Juno Beach to Ontario: The incredible story of the ‘Brown Suitcase’

Padre Walter Leslie Brown stepped onto Juno Beach on June 6, 1944, alongside thousands of Canadian soldiers in the largest seaborne invasion in history.

Unlike most of the men, the Canadian chaplain volunteered to participate in the Normandy landings during the Second World War. He wanted to be there to offer comfort to young men in their time of need under extreme circumstances.

"I'm much happier with the boys than at headquarters with all the brass heads," reads his last letter to his parents. It was penned just two weeks before the landing, and it hinted at what was to come. "I don't think that I have any news for you just now. Censoring is in force, and we are very much restricted. Needless to say, we are waiting to get cracking, and when we go, it will be a real show."

While the vast majority of the soldiers storming the five D-Day beaches were armed with rifles, machine guns or other weaponry, Brown had only a small brown suitcase which contained his communion kit.

"He chose to be there, he volunteered," said Dr. Barry Craig with Huron University College. "He saw something bad going on in the world and wanted to be part of the effort to stop that."

Brown landed with his regiment around noon on D-Day.

He spent much of that first day in Normandy holding the hands of the wounded and dying and preparing bodies for burial.

On June 7, Brown and two other Canadian soldiers were delivering medical supplies when enemy soldiers ambushed them. One of the Canadians was killed immediately. The other was wounded and left for dead; he watched as Padre Brown raised his arms in surrender.

The German soldiers, believing the wounded Canadian lieutenant was actually dead, left, taking Brown with them. "The last thing Lt. Granger remembered was seeing the Padre walking into captivity with his hands in the air, but also reaching down and grabbing the brown suitcase," said Major Tom Hamilton.

But the German soldiers who took Padre Brown had been ordered not to take prisoners.

Brown was listed as missing in action for weeks following his capture. His body was found more than a month later in a ditch along the side of a road.

The 33-year-old would become the only chaplain ever to be executed during the war, killed by a single bayonet thrust to the chest.

He was buried on July 11, 1944, in Normandy, and while his journey ended there, his story doesn't.

His brown suitcase was lying beside his lifeless body in the ditch.

It's a mystery how that suitcase, with the military stencil 'W.L. Brown' on the top, made its way from a roadside ditch back to Canada to be later discovered at a thrift shop in Windsor, Ont.

Chris McCreery couldn't believe it when in 1999, 55 years after Brown's death, he stumbled upon that brown suitcase. "You sort of lose your breath at this moment, that it's amazing to have found this."

McCreery was a student at Huron and had been researching Padre Brown and other graduates who had served and died during the Second World War.

Not only did the suitcase make its way home, but the communion kit, the silver chalice, chalice veil, the small breadbox for holy communion, every item was still inside, seemingly untouched.

McCreery donated Padre Brown's suitcase to the university where the chaplain was once a student himself.

The communion kit is now used every year on Remembrance Day and serves as a reminder of one man's sacrifice among the thousands made 75 years ago.

Other testaments to the memory of Padre Brown include a plaque at Huron, another bearing his name in an Orillia church, his gravestone in the Bény-sur-Mer Canadian War Cemetery just kilometres from where he died, and of course, on a single postcard from Juno to his home in Orillia.

Click to read the Padre Brown story: 'Postcards from Juno bring together past and present'

- With files from CTV's Mike Walker