Description
Mr. Danson recalls his return to his regiment as a commissioned officer and tells of how he suffered a shrapnel wound to the head which ended his war effort.
Barnet J (Barney) Danson
Mr. Danson was born in Ontario, 1921. Before the war, Mr. Danson worked for Columbia pictures. As a Jewish man, he was aware of the political situation in Europe. His instincts told him that war was imminent and he felt a sense of urgency to fight. As a result, he joined the Army during peacetime in hopes of being trained and ready to serve if war broke out. Mr. Danson was an Infantry Officer with the Queen's Own Rifles of Canada. In the Fall of 1944 he was wounded, thus ending his war effort. After the war, he had a successful business and later entered politics where he served as the Minister of Defence in the Trudeau Government.
Transcript
By the time I got back, it was into August, and when I got there I found out that Gerry had been killed, near Caen, he's also buried at Beny-Sur-Mer. And just Earl Stoll and I were the only two of our crew. And of course, we were going to get revenge, that was part of the deal in those days, and but we were going to win the war all by ourselves. And we had adjoining platoons, interestingly we both had the platoons we had been sergeants of, that was rather unusual, but it gave our troops a lot of confidence. And we worked well together. It wasn't very long, that we were moving up a place just around Falaise, a little village named (inaudible). And we stopped there. We were having lunch because we were supposed to go to a place called Trun, but the battle was changing things at that time. The Germans were evacuating. Falaise had virtually fallen that day, August 19th. And all of a sudden in the middle of lunch, we started being mortared. I had never been mortared by moaning minnies before. I thought we were being dive bombed. They make a hell of a whistling noise when they come down on you. And this was pretty scary stuff, and it was all around us, nobody hit. But I was just wearing my beret, and I put on my tin hat. And another barrage came. And from what was, I could figure, the bomb that got me, landed behind me, to my left and it came and hit the edge of my tin hat, through the temple here, down through the back of my eye, and stuck in the roof of my mouth. I thought I was losing my teeth which upset me terribly. I always had good teeth, but it was only a piece of shrapnel. But my eye, was not much good, and has never been any good since. So that really ended my war.