Canadian Doctors liberate an American jeep.
In 1944, Canadian troops raced inland from Juno Beach, moving into the south of Holland. Army Command was appaulled at what it found.
The people were sick and starving, even eating rats to stay alive.
Three Canadian Army Doctors were sent to Oss, north of Nijmegen to feed and to medically help these people who were so brutally treated during German occupation.
These three Canadian Doctors were billeted in the attic of the local Doctor’s home-Dr Fritz Fonteyn. When the retreating Germans left they took the Doctor’s car and every bicycle in sight.
Doctor Fonteyn found himself walking some 10 hours per day,ministering to his patients, until the Canadians arrived.
They were, in his recollection the most undisciplined military officers he had ever met. They went to Nihmegan and stole a Jeep, from the Americans who had too much of everything. They ran it through a REME shop-(Royal Canadian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers) They repainted the vehicle-gave it new numbers and presented it to Doctor Fonteyn. These three Canadians and Dr. Fonteynthen set about the task at hand.
That jeep became the most famous Jeep in all of Holland. Dr Fonteyn related that the jeep was retired in 1964, after 20 years of service. In a conversation with a Canadian friend working in Holland in 1966, the name Dr. Hans Geggi, inadvertently fell from Dr. Fonteyn’s lips. This Canadian friend knew Hans Geggi of the famous Geggi family of Wakefield Quebec, who had built the Wakefield General Hospital, and was well known to everyone in the Gatineau, and the Ottawa skiing fraternity.
When he returned to Canada in 1967, this mutual friend went to see Dr. Geggi and brought greetings from the Family Fonteyn, of Oss.
Dr. Geggi, packaged up his family and went to the Netherlands, during the summer of 1968, to renew many old aquaintences, in a country that universally loves Canadians for what they did------ gave up their lives, to free yet another nation from a brutal occupation.