‘We knew what fear was’
Kitchener man, 96, recalls Second World War service from Normandy to Germany
KITCHENER — Bill Wiles wasn’t a war hero, and he wasn’t in the thick of battle, but at 96, his memories of his time as a soldier in Europe in the Second World War still burn bright.
Wiles, a trained carpenter, served as a sapper in the Royal Canadian Engineers, 1st Canadian Army, Mechanical Equipment Company. “We built bridges, and we did a variety of chores so that we could advance the troops,” Wiles explained in a recent interview from his room in a Kitchener nursing home.
Sappers did everything from building temporary Bailey bridges, to using bulldozers and graders to remove German roadblocks and clear roads of the rubble from bombed-out buildings so troops and supplies could get through to the front.
Wiles enlisted in mid-June 1942, when he was just 20. In photos of him at Camp Petawawa, he looks more like a boy than a man, dressed in shorts and with a wedge cap jauntily tilted to the right.
At age 96, his years in the Second World War make up a small but intense part of his long life. But he’s one of a shrinking number of local men still alive who helped defeat the Nazis in the Second World War.
His wartime service took him to areas that have gone down in history, where Canadian soldiers fought hard in brutal, bloody battles: Normandy just after D-Day, through Belgium, the Netherlands and into Germany.
As he got older, Wiles decided to write
down his war memories. “Folks at home wanted to know where all we were, and what all we did,” he said.
His son, also named Bill, helped complete the memoir in 2013 and published a couple of dozen copies for family members.
His most vivid memory of the war is the night he huddled off the coast of Normandy in an open landing barge, one that had a 30-centimetre hole blasted into the front from an earlier crossing. It was July 1944, not quite five weeks after the D-Day invasion, but German planes flew overhead, sending out flares to light their positions.
In the dark, as the soldiers waited offshore like sitting ducks, all the talk and the training gave way to reality. This was war.
As the soldiers moved inland they passed numerous shallow graves along the roadside, the hurried burial spots of German or Canadian soldiers. “This was not a very reassuring sight to behold on our first day,” Wiles notes in the memoir.
Most of Wiles’ service took place some distance behind the battle lines. “I could see the front through a pair of binoculars; it’s the nearest that I ever got,” he wrote home to his family in August 1944.
Nonetheless, life was still scary and dangerous. Shortly after his company landed, two men were shot when Messerschmitts strafed the troops. About a week after he landed, he was caught in the open while on guard duty east of Caen when a German plane began dive-bombing their camp. He had no defence but to huddle behind a stone wall as the shells rained down.
“That was real,” he recalls now. “We knew what fear was, that’s for sure.”
He doesn’t remember ever killing anyone, but lost plenty of friends, young men in their prime and full of life.
“We had to do what we went there to do,” he says, but “Our primary goal was to get back home.”
“He wasn’t your typical type of soldier,” says his son. “He was a carpenter and a mine clearer and a bridge builder. But it was a part of the service that was essential.”
Even for someone not directly involved in the fighting, it was a grim time. “He saw an awful lot of horrible things,” said his son — Caen and Falaise pounded into rubble, dead soldiers piled on the side of the road like cordwood. He didn’t talk much about that, but on rare occasions, he’d mention a detail — the stench of the dead, the constant din of the shells in northern France, that gave his family a sense of the horrors he’d been witness to.
“As kids we never knew anything about it,” son Bill says.
Wiles’ life wasn’t as hard as those of the soldiers in the direct line of fire. He spent just one night in a slit trench, and his memoirs and letters home are filled with stories of youthful hijinks.
At a military camp in Nova Scotia before shipping out to England, he celebrated New Year’s Eve with his brother-inlaw, who was also posted there. Wiles had too much to drink, and his brother-in-law couldn’t rouse him, even when he used “thunder flashes” — training devices that simulated exploding artillery, to get troops used to battlefield conditions.
Once overseas, there was time for fun, too. In Montreuil, he caught “the loveliest trout you ever sank your teeth into” using a Sten gun, a type of submachinegun. “It’s not exactly the best fishing pole, but it answered the purpose fairly well,” he wrote in a letter home.
As his company marched toward Belgium, the locals showered them with flowers and fresh fruit. When the advance stalled in the Netherlands, Wiles stayed with a Dutch family, and befriended one of the daughters, Jetty, whom he called “my little Dutch tulip.” They went to dances — the boogie-woogie was popular — played cards, and went ice skating. He kept in touch, and visited her with his wife in the 1980s.
When victory finally came in Europe in May 1945, though, the soldiers’ reaction was subdued. While the Dutch were jubilant, Wiles and his buddies were content to look on from the sidelines.
“I didn’t know how to express my feelings . ... Strange wasn’t it? For myself, I had expected quite a hilarious celebration,” Wiles wrote in the memoir. “Our job was finished and the impression we felt in general was, ‘So what?’.”
It was October before Wiles was able to once again embrace his family and sleep in his old bed in the family home at 5 Maurice St. He met his future wife Marjorie Pigeon the same month he got home, and they married 19 months later. The couple bought a home on Maurice Street, across the street from his parents.
Wiles worked for his dad’s construction company, Oscar Wiles and Sons Ltd. He and Marjorie went on to have five children and 66 years of marriage, until Marjorie died in 2013.
He still has an astonishing variety of mementoes from his war years: his khaki-coloured parade tunic, his berets and duffel bags, even the maple leaffestooned banner declaring “Welcome Home Son” that his parents hung up the night he came home.
A few years ago, he gathered some of the photos, his medals, his ration books and the ticket on the ship that brought him to England, and put them in a frame that he made himself. The display, and a print of the D-Day landing, hold pride of place in his room at the home where he now lives.
Today, he simply says he’s glad it ended, and hopes the country never goes through anything similar again.
“It was an experience, a real experience,” he says.
“We didn’t know what the hell we were getting into.”