[music] [music] When we came back from Normandy, Brigadier Hill gave orders to his battalion commanders. There’s got to be greater discipline. There’s got to be better f physical fitness. There’s got to be better weaponage use. Jeff Nicholan was appointed left tenant

colonel and he landed like a ton of bricks. >> He was out of this world as far as training went because he was a hard-nosed football player. >> Oh, he’s a tough boy. Played for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers in the Canadian Football League. So that accounts for his u athletic ability and perception that we weren’t we were we weren’t up to his snuff.

>> The training became really painful. 10 mile runs with equipment. Then there was 50 mile marches and it was always done at a run. I can remember bringing my platoon down the road after 10 miles, ran alongside them and encouraged them, you know, there’s the gate, keep going, you know, but Nicholan as we went through the gate, he was taking names of stragglers.

They were gone and replaced very quickly. A pitly thing, we had to run around the praise square. We couldn’t walk on it. And that was one of the things that the guys hated him for. >> Nicholan was more respected than he was liked. And the anger was building. The veterans from Normandy felt that they had practically won the war.

They had done all the training they needed. They had been blooded and now was the time to rest. And that was strongly felt by just about every man that that came back from Normandy. >> It got on your nerves so bad that we did finally go on strike. What we did was we would form up in platoon and march through the kitchen right past the food, wash our mess in the trough that they had for us and that was it. We never touched the food.

We’re just we’re just not eating. We’re not eating. We’re you know we’ll do all the training. We’ll parade. We’ll do everything we’re ordered to do as soldiers. But we’re not happy. So for 3 days, our men refuse breakfast, lunch, and dinner. >> It gets up to divisional headquarters and Brigadier Hill.

He heard about it and he come down. Brigadier Hill was the most outstanding leader and that was accepted by every paratrooper that I ever knew. He wrote the book on leadership, but he had a special affection for the Canadians. >> He ordered everybody on the parade square and he got up on the stage and he gave us a lecture.

He just laid down the law and said he had the greatest respect for the Canadians, but discipline was key to survival. We would be going in again with the battalion very soon. And he wanted the men to be behave like men, behave like soldiers. >> Go back to work. And he would look after us. >> And when Brigger Hill says that, you listen cuz he was fair.

So the brigadier said to Nicholan, “Nick, back off. Let’s restore some sensibility to the whole thing.” So they did. Now, I don’t mean that the discipline went out the window. It didn’t. But it made a great deal more sense. >> In February 1945, it seemed that the European War was nearly over.

The Allied armies had reached the Rine, but here they halted. Faced with the greatest river obstacle in Western Europe, if they could cross the Rine, their war was won. The Allies planned the largest [music] single airborne landing of the war, Operation Varsity. >> The objective in the Rine was to cross the Ryan River for the final advance uh through Germany.

This was the final big push and and battle of the war [music] and we were lucky to be taking part in it. We were to drop the manpower by division strength. We’re now talking 20,000 30,000 men to drop them by parachute with the troops landing on the German side of the river and then hold the enemy in check until the troops came across the Rine and joined up with us.

when we were told where we were going into Germany, loud cheers. And when when the guys heard daylight, 10:00 in the morning, there was another cheer went up and somebody said to me, “We’re not going to have another Normandy.” As the attack gets underway at an airfield in England, men of the first Canadian parachute regiment in plain.

They join their British buddies of the sixth airborne division and their cousins of the 17th US Airborne Div and the mightiest air invasion in history. Veterans of D-Day fly to the grand assault. >> The aircraft flew at the required level of about 850 ft 900 ft. The Air Force guys, they were not happy about daylight drops of paratroopers because of the level.

If you’re on the ground as an enemy, that’s a big target that’s there. So, a lot of aircraft are hit. The plane I was on was hit by um by flack and uh caught fire. There’s a very steep dive and I had to climb up very quickly and as I was getting out and as soon as my plane my my shootute opened I looked back and saw the the crew coming out after me and they all got killed um cuz I saw them bounce from the ground.

It was absolutely massive. It was the largest parachute drop in history. It’ll never, of course, be repeated. Never in God’s world. >> I could hear the zinging of the bullets and you could see the the holes in my shootute where they they had gone through. >> A German battalion was in the trees. They surrounded the field.

They knew where we’re going to land. They just didn’t know what time [music] of day we were coming in. Uh so they were they were ready for us. We’re being fired at. There were several of us, but we didn’t know where the bullets were coming from. At the end of the field, there’s a white farmhouse, and I saw the farmer come running out and looking up at all of the parachutes that were dropping.

And as I ran into the woods, I saw him run back into the house. He got in to get a shotgun. And he was shooting the guys that were in the trees. We formed up for an attack. Ready up. Let’s go. And so we just all the men got up wherever they were firing from the hip, attacking these various pill boxes and god knows what all.

Farm houses, houses, whatever. And with the machine guns, grenades, and with the brand guns that we had, uh, it it made quick work. And the German Germans just came out and surrendered by the dozens. They didn’t fight much. They knew that when you see a thousands of paratroopers coming down, so they were surrendering to us without any trouble at all.

We come to this plowed field, got into the bush, and Jeff Nicholan was still hanging up in the trees. He was killed. He dropped practically over top of a German imp placement who simply opened up on him and that was it. It didn’t take very long at all. We saw a movement under this big tree about this big around and here a German tried to surrender.

Somebody behind me shot him. I don’t know who it was. And uh I guess he figured that it was him that killed Nicholan. after a few days, General Rididgeway, who commanded the Allied Airborne Army crossing the Rine, he had word from Eisenhower that Stalin, the Russians advancing from the east, were not going to adhere to an agreed They were going to move further into the western zone, ignoring any barriers that had been agreed on.

