By Owen – Grade 5
During World War 2, Cecil was a soldier in the Canadian army. During one of his missions in the military, he was sent to take over some hydroelectric plants that had been occupied by the Germans. The Germans knew that the Canadians were coming and they had fled the plant the day before the Canadians arrived. This made Cecil’s mission much easier.
When Cecil arrived at the hydroelectric plant, he was with about 17 other soldiers. Most of the soldiers went inside the building to rest. Cecil and another soldier were on guard duty, so they walked around the inside of the plant to see if anything was wrong. It was very easy to check around the plant because it was open. But it turned out that everything was alright.
At about 8:00 am in the morning Cecil and the other soldier decided to lay down and have a sleep. So they got their clothes off and had a sleep. They went to sleep in the building that had cardboard everywhere on the floor. The plant was filled with coal, all over the yard and everywhere – so it was much cleaner for the soldiers to sleep on the cardboard.
Cecil’s buddy was sleeping in a corner and Cecil was sleeping under a window. All of the sudden, Cecil heard a buzz bomb going off. A buzz bomb flies about 400 feet in the air. It’s fueled by gasoline and when the gasoline runs out, the bomb drops right away. When it hits the ground, shards of steel go everywhere. Cecil had heard and seen a lot of these when he went to England and other parts of Europe. Cecil heard this one flying above them, and he thought it was just going to pass over, but all the sudden it stopped. This was a bad sign, because it meant that the bomb was now falling and would soon explode.
Cecil yelled at the other guy, and told him to get under the nearby window he had been sleeping under. They heard the bomb go off, so they got out of the building and they saw the two guys who had taken their places on guard duty. The two soldiers had hit the ground, but they hit the ground in coal dust. When Cecil and his partner ran over to them, they were just getting up with their faces black as oil and coal dust soaked into their skin.
After that, the soldiers ran down to the nearby canal and there was a man, a wife and a little girl who was four or five years old. The man was carrying her up out of the canal, as a shard of glass had hit her in the head when the buzz bomb had exploded. The glass had hit her in a bad spot and she was covered in blood from head to toe. Cecil immediately ran up to the soldiers who had stayed behind in the hydroelectric plant. He asked them if they had any first aid equipment, to be used on civilians. The soldiers said they didn’t. Cecil had to come up with a new plan quickly. It turned out that all of the soldiers had something they called a shell dressing which they attached to their legs. These packages had medical supplies in it, so if a soldier was wounded he could use it to bandage himself up. The military rule was that soldiers were only supposed to use these dressings on themselves, and could get in big trouble if they used them on someone else. At this point, Cecil did not care about the rule, because he really wanted to help the little girl.
Cecil asked 8 of the other soldiers to take out their “shell dressing” medical supplies and hand it to the man who was holding the little girl, to stop her bleeding. Fortunately, when they got her cleaned up, they discovered she had a bad cut – but she was going to be alright. She didn’t have to go to the hospital or anything. That little girl was very lucky, because she could have been another victim of a “buzz kill”.
