Description
Mr. Walsh discusses, in general, the anonymity of soldiers who fall during the heat of battle, but after losing two close friends, his reluctance to make new ones.
Graham Walsh
Graham Walsh was born in Sydney, Nova Scotia, on January 22, 1925. He was the third of seven children. His father worked in a steel mill, and made a bit extra selling coke, a smelting byproduct. His father died when he was seven, and Mr. Walsh and his brother worked odd jobs to help the family. He joined the local reserves when he was fifteen and two years later, at the age of seventeen, enlisted for overseas service. Once in England, he was overlooked for Italian deployment and immediately volunteered for Normandy. Mr. Walsh served from France to post-war Germany, via the liberation of Holland, all with the Royal Regiment of Canada. He was fortunate to survive three wounds while in action.
Transcript
You didn’t know who you lost or how many you lost. You more or less consolidate. Either you, you either reached your objective or you didn’t. You were stopped before then. You dug in and I seen us digging in as high as four times a day just getting yards at a time, that’s all we were getting. You had to dig in and take shelter and you were out in the wheat fields and you were always vulnerable to everything that was coming down. That was a rough part of it. I kind of become friends with the fellow that I was with but he didn’t last long. I lost him and a couple of days later I lost another one and from then on you just didn’t make no more friends.