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Description
Mr.Ethell talks about the post Second World War years and the concern of another major world conflict
Donald Stewart Ethell
Donald Stewart Ethell est né en juillet 1937 et a grandi à Victoria (Colombie-Britannique). Son père était un ancien combattant de la Première Guerre mondiale et de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Sa mère était infirmière. Sa soeur et lui ont étudié dans un pensionnat en raison des emplois qu’occupaient ses parents et ils retournaient à la maison seulement à Noël et pendant les vacances d’été. La mère de M. Ethell est décédée lorsque ce dernier n’avait que 10 ans. <br><br> Lorsqu’il s’est enrôlé, M. Ethell a joint les Queen's Own Rifles à Calgary. Après plusieurs années de service comme soldat d’infanterie, on l’a recommandé pour qu’il reçoive la formation d’officier. M. Ethell réussit le programme et s’éleva au rand de colonel. Plus tard, il a commandé des troupes canadiennes et des troupes des Nations Unies au cours de divers missions partout dans le monde. Au milieu des années 1990, Col. Ethell a pris sa retraite après plus de trente-cinq ans de services distingués.
Transcription
Interviewer: Tell me Mr. Ethell during that period of time in Germany, the cold war was very much on and the situation involving the Bay of Pigs missile crisis in Cuba all exacerbated the tensions that were there at the time, as a serving member of the Queens Own Rifles, in Germany during those 33 years, were you aware of the potential for an open conflict to erupt?
We were, because we were there at a very dangerous time in history. We really didn't appreciate that concern at the time, because we were in a foreign country, you know with things to do. We knew that there was a crisis because we were almost continuously deployed to our alternate defensive positions, remembering we had soft skin vehicles as they call it, commercial, we didn't have any armoured with the battalion. So we were deployed that way, we were practising all the time by going up to a place call Hanau, in northern Germany where we fired our 106 calibre recoilless rifles and mortars and so forth and we spent time away. There's a term called bug out and that means the units are recalled and it can be done at a battalion level or a higher level, brigade, divisional level or even a NATO call out. It was not unusual for the trucks to come through the villages and there was no phone or knocking on the door, the Canadian trucks either from, whatever regiment, in our case, the Queen's Own Rifles or the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery, the artilleries next door, would just come into the villages and lean on the horn and you knew, that it was a bug out and that you had better get your butt in gear and get there. Leaving your family not knowing when you were going to be back, was it going to be 24 hours, 3 days or was this, had the balloon gone up, because I remember at that time Neil, the Berlin wall was going up, not down. Secondly there was the Cuban crisis, you know, you look back at that and I've done that since I've, since then, a number of times, that was the closest in history that Canada., the world came to a nuclear war. We didn't realize it, but basically our job was to slow the Russian assault coming through the, the Soviet assault, coming through the Fulda Gap. We were cannon fire, sacrificial lambs, a delaying action until additional resources could be brought over from the UK and from the United States and whether the decision would be made to go nuclear or not. We didn't have, you know they complain about equipment today, we had not that good equipment, we were in a situation where we just did as we were told; quite well trained, but we didn't necessarily have the horses to go with us.