Kenneth Tooley Schubert - Preparing for War

Before reporting to Portage La Prairie, I was given a 96 hour leave and returned to Armstrong where Helen and I were married in the United Church on November 19, 1942. Helen stayed in Armstrong until I found a place for her to board in Portage. She then came to join me. The weather that winter was very cold, with temperatures of -50° F. Helen had to learn to dress properly to keep from getting frost bitten. She consistently got her legs and ears frozen.

The Air Observer’s course was considered a hard one. It covered dead reckoning navigation, astronavigation, signaling by flag, lamp and Morse code, aircraft recognition, map reading and armament. These subjects were covered in the ground school and then practiced in the air. I managed to do pretty well in all of the subjects except for getting enough star shots on the ground for the astronavigation course. We were required to have several hundred shots on various stars. About three quarters of the way through the course, it was evident that I couldn’t make up the required number of star shots as I had been spending too many nights in town with Helen, so I was re-mustered as a bomb aimer. I was posted to the No. 2 Manning Pool in Brandon, Manitoba, to await a course. This was the only unit from which I ever went AWOL, to return to Portage to see Helen. I didn’t get caught, so my presence wasn’t much in demand.

From Brandon, I was posted to the No. 2 Bombing and Gunnery School at Mossbank, Saskatchewan. I couldn’t find accommodation for Helen, so she returned to Armstrong. At Mossbank, I really came into my own. Our flight consisted of men from all walks of life and, as the course progressed, it dawned on me that those with a higher education were not necessarily smarter than the rest of us. In fact, a lawyer and a teacher were at the bottom of the class. We covered all of the courses that had been given at Portage, with more emphasis on bombing, gunnery and aerial photography. I came fourth in the flight, tops in signaling and second in air bombing.

The aircraft used at Mossbank were Bolling-brokes for air gunnery and Avro Ansons for bombing. The accommodations for the gunners in the Bollies were very poor. One gunner was in the turret having a ball, while the other two were stuck in the windowless fuselage getting air sick. The gunner in the turret was trying to hit a drogue towed by a Lysander aircraft. The pilot would turn and slide to give the gunner a moving target at which to fire. The drogue was often hard to hit, so the gunners would stop firing, pretending that their guns were jammed. The pilot would then fly straight and level with the drogue practically sitting on the end of the guns. The gunner would then open up and chop it to bits, aborting the trip for the other gunners. The air bombing was carried out from Avro Ansons, a slow, comfortable aircraft with lots of windows and fresh air. I graduated on May 31, 1943, standing fourth in the flight, and was posted back to Portage La Prairie for the navigation portion of the course.

The navigation section of the course at Portage was easy for me as I had covered most of it before. Our flight graduated as air bomb aimers on July 8, 1943, with the rank of Sergeant. We then went on embarkation leave for ten days. Helen met me in Sicamous and we had a good leave, visiting between Armstrong and Ashcroft. Mae and her children, David and Jeannette, came to Ashcroft. We had a small family reunion with just Jim missing, busy on the North Atlantic. While on leave, I received notification that I had been commissioned as a Pilot Officer. It was the practice to commission the top ten percent of each graduating class.

On completion of my leave, I reported to the embarkation depot in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It was an experience riding the train across the continent – my first trip east of Winnipeg. The train was packed with servicemen and women. We were rationed two to a berth. Take your pick, sleep with a stranger or sleep in shifts – many of us stayed up most of the night. If I remember correctly, it took three days and four nights to get to Halifax. In Halifax, we met our first tight security and the war got closer still. It was one of medical checks, photographs and kit checks. While in Halifax, I developed huge hives all over my body. None of the doctor’s efforts seemed to do much good. As a last resort, the doctor drew blood out of my arm and shot it into my hip – the hives disappeared like magic.

