Jack Myers

In those days, I was making $10 a week working at Kresge’s and paying $25 a month for room and board. But I seemed to get by and that alright. But a lot of my friends were joining the army at that time, so I knew it was just a matter of time before I would join the army anyway. We started out with the Ram tank training and they were different. We didn’t get much tank training at [Camp] Borden because I trained as a wireless operator. And we were in A-9, to do our training there before we went overseas. So I was part of the crew, yeah. I was a loader operator but I could do every job in the tank. I even drove part of the time and I even got a bit of crew command work too. You get a whole bunch of new friends [joining the army] and everybody’s in the same boat. And my two friends both come from the States, they come up to Canada and joined the army before the United States was in the war. Yes, they came from Warren, Pennsylvania. I classify Italy as glad to get out of there. You see, Italy wasn’t susceptible to tank warfare. They were, too many mountains. We started in Arnhem and we come to Voorthuizen, Barneveld, our destination was Putten. But in the meantime, we had to cross this road. And as we pulled onto the road, we got hit by an 88 [ German 88 millimetre Anti-Air gun] and tore off our front and suspension and so we were stuck there for a couple days, before they brought us another tank. But the highlight of that thing was we come to the airport just outside of Arnhem [Deelen Airbase] and we were on the right side and they decided that instead of pussy footing around and going around it, we’d go right to it as fast as those tanks could travel. And that’s what we did and we never lost a tank. But my God, there was a, we took an awful toll on the Germans. When we got knocked out, coming up on the highway, we were in this town. I think it was Voorthuizen was where we were, the outskirts of it or someplace and we took over a barbershop there too. And the partisans come into that town too, after we got there and they come to the barbershop and picked up the clippers and scissors and stuff to cut the hair off the girls who had been collaborating with the Germans. And the ghost report was you had to phone in anybody that was killed. And you also heard the other guys calling in too from the other squadrons. And I heard when both of them got killed [friends from Warren, Pennsylvania ] and mind you, they’re, they were separated. One was in the Hitler Line and the other was in the Gothic Line. But I missed them quite a long time because we were all the same age and we did the same things.