Description
Mr. Smith talks about the mine sweeping they did on Juno beach.
Raymond Smith
Raymond Smith was born on July 31st 1920 near Niagara-on-the-Lake. Mr Smith lost his mother as a young boy and during the Depression he worked raising hogs and cattle. When war broke out he decided to join the army, which gave him a much needed raise from five dollars a month breaking horses, to a dollar thirty a day. He got the call for training camp in Regina where he became a driving instructor. He recalls arriving from training camp to England on July 31st 1941. Mr. Smith was an army tank sergeant during the war when he met his wife and they married in 1943 while he was on leave in Manchester, England. After the war, Mr Smith returned home on April 2nd 1946 and worked as a truck driver and later at O'Keefe Brewery.
Transcript
We drove on and they headed us to a bush area that had been cleared. We started cleaning off our vehicles ready to go and one of the first things I got, they called me to gather up some men to go up and pick up some mines and left the vehicles there. Now when you first start you’re very, very nervous. Then once you’ve lifted one or two you just kind of make up your mind, now you’ve got to be careful, you just go easy and yeah, you keep holding, you don’t move anywheres until you’ve probed it and when you found one you dig under there, make sure there’s no trip wires on it, lifted it out and set it aside. We didn’t bother to, we’d put a pin in it. We had a whole pocket full of nails, you’d find where you put the pin. That’s difficult to find where to put that pin in the night. We started in there just, oh it was sun down, I was glad of that, tried to give us that we could see a bit. By the time we finished that area we were going through, it was pitch black, but we were getting used to it by then.