Plenty of Training

Heroes Remember

Plenty of Training

Transcript

Of course like all the kids you know, everybody wants to be a pilot. We soon learned that that was not going to be. They had an excess of pilots by that time. So I was interested in radio in the first place anyways, so I, I ventured for the wireless operator course. And after my basic training at the base in Toronto, at the CNE, we were of course housing one of the cattle barns and then we, I was sent to #4 wireless school in Guelph. Well, the air force by that time had taken over the Guelph Agricultural College and so we did our wireless training there and did our flying training on the wireless course at, I think it was called Birch, which was a... and we flew Tiger Moths as wireless train, in training which was a great, a very great and exciting (inaudible) ‘cause you were in a little two seat cockpit, open cockpit airplane that I think flew at eighty miles an hour. I can remember one occasion he said, "Gee, gee we had a..." the pilot said, "Gee we had a good exercise today." He comes down out of the clouds and there's the base right below us. We hadn't moved, we'd just gone straight up in the air and straight back down again. So no wonder we had a good hours of operation. We were practically over the antenna. But.. and then from there of course when we graduated from the wireless school, and I think I graduated seventh in my class or something like that, which was pretty good. We went to the #4 bombing and gunnery school which was at Fingal. And I did my gunnery there and the biggest thing in the gunnery was learning the Browning machine gun absolutely backwards. And one of our final tests was to be blindfolded, to disassemble and reassemble a Browning machine gun and how it work, which everybody did! Our air training was, we flew in Bolingbroke twin engine bombers and they had a two gun tort which is actually called, like a mid-upper and that's where we did our firing from and we fired at drogues towed by Lysander aircraft. And we usually carried four gunners and each gunner had a different coloured tips on his ammunition. So when the exercise was over you could count the drogue, you knew what, who had, had what hits on the drogue. And then we graduated from that as sergeant wireless operator air gunners.

Description

Mr. Allen describes the variety of training required by the Royal Canadian Air Force.

Bruce Allen

Mr. Allen was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1923. His father worked in the foreign service of the Royal Bank, and returned to Toronto, Ontario, in 1930. Mr. Allen enlisted at the age of eighteen, completed basic training, and shipped overseas to England where he joined 172 Squadron, Coastal Command. His wartime experience involved convoy protection and submarine patrol. After returning to Canada, Mr. Allen pursued a career in various facets of television broadcasting. He remains very interested in Veterans' issues, and belongs to several Veterans organizations; 403 Sarnia Wing Air Force Association, Royal Canadian Legion, Veterans Club of Sarnia, and the Bomber Command Association.

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