Description
Once the war was over, Mr. Raymond saw German soldiers as human beings just like everyone else.
Jacques Raymond
Jacques Raymond was born in Trois-Rivières and lost his father when he was very young. He was placed in an orphanage with one of his brothers, because his mother could not take care of her seven children all by herself. At the age of 17, he returned to Trois-Rivières to work at Wabasso Cotton Mills. When war broke out, he received a letter asking him to undergo some tests in Longueuil. He started his two-month training in Valleyfield. He spent six months in Western Canada, where he learned English and continued his training. He shipped out from Halifax in early 1943 on board the Nieuw Amsterdam for Greenock, Scotland, to continue his training. He took part in the Normandy invasion with the Régiment de la Chaudière. He also participated in the battles of Carpiquet, Falaise, Caen and crossed Belgium and Holland. He even went as far as Germany. He remained in Europe for 11 months.
Transcript
Respect for German soldiersI had great respect for the Germans as soldiers. Even when I saw prisoners; at the end, 2,000 or 3,000 at a time were being taken prisoner. The men were surrendering. But when you know that you’re looking at a human being and that he’s your own age, perhaps a little older, and he’s completely disarmed . . . he’s in a field where all of them were put, sometimes all on their knees or sitting down in fields. These guys had families. I had respect for them, regardless. In the heat of action, it’s one thing but, afterwards we knew that they were surrendering. The war was over for them but, as a human being, I did not want someone to shoot them for no reason, when it was not the time. They weren’t like the leaders . . . they endured the war much more than we did. It’s true that they killed people. But a soldier is a soldier. He does what the commander or the government tells him to do. I look back on it today and I still wonder, was it worth it for us to go there, for democracy, because it was a world war? When they say to you, “Why did you go there? ” Young people ask us that. If you know the history and if you remember what we were being told, what we saw and why we went, when we knew that there were still some countries left in Europe and the Germans were in the process of . . . What would we be today if we had let them do it? Do young people realize it when we tell them? They said (inaudible) went, because at that time they were waging a war. You shouldn’t go there, it’s not your business, and everything. If nobody got involved in their business, that would be all well and good, but that wasn’t it. The Germans were in control. It was a second Napoleon who had turned up there. When we saw what we saw, even today, they ask us, “Would you be prepared to go back there under the same conditions? ” I would do the same thing again. Because I saw so much . . . so many things. You shouldn’t make the world and the people suffer like that for nothing. They went through so much damned suffering when you think about the bombings . . . we said that they were bombed in England but they were also bombed in Hamburg, in the big cities, in Cologne and . . . Those places were razed to the ground. The Americans had the time of their lives. They went there at times with flying fortresses . . . and they were flying over at times for perhaps an hour and a half. Sometimes there were 200, 300, 400 or 500 flying fortresses, always in a line, and then they bombed. They made them pay a high price, after all. They were civilians who were down there. There were millions and millions of civilians who died.