Description
Mr. Buote describes the difficulty of getting into a landing craft in rough seas, particularly since he had never practiced scrambling down a net.
Peter Buote
Peter Buote was born in Rustico, Prince Edward Island in 1924, the youngest of 7 children. His early years were spent in an orphanage. After moving to Moncton, New Brunswick he left school at age 14 and went to work in the Minto coal mines. At 16, he went to work at a dry-cleaners. Despite being of age, Mr. Buote was turned down for Naval service because he looked too young. He later joined the Regina Rifles and was involved in the D-Day landing. He served as a sniper in Europe. Mr. Buote also served in Korea, and after returning to Canada, operated a dry-cleaning business.
Transcript
When we got aboard the boats to go over to England, to France rather for D-day an officer come down and said, “I need 3 volunteers, you, you and you!” So there was me and two of my friends
that he took over to the platoon sergeant. Now I didn’t know what it was because nobody was wearing any shoulder flashes to indicate what regiment you were or anything and immediately we started getting off of the boat onto the landing craft to go onto the beach. Getting into the landing craft itself was a rough thing because I forget what you call them now but they were made of something like a net, it was made out of rope. You crawled down this net to get into the
landing craft and, of course, as you’re crawling down one wave takes the ship down here and the landing craft goes up here, it was kind of a rough deal. One man got crushed right between the ship and the landing craft as we were trying to get in. And, of course, we had never had, myself and my other two fellows, hadn’t had this experience of scrambling down this net yet – the other guys did so it was kind of rough getting down there. I got down about two rungs on the ladder and the landing craft came up and I just let go and jumped. The other two people had seen me do it, they did the same thing so we didn’t bother crawling down, we jumped.