Loading onto the Barge

Heroes Remember

Loading onto the Barge

Transcript

Like really start when you go on the barges you knew that was, there was maybe no return, that was kind of an anxious. Well all the guys you know, they were writing letters and giving them to the crew or the bar to send home to their wife, of course I was still single and I didn't have to do that. Yeah but it was hard on married men you know to... Interviewer: Well tell me about that, that feeling, what it felt like to finally load onto the barge. Well, to start with like, not so much on the barge but going into action. Like when you were going to make an attack you get a butterfly feeling in your stomach. Course that happens to everybody, like kind of a nervous feeling. Some guys can't eat nothing like when they get like that, but I was just the opposite, I could, didn't bother me to eat, guess I was a glutton or something and if, you know, if there was food around.

Description

Mr. Buchanan describes the feelings and thoughts soldiers had when they were loaded onto barges.

Floyd Buchanan

Mr. Buchanan was born September 7, 1921, and grew up in the prairie provinces of Canada. Military history was not a new concept to Mr. Buchanan as a record of military service is prominent on both sides of his family. In 1939, while visiting Vancouver, news that war had broken out swept the city, and Mr. Buchanan who had just turned 18 enlisted right then and there in the city of Vancouver claiming that it seemed a natural thing to do. Mr. Buchanan started his basic training right away in Vancouver, then in Ontario, and finally in Nova Scotia where his adventure began by boarding a ship in Halifax in the fall of 1940 for England. Mr. Buchanan was given more training while in England, gaining experience as an infantryman, tank driver, and a gunner. His first battles took place in France, and his regiment then moved quickly into Holland where they were a vital part of the Liberation of the Netherlands. After the war Mr. Buchanan went home to his family in Saskatchewan and currently resides in Whitehorse.

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