Description
Mr Smith tells us about the time German tanks were creatively hidden.
Raymond Smith
Raymond Smith was born on July 31st 1920 near Niagara-on-the-Lake. Mr Smith lost his mother as a young boy and during the Depression he worked raising hogs and cattle. When war broke out he decided to join the army, which gave him a much needed raise from five dollars a month breaking horses, to a dollar thirty a day. He got the call for training camp in Regina where he became a driving instructor. He recalls arriving from training camp to England on July 31st 1941. Mr. Smith was an army tank sergeant during the war when he met his wife and they married in 1943 while he was on leave in Manchester, England. After the war, Mr Smith returned home on April 2nd 1946 and worked as a truck driver and later at O'Keefe Brewery.
Transcript
We’d gone ahead with reconnaissance up ahead, came out of this valley up on the plateau and they told us to halt there. That’s far enough advance on that sector because they didn’t want one sector way ahead of the other. Just hold that until we send the infantry up. So we just played around there all afternoon in the sunshine. There were a few haystacks but nobody had the, to go and look in the haystack. There’s damn tanks buried in there, big tankers. And the infantry came up and they trucked them up there and they were unloading them and these Goddamn haystacks started firing. That was pretty rough going. Well, I soon got them covered because they had the assault troops and that there and they ran out there to give them machine gun fire to protect them when they were on a, up a ditch and PIATs. We got three tanks there in twenty minutes, three big tanks, took them out with those PIATs, but the assault troops did that. We couldn’t do it with the armored cars. They’d just bounce off, but that PIAT, it would go through.* PIAT = Projector, Infantry, Anti Tank, a British anti-tank weapon.