in the army as soon as the war broke out.
“Until about age 70 he didn’t want to talk about it. He considered war a horror,” Shaun MacIsaac said. “He had respect for his opponents. He realized that a lot of young, brave Germans were dying along with a lot of young, brave Canadians, British and Americans. But he also had a sense of the need to defeat the enemy, which was truly evil, and that the cause was noble.”
MacIsaac returned to Halifax when the war ended, studying law at Dalhousie University. He later rejoined the army, serving with the Judge Advocate General branch, including service in Korea in 1952-53.
MacIsaac retired from the army in 1969 and took a position as legal adviser to the Atomic Energy Control Board, the federal watchdog of nuclear safety, where he assisted in drafting the laws and regulations governing Canada’s nuclear industry.
He married his wife, Mary, in 1950 and the couple had five children — Jane, Anne, Shaun, Hugh and Michael — and 13 grandchildren.
MacIsaac returned to Normandy in June 1984 for the 40th anniversary of D-Day and again in 2004 for the 60th, this time with the entire family in tow.
MacIsaac continued to serve after his retirement, volunteering with his parish, Our Lady of Mount Carmel on St. Laurent Boulevard, and at the Shepherds of Good Hope, where he sorted and packed groceries.
“He had to be contributing,” Shaun said. “He’d rather be being useful than sitting around.”
Always athletic — he had considered a pro baseball career as a young man — MacIsaac took daily walks and was an enthusiastic swimmer at MacKay Pond, usually the first person in the spring and the last one out in the fall.
Having survived combat, he couldn’t understand negativity in people, Shaun said.
“He just seemed so pleased with life and this wonderful Canada we built post-World war Two. They’d seen the horrors over there and then to come back to this truly golden age.”
bcrawford@ottawacitizen.com
Twitter.com/getBAC
查看原文...
