Description
Mr. Smith describes how they were tasked with finding other roads and trails to get to places to avoid mines, and some of the ways they detected mines.
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
All the main highways were all mined. We had to find cow trails around that you could get in and whether you needed a bulldozer to widen it here and there and so forth so they could come up with trucks and so on. That was our job to find a way in because the highway, there’s lots of main highways, lots of room on them but all kinds of mines under them and that was the thing - to find a way in. We were traveling goat paths most of the time. Once you got onto it you could feel the hard pack road, they had to dig a hole in to put that mine in and they’d cover it over. If you have a sharp eye you start to see that, provided it was daylight. When you were doing that at dusk, that’s tricky. I remember one time, I don’t know we were going down this strange trail, and all of a sudden I saw where the dirt had been moved and I hollered to stop and we stopped there. We had missed a mine by that far. We backed out of there and taped it and called in to headquarters, there’s mines on this road so in a lot of cases we picked them up if we had orders to pick them up but otherwise they’d send up engineers to take them up and we got set back with our heavy machine guns and so on to try and protect them out there. And a lot of times they would bring those tanks up with the flails on and they’d run through it. Once they run through it there was a path the width of that, I think that was about a twelve foot flail on the front of it with these great big chains going around. They were stuck out in front of the tank so it didn’t hurt, these big chains flying around but it didn’t hurt the vehicle that way.