| Joining Up - The Enlistment Experience |
| by Stanley Scislowski
Perth Regt, 5th CDN ARMD DIV, 1943-1945 |
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| Part III - Into Army Life |
| The next morning bright and early there
came into our midst a squat and unlikely figure of a soldier with a single
chevron on his upper sleeve. None of us had ever seen the guy before, but
we all had him pegged the minute
he walked into view. Here was the original square peg in a round hole. Cpl. Rotenberg was the guy's name, a Jewish boy that looked to be more of a sheeny than an NCO. He really wasn't all that bad of a guy, however, and no one took him seriously. In fact, there was a tendency to ridicule and poke good-natured fun at him. He tried hard to affect the serious manner of a career soldier but he couldn't bring it off. He simply didn't have it, and he made himself even more a caricature of a soldier, a butt of jokes and ridicule, every time he tried to show his authority. But aside from that, in no way was he a dummy. Not by a longshot. In fact he had a wide streak of the 'con man' in him. It didn't take us long to find this out. |
| After a couple of days, Rotenberg came
around with an electric iron to lease out, and the fee wasn't exactly cheap.
Business wasn't booming, and eventually fell to zero. So, Rotenberg the
squat, shrewd little huckster,
decided to raffle it off. With something close to 500 guys in two drafts in the barracks, and with tickets at two-bits apiece, he did a roaring business from all of us suckers. No one, though, had the presence of mind to ask him when the draw would be held... and therein was the 'kicker'. He waited just long enough for the drafts to be on their way to points east. By this time it was too late to hold the draw, and so, the winner could only be Lance Corporal Rotenberg, the shyster. As I later learned, he pulled off the same stunt when the next big batch of recruits came along; he had to have made himself a few hundred dollars out of every draft, from less than a ten dollar investment. It's a bloody miracle someone didn't wise up to the little lard-assed con artist and beat his brains in. |
| I think it was on the third day in the service that we were allowed to go home wearing our new uniform, even though we still hadn't been officially sworn-in to the Canadian Army. As proud as I was of my new 'get up', I was a little too self-conscious, and went home by way of the Essex Terminal tracks instead of walking down the streets or taking a bus. However, after another couple of days rolled by, I shed this juvenile self-consciousness. |
| The only part of the uniform I hated was
the wedge-cap. The blamed thing refused to stay on my head no matter how
I planted it. It had to be the shape of my head. It just wasn't made for
wearing wedge-caps. It got so I had to walk with my head canted at
a two or three degree angle to the left all the time to keep it from falling
off. To salute was to ask for trouble. Up smartly with the arm, palm turned
towards the salutee, and then straight down, and almost every time this
happened, off would come the wedge. Even the slightest movement,
an abrupt turn of my head, a nod, or a slight breeze would
set the cap in motion. It would begin a slow but sure slide towards my
right ear where it would pause a moment before the final plunge.
On the square it gave me fits. After almost every move I'd have to make
a frantic grab to keep it from falling. It was a problem that never went
away until
some smart guy up in Ottawa decided the wedge would have to go. Too many complaints about it from guys like myself, or so I assumed.. but it wasn't until about a year later in Italy when the abominable wedge-cap was finally replaced by berets, something that fell in between what I called the 'Scottish cow-plasters' and the kind of berets the British Commandos wore. Not a smart-looking beret like the one that took us through the final year or so of the war, but a hell of a lot better than what had replaced the wedge-cap. At least it would stay on my head. |
| The Church Parade |
| Four days after I'd donned the uniform we went on our first church parade, compulsory, of course. Since I had given my religion as Roman Catholic, which was duly marked on records and in my Service Book, and having been issued the pressed fibre dog-tags with RC embossed along with my name and rank, I naturally formed with the RCs. But let me explain here first; the only time I ever stepped inside a church since I was able to walk, was at a couple of funerals. My mother, because of a falling-out with the Roman Catholic religion after her first husband's death (not my father) in Montreal during the great flu epidemic in 1918 (when millions around the world died), never insisted that we attend church, although she did bring us up to recognize and believe in God and Jesus, by telling us stories from the bible. We weren't exactly ignorant or paganistic when it came to religion. When all the other RC kids in the neighbourhood where dutifully trooping off to the church every Sunday, none of us from the Scislowski/Hedgewick clan did so. If it was spring, summer and early autumn, Pete, Mike, Joe and I would be out at the golf courses earning a buck or two. In winter, we'd be either preparing our neighbourhood skating rink for flooding, or skating whenever there was ice. And so it went. |
| Now that I was in the army, attendance
on church parades was compulsory, and I marched off in the smaller group
of RC adherents to St.Anne's Church across the road from Walkerville Collegiate.
