Description
Mr. Allingham describes being nearly bombed by Allied aircraft, and then describes the devastation of the retreating German army by Typhoon bombers, all at Falaise Gap.
Ronald Allingham
Mr. Ronald John Allingham was born July 16, 192 in Vernon, British Columbia. He was the eldest child with 3 brothers. With his father being an orchard grower, Mr. Allingham spent most of his young life working in the orchard; reaching a grade 8 level of education. Growing up during the “Dirty 30's” Mr. Allingham understood the significance of war being declared and on August 1, 1940 made the decision to join the Army and enlisted as part of the British Columbia Dragoons, B Squadron. After receiving basic training in Vernon, Mr. Allingham travelled to Duncan, BC to obtain more training, however, had a setback and took very ill. As health improved, Mr. Allingham had missed his opportunity for service with the army and was made part of the artillery under the 13th Field 78th Battery; a choice that later proved to be very satisfying. Mr. Allingham went overseas and in 1945 discharged from the service.
Transcript
That, I will say, was another tremendous organization by the military. When you consider that Mulberry and the amount of stuff that went ashore in a month. Do you realize that that was a bigger harbour than New York Harbour? Interviewer: I didn’t know that. Oh yeah, it went out to sea with arms out on the side of it. They unloaded ships there. These arms, like had the big one out this way and these arms out... two, three ships and it would just, knew stuff was coming off there. Well, it had to! You know, just our battery one time we got into quite a large barrage. Oh, we had a mound of ammunition that would take up almost half of this, that is the spent brass from the twenty five. So that’s, it takes a tremendous amount of people and should I call it freight or goods, to keep an army going. See for every one man you got on the front line and this is just in the army getting it well, we’ll say from, getting it up to the front line - it takes five people. You know, to say nothing beyond that, we’ll say after it got to the beach head, it took five people to get that stuff up there. One of our great salvations was that the gas pipeline we had. It was a prefab deal. It just butted together, you just bolted and bolted another one and they’d follow you up. Well, and the Americans had it too. Well when they broke through on the Ardennes, the Germans knew where their petro point was, but when they got up there there wasn’t anything there. They just pumped everything back.