Description
Mr. Walsh describes volunteering for service in Normandy, his preparations to go, and his impressions after landing in France as a member of the Royal Regiment of 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
They were assigned, we were assigned to go to Italy and the night that they were ready to leave I was taken off the draft and I was left behind. It was heart breaking for me really, you know. All the people I knew and I didn’t know another soul in the camp after that. So then I volunteered immediately to go to, they were looking for people to land in Normandy. We were shipped by train down to South Hampton. Of course, I didn’t know any of those areas at the time because we had never seen any of them. I found out later that it was South Hampton we were in and we were, we changed our uniforms. We were in uniforms that were treated for gas attacks and they were just like cardboard. Our rifles were sighted in at a range and we were given live ammunition, live grenades and we were boarded onto a landing craft and just before dark and sometime during the night they shoved off and just as it was breaking daylight we landed in France. We had a lot of heavy equipment in the base of the craft. We were on the decks. We were given rations, with little boxes of rations. They were American rations that we were given. Everything was dehydrated, little blocks of this and little blocks of porridge and little blocks of stuff like that. But, no, when I landed it was early in the morning and I can remember the day so plain that we came down off the deck on the ladder to the water’s edge and moved up the beach. You didn’t know what to think, you know. You didn’t know what was ahead of you. You didn’t know what to think, but I remember one instance where there was a priest and he was asking anybody that was a Catholic that wanted to hear confessions and receive communion before they went into action that he’d be glad to. I talked to him and I thought that, you know, it was then I realized that are we, what we’re doing is it wrong. You know, is it wrong, but as far as we were concerned as kids you ever injured or killed anybody. You never even dreamed of doing such a thing. He gave me a little insurance that it was right.