大象传媒

This story was entered onto the Peoples war website by Rod Sutton on behalf of Rosemary Nichollas, the author of this story from her cousin Norman Hunt, they fully understand and accept the sites terms and conditions.

Just before D. Day, while we were still training, they started sending over these machines, buzz bombs they were called. They were a bomb that had some kind of a jet engine on top of them and little stubby wings and they were controlled by a gyroscope, I guess, and they ran until they ran out of fuel. And then they would just go down to the ground and go off. They came - well, I think they came, from the coast of France. There were other places, but that was the nearest place. In the South, we were in a direct path. They were aiming for London but didn't quite make London; and we knew they were going to go off when they quit running, you could tell that. The noise stopped, and you knew you had better duck because somewhere close they were going to go off.

We were on parade one morning, we had just gone on parade for the 8.00 o'clock morning inspection parade. We had just got all lined up and standing to attention waiting for the Officers to do what they were going to do and we heard this buzz bomb, and then we didn't hear the buzz bomb. Well, it was the craziest experience I think I ever had because we had been brought to attention, we had to stand there, we were trained to stand there. We just had to stay there. We stayed to attention and this all happened in seconds, the things that went through our minds. And then this thing went off and we could relax because we knew it wasn't going to hit where we were. That was the funniest feeling, the strangest sensation to know that this thing was so near. We found pieces of it, and it did damage some of the huts that we stayed in, some of the Nissan huts, the blast got them. Nobody was hurt though, presumably because they were all out on parade.
At this time the Canadian army was not an army, it was five separate divisions, I guess the main reason, and I just recall this, that there were two division, the first division and the 5th division were in Italy. So we were not operating as a whole five divisions. Once we got to France they amalgamated the Canadian army into one Corp, and then there was the British Corp and a Polish Division that they put into the British Corp. All these amalgamated with the Canadians and we operated as the first Canadian army minus the 1st and 5th divisions. But they finally, eventually, did come in and join us in a North West group. I would say, just off the top of my head, that there would be about 50 thousand men in an army.

You start multiplying a Regiment, that's about 900 to 1,000 men and then go from there and you arrive at around 50 thousand men under the command of General H.G. Crurer. He was the commander of the Canadian army. I was a wireless operator at the time. When we started, we first saw real action at the Falais Gap after Caen had been captured. When we moved from England into France. We got into our vehicles. We all had our own vehicles, each Company and each Platoon, and we moved into London, somewhere in London, on the Thames River, and got into the big landing craft. There were landing craft and we transferred later into a smaller boat when we got close to the French shore. The Germans were in France now. The Canadians actually didn't go in 'till later on, around the end of July. We landed in France after D-Day, we missed D-Day.

Anyway we went on the Mulberry Harbor, it was a strange assortment of tanks and ramps, I don't know what you would call it, but a place that you could drive vehicles. A flat section on top, they had been dragged over with tug boats and all joined together and formed into a harbor so you could bring ships right out into them and land material and equipment and men. Trucks and vehicles and that sort of thing. Then we went ashore, a little place, I can't be sure but Corselle could be the place, the name Corselle sticks in my head. We pulled in to land, onto a farm. We spent the night there, we didn't know where we were, or what was going to happen. We could hear aircraft and the odd rumble of guns or cannon, and that sort of thing. We didn't know how close. We just hunkered down and dug holes like we were supposed to do, fox holes we called them, slit trenches. We stayed there for the night. The next day we moved off to somewhere near Caen. I'm not sure where exactly.

We were on the move for a couple or three days. And then one night they took us all out of our vehicles and we had to march up to a ridge. They took us up to a ridge quite close to where the Germans were. It was kinda static, there was not a whole lot going on. They put us in there for what they call battle inoculation, that was the idea, it was done to get us in there where there was a lot of shooting going on. We are talking about big guns as well as rifles, you know; and to get us used to the idea of guns going off and people shooting at us. That sort of thing so that we were not going to panic the first time we heard it. We were in a fairly safe position.

We did a lot of fighting before we got into Belgium and Holland. Our first real action was at what they call the Falaise Gap. Our instructions were to cross the Laison River east of the Caen-Falaise road and make for Falaise with all speed. The enemy resistance was disorganized and uneven and almost before fighting began groups of dazed and dispirited Germans began to shuffle forward to surrender.

Only slight resistance was encountered by the Lake Superiors until they reached the river Laison. At one time during the advance the Signals vehicle suffered a hit from an enemy outpost which fired on the troops from a slit trench in a clump of trees. But the Germans were passed and the column rolled through the wheat fields and down the gentle slopes towards Rouvres in the Laison valley.

What was happening was that we were in front of the Germans, we were facing the Germans, and the Germans we were facing were the crack German divisions and, I think, they were two armies, but I'm not sure of numbers. They were one side of the line and we were the other side of the line. They kept us there, they put us there purposely to hold the Germans there because once they got untangled Patten was making this great Georing Run of his, you know, around the end. And the idea was he was going to go around and get down near Falaise. We were holding the Germans and pushing them back gradually and into a big bulge. The idea was we would draw all the men and materials in, close the jaws of the trap and we would have them all.

We sank a ship around then in a little village called St. Phillips Land. A little later on, we had pretty well cleared out the Shelt Estuary and were moving into Holland. It was crazy how we got into this thing.

