Canadian War Stories

[Kyt]

The myKawartha has posted three video interviews with veterans. Click on the link beneath each bio for the video link:

As a young man, George Squantz could sometimes see the flare in the sky over Plymouth after German bombs had fallen in areas not far from his family farm in Devon, England.
It was only a matter of time before he would be fighting for his country, drafted at the age of 20.
“I chose to go in the Navy because I spoke to my father about it and he said he didn't like to think of me crashing down from the air in an airplane. I thought it was alright. You're 20 years old, you don't know very much. You think you do.”
Now, at the age of 87, Mr. Squantz speaks easily and proudly of his service career which began in the Second World War.
“I was on a destroyer called the Jupiter. It got sunk. It was in the evening and everything was quiet. We were cruising along at about 10 knots and all of a sudden Bang!”
According to historical accounts, Jupiter was either torpedoed or ran into an undetected mine.
“The guys in the engine room, friends of mine, were cooked alive; cooked alive with super-heated steam.”
The Battle of Java Sea was among the worst of Allied defeats.
Mr. Squantz ended up in an Australian hospital where he gave an interview to reporters, one of whom was a representative of the London Daily Telegram.
“He heard my story and damn me it was in the newspaper and that's how my parents learned that I was alive because they'd received a letter from the Admiralty saying I was missing presumed to be killed in action.”
Mr. Squantz is also fortunate that, unlike so many other veterans, he is not haunted by nightmares of battle.
“I'll wake up at night thinking about these things that happened but I don't wake up screaming at night.”
Still, even this brave, strong man can at times be dealt a savage blow by a random, horrible memory.
“Death from being cooked alive. I think about that you know. We never learn. What comes out of it is death, on both sides. And we don't want that.”

War Stories: George Squanz |VIDEO - myKawartha

Esther Might wanted to join the military from the time she was a little kid.
“My brother and I were about seven or eight. We got out some old pictures and there was one of dad's sister who was a Red Cross nurse.”
Ms Might's Aunt Sadie served as a nurse overseas during the First World War.
“I couldn't get over her leaving her family here in town and going away across the big ocean to look after soldiers and I thought how wonderful. How did she do it? How did she have the nerve to leave home? And that stuck in my mind as I was growing up."
In 1942 she enlisted and worked as a stenographer at an airforce base in England.
“We had rough times. There was always the fear of the water being contaminated. There was always the fear of gas. You had bombings.”
And then there were “the boys."
The young men who flew the bombers out of the base.
Many went up, not all of them came back.
“It was a very sorrowful time. There was one day I was looking at the window and I said, 'there's a crash over here' and my girlfriend said 'Oh there's one over here too,' and I think the one time we had four in one day. And some of them would get out OK and some of them wouldn't.”
For that reason, Ms Might says she never got close to “the boys.”
But Ms Might did come away from the war with a bit of a treasure – photos of King George VI, Queen Elizabeth and their 18-year-old daughter, Princess Elizabeth.
As far as Ms Might knows, only she and Ottawa have copies of the photos.

War Stories: Esther Might |VIDEO - myKawartha
(also has some nice photos)

Cleve Gallagher didn't know until he boarded the landing craft that there was a very good chance he wouldn't see that day's sunset.
He was just one of dozens of Canadian troops crammed into an armoured landing craft heading across the English Channel to Juno Beach in 1944.
Mr. Gallagher and his mates were tossed by angry sea swells as they travelled underneath a sun buried behind brooding clouds of gunship-metal-grey, as if Nature was rising up to show disapproval of the intentions of Man that horrible June 6 day in Normandy.
It was a day that marked the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany, a day when the lives of thousands of young men were forever changed as they either fell or felled others in a hail of bullets and blood.
“I remember I had a Corporal McDonald from Nova Scotia trained on the jeep with me. He was the orderly I was the driver. We went to go off the barge and McDonald wasn't there. They never told me but of course they knew, I guess, that he'd already been killed.”
A nervous smile plays around Mr. Gallagher's lips as he speaks of the horrors of war he witnessed.
Sometimes it's followed by a nervous laugh, as if it is born from a desperate struggle to keep that bone-deep pain at bay.
“My D-Day experience basically, was picking up casualties and hooking them up to send them back to England.”
The first wave of Canadian troops to charge Juno Beach suffered 50 per cent casualties. Mr. Gallagher had to pick his way across sand and bodies, separating the dead from the living, trying to save those who could be saved.
“Before we got off the boat there was everything flying at you. They (the Germans) couldn't help but hit something because there were so many of them out there. And of course there were planes over head, they were dogfighting up there and the bombers were coming in to drop bombs.”
The Allies won the battle, and eventually the war, but a much different battle continues on within Mr. Gallagher.
He doesn't like to talk much about his war experiences. It's too difficult.
And he misses his wife who died a few years ago. She helped keep the nightmares at bay.
Still, he says with a genuinely happy smile, he has children and friends who love him.
“I was one of the fortunate ones. I had a lot of friends who helped to keep me on the right track. But I think there's a power that's higher than we are that's looking after us all the way through, to be honest with you. That's all I can put it to anyway.”

War Stories: Cleve Gallagher |VIDEO - myKawartha

[spidge]

Great to have these first hand accounts on "film".