Description
Mr. MacDonald describes joining the 5th Anti-tank Battalion and discusses its weaponry.
Clifford MacDonald
Mr. MacDonald was born near Hughton, Saskatchewan, on March 28, 1923. He left home at the age of 15, and worked at odd jobs until becoming an underage recruit in the army, 67th Battery at Rosetown, Saskatchewan. After completing gunnery training in England and Ireland, Mr. MacDonald spent some time on a Bofors gunnery crew in England's coastal defence system. He then became a gunner with the 5th Anti-tank Regiment, and was involved in forcing the German retreat from France, Belgium and Holland. After the war, Mr. MacDonald returned to Saskatchewan and purchased a farm under the Veterans Land Act. He has been a Legion member for more than 60 years.
Transcript
Our 20mm got disbanded near Caen. We don't know for what reason but I think, according to the Geneva Conference you're not supposed to be shooting at soldiers with and that 20mm Polsten, had...you could fire at aeroplanes, explosive ammunition and, and it could fire at light armoured vehicles. And apparently now, this is my version of that I heard then, for no official reason, they must have been shooting at some Germans soldiers and blowing them up. And that's against the Geneva Conference, you're supposed to wound them I guess, not kill them. I don't know, but I mean and they never told us anything. "Pack up your guns." We loaded them up, packed up the ammunition. And all of a sudden there was ninety of us, we went to this Canadian identity aircraft outfit and we were there for about four or five days and they were asking for volunteers to go to the 5th anti-tank regiment. And there was fifteen of us there and we said that the first outfit that wants fifteen men we're gone. We're with it. So that's where we went and we went to the 5th anti-tank and they were a crack outfit, a good outfit. They were just good! You kind of wanted to look after each other in a way, but we were separated but we still, yeah... cause we had been given three and a half years by that time or over three anyway, yeah. And they were all young fellas. The reason they picked the ones to go to that 20mil, was because it was a new gun and a good one. And they didn't pick older guys, they just picked the young fellas, twenty years old, eh and we'd been friends for three years or so. And so, no we wanted to be together. And we had to learn how, of course it wasn't hard to, to lay the gun. Like you know, there was two layers and a gun that did the firing, a guy that did the firing and I forget the numbers now and then somebody had to carry ammunition. It was just ordinary, to us it was just ordinary. We fit in real well, even in this book. You could probably say that the old colonel did, he applied for recruits and bring them up to strength. He said he didn't get as many as he wanted, but they made up for it in, in quality cause we were well trained. Like we could do anything he, they asked us to. We had this 17 pounder and it was the same equivalent of the German 88 and if the infantry run into trouble, if there's a sniper up on the building a mile away, we were to knock of the steeple off the church, or building and we used it as artillery piece to, to, to shell the German positions. But it, it was an antitank gun and they had them on an M-10 tank and the barrel was about 15 feet long or 12 feet long and it shot a big shell, like I say it's a 17, a 17 pounder it was equivalent of, of the German gun and it can knock a German tank out. When it went into France, the Germans had better armour and this big 88 gun and they could knock our tanks out and we couldn't hardly touch them. But you know, then we got this gun and we were pretty well equal then. But it was a terrific gun, no question about it. And we actually, I wasn't on the M-10 tanks, I was with the polls section. We had our halftrack pulling the ammunition cart and then the gun. And then they'd put us into position, if there was chance of the Germans having a counter attack, that's why we were there to, to counteract it. Not to often, because they were mostly retreating.