A sense of relief flooded over Len Rigg as he walked, shoulder to shoulder, with his chums through the main streets of Berlin.
The Second World War had come to an end about a month prior, and he was gladly taking part in one of the most poignant moments in history — a victory march through the shattered remains of the German capital.
It marked the end of a long and arduous campaign for Rigg, an engineer in the British Army who was keen to return home to his family in the U.K. after years overseas.
Huge crowds lined the sidewalks as the soldiers marched by.
“I could hear people shouting, ‘Winston Churchill, Winston Churchill,’” says Rigg, 96, this year’s honoured veteran for Richmond’s Remembrance Day ceremonies. “There was a lot of excitement.”
It was a far cry from the scenes just over a year earlier on June 6, 1944 when Rigg was one of the thousands of Allied troops crossing the English Channel to land on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day.
For him, that was a journey into the great unknown, and a world away from his life as a young woodworker in the north west of England.
“I knew it wasn’t going to be a picnic,” Rigg says, adding that when he signed up for military service in his early 20s, he naively thought what lay ahead would be more of an adventure than what turned out to be a hard and dangerous slog through France, Holland, Belgium and finally Germany.
But it was waiting for the command to start the invasion of France that proved to be one of the most excruciating experiences.
To keep Rigg’s unit busy they were tasked with retrieving survivors from bombed out buildings in London.
“But when they knew the invasion was coming off, we were sent away,” he says, reclining in a comfy chair in his suite at The Maple Residences in Steveston, his smart blue blazer providing the perfect backdrop for his shiny row of service medals.
“We knew the invasion was going to happen, but when, nobody knew.”
Making it worse was the inclement weather.
Rigg was in an encampment — a marshalling area for D-Day forces on the outskirts of London — for just a few days when the heavens opened.
“It absolutely threw it down. And we had slutch (thick, heavy mud) up to here,” Rigg says, pointing to midway up his shin.
“You can imagine, we’re all in army boots, thousands of guys. It was a real mess.”
On the actual day of departure, the train journey to the coast where the Allied armada was waiting for them was meant to throw anyone watching troop movements off track.
“I saw the ocean in the west, then I saw it on the east,” Rigg says, recalling his view out the train window as it zig-zagged its way to Dover.
And when the train pulled into the final station, Rigg noticed all the doors on one side of the carriages were locked.
There was just one way out — on to the station platform and the nearby row of waiting boats. “You couldn’t escape,” he says, chuckling quietly.
While the crossing was largely uneventful, a sense of foreboding hung thick in the air.
“I was wondering what was going to happen, what we were going to meet,” he says. “I was a bit worried about the mines on the beaches.”
The destination was the town of Arromanches-les-Bains where the code name for the landing area was Gold beach.
In the engineers corps, Rigg had been trained to set up Bailey and pontoon bridges. But he had also been instructed in lifting and setting mines.
“I wasn’t too happy with that,” he said of the early training.
Thankfully, he wasn’t given the task of clearing the beach of explosives as his unit was pushed inland quickly, while the retreating German forces set up a counter attack position in the town of Caen.
“Caen was absolutely flattened. I don’t think there were two bricks stuck together. It was just a mass of rubble. It was a battle day after day in Caen.”
The job he and his unit had to complete was clearing an adjacent field of mines so it could serve as an aircraft landing strip. That’s when the deadly realities of war hit home.
“I got hit with shrapnel. It penetrated my helmet and I got a lump on my head,” he says, running his fingers over the impact area. “Of course, I didn’t go to the medics. It was more dangerous to go see the medics than it was to stay where I was.”
Caen finally fell and Rigg and his unit moved on through the rest of Europe, and eventually that memorable day in Berlin.
“It was great to think that was the end,” he says, adding part of his duties leading up to the parade was helping build a stage outside of the city were child actor Mickey Rooney was set to entertain the troops.
“(Rooney) was young then,” Rigg says laughing, “and sent there to entertain the (big shots).”
Coming home to the family he had started during the war — he married wife Kathleen while on two days leave in 1941 — was a time Rigg says he’ll never forget.
Arriving back in the U.K., he and the rest of the returning soldiers with him were ushered into a massive warehouse in Oldham where they turned in their uniforms in exchange for a brand new suit.
“It was a cotton mill at one time. But inside it had row after row of suits,” he says. “And there was a ticket on the end of each arm showing what size it was. That was my ‘going home suit.’
“You also got an overcoat when you handed your army stuff in.”
Rules at the time ensured pre-war jobs would be waiting for returning soldiers, so Rigg had a few days off, then went back to work, almost as if nothing had happened.
As the decades since the war’s end have passed, the raw emotions brought on by the annual observance of Remembrance Day have lessened for Rigg.
“It was pretty hard the first time I went. Over the years, it slips away a bit,” he says.
Part of that also came with moving his family to Canada in 1956 when the cotton industry died down in Lancashire, taking with it much of the associated jobs.
So, Rigg decided it would be better if he and his family — which had grown to three children — moved to greener pastures. It was a toss up between Australia and Canada.
What sealed the decision to come here was a large map of Canada posted on the local travel agent’s shop wall. “So, I sat looking at this map with places like Moosejaw, Edmonton and Yellowknife,” he says.
He ended up settling on Yellowknife because he had lined up a job there. But after two months, he headed for the Lower Mainland and settled in Richmond in 1962.
Rigg says he is honoured to play a role in this year’s Nov. 11 ceremonies and is forever thankful he managed to return home after the war and live a long and fruitful life.
“When I think about it, what I’ve been through, I feel sorry for the other guys who never came back.”
