Description
Mr. Smith explains that during the first days of the invasion he waited at sea for his chance to arrive.
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
It was the 6th of June, 1944, I was supposed to go in. We didn’t go in on the first, on Juno Beach as they called it. Being a reconnaissance, they sent in some heavy tanks, most of them got bogged down right on the beach but the infantry, once they got in about a mile, two miles, then we’d come in and that was about two or three days later before we landed with our vehicles. We were out at sea just sitting there waiting. We were on an American LST, landing ship tank as they called it, an LST, we were on one of them, the best food we had since we left home.