Mr. Harvey Hyland,
WWII Veteran
Leading Air Craftman – groundcrew.

Liberator of the Netherlands

I was stationed there, I was ground crew-airforce. Nothing spectacular happened, you know. I did mainly clerical work, office work, so there’s not much of a story there.
On a moment I was stationed in Eindhoven and we didn’t mix too much with the Dutch, but I had a Dutch girlfriend though at that time and I go and see her so once in a while.
But I remembered that in that neighbourhood there were sights for launching V1’s and V2’s. We called them ‘robot plains’. We were aware of that. When the war ended I was in Germany.  My task was mainly clerical work, but I also had to choose certain people to do certain jobs; when there weren’t any cooks I would pick out names and say: You are working in the kitchen tonight, you know, stuff like that, you know; kid stuff. So I met most of the people who came in and out, all the pilots who came in from missions and I hand out the things they needed, but they were in a different mess, they were in the officers mess and we were I the other mess so we didn’t really meet very often, so I really don’t remember any pilot in particular. The only thing what I remember was in England: They used to go bombing and they came back to England and they said: refuel and replace the airgunner, ‘cause he was the one who always got hit first. I was based in England, as well as in Holland, Belgium, France and Germany, so I moved around a lot, but where ever I was I always were with the ground crew. My division would follow the 8th English army, all the way from Normandy, through France, Belgium, Netherlands, crossed the Rhine river and into Germany. When the war ended I was not far from Hamburg. My division was the RCAF 39th Reconnaissance Wing. Our aircrafts would take pictures of enemy sights. They would come back and develop the pictures and give them to the 8th army, so that they would know where they were. I left Canada to join my division in 1944, I was only eighteen then. My friends were already in the service and liked to do just so. I left Canada from Halifax on the MV Isle de France and ended up in a fjord in Scotland, where we disembarked and from there they put us on a train to London. That was for a young boy like me off course very exciting; for the first time in Europe and then on such a train ride. The first time I actually felt that I was in a war was in Holland, where I could hear the noise of the V1 and V2 bombs. They knew about the launch site near Eindhoven, but I never heard or saw that it was destroyed. From England I flew straight to Eindhoven and stayed there for three months during winter, a very cold winter. The population really felt it, they had no coals, they had no food to eat. I used to get canned food from Canada and I would give this away to the people there. They were very glad, but they didn’t come to the base; we visit them in town occasionally and when I meet somebody I would give him a can.