THE ROYAL CANADIAN LEGION ALBERTA-NWT COMMAND www.abnwtlegion.com 213 There was some talk about a wine cellar being discovered, and the products thereof being indulged in, by him and his mates which was the cause of their confused wandering over the German lines. This seems plausible given the easy availability of wine, the health concerns about local water supplies and the general stress levels that the men were under. Death Martin sometimes talked about the smell of death about the battle area. He said that smell was one of the worst things about being in Monte Cassino. It is said that the sense of smell is intimately connected to memory, so it is no surprise that people would remember a thing like this for the rest of their lives. Swimming It seems like swimming was a pretty good way to let the troops get some exercise and blow off some steam. Apparently, however, some men did drown during these “swimming parades”. Martin would often list off all the places he had swum, presumably as another way of listing countries. “The North Sea, the Adriatic Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean…”. He was quite a swimmer – on their honeymoon, he both impressed and alarmed his wife by swimming across quite a wide body of water on the Scottish Coast (the Firth of Dundee perhaps). From the Railway to the RCE Working on an Italian railway in August 1944 would have been like old times for Martin. One of the reasons that he was put into the Engineer Corps was because of his railroad experience in Canada (and a high score on the M-test, a sort of IQ test given to recruits to place them where their talents could best help the army). Saved from an 88 Millimeter Gun by Pig Dung It can seem amazing that anyone survived the war, sappers or any other unit. Luck helped. His platoon was somewhere in Italy (presumably in and around a farm) when they were shelled by an 88 mm German gun. This was a particularly feared weapon. A shell landed in a large pile of pig dung, blowing up the pile and covering them all with pig dung, but the dung must have muffled the explosion as nobody was badly hurt. Had it not been for that pig dung, he said that they probably would have been killed. This event is not recorded in the War Diary, but it sounds too good to not be true. Slit Trenches These were also referred to as foxholes, though that may have been more of an American army expression than a British/Canadian term. In either case, the idea was to dig in as deeply as you could for protection from bullets and especially shells (shock wave and shrapnel). Generally, they were intended for one man, sometimes two, though in an emergency you might get an extra visitor or two. Martin sometimes talked about how, no matter how tired you were, you had to dig as deep as you could, when you got to a new area, even if you weren’t expected to stay there for very long. Even a few more inches might save your life once the shells started to fall. After the war, he sort of used this as a general rule of life, whenever it looked like someone was cutting corners on a construction job, or if his kids were slacking off while digging the potato patch in the back yard. Mine Clearance Throughout the war, mine detection and clearing (mine sweeping) were important tasks for engineers (and sometimes infantry as well). During the winter lull of late 1944 and early 1945 that was especially true as static warfare with frequent patrols and probing missions resulted in both sides putting down a lot of mines. Martin talked of one of the techniques for detecting mines, prodding. It seemed to involve poking the ground ahead with a knife or bayonet to determine a mine’s location by touch, the knife hitting a part of the mine that didn’t set off the detonator. He said it was stressful, but you got used to it. If you ever got over that, you would be able to get over almost any fear, later in life. It seems like a dangerous technique, but he said that magnetic detectors were not always reliable, especially if there was a lot of shrapnel, etc. in the area. Also, some of the German mines were primarily made of wood and therefore difficult to detect by magnetic means. So, prodding for mines was unavoidable at times. Forgotten Under the Bridge Engineer companies’ duties included preparing bridges for demolition and sometimes actually blowing them up. It is not clear exactly when the incident happened, but another rather celebrated family story involves an occasion when Martin was working on a bridge setting charges for demolition suspended by a line above or perhaps in the water below the bridge. The bridge suddenly came under attack and/or bombardment, and the platoon high-tailed it out of there to the safety of the other side. Unfortunately, they had forgotten all about him. It wasn’t until a fair while later that someone remembered and they went back and rescued him from his predicament. He was rather unhappy about the whole incident. He was left in the cold water for quite a while, unable to move for fear of being spotted by the enemy and being killed or captured. Stepping on a Landmine Not many details were shared to his family regarding his wound, just that he had stepped on a landmine at some time. Apparently, that was while working on the dikes along the Montone River in Northern Italy repairing and maintaining them and de-mining them. The details of that incident will forever be unknown. Perhaps it was a Shu mine that he stepped on, which was known to usually do a lot more damage than just breaking a toe. The army discharge records mention that he had a “fracture of left toe and scar Olausen, Martin Olaf (continued) (continued)
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