Routing the Germans at Falaise Gap

We formed up and we marched down to a wheat field, never seen the likes in my life. It was armour from far away as you could see up through the wheat field and as far across wheat field that you could see. Nothing but armour of everything we owned was in that wheat field. And all these German tanks were there and we boarded them before dark. Now the way it was laid out was that we were going to go right through the middle of the German army and try and close off the gap in Falaise. We started out, the way they laid it out it was an overcast night and it was done in the night time. They had everything lined up to go one way. When it came time after dark to move out search lights came on from further back in the fields. Those big search lights for bombers and stuff like that. They bounced them off the clouds, and everything was an aerial light as far as you could see out in front of you. They put bowfer guns on both sides of the fields, they were white anti-aircraft guns. They fired nothing but tracers in straight lines about eight, nine feet off the ground, ten feet off the ground in straight lines like that. Up at the front of the columns were what they called the flail tanks. They were Churchill tanks and they were equipped with two very big long steel arms in a drum attached to that out in front of them. And the steel drum was a very large steel drum and it had like anchor chains, pieces of anchor chains welded all around the drum. When the tanks started away, the drums start rotating and it was beating the ground as it went and it would explode the mines that were all in front of them. Now if a mine went off the arms just raised and dropped back down, just kept on going, Wonderful thing, best invention they ever had over there. Our objective was a small village. We were supposed to have gone 12 miles that night during the dark. It was, I was assigned to the 50-calibre machine gun that was on the turret, on this side of the tank and I never seen anything like it in my life. There was people going in all directions. It was horrible I guess to see it coming, it just demoralized the whole Germany army and there was comments made by the high command afterwards that they never dreamed of seeing anything like that coming at them.