Fifty years ago today, the sight of parachutes drifting in the sky north of Nicosia first alerted a young Canadian Airborne captain, Alain Forand, that a feared Turkish invasion of Cyprus was underway.

Forand had been called to a dawn meeting with his commanding officer. "And at 5:00, as we were talking, somebody said, 'Hey, parachutes.' They were dropping down in between Kyrenia and Nicosia, in the plain that was under Turkish control," he said.

"We saw maybe a dozen parachutes, just floating down. And then the shelling from the Navy supporting the Turkish invasion started at about the same time."

The 400 members of the Canadian Airborne Regiment stationed in Cyprus learned that Turkish forces already had established a beachhead following an amphibious landing on Pentemilli (Five Mile Beach) near Kyrenia, and were rapidly disembarking men and vehicles without any real opposition.

Greek-Cypriot forces then realized their island was under airborne and amphibious assault by thousands of Turkish regulars, said Forand.

"Then the firing started all over the place," he said.

About 120 unlucky Turkish paratroopers landed directly on top of a Greek Army unit; most were killed or wounded immediately. That encounter would be one of relatively few Greek victories in what ultimately would turn into a rout at the hands of superior Turkish forces.

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Other Turkish troops were able to land without resistance and were met on the ground only by relieved local Turkish-Cypriots and a British television reporter.

On that day — July 20, 1974 — a war that Canadian peacekeepers had spent ten years trying to prevent finally got underway. Over the next few days, Canadian paratroopers would find themselves in the thick of it.

A divided island

Forand was no stranger to Cyprus, having already done one tour there in 1969.

It had been a while since Cyprus had really known peace. As with so many enclaves in the Balkans and eastern Mediterranean, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire had left local ethnic communities in Cyprus at each other's throats.

From 1878 to 1960, Cyprus was ruled by the British, who tried to manage the competing desires of the island's two main communities.

Greek-Cypriots, who composed four-fifths of the island's population, showed consistent support for "enosis," or union with Greece, and waged a guerrilla campaign against British rule in the 1950s. A Turkish-Cypriot minority opposed union with Greece and sought partition of the island instead.

Neither side got its wish. When the British finally departed in 1960, Cyprus became an independent country rather than a province of Greece.

In 1964, communal violence broke out after Greek-Cypriots expelled Turks from government posts. That led to the arrival of the first Canadian Blue Helmets, drawn from the First Battalion of the Van Doos and a reconnaissance squadron of the Royal Canadian Dragoons.

The 1,100 Canadians who arrived in Cyprus in 1964 were the first of some 33,000 who would serve tours on the island in the decades that followed.

They quickly established themselves in positions along the "Green Line" that separated the Greek and Turkish enclaves on the island, both defended by militias who were bracing for war and constantly seeking territorial advantage. For the next ten years, the Canadians helped to maintain an uneasy peace.

A coup triggers an invasion

On 15 July 1974, the Greek-Cypriot National Guard — still bent on enosis — launched a coup that toppled the country's elected president, Archbishop Makarios III. The coup plotters were backed by Greece's ruling military junta and their intention was to join the whole of Cyprus to Greece, an outcome that Turkey was not prepared to accept.

The invasion began five days later.

The Canadian Army at the time had changed greatly since the years when combat-hardened veterans of the Korean conflict and the Second World War filled its ranks.

"There was a lot of young kids for whom this was her first deployment," said Forand. "The average age of my 53 soldiers was 20 years old and the majority of them had never been out of Canada."

Canadian soldiers were forced to defend strong points in Nicosia, including the airport and the Ledra Palace Hotel. They were frequently under fire and at times they bridled under strict UN rules of engagement.

"The fact that we lost two paras killed and more than 30 wounded had an impact," said Forand. "But I was very proud of those guys because they reacted with professionalism and courage, and they gelled together.

"When you're in these situations, you always ask yourself, how am I going to react? You know, when the bullets start flying or the mortars start dropping. And we found out that with the training we'd received and the cohesiveness we had, we were able to withstand whatever came."

That training held even when the Canadians' six-month tour was extended by four months, he said.

A riverbank rescue under fire

Forand needed all of that training on July 23, 1974, when two Canadian soldiers came under Greek fire while escorting Turkish soldiers back to Turkish lines across a small river.

Five or six Turkish soldiers were killed immediately. Canadian Capt. Normand Blaquière was hit twice in the leg and remained under fire. Private Michel Plouffe remained with the officer, doing his best to shield him.

"He was at the bottom of the riverbank," said Forand. "I said, OK, I'm going to go and get them, and I told my driver of the Ferret (armoured car), 'Go at such a position and put the .50-calibre machine gun in place. I'm going to go down and if they fire on me, I'm going to order you to fire.'

