Survival School

Heroes Remember

Survival School

Transcript

We started out with the Anson V, which was quite a good training airplane. It was a lot better than the Anson IIs and IIIs which you had to open the, a hole in the roof in order to get your sextant up in the wind and take a sextant shot of a star at night and that was difficult. Really cold. But the Anson V had a bubble, which you put your sextant up in and that made it nice. Interviewer: So you, when did you leave Edmonton? Left there I guess about May of ’44, about May of ’44. I went to the, sort of a survival school in Calgary where we learned how to handle ourselves in the jungle and how to shoot and that sort of thing, in case we were, had to parachute out or whatever. And then I went immediately after that to Boundary Bay, 5 OTU and trained on Liberators. At that point, I was the navigator and the pilots selected their crews from the list. I happened to get crewed with a squadron leader who was the senior man on the course, and he liked my marks at AOS. The air marks were almost identical to my ground marks so he liked that combination. So he asked me if I would be his navigator and he did the same with the bomb aimer and the gunners and the radio operators. He had sort of first choice going through the files. It was kind of fortunate that way that I got crewed up with him.

Description

Mr. Emslie describes his experience at a Survival School in Calgary and being selected for a squadron in Boundary Bay.

John “Jack” Emslie

John Emslie was born in Vermilion, Alberta in 1924 with the military in his blood. His father was a WWI Veteran and Federal Government employee in the Soldier Settlement Branch. His grandfather was in the Boer War. Mr. Emslie joined the Air Force in 1943 with the entire male component of his high school graduating class, all on the same day. He trained as a navigator in Edmonton, near where he grew up. Mr. Emslie took part in the Burma Campaign, where he flew in the Wing Commander’s crew. After the war, he finished his education in Alberta and Toronto and became a meteorologist.

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