Lawrence Smithers

When I went overseas, I landed in Aldershot [England] and shortly after that, they offered all different kinds of courses. And one of them was signals and I thought, well, if they wanted me to be a signaler, I’ll take a chance at that. I was attached to the North Shore New Brunswick, who now the Royal New Brunswick Regiment. They got that honour for the, you know, what they did in the Second World War. We sat out on the big boat overnight, on the big ships that the landing craft came off because they were going to go on the 5th of June, but change their minds and thought the 6th would be better weather for the landing craft. You climbed over, they have a rope kind of ladder, you climbed over, went down and got into the landing craft. There were Canadian sailors running it, so I imagine they were Canadian landing craft. You just plow on ahead and kept going. There were engineers there, looking for mines that … I never seen them find any, maybe they got them. The first Canadian who had been shot was a signaler, and where the beach ended and the, you know, ground started, there was maybe a three foot drop, he was laying against that, with an air gunner, I would think that was 20 feet in the air. Now, the Germans had snipers all in the trees. And you couldn’t miss in that area. The first day, we went in, I think, maybe five miles and dug in, dug trenches because they had warned us the Germans were going to come and attack with tanks. And then planes, Canadian pilots, came down so low, they were below the tree line, the top of the tree line, and knocking out tanks. So we had no worry of tanks that day.