We had gone up into St. Phillips Land. They had told us there were ships in the Harbor at Zijpe on an Island, so we went up to the end of the Peninsular we were on and sure enough there was at least one, but, and I think there were two. So we brought up tanks and sank them! We were the only army unit, I think, to sink war ships, German war ships. No one else had ever done that.

Our overall Field Commander was General Montgomery. The Canadians fought under General Montgomery for a lot of the War. From the very start of the invasion into Europe, Eisenhower was the supreme Commander in Europe, but he stayed in England. So, on the ground, Montgomery was the supreme Commander. He commanded the American troops as well as the British and Canadian and Polish, a whole bunch of them. Then Eisenhower set up headquarters in France, Supreme Headquarters moved to France, and then Montgomery went to controlling just his own British and Canadian troops and he loved the Canadians. He thought they were the greatest in the world. Then there were the Polish expatriates and they were a part of that army as well. They were good fellows, but they were crazy men.

The Dutch, they were so happy to see us. That was my first impression. They were in bad shape. It was coming on winter. They were poorly clothed and they had this gaunt look about them because they hadn't eaten properly, I guess, for years. But they smiled when they saw us because they knew, we had liberated them, and we were always known and, to this day, are known, as the Dutch liberators. There were other troops, British, you know, in there but the Canadians got the credit, for whatever reason.

I was billeted with another chap in a little place called Rose Mollen, in Holland. I never forgot these people because of their kindness. They used to eat potatoes, that's all they ate practically. And they boiled them, and they fried them. And there was this little old lady, the Grandmother, who used to spend all her day peeling those little wee potatoes and boil them up and have them for supper and bread and lard for breakfast and fried potatoes for lunch. These small potatoes were actually illegal, they weren't supposed to have these. The Germans said they should stay there and if you were caught digging them up you were in trouble. You could go to jail for that, you know. But they did it.

After we got there they started to get a better diet. A little more food, not much because they were still subsisting on mainly potatoes. We didn't have a lot, but we had a heck of a lot more than they did. Well anyway, one day they invited, the other chap and I to stay and have Dinner with them. We ate in the Army Mess or where ever the kitchen happened to be, and they wanted us to come and have Sunday Dinner with them. We kinda wanted to back away a bit, but they wanted so much to have us there, so we went. It was a special treat. They had got a roast of beef and they wanted to share this roast of beef with us. Well we hadn't had roast beef ourselves for a long time, we lived on stew or whatever we could steal or scrounge. And we ate a lot of eggs and rabbits and chickens and whatever but anyway they were so proud that they had, finally, after five years, I guess, got themselves a roast of beef, and wanted to share it with us. Well, we went down for Dinner and they were all seated around at the table and we sat down and they brought out the roast and it was about the size of a coffee mug. I couldn't believe it. But they shared that with us, you know, with potatoes and you know I never forgot that. Because just that showing of their happiness with us and their kindness in doing that, you know. They had been through hell, tormented, imprisoned, locked up for no reason. It must have been a terrible, terrible existence.

In any normal war the terrible defeat suffered by the Germans in the Ardennes offensive would most likely have been followed by peace proposals to the victors. But this was not a normal war, this war of 1939-45; it was a crusade. And the Allies, victims of their insistence upon "unconditional surrender," would not consider negotiations until the enemy was prostrate. Probably more than anything else "unconditional surrender" forced the Germans into continuing a resistance which only a few fanatics believed held any hope of success. So it was that the Anglo-American armies in North West Europe were forced to mount the great offensive of 1945. It had originally been proposed that the Allied blow to end the war should be carried through on a narrow front across the Rhine, just north of the Rhur. By a such a bold thrust, the centre of Germany's war potential, the home of the great Krupp work, would be isolated. This, at least, was how Field Marshal Montgomery hoped that it would be done, but, for whatever reason, General Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander, maintained the broad front policy which he had follower ever since the early battles in Normandy.

In spring 1945 we went into Germany. We left Caen and spent the winter in Holland on the Moss River and on patrol and stuff like that. In the Spring, about February, I guess it was, they moved us from Shotagwogbash where we were centered, mainly, we were spread out a lot, across the German border, and the first German town I can recall was a place called Cleeve, and this place had been bombed. I thought Caen was a mess but there was nothing left of Cleve. It was totally destroyed, demolished, only a few walls left standing."
"We stayed there for a few days to regroup, we were always regrouping, and then we took off and got involved in some fierce fighting, one of the fiercest battles our Regiment had been involved in, apart from Falaise. The Hochwald Forest battle was one of the worst experiences we had.

Our Regiment was practically wiped out at that time. There were Corporals in charge of Companies and stuff like this was going on. Just to mention one chap; Charlie Brice was his name, he was a very brave man, a good soldier. He was a native, the most decorated man in the Regiment and he was in charge of the Company when that battle was over. They gave us such a mauling.

The day after this battle, the dawn seemed to come more slowly than it had ever come before. But come it ultimately did and the Lake Superiors could walk away from the enemy. Past the mangled tanks, past the splintered trees and blackened stumps, past the muddy craters towards the rear they made their weary way, to food, rest and sleep. They walked like automatons, their faces were white and drawn and covered with grime their eyelids heavy. For they had been through something ungodly, and the horror of what had happened here still hung in the air. And yet, without realizing it, they had achieved immortality. The tragedy was that there were so few of them left to realize it, so few returned unscathed in body - for none returned unscathed in mind. By the conclusion of the Hochwald battle the motor companies were scarcely larger than platoons. They averaged no more than thirty-five men in each.

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