On June 6, countries around the world will mark the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings that launched the Allied invasion of Europe during the Second World War. McMaster will honour those who fell by lowering campus flags to half-mast.

Of the 35 men on the University’s Second World War Honour Roll tablet, two were killed during the initial 24-hours of the D-Day invasion. John Douglas Young (a continuing education student at McMaster who earned an MBA from Harvard in 1940) died while storming the beach in Normandy on June 6. Alumnus Robert Dorsey ’41 died on D-Day Plus 1, the second day of the invasion, while digging in on the Normandy beachhead with a group of reinforcements.

A third soldier from McMaster, alumnus Nairn Boyd ’41, served in a front-line Sherman tank during the Normandy invasions, and was killed during the Allied effort to take the French city of Caen the following month.