Enlisting

I think it’s just because you’re young and you want to see the world and you thought it was the thing to do, that you should do your bit. You know, all your friends and relatives, men especially were going, boys and then two or three of the nurses came back and we saw them in uniform, of course they looked very nice and we thought, well, this would be an advantage and we could do something. We thought we weren’t doing anything for the war effort by staying at home. But, of course, we were because a couple of my friends were with the... well, I was with the VON but I was with them working with them with the agreement that when my call came to get in the army, I would be released and a couple of friends were with the polio clinic and they were under the same condition. Most of us if we wanted to go, we worked for as long as we could until we were called up. We put in our application and we weren’t being called up. We thought we should have got in right away. So we just went to the, I guess it was the MO office, the military headquarters, and just said that we would like to go and we were wondering why we weren’t called up and so pretty soon just because we put in the appearance, they took us.

Ms. MacAulay talks about why she decided to enlist.

Kathleen Jean MacAulay

Ms. MacAulay was born in Meadowville, Nova Scotia on January 2, 1917. She attended school in Meadowville in a one room school for grades 1 - 10. Then she went to nearby Stellarton for grade 11 and New Glasgow for grade 12. After attending Maritime Business College for a year, she left and went to Halifax to train as a nurse at the Victoria General Hospital. Ms. MacAulay graduated as a nurse in 1941 and enlisted to go overseas. Ms. MacAulay made the four day voyage on the Queen Elizabeth and landed in Scotland. Shortly after arriving, she was sent to Bramshott where she worked in the operating room and in the ward from Oct. ‘43 to July ‘44. From there, she went to Whitby for a short period before heading over to Normandy. Ms. MacAulay ended up in Germany at the end of the war and was there for part of the occupation. She met her husband, a Canadian soldier, in Germany and was married to him in Jan. ‘46. She returned to Canada aboard HMS Rodney in June of ‘46.