The Vickers Platoon

We had a Mark 5 Sten gun. That's a, it had a, they were quite rare. They had a paratrooper down at the War Museum at one time, and I , they didn't have the proper Sten gun and they got it. It was, had wooden butts and wooden pistol grips. The Sten always had a bad reputation but when it was set up like that it was great little weapon, we were quite happy with it. It was just, it was just gas pipe and if you didn't take care of it, that's what, why the reputation was bad but it was because the operators weren't, weren't using them properly or weren't taking care of them. If you get them dirty they'll jam, you know. And the other, we had the sons-of-bitches in Korea too. Our fellas had to take the, the rounds out of the magazine because it was, it would, the platform would just stay down if you left them, they were a bad weapon. Just a bad weapon.

We jumped Vickers too at the time. I had a friend who was in the Vickers Platoon. He's a doctor now in Kingston. But they were great, they gave us a great deal of fire power once we got on the ground, which airborne, we didn't have too much of, until we got going.

I had a very good friend named Hlady, H-L-A-D-Y. That was one of the things about joining the army, I did not know Ukrainians existed. A friend of mine was a parole officer out in Shilo and he was visiting some farmhouse and got a blast of Ukranian and he said, "I don't speak Ukranian," and the farm wife said, "How long have you been in this country? " But Hlady and I were lying in a ditch, we did river crossings because we could go a for few miles until they got a bridge going and this particular spot there were some, it turned out there were Hitler Youth on 88s and they were snapping rounds at us. Hlady and I were lying in the ditch and one went past, having been to Camp, Camp Shilo in the artillery, it had a broken driving band and it was making a terrible, didn't sound like the rest of them, just an awful sound. And this guy, Hlady, said, "That one had a bayonet on it." Which lightened, lightened the life a bit, quite a bit.