It was 1942 when Joseph Gervais, a farm boy from Hitchcock, received an invitation from the Canadian government to attend a medical exam in Regina on Jan. 1, 1943.
He passed the test as a fit 19-year-old and was quickly sent to Vancouver Island to begin basic training in the army. He and the rest of the new recruits were given shots, uniforms and a rifle, and boarded a train to the West Coast.
The windows on the train would frost up, so they opened them in order to see the mountains. None of them had been far from home before, Gervais said, so travelling through the Rockies was quite a sight for the new troops.
For five months, Gervais underwent basic training with regular route marches of between 15 and 20 miles. He even recalls an instance when they walked for 24 straight hours. They had the choice to stop and sleep, but they had to sleep outside, and it was raining.
"Getting ready for basic training, that was just toughening up all the time," said Gervais. "We ended up walking a 24-hour route march. We were on our way back from landing-craft training. We had to walk back about 75 miles, so we walked the first day and at night when we stopped for supper, it started to rain. It was a choice to walk or sleep (in the rain), so we told them we better walk. So we walked all night. That would be 24 hours."
They weren't carrying full packs but he said they had about 30 pounds of equipment on their backs.
He entered the war in July 1943 in the Pacific Theater. Training in B.C. included a two-week beach landing course.
He said taking the course meant one thing: they were going to the North Pacific Aleutian Islands that spread west from Alaska. Japanese soldiers had occupied the island of Kiska. Gervais recalled landing on the beach at Kiska in the fog.
There was a rope ladder he and his fellow soldiers climbed down the side of the boat.
"When you think the (bottom of the boat) was at your feet you let go of the rope and step off. Well it was another 20 feet to the ground, so you end up on your back, and you have to move because the next guy is coming down behind you."
Gervais said he didn't hear any firing when he landed, which led to some confusion as to what exactly was happening. The Japanese had already left the island. The fog added to the confusion of the landing however. American soldiers were also landing on the island, and because of some friendly fire through the fog, Gervais' unit lost two soldiers that day.
For about six months he was stationed on that island, two months of which he was living in a foxhole he had dug into the side of a hill.
"There were no buildings, there was no nothing. We had to dig a hole into the side of the hill or wherever. We were there unloading ships. There were thousands and thousands of troops that needed to be fed. Even the coal had to come in by bags and had to be carried off," said Gervais.
They remained on the island for so long as a guard, to make sure the Japanese didn't come back to the island. In the meantime they spent a lot of days on the firing range in order to stay sharp.
Gervais returned to Canada for a couple more months of training before again shipping off, this time to England. He was separated from his unit after he was forced to stay behind to wait for some equipment to be ready for him, but he was thrown in with a new unit for the rest of his time in the army. He never saw any of the guys from his old unit again.
"You just go in with somebody else, and you make friends," said Gervais.
The trip across the Atlantic was the most worrisome time for him, he said, because the biggest concern was German U-boats lying beneath the ocean's surface. Passage to the British Isles was uneventful however and he spent some time waiting before heading to mainland Europe.
Gervais was in England for a few weeks before moving into Belgium and the Netherlands. He and his unit were behind the line, waiting to be called up if there were casualties on the line, but that didn't last long before the war ended.
His duty ended up consisting mostly of guard duty with the Â鶹´«Ã½AV Sask. Regiment. A lot of the time he was guarding bridges and keeping civilians from moving anywhere they pleased, as they needed passes at the time. There were also a lot of German prisoners who were heading back to Germany.
"They were sending German prisoners (back to Germany)," he said. "There were about 20,000 every morning that would walk by. After they walked by we had to make sure they didn't get away on us. They were just given discharges, I guess, and they went home after that."
He said the duty was kind of like an everyday "occupation."
Gervais considers himself lucky.
"It felt good to get out of there alive. If I would have been older, I probably would have seen more action, and I might not have come out so easy," he said.
Now Gervais is an 89-year-old veteran who has retired to Estevan. He is a meritorious life member of the Estevan Branch of the Royal Canadian Legion and has received a Palm Leaf, the highest honour one can be bestowed in the Legion. He is a past president of the Estevan Royal Canadian Legion and for three years was a zone commander for District 1, Zone 2. Gervais was discharged from the army immediately following his return to Canada in 1946. Upon his return he came back to Hitchcock and farmed for the next 34 years until his retirement in 1980.
