Retired trooper Yvon Couture was a member of The Sherbrooke Regiment and he remembers a weekend exercise in 1962 at Ferme McBain in St-Elie d'Orford during a snowstorm. “He had no tank fire in that training area. The terrain was rugged. It allowed us to do driving and armored maneuver exercises. It was slippery in some places.
The Sherman ran on diesel. It had a lot of wear and it smoked terribly when you let it go. It was a normal thing that when you choked the engine of the vehicle, you paid the beer to the crew. The Sgt was doing it on purpose to make us stop on the hill. All the drivers were caught at least once. Mr. Waren Begle comments as follows: “The field was too small and we were often in first gear. We had a contest to try to get the most speed. A crew consisted of 4 soldiers in a Sherman tank. All the instructors, sergeants and more, had served in the Second World War. The tank made very deep scratches. »
Yvon Couture “Another weekend, a Friday evening, we left for Petawawa by bus. The bus had stopped, a breakdown? Everyone went down to push in very cold weather. Then hop we go, we were on the road again. On the Petawawa base, we had Centurion type tanks for training. In live fire, there was six rows of Sherman tanks firing into a front line. High behind us, the Centurions were firing over their heads. We could feel our heads getting pushed into our shoulders and the ground also shook. We were shooting HE, smoke and Armor Piercing. Browning machine guns were also fired, but it was forbidden to fire a box of bullets all at once. »
One of the differences between the tanks was that the Sherman had two driving arms while the Centurion had only one driving arm. Regular Force drivers had stronger left legs from working with the clutch. A huge, life-size centurion was drawn on the wall of Petawawa's dining hall.
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