The long awaited embarkation date of August 2, 1943, finally arrived. We were loaded onto a troop train and arrived the next morning in New York City. We didn’t get much more than a look at the skyline before being hustled aboard the SS Aquitania. She was at one time the winner of the Atlantic Blue Ribbon, which is awarded to the luxury liner making the fastest crossing of the Atlantic. She wasn’t very luxurious when we boarded her. She had been stripped of all of her fancy trimmings, and bunks had been built into every available space. Staterooms formerly equipped with one double bed now had twelve double deck bunks, and this was in officer country, the best she had to offer. On the opposite side of the pier from the Aquitania, the Normandy lay on her side on the bottom of the harbour. She had been the pride of the French passenger fleet, the largest passenger ship in the world next to the Queen Elizabeth. She had just been converted to a troop ship when she was sabotaged and burned. Even lying on her side on the bottom, she towered over the docks.

The Aquitania was one of the few troop ships considered too fast for the enemy submarines to catch, so she went unescorted across the Atlantic. Travelling full bore, she altered course every five minutes or so to throw any subs off target. She heeled over on every turn, with the rivets squealing as if she was going to fall apart. As an officer, I was detailed as a fire marshal and assigned to patrol G-Deck, which was just under the water line. On this deck, a battalion of Negroes was billeted. If they had decided to smoke in this restricted area, I doubt that I would have had much control over them. There were approximately 12,000 troops on the ship. The crossing was made without incident in six days from New York to Greenock, just outside of Glasgow, Scotland.

We boarded a troop train in Greenock and, 18 hours later were in Bournemouth, a beautiful resort town on the English Channel. It was now a holding depot for RCAF air crews waiting for postings to advanced training units. The town had been bombed and signs of war were evident all around, with burned buildings and barbed wire along the beaches.

On September 3, 1943, I arrived at the Advanced Flying Unit at Wigtown, which is a few miles north of Glasgow. This was an RAF station and, since we were the only RCAF flight there, it created some friction and not a few fights. Our training was intense for a month. We were either in the bombing simulators, link trainers or in the air, bombing infrared targets in shipping and industrial areas in England or Ireland. My first view of Ireland was really something. It looked like a big golf course from the air, with various shades of green and blue lakes and rivers. The hope of all of the crews was to have an emergency landing on the Isle of Mann where there was no rationing. We flew over it on practically every flight out of Wigtown but never had an opportunity to land. Our month at Wigtown was soon over, and we were posted to the No. 22 Operational Training Unit at Gaydon, near Warwick, a few miles south of Birmingham and close to Stratford on Avon.

We graduated from Gaydon at the end of January, 1944, and were given two weeks leave. I was able to visit my Tooley relatives in Stoney Stratford and my Allen relatives in Northampton as well as take in some of the sights in London. The war was going hot and heavy in London, with raids every night, search lights, bombs, flack and fires and many buildings gutted and planes shot down. The local people packed the subway tubes and slept on the platforms or on tiered bunks against the walls of the tubes. They seemed to have gotten used to sleeping with the subway trains roaring into the station only a few feet from them.

When our leave expired, we reported to an RAF station at Topcliffe in Yorkshire. This was a survival training unit operated by the British Army. Our discipline to now had been child’s play – this outfit should have had machines, not men. We Canadians stuck together and survived. I think the cocky little English Sergeant Major with the brass ball on the end of his staff must have had a few laughs (when we were out of his sight). What a guy, you could hear him yelling a mile away. Everything was done on the double at that place.

We were posted to the No. 1664 Conversion Unit at Dishforth, Yorkshire, to learn how to handle four engine heavy bombers – in our case, Halifax Mark II’s. The night we arrived on the base, a Halifax that had been on a mine laying mission came in and dropped a hung-up mine on landing and blew itself up. The element of risk in flying became more apparent at this station. The German’s often flew back to England in the stream of bombers and shot them up as they came in to land.

The Halifaxes used at this unit were kites that weren’t good enough for operational flying. They were obsolete, well worn from operations, underpowered, and would go into a spin at any time without cause. The instructors had a tendency to do most of their instructing from the ground and watched the trainee crews do their stuff from that vantage point. There were quite a few accidents, and most of the time there wasn’t an aircraft that we were able to get into the air. The training followed the pattern we used when we converted to Wellingtons. I flew with the pilot as bomb aimer and rear gunner while the rest of the crew attended ground school. The pilot had no trouble converting. We flew practice flights as a crew for a couple of weeks, and then we were off to the squadron. The usual rumors of where we were going and what kind of aircraft we would have were running rampant. All bets were on a Lancaster.