The Sixth Of June

June 6 always means "D Day" to me as it did to my dad. He missed out on it by about a month but did get over there in time to see the devastation left of the battle. Burned out Sherman tanks and dead bodies of animals (and a few humans) were quite the shock. He said he did not have much hope of ever getting out of there alive. Somehow they fought their way through the next months til the war ended in May of the next year.
I've posted some of his memoirs here over the years but have been pretty slow at posting the rest of them. I am lucky he wrote down his account of his journey and saved photos of the places he was and the people he saw along the way. This photo was taken on Wangerooge island after the war ended. Dad at centre and Alec Abel on the left. I got to meet Alec in later years.

In other news, last fall's harvest is done as of a week ago today. That dry dead straw just disintegrated going through the combine and the wheat was the driest I've ever combined. It won't be worth much, just a little less loss in a poor crop year. And here is the video.

Probably not news that the wind is still blowing like a hurricane trying to tear everything loose. We did get one nice quiet day this week and it was yesterday. I went at it as hard as I could and managed to get two fields of chem fallow sprayed. Might have done more but heavy fog made for a late morning start and the 30 miles of road driving, at 14 mph, used up a lot of time.

Remembrance Day 2015

Nice sized crowd showed up for the Remembrance Day service today. Every year they read off the list of veterans and legion members who have passed on and it grows a little longer every time. Here is a photo of 4 who have been on that list for a while. My dad, Les Goff at left was a veteran of WWII and his experiences as a gunner in the 18th anti tank battery of the Canadian army have been written about on the blog previously. Memories of WWII
Next, a good neighbour, Phil Fisher, also a veteran of WWII. Next, my grandfather , Horace Nevard, who served in the Canadian Army in WWI.
His experiences have been mentioned on the "Nevardblog" more than a few times.

Finally , at extreme right is Caleb Fisher who served in the Boer war as well as WWI. They all got together for this photo sometime in the mid 1960s.

Airgraph

Nothing too exciting here. I happened to be watching an episode of Wartime Farm recently. An excellent depiction of life on a farm during WWII in England. The term  airgraph came up and it seemed familiar to me. Sure enough, after searching through some of the "museum" I found a couple that were sent from Wimborne, Dorset, England to Saskatchewan to my dad's cousins in 1944. Airgraphs were a means of compacting mail during the war when transportation was difficult at times. The letters were photographed on microfilm which was much smaller and easier to transport and mail. Then re-printed into a letter at some point. Here are a couple of scans of mine.