Description
Mr. Coffell talks about being put on charge for a training mishap.
John ( Jack ) Coffell
Mr. Coffell was born June 1, 1924, in Moncton, New Brunswick. At the age of two, he lost his mother. His family moved to Amherst, Nova Scotia, where he lived until he enlisted. With his father unemployed, and an unemployment rate of 50 percent, he was dertermined to pass Grade 11 so he could enter the Royal Canadian Air Force. He eventually qualified as a navigator and went overseas to join 429 Squadron, 6 Group. Mr. Coffell's theatre of duty was Northern Europe. At the end of his service overseas, he returned to Canada aboard the <em>Queen Mary</em>.
Transcript
He would take us out to the airplane line and we would do our various things like scrubbing, and gassing up, and doing all of the menial tasks that had to be done for the evening. And then we would jump on the, on the tractor. All six of us would jump and hang on. The corporal would drive the tractor and, and so we would drive back up into the hanger, and then he'd say, "Ok, guys, jump!" And he was still going three or four miles an hour and then he would, he would wheel the tractor off into the corner and, and stop, and it would stop there, and so on and so forth. Well, this had been going on for I guess a week or, or, or so, and this particular night, he said, "Jack, you take the tractor back, put it in the hanger, and we'll catch up to you in a couple of minutes. The rest of us are gonna clean up." So, I had, I had never driven a tractor in my life. In fact, I hadn't even been near a tractor in my life. I took the tractor and went up, a little slower than he would, but anyway, into the hanger, and I got near the wall like, like he always did when we would jump off, and so I jumped off. Well, the tractor was still in gear, it hit the wall and bounced off, bounced off the wall and then came to a stop on the tailplane of an Anson aircraft. And of course this had been going 5 miles an hour when it hit the Anson aircraft, so the poor little Anson tailplane, a huge thing you know, got all dented and smashed and stuff. And I thought, "Oh my God, I don't know what I'm going to do now." And, of course, by this time, the corporal has come with the group, because they had, he had actually made them run, because that's what he intended for them to do, anyway, was get a little exercise. And he saw, he saw it just as it was hitting. Well anyway, "You are under arrest. You are going to be charged. You are going to be seeing the CO.", this was Friday night, and Monday morning, you were going to get up before the CO and so, "Go back to your barracks, and don't you move out of there until Monday morning." Well, 8 a.m. came, I went to work and nothing happened, and nothing happened, and nothing happened. Finally, at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, I got up enough nerve to say to the corporal, "Uh, corporal, wha- what- what's happening? What's gonna happen to me? " He said, "What about? " And I said, "Well, the tractor..." "What about the tractor? " "Wha- wha- wha-... Well, it hit an airplane! And I was driving it!" "I don't know what you're talking about." It turned out that the flight sergeant, not the corporal, but the flight sergeant, soon as he heard this, he went over to see the airplane. He got about, about ten people out of bed. The, there's riggers and there's fitters, and, and, and there's, and these are the crews that, the people that do things in the air force. And he got the riggers who work on the physical, the body part of the airplane, and the, and the fitters, the, they do the engines and stuff. Anyway, he got all the riggers out, and they worked on that thing all night, so that by 6 a.m. on Saturday morning the airplane was back in complete, complete perfection, it was there. And so, I never did get a chance to thank this poor guy, but it was such a wonderful, it was a traumatic, terrible experience with a wonderful ending.