D-Day was the moment that Canada became a country that mattered

Tim Cook is chief historian at the Canadian War Museum and the author or editor of 18 books of military history. Eighty years ago this month, an American, British and Canadian armed force set off from Britain to launch a fraught assault on Northwest Europe to liberate the oppressed people from their Nazi overlords. And the Allied generals were worried. They had been sweating for months over multiple drafts of the operation, gathering military assets and formulating complex deceptions to trick Adolf Hitler's forces about the location of the real attack. Even then, the generals felt that the amphibious landing…