CLEMENT PEARCE
Birth Place: Toronto, Ontario
Residence: Toronto, Ontario
Squadron: 101 Squadron RCAF
Theater of War: NW Europe

I’ll never forget the way the war came home to me. It was Sunday morning and my parents were due back from a holiday that afternoon. There was a knock on the door and a telegram delivery boy stood there, whistling. This was quite an event: we’d never received a telegram.

“We regret to inform you that Sergeant Basil Vincent Pearce is missing in air operations over Germany. Letter to follow.” It was a long afternoon waiting for my parents to arrive home. When they did, I murmured to my father, “Come out to the garden with me.” He read it quietly, and then had to go back in to tell my mother. To this day, I can still hear her shriek of anguish. I was sixteen, six years younger than my brother Basil, and it was at that moment I decided I had to enlist in the air force.

It took us about an hour and a half before we were on our start line and we crossed that at one-thirty, which was the time we were supposed to, and away we went. It took us about two and a half, three hours to reach the radar station, and about an hour and a half to take it. It was just starting to get dusk by the time we had everything secure and mopped up and all the dead bodies out.

My platoon was thirty-seven men and myself. I had three killed and eight wounded, which was very light. In any attack, you take certain key people and keep others back, in case anything disastrous happens. Then you have a nucleus to re-form around. On this particular assault, I left Hutch back at A echelon and took another sergeant, who was killed rushing the enemy. He was trying to get underneath the machine gun fire to get grenades in the pillbox slots around the radar station. He just ran a little too far and was exposed a little too long. He pushed a little too hard.
Charles Scot-Brown, a CANLOAN officer with the Gordon Highlanders, landed on D-Day in the British sector, shown here in the morning of June 6th, 1944. CANLOAN officers suffered extremely high casualty rates and forty-one received the Military Cross.

When I saw Saving Private Ryan, there was a scene where the captain played by Tom Hanks was very upset when he lost his sergeant at the radar station. That was just how it looked and felt to me. I kept thinking, “Did I do something wrong? What could I have done to save him? Why did he do that? Should I have gone instead of him?”

When they took us over, we landed at Dieppe, which was just being taken over by the Canadians again. We had to go in by little boat to land, since no proper harbour had been established. Our field hospital was just some tents pitched in a farmer’s field. There was so much rain and mud, no food, and basically no drinking water except for the rain. We got everything set up and it wasn’t long before we got patients flooding into us. This is the sad part, all these kids coming back. It was so tragic, all these boys with arms and legs blown off. You can’t explain what it’s like to try and deal with all these casualties. They were filled with shrapnel and had every imaginable injury. I think they were just glad to see a nurse, a friendly face, after what they had been through. To be able to lie in a bed with sheets, and to have some loving care, so to speak, get a little tenderness: I know it meant a lot to them.

A field hospital in France. Nora Cook (extreme right) with colleagues and friends.

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