"As I went down, the Greeks started to fire at me. So I gave the order to shoot. I was able to bring back Capt. Blaquière. Then I went back for ... Plouffe and then we evacuated them to the hospital."

For their actions under fire, Forand and Plouffe received the Star of Courage, and three other soldiers were awarded the Medal of Bravery.

A narrow line of separation

Forand's paratroopers would be replaced by many more rotations over the years, and while no tour was ever as violent as the Airborne's 1974 deployment, trouble continued for several years.

Maj. John Boileau found himself on the island in 1979 with Lord Strathcona's Horse, a tank regiment that had "rebadged" as infantry for the mission.

In later years, he would go on to command the regiment. Today he writes historical non-fiction and authored the Canadian Encyclopedia's entry on the Cyprus mission.

"My squadron had downtown Nicosia," he said. "Now the Green Line through Nicosia in some places was only as wide as the medieval street, and in other places it might have been a couple of meters. We had a series of static observation posts along the Green Line which were manned 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and those were augmented by vehicle patrols and foot patrols."

Provocations by both sides were daily occurrences for the Canadians.

"Incidents could range from the sublime to the ridiculous," said Boileau. "For example, one side might yell at the other side, or throw a stick, or throw a stone, or brandish a weapon, or fire shots in the air.

"What both sides tried to do all the time was continuously advance their line a little bit, trying to make an incursion into the other side to say, 'Oh, this has always been our territory.'

"Every single incident which our soldiers observed had to be logged, reported, investigated, passed to our own regimental headquarters and they would then pass it up to UN headquarters. There was some boredom, of course, on the line, standing in a patrol tower, especially in the heat of the midday sun. But soldiers were kept pretty busy investigating all these incidents.

"So it was a great experience for these young soldiers to do a tour of duty there."

The conflict cools over time

"In the early days, the situation in Cyprus was a lot like Bosnia in the 1990s," said historian Walter Dorn, who teaches defence studies at the Royal Military College in Kingston.

"It was a situation of interethnic violence and violence was spread across the island. So the Canadians who had to do interpose duties and observation and ... try and de-escalate the violence, they exposed themselves to a lot of danger and there were fatalities.

"Then even after '74, when the Green Line separated the two sides, there was still huge danger because the UN had to control the buffer zone. There were still land mines, there were still areas being disputed, they were still shots being fired.

"After a period of years, it really calmed down and it was less of a risk. But during those hot periods in '64 for a few years, and in '74 and for a few years after that, soldiers took risks for the cause of peace."

But as time went on, he said, Canada began to question the scale of its involvement.

"Canada finally pulled out because after all those years, 1964 to 1993, no progress had been made on resolving the issue and we often felt there was a vested interest on both sides not to resolve the issue," said Dorn.

"Folks were just too set in their ways, were too comfortable with the situation that existed."

Dorn said the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP) was a major economic driver on the island and "the headquarters contributed a lot of money to the Cypriot economy. A lot of the supplies were purchased from local Greek merchants.

"I think we may have been more appreciated for our economic impact on the island than any peacekeeping."

Missions without end

Dorn said Canada eventually tired of keeping Cypriots from attacking each other.

"The Canadians felt that they had contributed to this for so long and they were coming up to their 30th year and they said, you know, this is kind of a drain," he said. "We're now in a post Cold War scenario. The risk of conflict is small.

"And so we've done our share and we can go on to other missions because in 1993 there was a huge demand on Canadian peacekeepers. We had 3,300 soldiers deployed in Bosnia alone. Then you had a Cambodia mission as well as Mozambique, so it was really a time of great demand.

"UNFICYP did a great job at peacekeeping, but the international community has not done a good job at peacemaking, that is, resolving the underlying conflicts.

"The European Union allowed Greek Cyprus to join without having unified the island. So that's a controversial decision."

The UN responded by drawing its presence down to fewer than 1,000 peacekeepers. Today, only one Canadian soldier is stationed in Cyprus.

Forand said he's seen cars and expensive hotels replace donkeys since his time in Cyprus, but sees little change in the politics or the attitudes.

"Those missions never seem to come to an end, and the situation always seems to be the same," he said. "That's very unfortunate, especially for the people that are there that never see their situation improve."

Boileau said the mission was worth it. "There's no doubt that the Canadian mission there resulted in the saving of lives, especially during the invasion," he said.

But he acknowledged he sees little movement on the island's underlying conflict since he served there 45 years ago, "which is a crying shame because it is such a beautiful island. It has very many medieval sites, archeological sites, great food, beautiful beaches and passable wine.

"It's just sad what happened there."

WATCH | Canadian peacekeepers bid farewell to Cyprus in 1993 

Canadian peacekeepers bid farewell to Cyprus

After 29 years of service, Canada's Blue Berets prepare to leave the Mediterranean hotspot for good.