Liberation of the Netherlands

Philip Pochailo Those people lived in bondage for five years and they existed, they didn’t live.Everett Cromwell They started getting into Holland and the Germans dug down, started to fight back.William Munroe And that’s when Jerry started sending out these V-bombs. They were the darnedest things you know. They sounded like a motorcycle without a muffler and you knew when they were coming. John Thompson And all of a sudden, we ran over Teller mines, took the track off and everything and it was ablaze. When I came to, I was about 30 to 40 feet from where the Bren Gun Carrier was. William Resch There was a hay stack. It turned out that it was a camouflaged 88 gun and they are deadly guns.Cliff Chadderton It was called enfilade fire which is sideways fire. So they had placed machine guns lengthwise to the canal so they could fire down the canal and shoot the hell out of us.Robert Meiklejohn This was the same time we knew the Germans were on the run and like an animal on the run it’s vicious. Floyd Buchanan Like it was mostly on the dykes where we were fighting. Like we’d be dug in one dyke and across the other side dyke, there was water in between. Then the Germans would be on the other.Murdoch Enman And of course they kept, any of the places there were dykes like that, that they were travelling on, they kept them covered with fire all the time, artillery fire or something like that, all the time.Clifford MacDonald You didn’t do much moving around, but all we would do was taking bearings of German gunfire. And when we took bearings and then our artillery was to bomb them.Bud Jones And patrols became another thing, where we would be patrolling every night. There were different types of patrols. There was a listening patrol, there were fighting patrols, there were capture patrols.Joseph Ross To get in a loaded buffalo, you can’t have too many waves because you may be six inches to three inches to the water.Murdoch Enman We thought we were hungry but we weren’t hungry at all, we just thought we were. Ewart Tucker And there was about seven or eight children of age of maybe ten, something like that, standing there with a hungry look on their face. We all gave them our breakfast, we didn’t take any. Robert Meiklejohn I saw for the first time in my life, cases of what they call starvation edema. Edema is a swelling of the body and this occurred in children. Philip Pochailo There was a little girl in the store front she had a brussels sprout and there was no sprouts on it, she was just chewing on the stock. And there were three other little children who were just as hungry as she was and they stalked her like wolves. John Hall And the ones you joined up with and went into battle with are becoming less and less, then mentally you become that you know it’s your turn next. It just has to be, because they’re all gone. William Resch I got hit, side of the head I guess, helmet, the doctor said that’s what saved my life was the helmet. Cause it took one eye out completely, damaged the other one. Ray Smith I was standing on the seat and it blew me out. The rest incinerated right there, they never did get up. That was on the 3rd of May, the war was over on the 5th of May.Archie Wright The greatest thing for the morale of troops is, in the front line, is to know that there are first aid facilities, ambulances and so on, right there in the front. Gordon Theal They had a casualty clearing station. Casualties were brought into the casualty clearing station and were shipped back to hospitals. Hallie Sloan Just taking an extra minute just to stop by the bed side and say “Well how are you today, have you heard from home? ” These kinds of things were what made the difference in the lives of the wounded, I think.James Latto When we were in that hospital, the water main got broken and a bunch of these ladies got together when we had no water and they formed a bucket brigade. And they were coming across there with their bucket and laughing and talking and the machine gunner shot them all down, right in the middle of that road. Glen Tomlin We were clearing a house one night and I walked up and I kicked this door open. Door across the room flew open, guy standing there. I started lifting up the rifle, he started to lift his up and I said, “This guy’s gonna beat me.” So I pulled the trigger anyway, you know, I figured if I scare him I might get another shot. There’s myself in a full length mirror across the room. So I shot myself in a mirror. (Laughs). Joseph Womersley I took the pin out of the grenade and I just held, and it was left in this hand. I didn’t throw it away like the other one and I had it ready to go and there was another noise. I was just gonna roll it down the stairs and I hear a baby crying.James Latto You’re never the same person if you ever take somebody else’s life, it does something to you.Floyd Buchanan Down the road comes the German army, then we opened fire. We caught all them, they didn’t even know we were there, cause I was a butcher, but it was war. Cliff Chadderton Then I got word from the set that I was to open up with the flame throwers. You realize that there were human beings there, so you know what I did? I got the padre. I wanted somebody to tell me this was okay. I mean you don’t burn people alive. I didn’t join the army for that.Glen Tomlin It’s the easiest thing in the world to kill a person. It is, but it’s awful hard to live with it afterwards.Joseph Womersley I thought, if I hadn’t killed him, he’d be a grandfather like me. And he would have, he had two children and I have three grand children I wouldn’t have. Albin Zarowny We’d be travelling along the roads in Holland, we’d see rifles piled up sky high. They just throw the rifle on one pile there and they were just, they knew the war was over.William Munroe Twelve, fourteen, fifteen year old kids, and sixty and seventy year old men. It was really sickening to see it. And this is what this proud nation had come to. Vernon Dowie They were put into compounds and our job was to prevent the resistance movement from getting in and killing them because they’d given up all their arms and were all there, which was a funny position to be in. Gerald Colbourne The Dutch were, you know, they joined in with the Germans and they called them the “Dutch SS”. We had a lot of them there. Edwin Laird You got to understand too, there were German soldiers there for six years, a lot of those girls probably had married German soldiers or had mixed with them. If anybody had done anything like that, they were outcaste. Philip Pochailo They’d throw them up in the air in a blanket and shave all their hair off and then let them out. And these girls would go up, put kerchiefs on their heads, lean out the window and watch the others being humiliated.Fred Rogers And the order we’d heard on the guns we’d never heard since D-Day, “Cease fire, empty guns”. The war was over. Philip Pochailo I can understand why you kiss the soil that you come back to. You come back to freedom.Hallie Sloan And everybody had something orange on, for the house of orange. You know, arm bands and little girls had hair ribbons and they sang their beautiful national anthem, they had their own flags. It was wonderful. Harold Ettinger And they even took their people who were sick in their beds out there so they could see us, shake hands, touch us and give us flowers. Gerald Colbourne Women galore, trying to get at you, you know, just to shake your hand or kiss you or bring you flowers. But I mean it was, oh god, it was hard to describe because there were so many people.Philip Pochailo It doesn’t come free, we’ve given up an awful lot, and they’re out there, under the stones.