It was claimed that the Winnipeg Grenadiers
had been standing guard in Canada and
were not fully equipped and trained,
but you had quite a number of men that
were transferred in from the
Camerons and the SSR and the PPCLI.
Now we fellows were trained,
we were over trained because we'd been trained and
re-trained and don’t ever let anybody tell you
that we didn't know about machine guns
or how to handle equipment or warfare
because we had been trained in Winnipeg and
our training had been very strenuous,
and we'd had lots of it.
We'd been there for quite some time.
We were reinforcements for the First Division in England.
We weren't moving we just sat there and trained,
and trained and re-trained and trained
and trained some more.
And, oh we'd joined this army to go out there and
save the world and all this, you might say.
So we were all chomping at the bits and
when we had a chance to transfer to some outfit
that we knew that was going to move or go,
well we, a whole lot of us transferred in and we had,
the last thing on anybody's mind was to go to China.
So we joined this Grenadiers outfit and
about three weeks later,
we were all down at the station and
we boarded a train only we said,
“Holy Moses this train is going the wrong way.
We thought it’s just going to backup for it to
go, because when you join the army,
you're going overseas, you're going to the East.
But that train backed up all the way
to Vancouver, and then we got onboard
the Awatea and we were on our way to,
across the Pacific to China.