Description
The war was ending. Mr. Raymond talks about the fear of not finishing the war safe and sound.
Jacques Raymond
Jacques Raymond was born in Trois-Rivières and lost his father when he was very young. He was placed in an orphanage with one of his brothers, because his mother could not take care of her seven children all by herself. At the age of 17, he returned to Trois-Rivières to work at Wabasso Cotton Mills. When war broke out, he received a letter asking him to undergo some tests in Longueuil. He started his two-month training in Valleyfield. He spent six months in Western Canada, where he learned English and continued his training. He shipped out from Halifax in early 1943 on board the Nieuw Amsterdam for Greenock, Scotland, to continue his training. He took part in the Normandy invasion with the Régiment de la Chaudière. He also participated in the battles of Carpiquet, Falaise, Caen and crossed Belgium and Holland. He even went as far as Germany. He remained in Europe for 11 months.
Transcript
“ . . . the fear of not getting through it”Fear. We were always afraid, but we reached the point where we got accustomed to it. When they got closer, you were certainly more afraid, but the fear was in those last few months when we knew that the Germans were retreating. The fear was that we wouldn’t get through it. In those last few months, the stress was worse than when we arrived, because we had buddies that we had lost and new buddies that had taken their places. Since I had been there, I had seen them go and I . . . I said to myself—when was it—am I going to get through to the end of this? Because we had radios and we knew that the German armies had started to surrender. But we were advancing all the same. We still had some small nests to clear out—what we called nests of Germans. But in those last few weeks, it was like hell because they said it was over. It was over, but we were still advancing. It was stressful at the end. We were not making any headway. The experienced guys like me were hardly advancing at all. Because I was asking myself, am I going to get through it? They talk about a guy getting himself hit three or four days before the end of the war. But that didn’t seem to me to have happened in the last few days. It was rather quiet. The Germans were still . . . there were small isolated cases. However, in the last few months, it was very, very hard, with no rapid advances. Let’s say that we let the aircraft do the work instead, or . . . for what remained of the resistance . . . we preferred to let the tanks do the advancing. But it was very stressful, when you thought about it, when you said that it was 10 months that you’d been there and in the last month, they were retreating and retreating and then advancing and advancing less and the Germans started to surrender everywhere. At times we saw complete brigades with 2,000 or 3,000 men passing by, Germans who were leaving. It was over. But there were still some ahead. Still, up ahead, pushed on by the SS. There was always an SS in these groups. That’s where the fear was, the fear of not getting through it, because we were more or less accustomed to the other fear, the guns and everything . . . it was the fear of not getting through to the end. But I was lucky.