A Lonely Soldier

Well, I was a lonely little soldier on a ship with a whole bunch of other guys I didn’t know and we were all sailing down the English Channel early in the morning and a storm was on us. I just didn’t think we were going to land anywhere, and eventually we stopped the boat, oh I’d say 15 to 20 miles off the coast of France and we were on a big ship and I could see the preparation to go in for landing the assault boats, the Winnipeg Rifles and they had scramble nets, I don’t know, that’s what they call them, just nets they dropped over the side and the sea was going back and forth and hitting these little ships, hitting against the big one that troops were trying to get down on and some of them soldiers were panicking and they let go and they were falling in between the sea and maybe some of them were a little nervous, I guess they were. And eventually they put about 25 or 30 people in these boats and they were the assault troops going in with the Winnipegs. And the strange thing when they prepared to go into the shore they made a great big circle and I seen pictures of that after and I often wonder whether they were just getting together or getting courage up and away they went and you could hear it and then eventually we didn’t think they’d happen because it was so rough and then it settled down and then the guns start going. We had a big, I think it was the Rodney, it was firing guns right over, scared the heck out of us.