Frank J Archie Archibald

I joined the 17th Field Royal Canadian Artillery Regiment and we went overseas at that time. We went from England down through the Mediterranean. We lost one ship to aircraft on the way down, went through the Mediterranean and we arrived in Naples [Italy], oh, it would be about the first of December 1943. [As a] Forward Observation Officer, I went, the 17th Field was part of the 5th [Canadian] Armoured Division and I had a command tank, although I was only a captain, we had the chunk of wood stuck out in front of it to imitate a gun and when with the tanks, I communicated with the tank commander and brought down fire wherever he requested it and in that tank, there was just myself, an Ack [assistant] and a signaler. And then we went in with the infantry, I went with the Forward Company Commander, so I could supply artillery fire when he ran into difficulty. The worst part of the war I had was in Italy. After leaving Italy, went to Holland but once the invasion [of Normandy] took place, Italy became the secondary effort and the … court in the parliaments in England, [asked]why weren’t the soldiers in Italy brought home to go and fight in the real war - and we had fought some very stiff battles in Italy. And we consider ourselves the lost brothers out there because we weren’t getting as much attention as the people who did the [Normandy] invasion. We went across Italy to, the leaning tower - Pisa. And we went from Leghorn [Livorno, Italy] to Marseille by ship and drove all the way from Marseille, right up into Belgium where we regrouped and then into Holland to fight. We started at Holland at Nijmegen, that’s where we went into action in Holland. Things about the war that’s hard to understand, something is why people did what they did. I belonged to an excellent regiment and everybody that was in the regiment, it was a good regiment, they thought that was their home and everybody was not going to let that regiment down. That didn’t apply only to officers and non-commissioned officers, but to every man that was a loyal member of that regiment. He wasn’t going to be the guy to let the regiment down; he would do his damndest. And I remember quite well, the end of the war we knew was coming but when it did come, I remember we had guns in action in order to empty them, we turned them and fired them into the sea the next day. But the first thing I remember doing is, we had some rum was getting to one of the sergeants, to take his rum and get it off the site because I didn’t want anything to happen. And I promised the guys we’d have a party later on when we got out. We, I just told you we came home on the Queen Lizzie [HMCS Queen Elizabeth] and came into Halifax and I got off and got in the Nova Scotian hotel and phoned my wife who was a nurse in Woodstock General [Hospital, in Ontario]. I got through to her, through the hospital and they said she was down getting her hair done, so they transferred the call to the hair salon. And I talked to her there and all the old ladies come out and listened to the conversation. And then we then got on the train and came back to Toronto and I was met in Toronto by my wife and mother and father, two sisters and one brother. And that was probably the happiest day of my life.