Interview with Mr. Wilfred “Woody” Riley from Pincher Creek – April 2005

I served with Hastings and Prince Edward regiment.  I was a private.  We were part of liberating Wilhelmina’s Palace, Het Loo, with  the 48th Highlander’s. We’d come up through from  Italy and landed in the forest up there, then across Ijssel river, we came up from there to Deventer.  The area was beautiful, but we didn’t stop to look around, it wasn’t safe to put your head up…Then we advanced to the Zuiderzee, it’s called the IJsselmeer now. The night the war stopped, I was a section leader, we were several of us in a building, getting it ready, cleaning it out for the regiment to move in, and then we were going to make a big push towards the west coast of Holland. All of a sudden, shall we say that all hell broke loose outside, people hollering and shouting, screaming, machine guns going, we thought the Germans must have broken through.  We wanted to go down on the bottom floor, we were on the top floor ; we thought that  if there was any shelling, we wouldn’t be safe on the top floor, so we went down, and we looked out the door.  There were all these Dutch people dancing in the street hollering and dancing and everything.  We grabbed the first man by the door, to find out what was going on and all he could say was “war kaput war kaput war kaput…”  She was all over, and that was music to everybody’s ears. I didn’t realize what was happening at the time, but after the war stopped, and they took us in trucks to go over through the German lines, there were lots of people by the side of the road, cheering us on, and so on. We didn’t understand why all the people looked so pale, they didn’t look healthy...we didn’t know….we were in the lines and we didn’t know what was going on, and then we understood the Germans had starved these people, and we felt very bad about that. I was in Holland in 95, 50th anniversary celebration, I was really impressed, the fellow that was with me, he lives in the same town, we went together and we spoke to each other after this. We were saying how hard it was going to be to explain at home how well we had been treated in Holland, it was just fabulous, you couldn’t be treated any better. I have a very soft spot in my heart for all the Dutch people and what they did for us. 

It’s very important for the young people to know how people suffered during wartime. How they were liberated, and what freedom really means, a lot of people don’t really know what freedom really is and what it stands for.