When the parade was
broken off in front of the church and the guys trooped up the wooden stairs to the entrance of the small, wood-frame church I knew I'd made a mistake by not joining the Protestant parade. As each man entered the church he'd dip his fingers in a fount just inside the entrance and touched them to his head and both shoulders in the sign of the cross. When I saw this I felt like backtracking because I'd never done that before, and I wasn't sure if I'd do it right even though it was about as simple a ritual as any could be. I must have done it right, or else no one noticed any wrong move on my part, but then came another unsettling moment. As the men came to the aisle leading to the pews, each one fell to one knee and again crossed themselves. This was not for me, I remember the thought passing through my mind. Already I was beginning to formulate plans for switching churches and attending the Protestant Church Service the next Sunday. |
| The Catholics were making this too complicated.
They knelt again before filing into a pew. And as confusing to me as all
this was, the Service itself was a 'lost cause' - it was in Latin, so I
didn't understand a word being said; besides, half the time I didn't know
when to get up, when to sit, and when to kneel. I simply did what everyone
else did, although with a split second delayed action. When it was all
over with, I knew exactly what I'd be
doing the following Sunday - I'd enter the ranks of the Protestants because I knew it would be a lot simpler and at least be spoken in English. And that's what I did from then on - I went on the Protestant Church parades. No one questioned me why I did, so everyone must have assumed I was Protestant. This switch had a minor repercussion, in my favour I'm glad to say, not long after our Liri Valley offensive, but that's a story for another time. |
| Marching On |
| WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 1942 was the big day for me. It was on this day that I was formally sworn into the Canadian Army. About a dozen or so of us recruits crowded into Major H.L. Petrie's office on the ground floor at about four in the afternoon for the brief swearing-in ritual. It was a simple ceremony conducted as we stood in a semi-circle around his desk; he read out our names and the required oath of allegiance, and we, with our right hands raised in prescribed manner, repeated the oath after him. Then it was all over with. I was now a Canadian soldier - untrained as yet - but a Canadian soldier nonetheless, ready to fight for King and Country and with hopes of one day winning the coveted VC. My Regimental number: A116651. |
| Although St. Luke Road Barracks was, by designation, an enlistment centre or depot, a certain amount of basic military training was carried out in the form of parade drill. Marching was no mystery to me, since I'd been exposed to it ever since Grade Six at elementary school. Our gym teacher, Wilfred Day, an Imperial Army veteran of the 1st World War, went out of his way to teach us how to march and do drill. At that time all drill was done in columns of 'fours', as compared to today's 'threes'. Anyway, by the time I got to secondary school (Windsor Vocational) I knew all the proper moves, and the further training in regards to drill in the Cadet program at school enhanced what I had already learned. Now that I was in the army, I, along with all the others in the draft who'd had marching and drill training, picked up right where we left off at school. It all came easy to us. Others who didn't have any previous experience with marching drill took a little longer to get the 'hang' of it and after a couple of weeks of basic training drill became every bit as good at it as the best of us. A few never did quite know what to do with their feet or their arms,and they sure took a verbal beating for it. "What the hell's the matter with you, you got two left feet or something?" It was a hopeless task. I don't know what ever became of them after I left Basic and went on to the next level of training. |
| It was tough marching behind the guys who never did pick up marching and drill skills. If they weren't forever out of step, it was the way they moved in general that made it tough for those of us who happened to be behind them. Their timing was off just enough to throw you off. It didn't matter how they marched, whether with a band or without, this type made life for the unfortunate guy who followed in their wake, something of an agonizing experience. They had no sense of rhythm, no sense of co-ordination. As bad as it was on the square, it was worse when we marched along the city streets to the admiring gaze of a civilian audience. It was embarrassing. Having to forever skip in changing step made it look to the onlookers that you didn't know how to march. I could understand exactly what the drill instructors had to put up with in trying to get these club-footed wonders, these plough-jockeys, to know their left from their right. |
| Thus endeth the First Week! |
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