When World War II broke out in September of 1939 with Germany’s invasion of Poland, I was working at the Grain Research Laboratory in Winnipeg. My dad had bought a small general store in Rockglen Saskatchewan and next summer I went to visit them. My mother was with him but my sister Ruth stayed in Regina with mother’s younger sister Bertha Silverman because it was thought that a small town in the country was no place for a nice Jewish girl of marrying age. She was not given the opportunity of going to University; our parents stretched their resources to send me. Rockglen was a small village of the kind where many of the residents had been born there and never wandered farther away than to the nearby big city of Moose Jaw. When I visited my parents I helped in the store but life was dull. Fortunately for me there was a pretty young girl assisting in the store and she made my life more interesting. To get to the bigger city of Regina I would hitch a ride with the local trucker in his massive transport and that’s where I first experienced the blinding dust storms of the prairies. They were scary. The road disappeared under the dust and there were only the farmers’ fences along the side of the road to guide us.
Back in Winnipeg I had two years of bachelor life that I wasn’t quite yet prepared to handle. I moved in temporarily with my cousin Cliff Shnier who was renting a room around the corner from his parents’ house. He was the one who was shot down over Germany during the war piloting an RAF Lancaster bomber. We hung out together and double dated. He was two years older and already worldly and I was socially immature; he tried his best to smarten me up. We didn’t share a room together for long because when Lanny Remis joined the army early in the war it meant there was an extra bed in his mother’s house. Mrs Remis, a friend of the family, offered me board and room. The Jewish community in Winnipeg’s north end was a close-knit group. I continued to work at the GRL until I joined up.
In
September of 1939 I had just finished my university education and the
depression was tailing off but we didn’t know it at the time. I felt
sorry for myself because the Great Depression had taken its toll out of my
early years and now the war would delay further any plans I may have had for a career.
However the Depression years were interesting ones to live through and WW2 may
have taken four years out of my career but not out of my life. In
retrospect my time in the RCAF was an experience I wouldn’t want to have
missed; it contributed positively to my development. My time overseas in
the UK broadened my perspective and gave me a chance to learn how to have fun and
enjoy life, something that I was never too good at before.
I was
living in Winnipeg in 1939 and my friends and I were at a stage in our lives
when we had finished University, and had not had the foresight to join the ROTC
(Royal Officers’ Training Corp). We were looking for our first job during
the great depression and, already frightened by that prospect, were terrorized
even more by the realization that we were the perfect age for cannon
fodder. Now, those of us lucky enough to have survived look back on our
war service as being some of the happier more carefree years of our lives.
I did not
rush to join up although some of my more loyal or enthusiastic friends
did. I managed to get a job as Statistician at the Grain Research
Laboratory in Winnipeg and waited for developments. In January of 1941,
we received orders from Ottawa to report to the Royal Winnipeg Rifles army
depot in Brandon for 30 days of basic training as a foot soldier in ‑30ºF weather;
it was character building and rugged. It motivated us to start thinking
seriously about what part we might play in this war before we would again be
told what to do by orders from Ottawa. If we were drafted we would stay
in Canada. If we volunteered they could send us to serve anywhere in the
world. A friend (David Baker) and I started shopping the different
branches of the service to see if our university degree counted for anything
towards getting a commission, but we soon discovered it did not. About
that time we learned of a program in the RCAF to train radar technicians (and
we had previously heard that in the Air Force even the ‘other-ranks’ slept with
sheets on their bunks) so we decided to apply. We volunteered and joined
as AC2’s (Air Craftsman 2nd Class) December 7, 1941 and were sent off a month
later to Manning Depot to await posting for training.
At Brandon Manning Depot in January 1942 David and I, probably because we had
university degrees, were fingered by the padré to teach elementary mathematics
and physics to the air crew recruits; which filled in our time nicely while we
were awaiting posting. But a mumps epidemic put several including me into
the hospital, and David was posted away without me; our paths never crossed
again until after the war. As it happened, I spent five months in Manning
Depot before being sent to U.B.C. for basic radio training.
At the University of British Columbia the three month radio course with a
group of 50 or more congenial AC2's in the springtime of 1942 in
Vancouver was certainly no hardship: it was enjoyable and friendships were made
there. However one soon learned that in the service, friendships cannot
be long-lasting since the Air Force did not leave a radar technician in one
place for longer than about three or four or five months. Of all the
friends I made at Manning Pool and at U.B.C. and at Clinton, I can count on the
fingers of one hand the ones with whom I subsequently crossed paths with again
during or after the war: David Baker of Winnipeg (now gone), Bud Sugarman of
Toronto (now gone), Bill Stovin of Saskatoon, Dave Roumieu of Smithers, BC, and
if I tried hard I may come up with another. At the end of September 1942
we were all promoted to LAC (Leading Air Craftsman), and sent to Toronto
Manning Depot (the Horse Palace at the C.N.E.) to await posting to Clinton for
further training.
The RDF School at Clinton was the ultra-secret high-tech school of its
day. RDF stood for radio-direction-finding but it was in fact a radar
school. The word RADAR came from RAdio Direction And Ranging. Radar
was Britain's state-of-the-art secret weapon that had already been used
successfully to track attacking aircraft during the London Blitz in the winter
of 1941‑42. At Clinton we were taught the principles of radar and
were given hands‑on training; all fascinating stuff during five months of
winter in the snow belt of Ontario. When we graduated in February of
1943, I was one of the lucky few who was commissioned and, as a Pilot Officer
without any officer training, I was given a 10-day leave to go home and visit
my parents, then quickly shipped overseas to the United Kingdom and attached to
the RAF (Royal Air Force).
