Description
Mr. Walsh discusses his disappointment with what he saw as an unfair repatriation policy which meant he was left behind when his unit returned to Canada.
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
The only thing I didn’t like was the way they re-patriated the troops back home. They drew up a point system and you had to have a certain amount of points and the points were accumulated through time that you served from the time you joined up. Now a lot of them people arrived over a week before the war ended, two weeks before the war ended, three weeks before the war....
They were in services some of them for four years. They had all kinds of points. Now me, I was shy one point. I had to go on occupation duty for a whole year. Those fellows made up the unit and came back marching back to Canada. The hurt, that was really, really tough to take.