CAF Story | 95 Year Old Veteran George Ward
Video / November 10, 2020
Transcript
Well, I'll tell you. At that time, we were 17. The war was on, a group of us, one fellow said: "I'm gonna go in the army and I'm gonna be a tank driver or something." And another lad by the name of Ikie Preston, he joined the Air Force. I was always fishing and whatnot in water and then, I thought: "We'll hitchhike a ride up to Hamilton and join HMCS Star in Hamilton.
This is George F. Ward speaking. I was born in Sarnia, Ontario in 1925. I'm 95.
He said: "Well, maybe you should go in the stoker, as a stoker." And I joined what they call a stoker second-class and I got to be a stoker first-class.
We wouldn't be told where we were or where we were going and then, we were dispatched to meet the... The name of it was...(inaudible) de France and had a whole load of German prisoners. And it was the Red Cross that said: "You have to protect them." The ruling, you know. So, we sort of escorted it. Some of us weren't that lucky. And I don't want to cry, but... Some of the boys lost...
We were a nice, big family, you know. Whatever it was, that was it. We all had a job to do and naturally, I was a stoker so, I was down below in the boiler room there.
We had a tot of rum every 12 o'clock, at noon, and if you didn't take your tot of rum, you got a quarter.
(laugh)
Some of the guys were taking it in their mouth and then go into their quarters and spit it back in a bottle to save up when we got ashore. But, I wasn't too interested in doing that.
And I often think of this guy, or this guy, and you're trying to envision it? And then, I'm here, chuckling to myself.
Within the last month, I tried to locate several and we put it on the Internet if there were any veterans from the corvette HMCS Rosthern K169. Just wanted to talk to them about: "Do you remember this?" and "Do you remember that?", you know.
I was anxious to try and find somebody. I've tried to locate anybody that was still alive, you know, and I couldn't find one. Quite often, I think of guys. I just take a minute and think. Yeah. By myself. All the guys, you know. It's saddening, but here I am, still surviving, you know. Oh, some of these guys I worked on the ship with, their names and their faces come up quite often.
It's... Oh, I often think of that fellow by the name of Bodie there and Al Lemay and a couple of those guys.
Yeah. I'll never forget them, I guess. Let's go, you know, that group of guys, one in the Air Force, one in the Navy, one in the army, away we went. It was our duty.