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At 19, and then after turning 20, I received my call to mobilise. So I showed up, I was in Longueuil which was Montreal South at the time, on the other side of the Jacques-Cartier bridge. I enlisted in the artillery. I'll tell you why; because I had worked with veterans of 1914-1918 and we had worked together in construction before as well. We had a hard time! The boss used to shovel ¾-inch crushed stone with a number four shovel behind the mixer. He had a metal shoulder and he had been hit by shrapnel in 1914, 1918 and he’d had a fractured leg. So he says to me, You like horses, so why would you enlist in the infantry, in the army? He says, enlist in the artillery, you'll like it. You'll be behind the lines. He says, you'll get to sleep at the peasants’. So when I was called, I asked for that, I passed my test and they said I would do well in the artillery. That's why I was one of the last gunners to join the [Royal Canadian] Horse Artillery in Petawawa. There was big mountain of coal, and in the winter we would deliver the coal by horse. We would also distribute supplies; I can't remember how many kitchens there were in all. We would collect swill which we would sell to the residents of Mattawa. They would boil it in wood containers, they had boilers. And in the winter we would cut ice on the river, and we would distribute it for the ice boxes. When they got rid of the horses, they transferred me directly to England.
When I arrived in Belgium, they came to get me. They took me to
a reinforcement
unit,
the 5th
Field Regiment Artillery. I spent about
four
months in Holland and
then we
crossed the Rhine
to Germany. They warned us that it would be dangerous there, that
there would be
SS
[Schutzstaffel]
and the
Hitlerjugend
[Hitler Youth]. They said, they
won't hand themselves over. But it was the opposite because we had done a sweeping
before
the
crossing. It had gone well. They were all friends when
we got there and then I
went in...
with my guns. The friends gave themselves up as prisoners. We had a quantity
of prisoners before
the
cease fire took place on May 8, 1945. Afterwards, we had an
occupation army. I
left
the 2nd
Division, 5th
field. Then they transferred
me to the second,
3rd
Division [2/3rd
Canadian Infantry Division
of the Canadian Army Occupation Force],
the
grey
patch
with a
little bar underneath. The main 3rd
Division had just a patch. We
carried out the
occupation. We
did
sweepings and we rounded up the
SS. They thought
of us almost as liberators since the
SS
would shoot them down. The
SS
weren't on the
front line, they
stayed
behind and they
would
shoot people. During a time, the
Americans had bombed them a lot, especially
the
V-2
rockets. There were places where
we couldn’t advance
-
there were thousands of
[destroyed]
V-2s, it was mayhem. Then, in
places where we couldn't advance any more, the German
[civilians], the elderly, the
women, we would say to them
[in German],
Warum du viel arbeit
[why do you work so
much?] One,
she said,
Nicht viel arbeit
[not much work], She said,
Ruski,
Ruski!
And she
showed me that they were scared of the Russians. They were
clearing
the roads
so that
we could go and arrest them. We freed the Russian
prisoners in the
work-camps.
On the
way over, it took me 14 days
of
travel,
of which eight were
stormy, it was hard. We were
always scared of being hit with torpedoes. We had a safety vest with a light attached to
the shoulders so that we could be found during the night, with some
batteries in the
pocket. And a water gourd of course,
since we couldn't drink salt water.
The journey
back was a lot nicer...
And when we heard "Welcome Home Canada" when we arrived, we
were happy.