Georges Bernard

I received a letter [under the National Resources Mobilization Act] via my mother telling me I had to go to Rimouski [Quebec]. There was a military camp over there. Pretty much everyone who received a letter had to go. I had a brother who also received the same letter, but he never signed. I signed as a volunteer. You had to be single to do that. That’s how I enlisted [in 1940]. I became the first mechanic for our platoon [M. Bernard served overseas with the 4th Medium Regiment, Royal Canadian Artillery]. I took care of the trucks and all of the mechanical problems that I could solve. We weren’t in the big cities; we were in the south of England. We were bombed, but then things calmed down. After that, the V-1s arrived [German flying or "buzz" bombs]; planes without pilots. It was the quantity of fuel that determined where they would fall; it was all set in advance, months earlier. At a specific moment, the fuel would run out. There were a lot of them, but especially in London. We were trained. The trucks had to be prepared. In France, we were ready. We were on the coast in England days in advance [of D-Day, the Allied Normandy landings of June 6, 1944] to be sure that we would be there. American ships brought us over. They were ships [Landing Ship, Tanks] built especially for that, with big doors in the front. The trucks could offload onto land. We weren’t the first. Everything went well. There were sailors’ bodies in the sea, those that had arrived before us. The corpses were floating in the water. Bodies float, swollen, like balloons.