Maurice Nowosad

My name is Maurice Nowosad. I joined the Army – the PPCLI – when I was seventeen years of age, and I served with the battalion here. I went over to England, the beginning of 1940. I met my wife, and I married when I was twenty-one and my wife was eighteen. We had a good marriage. We got married on March the 9th. On July the 10th… that's when we landed in Sicily. We were very well trained, and we did all or most of our basic training over in England and Scotland. We landed in Sicily, and we took Sicily in thirty-some odd days, and then we went over the Straits of Messina into Italy, and from there, I was in all the battles up until the Hitler Line. After the Hitler Line, my regiment was so well beaten up, and we buried our dead. All I can say is that I was a proud Canadian, and we had a lot of good times after the war. We would meet at our different anniversaries in Calgary, because the other PPCLI was stationed there. I was lucky that I was able to go through. When we were north of Ortona, this was the first time I heard the Germans sing… it's called 'Lilly Marlene', in German. They say that we were the 'D-Day Dodgers'. We did more fighting in the two years than what they did when they landed at Normandy. All I can say it thank God, and with all the close calls, I'm still alive. I lost many, many of my friends.