Tea Break

In England we got, we camped in, it’s called... it was a castle. Oxford, just outside of London. We could go to London, like. We were there and then we started training back and forth. And then we finally got into a field with tents. And then our equipment came in, and it came from Scotland. Apparently, the story that I heard, it was supposed to be the Scotch people to have all these tanks. They’re all brand new tanks, but they didn’t like them or they weren’t equipped or they weren’t trained for it. We were, you see. We had been training on those and I guess some of our officers found out and he said, “Okay, all our equipment is in Scotland.” That was the tank. So he says, “Now we’ll get a couple of drivers.” So I was one of them, to load them on flat cars to bring them back to England, to where we were. That’s quite a trip. So anyway, we had, we loaded them on the ramp to load them, and we didn’t realize that there was about that much of the track of the tank lean over the flat car. So an inspector came along. We got all these damn tanks loaded and the inspector come along he says, “By the way,” to one of our officers, it was a sergeant officer in my crew, he said, “You can’t ... some of the tunnels are too narrow.” He said, “These tanks won’t go through.” So the orders came down we had to drive them. So they brought a whole bunch of drivers and we had a lovely trip. We drove slowly and stopped for tea wherever, cookies and stuff, especially in England. The tea break.

Mr. Ducharme relates an amusing turn of events while trying to deliver tanks from Scotland to England.

Paul Ducharme

Paul Ducharme was born in Montreal, Quebec in 1919. His family moved to Lorraine, Ontario where his father had a successful career with the Abitibi lumber company. Mr. Ducharme left home, penniless, at the age of thirteen. In the years leading up to his enlistment, he was employed as a trapper, a guide, a male poster model, and a mushroom picker. He enlisted in Ontario and volunteered for the new 19th Self-propelled Artillery Regiment being formed in Borden, Ontario. After shipping overseas on the Queen Mary, Mr. Ducharme took part in the D-Day invasion, landing at Juno Beach. He saw further action in France, Belgium and Holland. He was wounded by shrapnel in Holland and sent back to England. After leaving the service, Mr. Ducharme operated an auto body shop for 40 years.