The 18 Pounder

I liked the army, and I was good at my job, and I crawled up the ladder pretty fast. And I had my gun crew up at that (inaudible) shed this day and my back was turned to the corner of the building, and my gun crew, we had started off with the old 18-pounder, that was a First World War gun, and it's a big, good size gun. And it had high wheels, high iron shod tires on, it literally took the tire . . . you used to spend a lot . . . every year we went out to Petawawa. That's up near Algonquin Park, up in Northern Ontario, that's where you, that's where we used the guns up there. And they took the big tire, the wheels off, the high wheels off, and they put rubber tired wheels on, they were quite a bit lower, lowered the gun down a lot. And when you fired the shell there was a big wide trail at the back end, back end, there was sandy soil and the trail dug into the, they would jump off the ground altogether. And that trail dug into the, right into the ground. And you had a number seven dial site on there and that was fairly (inaudible). You had three, three aiming points, you had a gun aiming point and the battery aiming point. Well you got the, there was a dial site on, there was minutes and degrees on the dial site, so you, you turned that to the orders you got. And you picked, you picked your own gun aiming point so to try and get a little action before they . . . and you shot, what you shot at was a, a tank. It was made of plywood and it was a long distance away, and towed by a tractor with a long cable on it. So what we used to try to do was hit the cable to stop, so to cut the tank off from the tractor. You couldn't see the tractor of course, it was a mile away.