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Arnold Edward McDonell served in the Canadian Army during the Second World War. See below for Mr. McDonell's entire testimony.
Please be advised that Memory Project primary sources may deal with personal testimony that reflect the speaker’s recollections and interpretations of events. Individual testimony does not necessarily reflect the views of the Memory Project and Historica Canada.
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Transcript
And I wanted to go to Europe so they shipped me over there, sat on the beach for a week I think, and raining all the time, cold. And living in water. Dig a trench and it would fill up, we were right on the shore. And then I went to II [Canadian] Corps headquarters. And I drove for a little while there, the truck, and we were moving all the time. And then they asked me to take the job as pilot, pilot car driver for General Simonds [commander of II Canadian Corps]. And I did that until the end of the war. We were in the Reichswald Forest just outside of Kleve, Germany. And one afternoon, I took the DAG [Deputy Adjutant-General] into Kleve and he was inside and I was talking to another fellow parked behind me and I was just in the line between the two houses. And there was a tree there. And all of a sudden, there was a whiz-bang and they used to come in threes, German shells. And it landed somewhere away, it wasn’t near us. And then another one, whiz-bang, and I was out on the ground. And my Jeep had a few holes in it; it hit this tree and exploded up in the air. So I don’t know just how high. And then all the force of the explosion come out like between the brick buildings and got me. But I never got hurt. We did see some things like that, you know, getting shelled at night and stuff. You’d hear the planes coming over, bombs dropping around. I was one of the lucky ones and I come home in one piece. In winter of 1944, we were outside of Nijmegen in Holland, just outside of there. That’s when I got the job of driving the pilot car for General Simonds. He come out and I was escorting him someplace. He’d come out and walk across the road and come and say good morning and how are you today, Mac, yeah. He was very, very nice. A great man. We took over an English hospital there. And she had been working there and I met her there when we first went in. We got going together and ended up getting married. Got married in 1943. My first daughter was born there in 1944. I was over in Germany. I was one day late. The baby was born the day before I got back there. And she had her first birthday on the train between Halifax and Winnipeg. That was quite a trip for them, that long boat trip, the girls [war brides]. Didn’t know where they were going, they didn’t know anything. And coming to a new country with little kids, babies and that. But they made it.
