Being Briefed about Raid

We did all this training and about the 2nd of July we were ordered aboard the motherships that we had been training on and our brigadier, Brigadier Lett, called the troops together and with headquarters, the headquarters people, about one hundred of us, and the Essex Scottish who we were with on board ship and he said, “Okay men, this is it, we’re going into France!” And you never heard such insane cheering in your life. The troops were so anxious to get into action. We’d been there three years with this awful training. We now saw a chance to get into action and so on. Well, we were aboard ship from the 2nd til the 9th and we had paratroopers that were supposed to land on either flank. The winds were too strong so they decided to scrub it. But all the troops had been briefed, you know, about the raid and so on. But we went back to our barracks in England from the Isle of Wight and I’m sure five thousand Canadians guzzling beer in the pubs and so on, talked an awful lot about the forthcoming raid and so on.