Gordon Carbert

I was twenty years old and they were going to call us up anyway. So I went to Vancouver and joined the Forestry, the Canadian Forestry Corps as they called it. And in Vancouver, they had a couple of companies on the go, recruiting and then I knew lots of guys in there and I could do anything in the line of timber work. So I joined them. Then we went to Valcartier, Quebec, and trained for basic training. And I went overseas in May, 1942. In October of 1944, we got on a ship with landing barges near Dover. And we landed in Boulogne. And then we all had to get onto our truck outfit and we went to the Ardennes in Belgium. And we stayed there about a month, a little more, and that’s when, if you remember, [German Army General Field Marshal] Von Rundstedt made a big push [the Ardennes Offensive, also known as the ‘Battle of the Bulge’, which began in December 1944] and pushed us guys out of there. Before we got pushed out, I could hear, we heard guns for a couple of days and then we didn’t know what it was about. We found out and it was foggy as anything then, you couldn’t see anywhere. We come out and went back to, north of Antwerp [Belgium]. And there was planes come over us and you could see the guys right in the cockpit. They were low, not going too fast, and they didn’t look at us at all. And they could have turned around and shot the hell of a lot of us if they had wanted to. But they weren’t after us guys.