Verrière Ridge

I went into action with the Royal Regiment of Canada at Etreville, which was a very exposed village on top of a hill which the Germans had just been driven out of by the 15th Lowland Division the day before and nobody had been up to collect the dead from either side. When we, we went in at night and marching up, the German Air Force were flying, I guess, I'm not sure what they were using but they were dropping chandelier flares that would light up the whole landscape. And one of these things would start to burn up above the column of the Royal Regiment of Canada marching along the road. They'd all hit the road. Everybody was carrying a shovel on their back and had a tin mug and their mess tents tied on their haversacks and the crash of all this metal hitting the road. It was very funny. And then in all the excitement.....then after, if they saw anything, then they would, then they would drop anti-personnel bombs, but, and those were things they called bread baskets, I think. They dropped them from a fairly good height above the flares but they spun as they went down and these little about 4 pound anti-personnel bombs would be thrown out in a wide radius and they had very quick fuses so they broke soon as they hit the ground. And until we got onto these things, when we had all our trucks parked in the Carpiquet airport, there was hardly a truck that didn't have a tire punctured or a radiator punctured. So then on, we had to dig a hole for each wheel in front of it, then roll the vehicle forward, put a few sandbags beside each tire and sandbags in front of the rad. Hell of a lot of extra work. There was a tank jammed in the gate of the shadow at Etreville. With a dead it had burned out, and there was a dead German hanging over the, the rim. He'd got half way out through the hatch and didn't make it. So that was my, my first dead German I saw, was this guy hanging out of the tank cause I came in there about two o' clock in the morning and I was looking around with my flashlight, trying to find a place to park my carrier.