Family members of Canadian D-Day veterans, serving soldiers and local citizens attend a ceremony outside Queens Own Rifles of Canada House in Bernieres sur Mer June 6, 2014. World leaders and veterans gathered by the beaches of Normandy on Friday to mark the 70th anniversary of World War Two's D-Day landings. REUTERS/Chris Helgren (FRANCE - Tags: POLITICS ANNIVERSARY CONFLICT)

To all those Canadians for whom this Friday, the sixth of June, is just another TGIF, here's a reason to pay attention to the 70th anniversary commemoration of D-Day.

There's a direct line from that long-ago battle on the shores of France to the Canada you live in today.

Much of the news coverage of the anniversary this week justifiably has focused on the valour of the 14,000 Canadian soldiers who waded ashore on Juno Beach that morning or the 450 Canadian paratroopers who were part of the airborne landing hours before. More than 350 died in the initial landing, and some 5,000 were killed in the subsequent Normandy battle, some of the hardest fighting of the Second World War outside of the Russian front.

The event is being marked Friday with ceremonies in Normandy attended by leaders from the Second World War allied nations, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Russian President Vladimir Putin, currently not on speaking terms.

We've been hearing this week from the dwindling number of veterans of the battle and from experts telling us there's a need to educate young people to remember their sacrifice.

But for most, this will be just another day and D-Day just another battle on a Canadian honour roll that includes Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele, Dieppe, and Hong Kong.

But it is more than that, much more. To explain why, Yahoo Canada News spoke with two experts on Canadian history, who helped shed some light on why Normandy is such a critical part of Canada's story.

[ Related: Chronology of 1944 D-Day landings in Normandy by Cdn. forces ]

First, a D-Day primer. Younger Canadians raised on reports about the nasty but relatively small-unit skirmishes of Afghanistan and the Iraq insurgency may have trouble getting their minds around the sheer scale of Overlord, the plan to throw a huge army across the English Channel onto the Normandy coast of northern France.

The disastrous 1942 raid on the French coastal town of Dieppe, which cost more than 900 Canadian lives, had taught the Allies a couple of things: Trying to attack a heavily defended port – even a small one – directly would be difficult and costly compared to a beach landing, and co-ordination between the land, sea and air arms would have to be much better in a real invasion.

And it was. Through a combination of deception and tight security, the invasion force achieved complete surprise. An immense fleet of 5,000 ships, plus hundreds of smaller boats and landing craft, appeared off the Normandy beaches the morning of June 6, 1944.

Preceded by 24,000 airborne troops, about 150,000 soldiers came ashore on five beaches that day. The Canadian 3rd Infantry Division landed on a beach code-named Juno, between the British landing beaches of Gold and Sword. U.S. forces assaulted Utah and Omaha beaches.

The Royal Canadian Navy contributed more than a hundred ships, manned by 10,000 sailors, while several Royal Canadian Air Force squadrons were part of the effort to maintain air superiority over the beachheads and knock out coastal defences.

The Germans were hunkered down behind Hitler's unfinished but still formidable Atlantic Wall, a line of concrete defences studded with artillery emplacements and bunkers bristling with machine guns. The beaches themselves were strewn with booby-trapped steel obstacles designed to disable landing craft and tanks.

Some of the defenders were low-quality divisions from Germany's "allies" and many German units were undermanned or used older troops because of the massive casualty rate on the Eastern Front.

Still, many put up a strong defence before being overwhelmed, especially at Omaha Beach, where the Americans suffered the most casualties on D-Day. The Allies' pre-invasion disinformation campaign kept Gen. Erwin Rommel's powerful Panzer reserves from intervening. Commanders believed the Normandy landings were a diversion, not the main invasion.

The Canadians on the eight-kilometre stretch of Juno Beach encountered fierce resistance but made some of the deepest advances of the day. Weeks of bitter fighting lay ahead in the Normandy battle but an oft-quoted line from British historian John Keegan's Six Armies in Normandy summed up their achievement that day:

“At the end of the day, its forward elements stood deeper into France than those of any other division," Keegan wrote.

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