Transporting Airplanes and Children ll
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- Owner: Veterans Affairs Canada
- Duration: 2:23
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6. Transporting Airplanes and Children
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Transporting Airplanes and Children ll
In Liverpool he observes the damage done to a city bombed by the enemy for nine days. He tells how the inhabitants protected themselves in their homes.
Guy Jobin
Mr. Jobin’s father was a chemist for a mill in Chandler, in the Gaspé. During the Depression, his father left to go work in Masson, in the Outaouais Region, and the family joined him 18 months later. They settled in Buckingham and when war was declared young Guy Jobin, a lover of ships, wanted to enlist in the Navy. He did his basic training in Québec and then went to Halifax to learn to fire guns before being sent to British Columbia. His group of Canadians left on the British aircraft carrier HMS Nabob. The ship went down the Pacific coast, crossed the Panama Canal and stopped in Virginia before arriving in England, at Liverpool. There they found the remains of a city damaged by 9 days German bombings. The Nabob was active in the British Isles throughout the war. During a mission to Scapa Flow in northern Scotland, the boat was hit by a torpedo. Upon his return to Canada, Mr. Jobin was hospitalized for awhile.
Transcription
A Razed City
The city of Liverpool had been bombed for seven or nine days by the Germans. And it was absolutely flattened; with a building standing here and there. They really had to deal with the war there. Halifax had nothing, there was nothing in Halifax. But in Liverpool,. . . Good God… flat, y’know? And the people there – I had a girlfriend while we were there and I was invited to their home for the evening. In the houses there it was worse. All old furniture, you understand? The English had been at war since ’39 and they didn’t buy new furniture everyday. Everything went for the war effort, so you couldn’t buy a new table. So when you arrived at someone’s home in Liverpool, at a girl’s house, for instance, there were old rugs, old tables, almost no furniture and no paint. And the doors into the house – there were cement blocks in front of them. If a bomb fell in the street, shell fragments wouldn’t go through the door. This brick wall wouldn’t let any through, y’know. They didn’t have them everywhere but there were quite a few to keep shell fragments from going through the door. So when you went to a house, don’t expect to be served on china like from the Château Laurier, y’know? Because the war effort – they got a good taste of it, the English did.
There was one thing, I’ll tell you what struck us the most was the parks in the cities, full of military equipment, with tarpaulins over it so the German planes wouldn’t see it. As far as the eye could see. You take a park like we have here, at lake [name unknown]. There was a park there and they filled it up with military trucks and guns, and everything you can imagine, and a tarp over it. It was really hard. The lawn wasn’t cut, y’know? And the sidewalks weren’t looked after. During the war, the war effort didn’t allow the streets to be repaired. Everything went for the military.
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