CAPTURING THE BEACH
Corporal Wilfred Bennett enlisted in the RCAF in September 1939. He wanted to be a pilot, but after waiting to be called up he ran out of patience and approached the Royal Winnipeg Rifles (RWR) who accepted him without hesitation. He heard from the air force three days later, but by then he was fated to land on Juno Beach with the RWR.
The beach was pretty nasty [when] we came in about 7:30 a.m. The water was very, very rough, and on our LCA coming in we’d sit on the top of a high wave crest and then plunge straight down into a huge hole in the trough. Quite an experience for a boy from the midwest.
When we landed and hit the beach, another chap and I were running along the beach side by side. The Germans were in pillboxes and they had loaded their machine guns with tracer bullets.… It looked like yellow popcorn, popcorn floating upwards, and those were just the ones we could see. There were hundreds of bullets we didn’t see.
The man beside me got hit in the face. He was on my right side, and the fire was coming in from ten o’clock on the left, so [it] missed me and hit Kelly McTier from the
MO’s office in the Rifles. I remember saying, “Well, Kelly, you’ll be back to Blighty” and then had to leave him as we were to “keep moving….”
Years later, Bennett saw McTier at a reunion. He told him, “Benny, do you know how long I spent on the beach on D-Day? Till six at night. It was pretty rough.”