With or without a gusset, ill fitting or not, the RCAF uniform could barely contain the pride of the Aircraftman 2nd Class inside. That too was something the air force (knowingly or unknowingly) counted on, because built into the blues that the recruits wore was a new-found sense of esprit de corps and responsibility.
Yet, as rigidly as air force regulations governed things and as busy as the blow-hard drill sergeant kept his recruits, there was bound to be trouble; as former lacrosse and football player Jeff Mellon painted it, “that’s where a kind of mob rule took over. People would steal wallets. And snipping wrist-watches was pretty common. But if a guy was ever caught stealing, he’d be taken into the shower and roughed up pretty good, with eight guys standing guard at the door.”
“I remember one night we found a guy lifting stuff out of a bunk,” Bob Hesketh recalled; he had joined the air force because it seemed the most glamorous of the services, but an introduction to barracks justice quickly changed his view. “Six or seven of us chased this guy all over the barracks. We finally caught him and kicked the shit out of him. It was never reported.”
“Everybody knew if you got caught, that’s what happened to you,” Bill Lennox confirmed. Employed before the war in the pulpwood camps outside Port Arthur, Ontario, Lennox was familiar with the severity of life and justice in a work camp. Manning Depot justice was the same, because “there were thousands of guys down there. If a guy got started stealing, well then, you couldn’t leave anything any place. The rule was, if you caught anybody stealing, just make sure he’s got one breath of life left in him when the medical officer got there.
“I saw one guy drummed out of the service at Manning Depot. Holy Jeez, it was impressive. He was paraded with the slow roll of the drums into the Coliseum. It was packed with airmen. And they led this fellow in and just stripped him of everything that was air force. They stripped his brass off. Stripped off everything he had. His buttons came off and everything else.”
Each day’s procedure and activity was carefully laid out for air force volunteers. When a recruit was officially inducted at Manning Depot, he was handed a sheet of paper that itemized seventy procedures, from procuring socks and shirts to getting X-rays and inoculations. Each procedure had to be completed, each item on the list initialled. (Somebody calculated that if each procedure were actually followed to the letter, it would have taken Manning Depot two years to process recruits.)
New acronyms entered the air recruits’ vocabulary. They learned KRs and ACIs—the King’s Regulations and Air Council Instructions. They had to pay close attention to DROs—the Daily Routine Orders—and specifically to the back pages of those orders, to discover which recruits would staff the kitchen, when they’d clean latrines, or where they’d conduct ground policing. There was an expression that very much summed up life in the air force in those early weeks at Manning Depot: “If it was on the ground, you picked it up. If you couldn’t pick it up, you painted it. If you couldn’t paint it, you saluted it.”
“I learned a valuable air force lesson one day,” Jack Harris recalled. He’d grown up in the west end of Toronto, not far from the CNE grounds. (In fact most of his air force career would be served within a hundred miles of his Humber Bay home as a service flying instructor.) “They had this French-Canadian corporal who had us all lined up. And he says, ‘How many of you fellas can drive trucks?’ Well, three of us put our hands up, because we figured we were going to get an interesting assignment. And he says, ‘There’s a pile of asphalt that’s got to be removed, so here’s the wheelbarrow and the picks. Get at it, guys!’ So I learned early in the game: Never volunteer.”
Of course, air force days weren’t all KP, PT, and BS. Within weeks of its opening, No. 1 RCAF Manning Depot had an auditorium with a stage run by Oscar Pearson of the Central Toronto YMCA, who supplied various types of entertainment. Soon a library was assembled, lounges arranged, and soccer teams organized for games in the CNE parking lots. From among those recruits who excelled at the rhythm and discipline of parade drill, the air force assembled precision drill teams to perform at the CNE grandstand and the annual Grey Cup football game at Varsity Stadium.
The moment that New Brunswick recruit Dick Ross remembered best was his introduction to a “wet canteen.”
“‘What the hell’s that?’ I asked.
“‘We can go there and get a drink,’ they said.
“‘You mean liquor?’
“‘Well, beer,’ they said.
“So we go in. You could cut the smoke, it’s so thick. And the rattle and smell of things, it’s incredible. Anyway, I got a bottle of beer and sat there and drank it. And the waiter came around and said, ‘Have another?’
“‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘I’m already feeling this.’
“‘How many have you had?’ the waiter asked. I held up one finger and he said, ‘How can just one bother you?’
“I said, ‘When I look up at the lights, they’re flickering.’
“And he asked, ‘Where you from?’
“‘Moncton.’
“And he laughed as he said, ‘That’s it. You’re used to sixty-cycle electric power. We’ve got twenty-five up here, twenty-five times a second. Your eyes aren’t accustomed to it. But they will. So you can have another beer all right.’”
There were many such discoveries at Manning Depot. Jim Coyne had experienced a lot in his nineteen years before joining up and coming to the CNE barracks. He had hunted and fished and thrived on backwoods cooking at his home at The Pas, Manitoba. Air force food, he discovered, would never be as good. John Clinton had been in the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry Reserve before he enlisted in the RCAF and came to Toronto, but he still couldn’t believe the sheer numbers of men, the confusion, or the twenty-four-hour-a-day poker games at the Coliseum barracks. And in the quiet of one evening at the Horse Palace at No. 1 Manning Depot, Herb Liebman was sitting on his bunk, when “a blond fellow from up North came up and sat down beside me.
“‘Are you Jewish?’ he asked.
“I said, ‘Yes, I am.’
“And he said, ‘I’ve never seen a Jew before. My father warned me before I left home. He told me to be careful of the Jews.’
“I talked with him a long while. It was a totally innocent question. There was nothing malicious about it. He was a nice fellow, and we were quite friendly after that. Things like that happened in those days.”
Tolerance had its limits, however. George Bain had already begun his career in journalism as a stringer for the Toronto Telegram. He remembered Manning Depot in the dying moments of one of those first event-filled days, when, as thousands of physically drained recruits were near sleep, someone would yell into the silence: “Anybody here from the West?”
“Yes, sir,” would come back some lone, naive voice.
And everyone in the place would yell back, “Fuck the West!”
Wherever he was from, the day a civilian arrived at Manning Depot, his life changed permanently. However, for Cap Foster, the self-proclaimed master of “casual bravado,” things didn’t change completely until the day after he arrived at the CNE.
“I had been a boxer all the way through high school,” Foster recalled, “and I used to spar with Harry McLean, the welterweight champion at Queen’s University. The day I joined the air force, I was on the card at Maple Leaf Gardens. So I went to ask permission to fight that night. They didn’t give it to me. But I snuck out anyway and won my fight by a first-round knock-out.
“Next morning, I was called in and asked about it. Fortunately, the newspaper had misprinted the