Lena's Story: The D-Day Landings

Lena’s Story is a forty-eight page novella about D-Day. On June 6, 1944, American, British and Canadian forces launched Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy which began the liberation of Europe from Nazi Germany. I was immediately interested in this slim volume because my father-in-law and two of my uncles served in the Canadian army during World War II. One uncle served in the follow-up to D-Day. The other uncle was a prisoner of war awaiting liberation by the Allies. Older Canadians like myself, as well as younger ones, will be attracted to this accessibly-written story.

The account of the invasion, which takes up 17 pages, is presented in an exciting, vivid way, with terms like “squadron”, “bunkers” and “paratroopers” explained. Wendi Nordell’s illustrations, with the text superimposed upon them, bring the story to life, showing soldiers in the landing crafts and on the beaches, parachute dummies descending to confuse the Nazis, and townspeople crowding a street, beaming at their liberators. Author Patricia Sinclair provides a glossary, appendices, and bibliographies that include websites and videos. Clearly the book is intended as a teaching tool. The invasion part of the novella could stand alone as a thrilling, nonfiction war story.

As a work of fiction, however, Lena’s Story is less successful. The cover illustration, showing a young woman’s image in the sky above an invasion scene, leads us to believe that we’ll read the woman’s personal experience of the event. (While the only woman on the beaches during the invasion was American journalist Martha Gellhorn, Lena might have been a French, Dutch or Belgian citizen welcoming the liberation.) In fact, Lena, a Canadian, spent the war in Canada. The story begins promisingly when she, as an older woman, invites a young neighbour girl to her home to give her a little hat, a “fascinator” that she wore long ago to dances. The hat is the jumping-off point to Lena’s account of the invasion. In the final seven pages, Lena comes back into the story on a personal level. Essentially she is a narrative device, not a multi-dimensional, “round” character. Her boyfriend, Paul, who died in action on D-Day, is brought into the story at the end with no opportunity for him to be fully developed, either.

In her acknowledgments, Sinclair, a retired elementary school teacher, says that she wrote Lena’s Story because of the lack of Remembrance Day material in story form for young readers. Though the invasion scenes are well-presented, this novella probably shouldn’t be the first story a child reads or hears about World War II. The only explanation given in the novel about what the Allies were fighting for is the paragraph quoted at the beginning of this review.

Over the years, I’ve noticed that many Canadians, adults as well as children, have only a vague knowledge about the two world wars. Most have heard of Adolf Hitler, though some confuse the two wars and think that he and his Nazi party were significant in Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Germany during the First World War. It would have done no harm if the author had used the term “Nazi Germany” and mentioned that Hitler was the German leader. (He became German chancellor in 1933.) To say that the Nazis were “one of the Axis military forces of Germany, Italy, Japan and other countries” is true as far as it goes but does not present the good reasons why Canada and the other Allies went to war with them.

The Nazi party, which arose in Germany during the 1920s, had an ultra-right wing, racist, imperialist, totalitarian ideology that was put into practice once Hitler was elected chancellor. Conveying this information in a way that young readers can understand is a challenge, to be sure, but if it is omitted, they won’t be able to understand that a moral imperative compelled the Allies to liberate Europe from Nazi domination. War action-adventure, which doesn’t explain the causes of the conflict, is insufficient in a story for young people who will need to think seriously about Canada’s involvement in future wars.

Sinclair notes in her acknowledgments that she has presented Lena’s Story to a number of audiences, including her local branch of the Royal Canadian Legion, Toastmaster clubs and schools. Presented as a dramatic monologue, the novella would certainly hold an audience’s attention, and my reservations about it would go unnoticed.