Training Improvisation

We were sent to Camp Borden. That's where they took boys and made men out of them. They were undergoing, I would say, military training. How to walk, how to live and you had to live in the barracks, which I wasn't used to and I think none of us were. And they put me in headquarters company, I became a gunner. We didn't have anything, theoretically. We had nothing. We were lucky we had uniforms. Rifles, sometimes there was a rifle and some, we had the old Ross rifle, the 303. Tanks, none. By the grace of God, General... I'll think of his name in a minute. He was command of the regiment up there, of the brigade, the armoured brigade. And he went to the States and he bought about thirty tanks. You know, as we were a tank regiment we had to have tanks. And he came back from the States with the Renault Mark IV. Which were falling apart of course. All you had to do was bang the door, bang one of the side panels and it'll fall apart. And he turned around and says, he says "Well that's all right" because he says he got three tanks were loaded with equipment. This is, don't forget you have to realize this is tanks from the 1914-18 war! And we used to lose tracks and oh it was... I would call it a pantomime, let's put it that way there. We improvised.

We got one other tank was an American tank but it wasn't what we wanted. It wasn't (inaudible). First time, the only tanks we ever had , what I would call a, an operational tank, would be the Matilda, which we got in England. That was the first tank we ever had. But we all had to be retrained again to what we, for the Matilda tank, which was a British tank at the time. But there was nothing we could do, because at that time, as you said, we learnt discipline, we learnt to take orders, and we accepted what was coming. Well we, we learnt.... A regiment became known as a, as a fighting unit. And we were honoured for that.