Today in many places there’ll be people recalling D-Day on the 65th anniversary, and on the other side of the hemisphere from where I am now, in the Canadian town where I spent my youth — Georgetown, Ontario — local dignitaries, some of my old neighbours and perhaps a few World War II veterans are unveiling a plaque.

They’ve selected a spot along the street on which I grew up, Normandy Boulevard, so called because the government built houses there for returning veterans as part of its nationwide Victory Home Project. Normandy was, of course, the region of France where the D-Day landings took place.

My father, Wilfred Anthony Dorsey, returned home from military service well after D-Day, though not to Canada. He was in the British Army and had a go at civilian life in England before deciding the job situation had to be better in Canada. He emigrated in 1953, the year I was born, and bought the house on Normandy Boulevard from its original war-veteran owner. My mother and sister and I followed a few months later.

Dad proceeded, 90% with his own hands, and really only one good arm, to transform the house at #37 into the best on the street — a beautful yard out front and a veranda that later became a roomy enclosed porch, a vast garden out back, a basement excavated beneath, a paved driveway, wood panelling on all the interior walls and carpeting throughout, plumbing, and all the modern appliances as they came on the market.

And he did all this while working for a quarter century, five or six days a week, often 10 hours a day, at a Ford assembly plant that I would discover, in my own brief stint there, was a bit of a hellhole.

But back to the war, the real hellhole.

I’ve always liked to say, based on the few tales Dad shared about his time in the army, that he was chased off the European continent by the Germans in 1940, from the coast at Dunkirk, and came wading back ashore, 270 kilometres to the west, four years later, insisting on staying longer this time.

The hasty exit of the 340,000-strong British Expeditionary Force in late May and early June 1940, gunfire at its heels, was facilitated by Operation Dynamo, Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay’s “miracle of deliverance”, as Churchill dubbed it, aboard a makeshift rescue armada of 850 boats, the “little ships of Dunkirk”.

The return trip was Operation Overlord. They came back swatting.

At 3 in the morning on this day, June 6, 65 years ago, British bombers began hammering the German coastal defences around what the Allies had designated Sword Beach, the sands fronting the town of Ouistreham.

For all the information that’s available online about D-Day, I have not been able to determine the exact role played by my father’s regiment, the Lancashire Fusiliers, or even whether it was Sword Beach where they landed. The regiment’s own website is frankly terrible, even getting the date of D-Day wrong, and other sites maintained by former Fuseliers have surprisingly little to say about the Normandy landings.

Other sources say the Sword Beach incursion included the 3rd Infantry Division, of which 1st Battalion, the South Lancashire Regiment, was a part. Third Infantry was in turn under the 1st Army corps, led by Lt General John Crocker.

Meanwhile the 2nd Infantry Division under Maj-General HC Lloyd had the 1/8th and 2nd Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers, and Maj-General WG Holmes’ 42nd (East Lancashire) Infantry Division included the 5th and 6th Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers, but were they on Sword?

Regardless, at 7.30am the tanks hit Sword Beach, followed closely by the infantry. For all the firepower directed at them in a small attack zone, and the rising tide quickly engulfing the beach, the invaders suffered relatively light casualties at Sword — the Canadians hitting Juno Beach five kilometres to the west had it much worse.

Even so, the German defence was fierce enough to keep the beach zone hot until midday, and only then could reinforcements roll up.

Sword Beach and Ouistreham as seen on Google Earth. At the centre of the image, between the legs of the road junction, is a memorial — a British Centaur IV Cruiser tank.

According to DDay-Overlord.com, by about 9.30 the 1st South Lancashire was clearing pockets of German resistance in the village of Hermanville. Further progress was hampered by camouflaged snipers, but with the aid of glider-borne troops seizing the Bénouville and Ranville bridges, codenamed Pegasus and Horsa, the Brits made it eight kilometres inland by the end of the day, to the village of Biéville-sur-Orne. Nevertheless, the city of Caen, only 5km further on, eluded them for another month.

The 3rd Infantry Division lost nearly 630 men, killed or wounded, on D-Day, out of some 30,000.

My father never had a lot to say about the war, though he made it clear that it was awful. Sometimes there’d be documentary footage on TV of the D-Day landings and, in one sequence, he thought he remembered the well-spaced, two-storey houses along the beach that were filmed from the landing craft. They were, as it turned out, quite common all along the coast.

How anyone had the wherewithal to shoot film in the midst of that mayhem is beyond me. The opening sequence of “Saving Private Ryan” completely unnerves me because it rings so true. I would love now to be able to sit down and watch that movie with my father. As much as the fighting left a permanent bad taste in his mouth, he enjoyed war flicks, as long as they didn’t get daft. I think he’d say Spielberg got that one right.

As well as soldiers being picked off left and right, Dad recalled comrades drowning because the landing craft couldn’t get onto the beach and they had to jump into swells over their heads. A lot of them couldn’t even swim, and they were hauling a full kit.

Somehow my father, whose disdain for authority was constantly bouncing his rank between corporal and sergeant, made it through that moment in history and carried on up the road.

In the ensuing six months he drove lorries around France and delivered messages by motorcycle. He was on his bike one day, escorting something or other, when a landmine sent him flying. A landmine is what I recall hearing; my sister thinks it was a bomb.

Poor memories and the insolence of youth, which prevents kids from recording every single detail of their parents’ lives before it’s too late, means the facts of the matter are now gone forever.

At any rate, the consequences of the shrapnel that tore Dad’s right arm apart were something the whole family shared for the rest of his life.

Shipped to the military hospital, he refused to let them amputate the arm, so they bolted the pieces of bone in his elbow back together with common woodworking screws and shards of bone from his thigh, also wounded, and sent him home. There was more surgery in England, and skin grafts, but the limb was never right again.

Years later in Canada — year after year, it seems in hindsight — there were lengthy visits to Sunnybrook Veterans Hospital outside Toronto. Dad’s arm was opened and reclosed in various positions, with braces in different configurations and other forms of support, including one chest-and-arm cast that held him for a couple of weeks in a Nazi salute.

The pain never stopped. The carpenter’s screws wanted to come out, and to gain their freedom they made sure the wound at the base of the elbow never healed. It was routine for my sister and I to help with the bandaging, holding a gauze pad against the hole while Dad wrapped a long bandage around it.

Even though he could never spurn them entirely, Dad lost faith in the doctors. A neighbour once used a regular screwdriver to extract a bolt whose head was poking out of the pus-filled wound. Imagine the twist of a tight screw through bone with no anaesthetic, apart from a few beers. I was still too young to fully comprehend, but I almost fainted watching.

Finally the last screw came out and, by then, medicine had found a way to fuse the elbow at a not-so-weird angle. The last of the agonising episodes had passed and, for now, the hospital visits, but the arm no longer knew how to be anything else but the withered branch that the war had left.

My father enlisted in the Regular Army at the Manchester Sub-Recruiting Office in Trafford Park on March 30, 1933, giving as his trade “butcher’s assistant”. He agreed to a 12-year run with the glory-laced Lancashire Fuseliers, seven “with the Colours” and the balance in the reserves.

Within eight months, the butcher’s assistant bearing Army Number 3446572 and a patch on his uniform with the words “Omnia audax”, meaning “In all things daring”, was on his way to China, and that part of the story I’m going to tell next, with some shocking photographs.