When rumours of another war in Europe began buzzing around his community in 1939, Foster decided it was time to rekindle that feeling he’d had aboard the barnstormer’s autogiro. He and two close friends—Dave Heathcote and Bob Aldrick—had seen some Royal Air Force recruiting folders and had fallen in love with the look of a Supermarine Spitfire depicted on the cover. They immediately wrote away for RAF brochures and application forms.
Neither of Foster’s friends would ever fly a Spitfire. Dave Heathcote was killed in a Harvard crash during pilot training and Bob Aldrick became an air gunner, was shot down overseas, and became a prisoner of war. When Cap Foster finally slipped into the confined cockpit of his beloved Spitfire in early 1943, the fighter aircraft nearly killed him. What ultimately saved him was the experience of thousands of hours of instructional flying and the instincts and reflexes that instructing had developed. It all began when the RAF refused him, but recommended that he join the RCAF.
“I had two very strong and long-standing reasons for joining the air force,” Foster said. “First, I wanted to fulfil that dream I’d had ever since my ride in the autogiro. And second, I had a score to settle with the Germans. In the First World War, my father was gassed and taken prisoner at the Second Battle of Ypres. He spent thirty-eight months working eighteen hours a day in German salt mines at Bienrode, and during that time he was beaten and tortured by German prison guards.” Foster’s father was Mohawk, a full-blooded descendant of Chief Joseph Brant, and Foster maintained that the colour of his father’s skin had provoked the abuse he’d received as a POW at Bienrode. His introduction to air force life might well have suggested he was up against a similar prejudice.
“I reported to No. 1 RCAF Manning Pool, located on the Canadian National Exhibition grounds in Toronto,” Foster wrote. “My first few days there were spent shovelling out sheep pens and then sleeping beside the piles of manure.”
The 352 acres of the Canadian National Exhibition grounds had been the site of a yearly exhibition and fair. The Ex had always boasted one of the finest amusement parks in North America, one of the most popular grandstand shows on the entertainment circuit, and one of the biggest livestock competitions in the world. When war was declared, a week after the 1939 CNE closed, the grounds took on a brand new identity—No. 1 RCAF Manning Depot—and the space used for housing thousands of prized cattle, pigs, horses, and sheep became the new barracks for a mustering air force.
While Cap Foster cleaned sheep stalls, a young photographer from east-end Toronto managed to escape the clean-up because his medical revealed varicose veins. Ken Smith, who later instructed pilots in aerial photo reconnaissance, remembers the extraordinary renovations going on at the Coliseum, the main livestock quarters of the CNE.
“For several weeks,” Smith wrote in September 1939, “each morning [they were] hosing down the bullpen, where the cattle had been and where the [military] drilling would be, and scrubbing up the General Exhibits area, which was to be the bunkrooms. The upstairs had been the poultry show, and it meant pushing along the cracks in the wooden floor with a long stick with a nail on the end to push out the chicken lice, vacuuming the floor, and then washing it down. This took a number of mornings.
“Double bunks were eventually installed . . . 1,000 bunks upstairs and 1,000 down. Soon, although my home was in Toronto, we all had to live in. The bunkrooms were not always quiet late at night. Along the end of each bunkroom was a row of washbasins and taps for morning ablutions, etc. I was in the lower bunkroom. And every once in a while one of the tin washbasins would come sailing over the railing to land with a satisfying (for those upstairs) crash on the cement floor, fairly close to our bunks. They put up chicken wire to forestall this habit.”
“I was in where they used to put feed for the pigs,” Harvey Timberlake said. At the outbreak of war, he had taken his six-foot-two, 110-pound frame to the recruiting office. They took one look at him and told him to “go home, drink beer and milk, and put some weight on.” When he was at last accepted, he was marched down Bay Street, straight to the CNE and “Manning Depot, where they put us into the pigpen. They had long troughs in the pens and that’s where you all stood up and urinated.
“As soon as we got there, it was, ‘Shirts up, pants down, peckers out.’ Imagine a couple of hundred men standing in the horse ring with their pants down, waiting to receive short arm inspection. I didn’t care; I’d been delivering groceries to prostitutes when I was ten. But most of the boys cried.”
Medical officers were anxious to prevent any outbreaks of disease. The air force doctors often assembled recruits in the drill hall and conducted elementary sex education (what an Edmonton recruit called “cock and ball lectures”), during which the medical officer would lecture on the consequences of failing to use condoms and show graphic pictures of genitalia covered with VD sores.
There were 1,400 RCAF Aircraftmen 2nd Class (AC2s or “Acey Deuceys”) in the converted pigpen barracks with Timberlake. Plenty of them joined up initially because of patriotism; there was still enough anti-German sentiment left over from the 1914–18 war to fuel a young man’s emotions and patriotic fervour. Many came from parts of Canada that had limped through ten years of depression; the air force offered the first potential paying job and regular meals in a decade. Some who enlisted were in search of adventure as far from Canada as they could get. Others responded to peer pressure to sign up, or joined to get away from girl troubles or tensions at home. But the new world they entered was daunting at first.
“All the stabbing of my arms, the endless series of vaccinations”: that’s Chuck McCausland’s memory of his first days at Manning Depot. Unable to enlist right away, because he worked with Ontario Hydro (considered an essential service), McCausland had finally been called up to Toronto; he remembers that “you went in one day and it would be a smallpox shot in the left arm, the next day German measles in the right arm. I don’t think there was anything they didn’t inoculate you for.”
Harold Lancaster, a farm boy from Elgin County, in southwestern Ontario, had had scarlet fever shots at school, but “when they checked me in the air force, I tested positive. A bunch of us tested positive, so they moved us to the Automotive Building and quarantined us there for three weeks. I’ll always remember one of those first mornings, when that old bugle went, I thought, ‘What in hell have you got yourself into, Lancaster?’”
The routine that Lancaster and thousands of his fellow recruits soon got used to was an indoctrination to air force life—a sort of boot camp—where you marched and cleaned animal pens, paraded and washed latrines, got vaccinations and learned to salute with your left arm while the right arm was sore from the vaccine, drilled in the horse arenas, and got your head shaved. The object was to reduce every volunteer to the lowest common denominator so that the air force could rebuild you in its own image. In most cases, the architect of that rebuilding was a foul-mouthed, raspy-voiced, unsympathetic senior drill sergeant. After a while the endless vaccinations and embarrassing crotch examinations seemed a picnic by comparison to a day “down on the parade square with the sergeant-major, who really thought he was J.C.,” as AC2 Timberlake remembered.
“From the first day, this was the guy who was going to make men out of us. He was out to break our spirit. He’d march us around for hours on end, put us all in a row, slap us between the shoulder blades, and yell ‘Stand up’ till some of the boys started to cry.”
“Our sergeant-major stood up on the mezzanine [of the cow palace],” Harold Lancaster said, “watching and pacing and shouting out commands. And he always said, ‘How in hell do you guys ever expect to fly aircraft in formation when you can’t even walk in a parade?’”
“Most of us hated his guts,” Timberlake agreed; but they soldiered on despite the insults, the blistered feet, and the exhaustion, because the reward for enduring the drill sergeant’s abuse was that first set of regulation boots and air force blues. That uniform, no matter how ill fitting, no matter how scratchy around the neck and down the legs, seemed to compensate for the weary muscles and bruised egos.
“When you were