Description
Mr. Raymond talks about the importance of training because when you arrived on a battlefield, you could lose self-control . . . .
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
Importance of being well trained for warWe were there one day, and we didn’t know if it was going to be our turn tomorrow—reinforcements were coming. In Zutfen, in Holland, I had a friend that I had trained with in the West, a guy from Montreal. He was called l’horreur de Vaillancourt [the Vaillancourt horror]. He arrived as one of the reinforcements. By chance, he recognized me and he came over to shake hands. He was a corporal. He had come to take charge of a platoon. Talking from experience, I told him to be careful. We were in Zutfen, facing a town that we were supposed to counter-attack the next day. “There are a lot of snipers. Follow the shadow of the houses because there are about four streets. Stay in the shadows because there are snipers.” But when you don’t have experience of being under fire, well. He went maybe a block or two, crossed the street and got shot. I’d just shaken hands with him. It was my buddies who said to me, “Look at your pal . . . .“ I’d just shaken hands with him and he was dead. How many cases just like that happened . . . I was lucky. I got through it and others lasted five minutes. There were young guys that I saw running off at night and shouting. It was called shell shock. They lost their nerve because they were not accustomed to hearing the guns and everything that happened. We also had some who disappeared at night. Or they would start shaking because they couldn’t handle it any more. We had to send them to the rear. But we had some whose nerves would be shot the first day with the noise, the machine guns and the echoing when night fell. Not many. I personally saw two or three of them. They ran off. We didn’t see them again. That was getting right into the heat of the action. There was virtually no preparing for it. But there are those who got through it, and others who didn’t. I was known as a leader, you know. I told them to be careful, not to go out without a good reason, not to put their heads up when it wasn’t time, to stay crouched down and not to go off for a walk for no reason. These were the instructions that we gave them. Don’t fool around and don’t go out to see what’s happening when it’s dangerous. Keep quiet. You advance when we advance. They listened to us, normally . . . except that you couldn’t stop them, at night, in a trench, when we happened to be in a trench, which was not always. But, you know, the guys were young when they first arrived and they were green. Their nerves were shot and they started crying and shaking. We sent them to the rear. They couldn’t do anything. They then sent them further back. They could be used to work . . . picking things up or doing jobs, seeing to weapons. But, all the same, it wasn’t easy when you saw that and they started shouting . . . because, apart from that, it created an image. If the Germans were near, there were echoes at night and they must have said, “There are some soldiers there.” There were things that you had to pay attention to. If you walked into houses at night, there were broken windows in the houses. It didn’t seem like it, but it echoed when you walked on it . . . you know, there were guys who smoked—everybody smoked at that time. Well, you wanted to go and have a chat with someone, you walked on some glass and it would crack, and you didn’t know if there were Germans there. There were patrols that went out at night. These were all things that you had to learn. I can tell you that we were amateur little warriors compared to the Germans. We had training of a sort but, compared to them, we were not prepared at all. We knew how to use a grenade, but we hadn’t thrown enough of them. The same with machine guns. We perhaps fired two or three times. So we more or less learned, so to speak, on the job. Because there were a lot of things . . . it’s true that even though you did the training, when you got to the front line, it wasn’t the same thing at all. I felt that we were a bit lacking in training there. Even on firing. Firing a rifle. We fired a rifle perhaps three or four times. There should have been more time for real war training. Instead of doing night marches and then hardening us up with bayonet training and everything. It was mainly on weapons handling that I found that we were not really up to scratch. We also learned how to strip down a machine gun and then reassemble it, but too quickly. Changing the magazines. I always found that there was something missing on that side. It’s because, you know, when you got to the front line, it wasn’t the same. There were so many things you had to learn . . . it wasn’t like training. But there were young guys who had hardly done any firing at all. I know that they arrived and they hadn’t fired a rifle or anything. Although you didn’t fire a rifle like you were shooting at a hare, because it didn’t often happen that you had a rifle and a German at the other end of it. It was mainly the machine guns, the tanks, the big guns that did the work. Our job was to advance. Instead, we used grenades. I was one of those who liked to use a grenade when there was an abandoned house and we thought it was dangerous. There could be Germans hidden in there. We always had four grenades in our shoulder bags. I liked to throw one into a basement. We had to do that, but at times it happened that there were residents who had been ordered to evacuate but they were still there. We didn’t know whether they were Germans or whether . . . those were the fortunes of war at times. We didn’t know if it was a guy who lived there, who didn’t want to leave, who was determined to stay in spite of everything and to take his chances . . . to take his chances at being killed too. Because if there were any movement, you didn’t know if it was a German there. There were many, many cases when that happened. They were civilians who were there, who had no business being there. They were at home and they were supposed to evacuate but they stayed there all the same. That wasn’t easy. They called it clearing house, and it was best not to take any chances. Those of us who were experienced would tell the young guys, “Take grenades and if you think there’s any movement and it’s dangerous, if you think there may be something that moved, throw in a grenade. If there’s someone there, he’ll die or he’ll come out.” Those were times when we had to use our heads. You learned from experience.