Holland Celebrates

Our first action, immediately, was in Nijme-, just outside Nijmegen, in Holland. Now the 1st Canadian Corps, which we were part of in the Italian Army, they were sent to the left to liberate Holland, and the 2nd Corps, which would have been in Europe all this time, they went to the left and started down into Germany, such like . . . very, very wet because the Germans had destroyed all, a lot of the bridges and dams and such like. And the country was pretty well flooded, but there was, the Dutch people were surviving, they were wonderful. I can remember when about a week before the war was over, there was a bit of a truce declared and food was trucked into Amsterdam. And thousands of people, just thousands, gathered for this, all this food that we hauled into there. And once, once the war was over, it took us nearly all day to go through the city of Amsterdam because you just couldn't . . . the traffic was just . . . you couldn't travel because the people were out. I, I had a . . . I was driving a Bren-gun carrier, and there must have been 20 people on it. You could hardly see. You'd move two or three feet, and then stop. And they were climbing all over the vehicle, just they were so pleased to see . . . we, we were sent up to a place called Den Helder, in Holland. And there we disarmed the Germans and sent them back across. Took all their arms from them or most of it, sent them back across to Germany. And we were there from June, from the first of June, about, until September. And then we were, we were sent home.