Frank John Round

And I was sent overseas in 1940. And we landed at Gourock in Scotland and were transferred to our home away from home, I guess you can call it, which was in Farnborough, England. I only had one thing from that. I went to the island of Spitsbergen [Norwegian island group] to get the Germans out of there [Operation Gauntlet], supply the communications. But when we got there, they had gone, so they knew the Canadians were coming and they took off. Then we went back and I did most of my training in the southern England. The Canadians, of course, were the number one line of defense because of Dunkirk and that. The British Army was shattered and spread all over the place, and the only intact people were really the Canadian Army. So we were the first line of defense. So we were loaded on the ships at Portsmouth and we sailed for Sicily. We landed in Sicily about six, seven days later I guess, wide open, out in the sea there, anybody could have spotted us. We lost three ships to the German U-boats. Fortunately, I wasn’t on one of them, but we landed in Sicily. I was in with the PPCLI [Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry], on attachment at that time. And we landed just north of Palermo and we had a fairly easy time. We didn’t see Germany, any Germans until we were about five miles inland and then the fun started. And we advanced across Sicily and we got to a big city, one of the largest cities there, Catania, where we billeted for a week, and then we got on boats or landing ships and went over to southern, to Reggio di Calabria in Italy. Our first stop was to make a withdrawal from one of the local banks. After that, we just fought our way up the middle of what they called the Liri Valley, which was the toughest part of the fighting in Italy. While we were sitting on our butts over there with nothing to do but train, I was approached by our commanding officer and he said, “Frank,” he says, “you’ve had some chemical experience.” I said, “Well, I worked in a chemical laboratory,” I said, “for a while.” He said, “We have an opening,” he said, “for a water treatment person, somebody who knows a little bit about chemicals and could make sure that the regiment is supplied with water at all times.” So I said, “Sounds interesting.” He said, “There’s an extra 15 cents a day.” Naturally, 15 cents a day, you’re going to jump at in those days. So I accepted and I went up to Sandhurst military college, school of hygiene, for two weeks. Took this water treatment course and when I went back to the regiment, I, we were there almost nine months before I was really needed because we got, there’s lots of water on the way in the Liri Valley, there’s nothing but rivers. So I had a visit from the company commander one afternoon and he said, “Frank,” he said, “we desperately need water.” I said, “What?” He said, “Yeah,” he said, “we need water.” He said, “Everybody’s running short.” He said, “You’d better get in that truck and get a driver and go and get some water.” So I said, “Okay.” So he said, “Pick anybody you want.” So I picked one of the guys I liked and I knew I could trust, and we got in this water truck that held 200 gallons of water. And we got a map and we headed for the closest river. I don’t remember the name of it, but as I said, the Liri Valley’s full of streams and rivers and this type of thing. We drove along this road and we come to a little village. It’s a big village now. It’s called Siena. If you know wine, you know Siena. So we got in to Siena, and we were driving through town and we heard a rifle firing, what we thought was rifle fire. So as we got closer to it, I said to Tommy, “That’s not rifle fire, that’s pistols.” I said, “Somebody’s having a close encounter.” I said, “Let’s go and see, have a peek.” So we parked the truck and went and had a peek and then we come to this great big building. And that’s where the sound was coming from. We looked in through the window and sure enough, it was pistols firing. It was Royal 22nd Régiment. I guess it was a patrol in there. There were these great big 40 000 litre vats in there, full of wine. And they were firing pistols into the top of the vat, the wine would pour out and they’d be there with garbage pails, anything that would hold water. I said to Tommy, “Hey, we’re going to get some of that.” He said, “Okay.” So we hooked up the truck to the vat and we got 200 gallons of wine loaded into the truck. We thought, well, it’s time we’d better take off. So we were talking to some Van Doos, and I said, “Where’s the rest of your guys?” He said, “They’re a way back. We’re a patrol. We’re trying to catch us some prisoners.” So I said to Tommy, I said, “We’d better get out of here.” And Tommy said, “Well, let’s make sure we’ve got lots of wine.” I said, “Okay.” So we got in the truck and we started down this small dirt road, come around this bend and all of a sudden, bang, we ran into something. So we stopped and got out. It was a tank. Fortunately, it was one of ours. But in the meantime, our truck was all, the radiator was all dented and leaking and this type of thing and I said, “I don’t know how we’re going to get this truck back there without the water.” And Tommy says, “Well, there’s one thing we could do. I could drive, you stand on the bumper and we’ll take a gasoline can, fill up the tank as much as it’ll go, dump the rest out and fill the can with vino, and as we drive along, you’ll pour water into the radiator.” So we went along about six miles like that. We hit a bump in the road and I went flying. Tommy stopped the truck and he’s running down the road, “Frank! Frank! Frank!” And I’m lying there on my back laughing like crazy. So we finally got the truck back to camp. Nobody said we expected to be in trouble for damaging the truck, but hey, we were heroes. I thought we were going to get another medal. If it would have been up to the guys, we would have got one.