During those first weeks in the air force, nearly everybody was assigned to guard duty at some point. RCAF aircraftmen were dispatched from Manning Depot to act as sentries at air force installations across Canada. Whether or not those installations were actually at risk, guarding an aircraft, a hangar, or a runway (four hours on, four hours off) was itself an extension of air force discipline. At the very least, these temporary postings gave a military organization that was swamped with bodies and a backlog of paper time to clear the pipeline.
For Willy Clymer, who had just quit a job at Canada Wire in Toronto to answer his call-up, guard duty was actually a substitute for the livestock stables at the CNE Coliseum, because “they had a diphtheria epidemic down there at Manning Depot, so they couldn’t take us.
“We went straight on to Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, for guard duty. God, it was awful. Two and a half months standing out at the end of Runway No. 2, out in the boonies at night, all night. From two till six in the morning. You’d almost think the Germans were going to come over the end of the runway.”
At the other end of Nova Scotia, the air force stored its fleet of coastal patrol aircraft—Northrop Deltas, Westland Lysanders, and Lockheed Hudsons. An RCAF recruit posted to guard duty at Sydney admitted: “We never knew what we were doing. Nobody ever told us what we were supposed to be guarding. We marched around the airport carrying old [Enfield] rifles that nobody had showed us how to fire.” Yet the thrill of seeing these bush planes, sub-chasers, and bombers up close for the first time in his life made up for the boredom of sentry work.
Aircraftman Harold Lancaster got more than a look. After surviving both scarlet fever and the quarantine quarters at the CNE Manning Depot, he was posted to guard duty at Fingal, Ontario, “where an aerodrome was going up. They didn’t have the personnel for security police, so we just walked around at night with a gun in our hands. But that’s where I had my first flight in the air force. A fellow was testing [a Fairey Battle] after an engine overhaul. He offered me a flight around the countryside while he tested everything, so I just rode along in the back gun turret.”
Jeff Mellon got his first flight while on guard duty too, but he had to earn it. When he was a kid, growing up in east-end Hamilton, he had won the right to hang around the air club’s Gipsy Moth by running errands. Tarmac duty at No. 5 Service Flying Training School in Brantford worked pretty much the same way. “They were flying Anson [Is] there. We had to [supply the aircraft with] high-pressure air, which was the power for operating the flaps and brakes. Our job was to run in between the propellers, keeping your head down, jam in this tube from a dolly where the pressure was generated, and fill the Anson’s tanks with the air. Then you’d back out and hope you weren’t close to the props. We did this day and night, but it was especially fun on ice. We used to get a lot of flights that way. You could fit one or two extra bodies in the back of an Anson and the instructors were good about giving us a free flight.”
As dangerous as dodging props might seem, at least Mellon and his AC2 buddies had some of the comforts of home at the Brantford station. When a former employee of the Coca-Cola Company named Pat McLean arrived for guard duty at Portage la Prairie, at what was to be No. 14 Elementary Flying Training School, “the station was still under construction. There was a barracks block being built, but beds weren’t up. We had to scramble around and unpack the bunkbeds and put them together. No electricity in the building. No running water. We ate our meals with the construction crew. The black, black soil there was either blowing dust or mucky gumbo. We had rifles. They weren’t loaded. And we walked around on 3-hour shifts all night.
“We got to the point where we thought we saw things too. This was near a German settlement. One night we saw a light flashing across the airport. We thought, ‘Uh-oh, could be sabotage here.’ So we called out the Mounted Police. They came out and investigated. They found a man walking to his barn with a lantern, and the light was flashing between his legs.”
While the German threat to airman Pat McLean and the muddy airstrip at Portage la Prairie was imagined, the one in Europe was real. On January 10, 1940, Adolf Hitler informed his commanders that his plan to attack the Allies would begin within the week. The same day, a German light aircraft made a forced landing at Malines in Belgium; the plane’s occupants carried details of the proposed attack. The danger to Holland and Belgium was real. On January 27, Hitler tabled Operation Weser, the plan to invade Norway. The Phony War was becoming less so.
In the early months of 1940, the RCAF raced to keep pace. By then its strength had doubled from 4,000 officers and airmen to 8,000. The first RCAF Overseas Headquarters were established in London, England, in January. In February, No. 110 Army Co-operation “City of Toronto” Squadron sailed from Halifax, the first of forty-eight RCAF squadrons to serve overseas during the war.
To implement the BCATP, the air force organized four Training Command regions: No. 1 TC headquarters was in Toronto, No. 2 TC headquarters in Winnipeg, No. 3 TC headquarters in Montreal, and No. 4 TC headquarters in Regina. And in mid-April, two weeks before Zero Day, when the BCATP was to be officially christened, the RCAF opened its first Initial Training School (ITS) in Toronto and soon after that, its second in Regina. Each one used borrowed premises for accommodation—an equestrian facility (the Eglinton Hunt Club) in Toronto and a teachers’ college in Regina. Later on, a Catholic convent in Victoriaville, Quebec, and a school for the deaf in Belleville, Ontario, became ITS facilities.
After a month in the mud of southwestern Manitoba, Pat McLean and the rest of his course arrived at No. 2 ITS Regina to begin preflight training. This was a critical time and place for the RCAF volunteer. It was here that AC2s were promoted to LACs (Leading Aircraftmen) with a pay increase from $1.70 a day to $2.00 a day (plus 75 cents a day flying pay). Here, the ranks were culled and the best recruits streamed into one of three air crew careers: pilots, observers (navigators), or wireless operator/air gunners. For most, no other designation but “pilot” mattered. Four weeks at ITS would determine which it would be.
When the BCATP began, only applicants with junior matriculation— those who had completed high school—were considered. ITS specialty training took on the atmosphere of a postsecondary or university education. Aircraftmen left the business of cleaning livestock pens behind them and attended their first lectures. The content and tone of these sessions immediately reflected the serious nature of the commitment they’d made at the recruiting centre.
With lectures and textbooks, instructors introduced them to the science of aerial navigation and the business of determining “reliable fix”—the location of an aircraft at any moment. Given a compass, a divider, and a Dalton computer (a manual calculator that a pilot strapped to his leg), they dealt with longitude, latitude, and vectors, and their instructors gave them rhymes to help convert magnetic compass bearings to true compass bearings: “Variation east, magnetic least. Variation west, magnetic best. Deviation west, compass best. Deviation east, compass least.”
Any Morse code they may have learned as boy scouts was dredged up from their memories, as ground instructors had them practise on table buzzers and Aldis lamps to a rate of at least eight words per minute. The manual Meteorology for Pilots and Navigators put out by the Department of Transport gave them a basic knowledge of meteorology, from cloud formation and ice accretion to wind variation, line squalls, and vertical currents. There were official presentations on LDAO (Law, Discipline, Administration, and Organization in the RCAF). Leading Aircraftmen also took classes in armament, aircraft recognition, aerodynamics, and airmanship. Between classes, the school disciplinary officer led them through daily physical training (PT) and, of course, parade drill.
All this training was designed to determine if the recruit was “air crew material.” In fact, the opening line of Pitman’s Flying Simply Explained read: “Will I make a pilot?” The syllabus was demanding, but the new official Leading Aircraftman status did wonders for the confidence and the ego.
“At ITS we received the coveted ‘flash’ to wear in the front of our field service cap,” Don Suthers wrote. He had graduated from McMaster in Hamilton and had worked as a clerk with Westinghouse for four years, but, up to that point in his life,