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Estelle Ruth Tritt Aspler. I was a Lieutenant Nursing Sister from 1942 to l945. I went to England with agent of 18th Canadian General Hospital. We were farmed out to different Canadian hospitals.

We had a Highland Division in with malaria. They had come from the Middle East and Italy. The soldiers were given anti-malaria pills while they were in the Middle East, but when they went on leave, they didn’t take the pills. The bugs were still in their system and they developed malaria. And we had whole units in our wards. You could call the roll call. They were all there.

The evening of D-Day, we could hear the planes going over all night long, and after four or five days we began to receive men who had been injured in D-Day. But, they had gone from hospital to hospital to hospital before we got them. (more…)

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My name is Elwyn Elliot, and I was born and raised in Caledonia, Ontario. I went to school in Caledonia. There was an ad in the paper that came out – I was sixteen at the time – for seamen to go to sea. We went into the Manning Pool up there in Halifax. Within about three days a convoy came in and I ended up on a ship as a coal trimmer. The idea was you fed the fireman the coal and you shot the ashes over the side. It was alright for about the first four days out, but from then on the coal got too far away from the chute so you had to use a wheelbarrow to wheelbarrow the coal to the chute. And the North Atlantic was something out of this world.

I stayed on the ship and I was promoted to fireman, so from then on I was a fireman. Most of all the ships I was on were all loaded with grain on the bottom, ammunition in between decks, and on the decks themselves we had tanks, or big heavy trucks, or airplanes.

What was on the ships was just us, sixteen year-olds. Guys that had been turned down by the Navy, Army and Air Force. Some were draft dodgers – they’d jump ship before we sailed, so we never ended up with them. And some were even drunks, but get two or three days out they’d dry out and some of them would even drink the shaving lotion. (more…)

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My name is Catherine Baillie. I’m speaking of behalf of my grandfather, John James Baillie. He died in December of 1997. He was a George Medal winner in World War II, and I’m going to speak a little bit about his time in World War II and the reason for his citation of the George Medal.

My grandfather left from Halifax for England on the last day of August 1944. On January 3rd, ‘45, he left the UK with No. 435 Squadron and was then transferred to 436 Squadron, en route to Burma. By February ‘45, he was transferred to the 194 RAF Dakota Squadron. The 194 Squadron was one of the squadrons responsible for flying in supplies for the 14th British Army. They would begin each day at 5:30 AM, and make three trips daily. It was on June 14th, 1945, on their second trip of the day, that my grandfather’s Dakota was hit by Japanese artillery.

On board his Dakota were two other Canadians: Flt. Lt. James Murray Rice, whom my grandfather called “Smitty,” and John Maynard Cox, as well as four Indian Army Service Corps. This is my grandfather’s story:

“We flew up to the town and crossed the river. We circled north above the air strip, then east again over the river, ready for the drop. As we came to the east bank, “Bam” – all Hell broke loose. It was like an old-fashioned movie where they speeded up the film. The first thing I noticed was the sound of the starboard engine. It was running away like crazy. Bits and pieces of things were banging on the side of the plane, and she was smoking back along the wing. A piece of metal was sticking in my right arm. I looked at it and thought, ‘That should not be there,’ and pulled it out. Funny thing - it did not hurt. I did not feel it. I ran forward to see the pilot. He was busy, trying to hold her with the other engine. He said that he would try to hold her if we would get rid of the load. We were about a ton or so overloaded, but this was normal. The right wing had dropped, and we had started a slow curve to the south. We were only about three hundred feet up, so there was no jumping from this one. (more…)

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My name now is June Redford. I was in the Navy during the war as a cook. I joined up as June Martin. My father was manager/superintendent of all of Sunnyside. We had a good bringing up, and my brother joined the Air Force – I had one in the Navy and one in the Army, and my sister was in Fort Worth, and I was the youngest and I went in the Navy.

I joined up as a cook, which I always did like from public school, and I had my training at HMCS York, which was the automotive building at the Exhibition. We were the first draft of women cooks that went there. We had training at York for six weeks, then I was transferred down to HMCS Montcalme, which is Quebec City, right on the Plains of Abraham. I had a really enjoyable time there. I was helping to cook for two thousand naval personnel, and then I was taken upstairs to cook for the officers. I was not even nineteen by this time. (more…)