So Bridgeway went to Brigadier Hill. He said, “I’ve got to have a force moving fast as hell, non-stop to get north to halt the Russians.” And Hill said, “I’ve got just the outfit that can do that.” And they’re Canadians. They are cowboys like you wouldn’t believe. If anybody can do it, they can do it.

So, I’m going to put them on tanks and we’ll go like hell. >> Men of the First Canadian [music] Parachute Battalion forge ahead into Germany. Riding on British tanks, the force strikes out in a general northeasterly direction. Their goal is the German North Dort. We were ordered to go night and day to Whismore and [music] get there before the Russians.

But on the way up, if you were fired upon, you jumped off the tanks and cleared it out. Got back on the tanks again. But the Germans were running. They were hard to keep up to. You knew something was up because you were not getting the heavy fighting or anything real. You know, something was going on.

And to us, we thought, baby, the war is getting over, you know. I was on the lead tank. Suddenly, we’re seeing this barbed wire enclosure on our right. I can remember it vividly cuz I have nightmares about it today. This barb wire enclosure with guard towers. I never seen anything like this before. Suddenly the tank I’m on came to an absolute halt because people came flooding p not prisoners victims of the Holocaust came out of the camp and threw themselves in front of the tank and at the side of the tank just clutching and screaming, you know. They were the most emaciated. They they were skeletons. Some of them were just crawling. I can remember seeing one man come out

stumbling out of the gate and he was no no skin on him at all and he fell and he was crawling you know and I’m still sitting on this tank and I said get off give these people a hand you know find out what they are and then somebody came along and said this is a concentration camp it was Bergen Bellson concentration camp >> did you See Bergen Bellson? >> Yes.

Is that I don’t I hate to even talk about it. It’s just bones and skin and piled up like you see. When somebody tells me about Holocaust, they don’t believe in it. I feel like the medical officer came up and said to me, “We’ve got to get we’ve got to get some divisional help up here real fast. So move your tank.

Get your tank and this whole company B company and get moving. I just remember going by it in the middle of the night. I I remember very clear it was about midnight and I could hear the moans and groans from the from the encampment and I was informed at the time that it was I didn’t know it was Belson. I just knew it was a a um a concentration camp.

Once we were across the Elb, we could sense that the German army was collapsing, surrendering by the by the company on either side of the road, fully armed, but we couldn’t stop to take the prisoner. >> They were filling the roads with their weapons still in their hands. were waving his arm. Come on, get past me.

Soon as they knew they were they were going to be facing the Russians, they want no part of them. >> We were engulfed by hundreds of citizens, German citizens, carrying everything they owned, and they were frightened to death of the Russians who were massacring. That’s what we could gather further up in the eastern zone.

They were massacring the Germans. The stories they were telling of the brutality that was going on was terrible. But somebody said to me after I was getting pretty angry about it, they said, “Look at it from the other side. Those people have been these Russians have been brutalized by the Germans. Their farms burned to the ground, their women and kids massacred.

So their feelings about the Germans is more violent, is more retaliatory than ours because we didn’t have that at all. We arrived in Weismore on May the 2nd at 2 hours before the Russians arrived. We quickly dug in there. We brought up a Churchill tank and put it all down. We got it into a ditch there with just the the gun showing.

And so we had a pretty substantial roadblock. Waited and waited and waited. Then the Russians come. They had tanks and everything. One of our men, Sergeant Warick, he could speak Russian, so he understood what they were saying. And they the Russians said they had orders to go and take the town from us and they were going to go through our division to do it.

There was a major I don’t know some big wig from the Russians. They kept a car tried to get through and we told so he started to go ahead. So I said fire burst over his head with a machine gun. They did. She said, “I’ll go back.” He went back and uh would let him in. >> We were there to hold them back.

If they had have fired on us, we would have fired on them and it would have been third world war right there. So finally on day four, our company sergeant major came up to the barricade where we [music] where my platoon was and he said, “We’ve got to have a patrol go in into the Russian zone and make some contact in there at a higher level.

” We took an interpreter, a young lad by the name of Dio. He was a Polish kid from the prairies. And we went in about 20 miles. And we were finally sent to a headquarters off to the right just off the main highway. And out came a bunch of Ger Russian officers, beautifully dressed. And this one fellow with breaches and one thing, another he looked about 21 years old, but he was a full general.

He said, “Come in. Come in.” They had a big table set up with some finger food, but the main thing on the table was great jugs of vodka. Tremendous jugs of vodka. And of course, you know, Winston Churchill, they knew that they could Winston Churchill. Okay. wish preach, you know, now that meant Marshall Stalin, Marshall Stalin, and it went down, you know, President Roosevelt and Eisenhower, Zukov, I couldn’t drink anymore.

It ended up I had to drive back. Pete couldn’t drive. He was too far gone. We would go back to our headquarters and report to our general that there’s peace. So it was friendly from then on. Yes, we did socialize with them [laughter] perhaps to excess, I’m afraid, because for us the war was over. We were the first active battalion from the war zone from actually from Germany to arrive back in Canada.

So everybody wanted a piece of us. The city had a prepared a parade up Bay Street to welcome at city hall which nobody had ever experienced before. My mother and father were both there and they were very careful. It was heartwarming. It really was. It was great to be home. I just looked at my dad and my mother and I said, “All right, Dad. I made it.

That was it. Sometime he just hit you like a ton of brick. But uh life goes on. The thing is that with the paratroopers, you look after each other. You can’t describe [music] it. It’s just one of those things. To this day, we’re still airborne. And I, you know, and I’m proud that I’m an airborne.

If I was a young fellow today, I that’s where I’d be jumping. [music]