Campbellton man's wartime jeep returns to Juno Beach exactly 80 years later

Eighty years to the day after Campbellton's Buck Cyr landed at Juno Beach, the jeep he drove across the sand as a 20-year-old soldier returned to the historic site.

The image of the jeep on the beach with Cyr's name etched in the sand is a powerful one for his daughter, Phyliss Roy.

"It brought many a tear to my eye," she said.

And seeing her father's army jeep with her own eyes was also an emotional experience for three generations of her family.

"I could actually picture my father sitting behind the wheel of the jeep with his twinkling blue eyes and his smile, and I could hear his laughter and it just melted my heart," said Roy, who recently returned from a trip to Europe with her family to commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day.

Putting her hands on the steering wheel that her father etched his name in during the war was particularly poignant.

"The steering wheel was it'll be forever embedded in my mind and in my heart. Just to touch it and to run my fingers so gently over where he carved his name, Buck Cyr, Campbellton, New Brunswick. And to hold it. The memories that come flooding back from the stories he told me the few stories he told me about the war and how he had looked for that jeep in 2005, was very, very emotional."

WATCH | A moment exactly 80 years in the making:

Buck Cyrs jeep returns to Juno Beach

3 months ago

Duration 2:13

Campbelltons Buck Cyr landed at Juno Beach on June 7, 1944, with his trusty jeep. Exactly 80 years to the day, his jeep returned to the historic site.

It was also an emotional day for Nick Obdam, who lives in the Netherlands and purchased the Second World War jeep for his family in 2022.

It was Obdam who noticed Cyr's name carved into the steering wheel and set out to track down the family of a Canadian soldier whose fate was unknown to him at that time.

Obdam eventually found a social media post about Cyr and noticed a message from a woman identifying herself as his daughter.

He reached out to her and explained his find.

Before long, Cyr's family began planning a trip to Holland to see the jeep a trip that coincided with a school trip for one of Cyr's great-grandsonswho happens to be named after him Ewan Buck McCormack.

When the family landed at the Amsterdam airport, Obdam and the jeep were waiting for them. The powerful moment wasn't lost on Obdam.

"I'm not made out of stones, so I also have some emotions, of course. At the moment you see somebody very happy and emotional touching the steering wheel."

He said it was a happy day for his family to be able to make it happen.

Fresh out of high school

Through the family, Obdam learned that Cyr had enlisted in the army in the summer of 1943, fresh out of high school.

The day after D-Day, he went ashore at Normandy and he and his jeep went on to take part in many important battles.

It wasn't until after Obdam contacted her that Roy realized the significance of a comment her father made during a trip she took with him to Europe for the 60th anniversary of the end of the war.

During the trip, her father got a chance to sit in a war-era jeep. When Roy suggested that it might be his, Cyr said, "No, mine had my name on it."

He would make a similar remark about several other jeeps he saw on that 2005 trip.

Roy said she was sad her father wasn't alive to see his old jeep, because she believes he was looking for it during that trip. Cyr died in 2018 at the age of 95.

But his connection to the jeep is now clearly visible thanks to Obdam, who takes a framed photograph of Cyr with him whenever he takes the jeep anywhere, including during the recent 80th anniversary commemoration of D-Day.

Obdam proudly tells anyone who asks the story about the young soldier in the picture.

"'That's actually the soldier who drove this jeep on this spot 80 years ago,'" he tells them.

"And I told the story,I think now 100 times. But every time, you see the reaction in people's eyes. And some people even start crying. So they can't believe. 'Really? You're not joking.' I said, 'Come over here, look in the steering wheel, his name is in.'"

One of the things Obdam had been planning for a while was to have Cyr's jeep on Juno Beach 80 years to the day of his landing there on June 7, 1944, the day after the initial invasion.

"So what we did hopefully not a French policeman is listening now a little bit illegally drove the jeep on the Juno Beach and took a picture and wrote in the sand Buck 2024. And on the same day, exactly 80 years later, the jeep was back at Juno Beach. It was a special moment."

After that, Obdam joined a group of about 120 jeeps and trucks from the war and participated in a memorial tour through historic sites and graveyards.

He even met up with Ewan and his class trip in Normandy andtook him on a route his great-grandfather likely took after landing.

"And you could see it was also emotional for him and probably his great-grandfather did the same driving into Arromanches with the jeep," said Obdam.

Ewan said "it was the most incredible thing I think I've ever done in my life."

He said it wasn't lost on him that he's about the same age his great-grandfather was when he signed up to join the war effort.

"It's just hard to believe that he actually was a year older than I will be and he went through all that," said Ewan, who turns 17 at the end of the month.

"Yeah, it's hard to believe that he just dropped everything, left it all behind, andbeing that young, he wanted to go and he wanted to enlist and do his part."

Cyr's descendants are grateful to the stranger who decided to search for the family of a man who once carved his name into a steering wheel while he fought in a war far from home.

"It's just hard to believe that he cares that much about a family that he didn't even know existed," said Ewan.

"And it's really nice to see how [Obdam's]honouring our family and how he shows that much respect towards what happened back in World War II and what my great-grandfather did."

Roy said her father "would have been on Cloud 9" to know how things turned out with his jeep.

"I know he would have been over to Holland in a heartbeat. He wouldn't have hesitated and he would have been more than happy to sit in that jeep and tell everybody his story. And that's why I'm so glad that Nick and his family are doing it for him. They're keeping that story alive."