Carpiquet airport

There was a big battle going into Carpiquet airport. That had changed hands about twice before we went in. We went back in there again and that was pretty tough going. There was so many dead animals and stuff around there, the stench.... We went in there on foot and kept the drivers and the vehicles back in the bush and out of the road because the North Shore Regiment was having it, and they were down to seventy-four men and they had to have reinforcements immediately so what the higher ups decided was just dismount us and send us in there to give them a hand. So we did that, that night, all the next day and the next night, then we went back into our vehicles again. They were shelling from farther back with their artillery so you were dodging shrapnel all the time. It didn’t pay to stand up and walk from place to place, you crawled from one cover to another cover. The engineers start moving in, that’s when we was leaving, with bulldozers to clear the runways so that we could start using it. We’d patch it up. They moved right in behind us, start to clear that airport so that it could be used, but used by us instead of them this time, because once you took that airport away from the Germans right there close to the beach and so on, they had planes coming and going and hazards for the people on the beach coming in and unloading stuff and so on. Once they got our Spitfires in there right away, they were the fighters that came in there.