D-Day invasion remembered

History records that nearly 160,000 troops crossed the English Channel for Normandy on D‑Day, June 6, 1944. Among them was 20‑year‑old Charles "Charlie" Reid, who grew up on a farm at Old Ridge just north of St. Stephen. He drove a diesel‑powered Sherman tank off a landing craft into the water and up the beach with four other crew members on board.
"There was a bunch that went in before we did, and they took the brunt of it. We landed and went up behind a hedgerow and took our waterproofing off. I was the driver; there were five of us of a crew," the musician and retired mechanic recalls at 97 in his Crocker Hill home before Remembrance Day. This crew went through at least four tanks before Nazi Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945. "There was three of them [tanks] we actually had to bail out of. Take our chances. Get down on your belly in the wheat field and crawl," he says.
"The first one we lost; we had to bail out and hear those old bullets snapping over your head, machine gun and sniper bullets. The Germans were around. We were right down on our belly. A fellow name of Williams was the gunner, and he was crawling with his rear end stuck up in the air. We said, 'Get your a** down so you won't get hit!'" he recalls. "And the five of us, we survived that day," he says.
Charles Reid, the second of three children of Fred and Martha (Groom) Reid, graduated from St. Stephen High School when he was not quite 16 years old in 1939. He worked at Joe and Ken Thomas' service station, then at Haley Lumber sawing "shooks" for ammunition boxes until he joined the army at age 19 in 1942.
He trained in Fredericton, Camp Utopia, Camp Borden, Ont., and Windsor, N.S., before embarking for Europe at Pier 21 in Halifax, N.S., in 1943. "And the next morning everybody was sick, but I wasn't. I never got sick. We were seven days going over, dodging around for submarines and stuff," he remembers.
He landed in Greenock, Scotland, took a train to Blackdown, England, then to Brighton. A truck took troops to Windsor "to pick up our D‑Day tanks," then back to Brighton to waterproof them and finally to Gosport to load onto landing craft. "When we were going down through England to get to Gosport, I never saw so much equipment, artillery, trucks, tanks, everything, all lined up, ready to ship over for the invasion," he says.
At Le Mesnil‑Patry his unit lost all but three of at least 21 tanks. "And that's where we lost a lot of men that I never saw afterwards, didn't know where they were gone, but we survived, the five of us in our tank."
He recalled a wounded man the tank crew could not stop to pick up. He remembered putting his tank into reverse and flooring it to get out of harm's way, shooting a shell at a pesky German machine gun and getting lost one night on guard duty. He survived action in France, Holland, Belgium and Germany. He shared army rations with starving Dutch families and ran into other soldiers from home. He saw "old General Montgomery" in his Jeep at the Reichswald Forest. After the war ended in Europe the army put him to work repairing military vehicles at Arnhem.
He landed back at Pier 21 in Halifax in 1946. He took a train to Saint John then a bus to St. Stephen, where his mother and father met him on the front street. "I got home -- survived. It was great to get home," he says.
Reid did carpentry work and a bit of farming until Joe and Ken Thomas asked him to return to the service station. He worked at J. Clark and Sons car dealership, the provincial highways garage and Chet Hyslop's garage. He returned to the highways garage for over 20 years before retiring.
He started a family. He also picked up the violin again, something he had little time for in the army. Reid's father, who worked in the Canadian Pacific Railway machine shop, played the violin. His mother played the pump organ at church and piano at home. He started playing at nine, first whistling and the harmonica before picking up his father's violin.
"After the war your nerves are pretty well rattled. Things you wanted to do, you get worked up about it, and you couldn't do it. You get stressed out," he says. "That's helped me a lot, playing music." Today, he and others play at the hospital and local seniors' homes. He has built 11 or 12 violins.
"And, you know, my Dad never played the violin while I was in the army, never played it. As soon as I came home, he started playing again," he says.