Marcel Joiner

Well our danger was the lack of thick armour like what the Tiger tanks had, the German tanks. To get a German tank, to knock it out, you had to go to the rear of a German tank. This was where we had the manoeuvrability. The Tiger tanks had a slow manoeuvrability because they were so huge and heavy and the guns was much bigger than ours. They didn’t have power traverse like we had. They had a hand traverse. We had that over them. If we wanted to, we would get behind a tank and knock it out from the rear. That’s the only way we could knock it out because from the front our armour-piercing shells would just about bounce off. We had that on them. I think we had the firepower too. They might have had the armour but we had the firepower and the manoeuvrability. But they didn’t have it.

When we were in Holland, we were there on a defensive position because you couldn’t fight much in the winter time on account of the terrain. So we took up a defensive position along the Maas River. We’d have recce people go out on their side of the river to feel out the enemy. See where the enemy is and see what kind of equipment they had and come back and report to the squadron. When the squadron got the information back, then they’d get the different ranges of these different areas. We sort of, at night, we’d fire on these certain fixed lines. The range of the enemy where he was, we would know that, and at night we would fire salvoes on the Germans, machine-guns and also HE. This would soften up their position and there were times when prisoners would come in the early morning hours with their hands up saying they were giving themselves up. But we really hit them hard that time.