Quinn Duffy share CoH story & 75th anniversary of the D-day

Re-post from Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CompanyOfHeroes/comments/bywddk/quinn_duffy_share_coh_story_75th_anniversary_of/

Thanks for sharing.
It's good to know some Relicans still care about CoH and WW2 sacrifice.
The CoH community can be tough on each other and Relic but many fans do love this game.


Source:
https://www.facebook.com/quinn.duffy.the.first/posts/10161787777955084
https://twitter.com/QuinnDuffy/status/1137435955143385088

Among many of the privileges I have as a game designer at Relic is being able to travel for research on the games I've worked on. I visited St. Petersburg in winter, and the battle sites around the harrowing Siege of Leningrad; the Sinyavino heights, Shlisselburg, the banks of the Neva river, Kronshtadt, the Siege Museum in Leningrad, Piskarevskoye.

We overlooked the Oder River at the escarpment at Seelow, saw the narrative of battle left written in the physical damage on many street corners in Berlin, experienced the deeply powerful Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, saw where the final armistice was signed at Karlshorst.

In January of 2018 I finally had an opportunity to visit Normandy, France. We centered our visit in Caen, and traveling around the area was a tour of history I’d been reading about since childhood; Mike-Green to Nan-Red, Cruelly, Authie, Buron, Place des 37 Canadiens, Arromanches, Omaha, Pointe du Hoc, Carentan, Villers-Bocage, Verrieres, where the Black Watch bled itself dry, Bourguebus, Falaise.

Nothing, however, prepared me for the raw emotion I experienced at Bretteville-sur-Laize Canadian War Cemetery. South of Caen near Cintheaux, where almost 3000 allied dead lie, casualties of Goodwood, Spring, Totalize and Tractable. You see little of the cemetery as you approach the stone portico at the entrance, but as you pass through those columns, the simple shape of the almost white Portland stone grave markers appear arranged with utter exactness so that in every direction you look, the lines are perfect. The design alone illustrates deep respect and reverence – grief manifested physically with military precision.

Seeing it for the first time brought a catch to my throat. Battles became instantly less abstract because the cost of those terrible moments was visible and tangible, touchable. As I wandered the rows in the fading light of a cool Calvados winter, many stories emerged – there were soldiers from all over Canada and the Commonwealth, there were great clusters of marker dates that signified the big battles and terrible casualties, personal inscriptions memorialized the fallen, tiny flags and fresh flowers showed that many were still visited, and remembered, and loved. I thought of my grandfather and my great uncles, all of whom, blessedly, survived the war.

The men buried in Bretteville-sur-laize were mostly young. A 22 year old from the Calgary Highlanders, a 19 year old from the British Columbia Regiment, but that also made me think of the war memorial I had visited at Tiergarten in Berlin where many of the Russian soldiers there seemed surprisingly old – I guessed that the flower of youth had long since been spent in the horror of the Eastern Front before the final battles in Berlin, and older and older soldiers had replaced the young. Fathers fighting after their sons had died. There’s a lesson there on the cost of war if what I think is true.

The 75th anniversary of the D-day landings has passed. Soon we will reach the 75th anniversary of the end of the war. These milestones certainly make one remember in a more focused way. I feel however, we’re one more year from understanding real sacrifice, one more year removed from knowing how to band together and tackle existential threats, one more year from the cost of lessons learned about the willingness, and need, to put the collective good before self.

And that’s something we should never, ever forget.

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It appears that Bonnie Jean Mah (former AoE4 narrative lead) also visited France in 2018:

Bonnie Jean Mah‏ @BonnieJeanMah
Such a great thread, @QuinnDuffy . Visiting those sites was incredibly moving and struck home, imagining what those soldiers and civilians went through. Juno Beach affected me deeply, thinking of the Canadians who stormed the beach. Thank you so much for writing this.

I am not British nor do I think I have British ancestry but CoH's campaigns really made me feel about those men's sacrifices, the stories, missions and cutscenes just well portrayed the feeling of sorrow those men felt watching their comrades die, often in their arms.



I edited the above for ANZAC day but really, you just gotta admit the quality and feeling these cutscenes convey.

Here's a couple of other at the end of the Caen missions and from the final mission as well





I even got both of the tracks from the scenes here for anybody that's interested -





Not that the rest of the campaigns were not good, I'd say that all of them were great, especially the American and German ones but the British one especially hit me and made me realize that they were actually a Commonwealth in the full sense of the word, Scots, Canadians, Irish, Indians, Austrians, New Zealanders, people from both mainland of Britain and the Colonies, Colonies that weren't even directly threatened, men who could stay home with their sweet hearts instead of going to fight an enemy they didn't even know joined up and bled because of a sense of purpose, purpose which I sadly see lacking in many people today. And that's say I have the utmost respect for all soldiers but so much more for probably the greatest generations that ever lived during both of the World Wars, and our tired Vietnam veterans that were drafted to fight a foreign war and then ridiculed as baby killers by hippies that didn't even know what was at stake at home.