Description
Mr. Walsh describes how attrition had caused critical shortages of both men and supplies by the time the Canadian army faced the Germans in Holland.
Graham Walsh
Graham Walsh was born in Sydney, Nova Scotia, on January 22, 1925. He was the third of seven children. His father worked in a steel mill, and made a bit extra selling coke, a smelting byproduct. His father died when he was seven, and Mr. Walsh and his brother worked odd jobs to help the family. He joined the local reserves when he was fifteen and two years later, at the age of seventeen, enlisted for overseas service. Once in England, he was overlooked for Italian deployment and immediately volunteered for Normandy. Mr. Walsh served from France to post-war Germany, via the liberation of Holland, all with the Royal Regiment of Canada. He was fortunate to survive three wounds while in action.
Transcript
We had some bad times with regiments that companies that were down to platoons and platoons that were down to sections. And this from, I guess from Antwerp in the Walcheren Islands I guess this is where we had the least amount of troops to put back in action and they were always in action. We weren’t like, we weren’t as fortunate. I often thought that after the war. The Americans could throw a division in, you know, take out ones and let them have a rest. Canadians had nobody. The whole army went in on the beaches and the whole army just kept fighting at us. They kept supplying them down there at the beaches, Normandy and that area was fine. They had a lot of recruits coming in. But then when we got up into Holland and went into Germany, we were very scarce at the time. We were carrying on attacks and I can remember that myself. I remember reading it afterwards where people walked and didn’t know they were walking. Probably walked two or three miles asleep, dead sound asleep and tired and dry and hungry. A lot of times you didn’t eat for three or four days, you didn’t see no food or naught.