Description
Mr. Stanway recalls that he and his Battery (and other troops in Italy) were discouraged by being labelled the D-Day Dodger and by the amount of news attention given to the Western Front.
Frank Stanway
Mr. Stanway was born in Britain, and relocated to Montreal, Quebec with his family at a young age. Mr. Stanway joined the Non Permanent Active Militia (NPAM) along with friends, 8 months after Canada declared war. Shortly after basic training finished, their unit went active, so they joined the active forces in August 1940. Mr. Stanway shipped out to Scotland in 1941 and was transferred to Italy, along with the rest of the 5th Battery, in May 1943. They remained stationed there until a few months before the end of the war (February 1945) and returned home shortly after the war ended.
Transcript
Interviewer: When you were reading the newspaper, The Maple-Leaf, or hearing news reports. The news, I understand was all about North West Europe and very little about what was going on in Italy.
That’s right
Interviewer: How did the men feel about that?
Well they were kind of upset, because everything was talking about the Western Front and over there and we’d been, you know, in Italy for a year and a half or something, you know, for 18 months and they were just starting. It was discouraging, I mean, and that’s why the D-Day Dodgers. I remember a Lady Aster, Lady Aster. I brought the, we have a, we made a revised version of it, and you can take a picture of it after take it back with you.
Interviewer: The Lady Aster of course the very famous noble woman, English lady that decided those of you that were fighting in Italy were just D-Day Dodgers.
That’s correct.
Interviewer: The men decided that was a badge of honour.
Yea that’s right, as I say, we are the D-Day Dodger in sunny Italy. Always on the vino always on the spree. Anyway, yeah that was discouraging.