Joining Under Peer Pressure

I made the choice to join - peer pressure more than anything, I believe. I joined up from Welland and thank God I got back to Welland. When I joined you had your choice of where you were going; you were either going in the infantry or you were going home. So I joined and I joined as infantryman. I had an awful long trip for me, all the way to Orillia where I did my basic training. I think we had six weeks basic training in Orillia and then we were shipped to Camp Borden and when we graduated from Camp Borden as trained soldiers, we were shipped to Aldershot, Nova Scotia. And the army always worked alphabetically and they got as far as the S’s but they never got to SU and there I was, the draft pulled out and there was about seventy five or eighty of us left in Aldershot and Aldershot was just, more or less, an interim camp so they shipped us up to Debert, Nova Scotia and there I got a job in the Intelligence Corps. I trained a little bit for the Intelligence section and when the next draft for overseas came up, they were in a hurry for cannon fodder and there we were. All of us went up, got aboard ship and we got to Aldershot, England just about Christmas time, 1943. By the end of January, we were ready to go and they put us on a ship for Italy. They took twenty eight days to get from the English port down to Naples.