Description
“Down time” leads to dangerous “fun time” at base camp.
Joseph Anthony Ryan
Joseph Anthony Ryan was born in Montreal in 1920. The circumstances during the depression era saw him and his family moving to Thunder Bay, Ontario in search of a better life. Like many during this time, applying to Canada’s military was a way to find work, adventure and purpose, so in the late 30’s he joined the Lake Superior Regiment and began his training alongside the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry and Lord Strathcona’s Horse (Royal Canadians). From participating in operations from Iceland to Dieppe to his time as a prisoner of war in Germany, Joseph Ryan’s stories bring us a unique perspective on the price paid for our freedom.
Transcript
And we used to get out of those shells a certain amount of cordite, like spaghetti, gets left over, doesn’t go off; it’s emptied out of the shell. You got to be careful of that because it is highly explosive. We used to take it when we had blackouts, plywood blackout things, so we used to take our blackouts when we had our time off and we used to make all kinds of pictures with the cordite, line it all up then light a match that would burn it into the blackouts see so everybody had blackouts with pictures on them from the cordite until we got told we could set fire to the place, “Stop doing it.”