Norman William "Bill" Wiles

1922 -

• Name	Norman William "Bill" Wiles
  Born	19 Apr 1922
  Gender	Male
  Military	WW2
  Name	Bill Wiles
  Residence	5 Maurice St., Kitchener, Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada
  Eby ID Number	Waterloo-195119
  Person ID	I195119	Generations
  Last Modified	7 Nov 2024

  
  

  Father	Oscar Wiles,   b. 26 Feb 1893, Waterloo Twp., Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada ,   d. 27 Mar 1980, Kitchener, Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada  (Age 87 years)
  Mother	Maria Elizabeth Biesel,   b. 16 Jun 1897, Baden, Wilmot Twp., Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada ,   d. Yes, date unknown
  Married	Apr 1916
  Family ID	F42885	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

  Family	Marjorie Pigeon,   d. 2003
  Last Modified	12 Nov 2024
  Family ID	F9130	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

• Notes

  'We knew what fear was' Kitchener man, 96, recalls Second World War service in Normandy, Netherlands by Catherine Thompson Waterloo Region Record KITCHENER - Bill Wiles wasn't a war hero, and he wasn't in the thick of battle, but at 96, his memories of his time as a soldier in Europe in the Second World War still burn bright. Wiles, a trained carpenter, served as a sapper in the Royal Canadian Engineers, 1st Canadian Army, Mechanical Equipment Company. "We built bridges, and we did a variety of chores so that we could advance the troops," Wiles explained in a recent interview from his room in a Kitchener nursing home. Sappers did everything from building temporary Bailey bridges, to using bulldozers and graders to remove German roadblocks and clear roads of the rubble from bombed-out buildings so troops and supplies could get through to the front. Wiles enlisted in mid-June 1942, when he was just 20. In photos of him at Camp Petawawa, he looks more like a boy than a man, dressed in shorts and with a wedge cap jauntily tilted to the right. At age 96, his years in the Second World War make up a small but intense part of his long life. But he's one of a shrinking number of local men still alive who helped defeat the Nazis in the Second World War. His wartime service took him to areas that have gone down in history, where Canadian soldiers fought hard in brutal, bloody battles: Normandy just after D-Day, through Belgium, the Netherlands and into Germany. As he got older, Wiles decided to write down his war memories. "Folks at home wanted to know where all we were, and what all we did," he said. His son, also named Bill, helped complete the memoir in 2013 and published a couple of dozen copies for family members. His most vivid memory of the war is the night he huddled off the coast of Normandy in an open landing barge, one that had a 30-centimetre hole blasted into the front from an earlier crossing. It was July 1944, not quite five weeks after the D-Day invasion, but German planes flew overhead, sending out flares to light their positions. In the dark, as the soldiers waited offshore like sitting ducks, all the talk and the training gave way to reality. This was war. As the soldiers moved inland they passed numerous shallow graves along the roadside, the hurried burial spots of German or Canadian soldiers. "This was not a very reassuring sight to behold on our first day," Wiles notes in the memoir. Most of Wiles' service took place some distance behind the battle lines. "I could see the front through a pair of binoculars; it's the nearest that I ever got," he wrote home to his family in August 1944. Nonetheless, life was still scary and dangerous. Shortly after his company landed, two men were shot when Messerschmitts strafed the troops. About a week after he landed, he was caught in the open while on guard duty east of Caen when a German plane began dive-bombing their camp. He had no defence but to huddle behind a stone wall as the shells rained down. "That was real," he recalls now. "We knew what fear was, that's for sure." He doesn't remember ever killing anyone, but lost plenty of friends, young men in their prime and full of life. "We had to do what we went there to do," he says, but "Our primary goal was to get back home."..... When victory finally came in Europe in May 1945, though, the soldiers' reaction was subdued. While the Dutch were jubilant, Wiles and his buddies were content to look on from the sidelines. "I didn't know how to express my feelings. ... Strange wasn't it? For myself, I had expected quite a hilarious celebration," Wiles wrote in the memoir. "Our job was finished and the impression we felt in general was, 'So what?'." It was October before Wiles was able to once again embrace his family and sleep in his old bed in the family home at 5 Maurice St. He met his future wife Marjorie Pigeon the same month he got home, and they married 19 months later. The couple bought a home on Maurice Street, across the street from his parents. Wiles worked for his dad's construction company, Oscar Wiles and Sons Ltd. He and Marjorie went on to have five children and 66 years of marriage, until Marjorie died in 2013. Thompson, C. (2018). 'We knew what fear was' . KitchenerPost.ca. Retrieved 7 November 2018, from https://www.kitchenerpost.ca/news-story/9021996--we-knew-what-fear-was-/?fbclid=iwar30vyif_r9-vqgsazloonnngkhdayjxa7pr0cdczfesosbaiu_8mfdmyya

  
  

• Event Map

  Residence - - 5 Maurice St., Kitchener, Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada  = Link to Google Earth