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we had to steal the odd cow or chicken
interview, April 2005
Mr. George R. Thorel (Port Carling) Legion 489 - 2nd
Division, Private in the Royal Regiment of the Canadian
Armed Forces.
Liberator of the Netherlands
I enlisted in 1944. I don´t even know how old
I was, I had my 21st birthday overseas. Four months after I
enlisted I was on the continent. It seemed to be the right
thing to do, back then it was different to what it is now.
It was really an adventure. We left from Halifax,
Mauritania was the name of the ship, on the way back it was
the Aquitania. It was one of the slowest ships, the
convoy could only move as fast as the slowest ship. It
was very, very slow, it was all over the ocean. One day it
would be freezing, and the next day it would be warm.
There were 36 or so ships in the convoy. They used to
station them down there on the east coast, and get going.
When I went across the channel, the ship ahead of us was
torpedoed. We´d
just got nicely going, it was dark and this was about 2
o´clock in the morning and there was a ship ahead of us and
it sank. There was a lot of lives lost needlessly, and
there was nothing you could do about it, it made you think.
I got wounded. We´d crossed the Twentsche Canal, and we
went into Holland, and then they pulled us out because there
was no opposition there, and we just moved up, 20 miles up
the front and we had to go back in again, that´s when we ran
into trouble. We were way out in the countryside when we
crossed that canal. The Dutch were very friendly, we just
had crowd control, a lot of it, you know, moving them back,
trying to look after them, keep them out of the danger
zone. Moving civilians, we had to make sure they got safely
back out of the war zone. We just pulled out the front, and
then moved back in again. We´d gone across, and there was a
little railway station leading up to a hill, |
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and we had to clear that and hold that, and see if there
were any civilians up there, and that´s when they locked in with a
Tiger tank and got most unfriendly. They took me out of
there and the next morning they came up to see if there was
anything left of the position, and there were 6 of us left.
The rest of them had gotten back to the lands across the
canal. I went to the 12th Canadian general hospital. I was
there just long enough for them to pick the shrapnel out,
and they shipped me back to England.
I stayed in England
quite a while then. We came in through Ghent. We stayed in
a monastery in Ghent. Once it was pretty hectic, we were
moving so fast and trying to keep moving, they just wanted
to keep the whole line going, and it was kind of tough when you´re scattered out that way we were. You had to walk, at
that time, we´d walked 20 miles further north, because there
was nobody in there, if there would have been when they had
left, and they shouldn´t have, we had to back up in there
and keep moving. The field kitchen wasn´t too far back all
the time, and they would keep coming up.
They would fix the hundred-weight and they cooked, and they´d cook right out
the back of that. They would make whatever they could get
their hands on. At times we had to steal the odd cow or
chicken, and that was that, we´d boil them.... The kitchen
always seemed to be operational, they´d get destroyed, but
then they´d bring another one up. They were just as
involved as anybody else, they had to keep up, the same as
the ammunition trucks, they had to keep up, they had to keep
going. It was the same old war, day in day out.
It was pretty hectic, there was no spare time. Sometimes they´d
pull you back for 48 hours or back for 96 hours. Then you´d
try to get your feet dry, and your clothes and boots, so you
could pound the mud out of them. |
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It wasn´t too warm...
We could communicate with the tank commanders, there was a
telephone in the back of the tank. You had to let them know
you were there, or they might back up, back over you. They
tried to keep an eye on us, they had communication telephones
that were hung up there in the panel in the back and you
could pick that up and talk to the tank commander. You had
to make sure he´d seen you and point to what you were going
to do. They tried to keep their eyes on you. I don´t
remember much, except trying to keep warm and keep moving.
Then it was just up and out. My brother, Edwin Thorel, spent
time with a Dutch family whilst he was over there, in fact
he wrote to them for a long time after he was back. He was
with the anti-aircraft. They moved us just like artillery,
they used them for artillery and for shooting on the
aircraft. Him and I got together once, a friend of mine
that used to live just by the road, I caught up with him,
and then there was a fellow, he´s been the president for 30
years of the Legion branch over here, and they came to see
me, it was on the way back. I was in the hospital when the
war finished, and stayed there for quite a while after
that. When I heard the war was over, I wished I wasn´t in
the hospital, we didn´t celebrate too nicely, but it gave a
special feeling. A couple of years back we got medals form
the civilians in Holland, they were the ones that issued
them, this wasn´t paid for by the Dutch government, it was
done by the people of Holland. They had representatives
over here and they visited several big branches, we were all
notified, and they had us down on a special day, and there
were people from Holland there, and the Legion helped them
hand out these medals. |
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