First Enemy Encounter As An Infantryman

We were called up, our unit had advanced up Monte, Monte Micesio (sp) and they'd pretty well captured it, but hadn't taken it all, and the commanding officer commanded decided before he wanted pushed on, he was going to need support from his support weapons, his anti-tank guns, his mortars and his machine guns. So we were called up, and I remember, climbed up this hill and we got about half way up, well three-quarters of the way up and we were stopped, and our officer went, had to get his orders to find out what he, what the CO wanted. And he came back and told us the attack wasn't going to go in for half an hour, so we could stand down, and we're on the, the other side of the hill from the Germans, like just over the crest, and I remember we were standing there talking, the driver and myself, and about twenty yards from where we were standing there was a German dugout on the reverse slope of the hill. And the PPCLI, about five hundred yards to our right, were attacking another hill, and they were getting pretty heavily artilleried, and we could see the shells landing in there and doing some damage to the Pats. And we'd been there about twenty minutes and there'd been nothing coming our way at all, and all of a sudden, the driver said to me, he said, "Gill, I think we should go down to that dugout." "Oh, okay." So went over to the dugout and we started down the stairs and we got there, and by God, we were blown the rest of the way down into the dugout. A shell had landed right where we'd been standing. So I often think, "What caused this guy to do this? Was it his guardian angel or what? " Something was looking after him. It wasn't me this time, it was him, you know, and, and then we went ahead and went in the attack, we set up our machine guns, and added enfiladed fire while the troops attacked, and of course, these Vickers machine guns would fire a good mile, so we were about a half a mile behind the front of the action, I guess, sort of enfilading fire, make sure there was nothing coming in from the sides, and I guess we, we layed down quite a, quite a barrage of machine gun fire there and the troops went through and captured. We went through the field afterwards, and it was a real slaughter. Must have been four, five hundred dead bodies. Both ours and theirs lying where they'd, they hit, and whether our machine guns had had any effect on them or not, I don't know. But our battalion, the 4th PLDG, the first time they had infantry, they were awarded a battle honour. And the commander, the divisional commander, and even the 8th Army commander, sent a commendation to him and praised him, at what a wonderful job that'd been done in about two to three months, converting from straight reconnaissance to an infantry battalion, and that is one of our regiments battle honours.