Parksville veteran Jack Rossiter says returning to the Netherlands this spring was like "going to a second home".
Rossiter was part of a group of 22 veterans who travelled to the Dutch city of Apeldoorn for a celebration that marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Netherlands from the Nazis.
He and the other veterans were greeted by thousands of grateful Dutch, who lined the streets to cheer them on, shake hands and give them flowers.
“They’ve been that way for 82 years now,” said Rossiter, who turns 100 this July. “It was an all-Canadian effort that brought the Netherlands out of German hands.”
He was in the Netherlands for approximately a week, and the group used Apeldoorn as a base to travel out to a few other communities. Businesses treated the Canadian veterans to free dinners and other gestures of gratitude.
“They’re still in love with the Canadians,” Rossiter said.
He was approximately 19 years old when his regiment, the Seaforth Highlanders, was transferred from Italy to the Netherlands in 1945, near the end of the fighting in that theatre of war. Rossiter said the Canadians were serving in a policing role, day and night, as well as bringing in food to feed the population.
"People were starving," he said. "You find somebody who’s down and not well, you pick em up and take them to the Canadian Red Cross groups and so forth and that was about it.”
Rossiter served as an infantryman, and fought in Italy before the 1st Canadian Division was transferred to the Netherlands.
“I came in because I was younger than a lot of the people that were there before and volunteered early, and when I went in as a reinforcement with 16 other guys at the time, north of Naples, and from there on my trip was to the top of the boot in Italy, with the Seaforths,” he said. “When I joined the Seaforths, they’d been in battle for half of the boot [of Italy] by that time, and they carried on until we were just at the northern borders and then the First Canadian Division was moved."
Rossiter is a member of Royal Canadian Legion Branch 76 and has gone back to the Netherlands several times, but said this would be his last journey there: "it’s getting to be a little bit tiring on an old man.”
From September 1944 to April 1945, the First Canadian Army fought German forces to liberate Netherlands, at a cost of 7,600 Canadian soldiers, sailors and airmen killed, according to the Canadian Encyclopedia.
