Charles Whitehouse

My name is Charles Whitehouse. From day one of my service, I spent a lot of time in Holland. The war ended and I had helped free Holland from the Germans. The captain of our outfit told us it was a great experience for us when we saved Holland. When Hitler committed suicide, he shot his wife, then himself, and the war ended. That wasn’t the end of me. I had to take prisoners of war and have them committed for trial. And the way it was, I was driving for the third day, and the word was to empty some ammunition from my truck over there somewhere and then use that truck to transport prisoners and take them over there to determine if they are good ones or bad ones. The good ones were told find your way home if you had a home. The bad ones went for trial. I backed my truck to make an ammunition dump to get rid of the ammunition I had on board. And I’ll be damned; there was a mine there. I ran over a mine! My buddy, my dear friend, he was gone. He had stood in front of the truck, and when I hit the mine, he was gone. And me, it blew the wheel off and a big part of the door, and they had to carry me out on a stretcher. I ended up at a field hospital; I was there for quite sometime with two English doctors working on me. I was in there for nine months! I asked the doctors “Am I going to walk out of here?” They couldn’t give me an answer. But I did, I walked out of there. Nine months later when I got home, I walked down the stairs at the CNR station, the whole family was there. My mother took one look at me and she cried. I was down to a hundred pounds or maybe a little less. Anyway, we got through it. My two sisters had grown up and were both nurses, I hadn’t seen them for about six years and well it was quite a thing. But then everything got back to normal. What else can I say, that was war over in Holland.