Robert Daniel Cadigan

I come to join the army, I was conscripted. And then when I went got down to Kingston [Ontario], I joined the active service. You didn’t have to join active service but I did. Who I guarded, there was always a bunch of those, one place, I think it was Monteith [Prisoner of War Camp] we sat with a Sten gun, machine gun across our knees for two hours off, two hours on each day. There were three locked doors between the prisoners and the guards and they stood there with a loaded machine gun on them. But you had to watch the door behind me because there were deserters from the Rommel Army [Erwin Rommel was a prominent commander of German forces] in Africa. And some of those others on the outside, trying to get at them. And then another case didn’t come back because the guards, there was this guy inside the compound and I noticed they were going back with their music instrument case. I noticed a bit dirt on this one day and I got it opened up and it was full of dirt and they had almost dug out [of the camp]. And the music building was a small building not too far from the fence and they would take it from the compound and dump up in the attic. We were just about ready to pull out for the Pacific, Japan when they dropped the [atomic] bomb.