Jon sent me an interesting anecdote from The Telegraph. According to this (as far as I know uncorroborated) story, the Canadian soldiers stationed in Britain during the Second World War were far from being boy scouts:
Apparently the manoeuvres had got completely out of hand and some of the people living in the Forest Hill and Shotover areas of the county and adjoining Wheatley were being terrorised by tanks, driven utterly without care and thought through the area.
They ploughed up gardens, ruined hedges and flattened walls and carefully cultivated vegetable plots. Concrete pavements were smashed and local roads were apparently chewed up like ploughed fields.
One woman out for a walk with her children was terrorised by a madman in a tank and had her pram damaged.
Stories of the causes of this irresponsibility abounded and the memory of that awful Sunday lived on for years.
The Canadians had the dubious distinction of having inflicted more damage and fear on the civilian population that the Germans!
I’d not be surprised to hear that there’d been some incidents, but I hadn’t heard of anything of quite this magnitude. Has anyone else heard about it before?
