I Wanted the Full Wing

And everybody wanted to be a pilot naturally. When I left home, you know, my buddy was saying, “Oh boy, you’re going to be a pilot, of course,” but that wasn’t for me to decide. So you went to a selection board and they probably the marticulator, how many pilots do we need, how many air gunners do we need, based on what was happening over there. And there was a lot of things happening where pilots were being shot down. Spitfires and hurricanes, whatever, Halifax and Blenheim Bolingbrokes, all the air crafts at that time. So the need of the selection board would be dictated, because we didn’t know, by what was needed.So there was lots of air gunners needed because it was sometimes there was four of those in a Lancaster, etc. and when a Lancaster went down, everybody went down. So I think there might have been one pilot chosen of our group and I think I was the only wireless air gunner, but there was about three guys chosen as air gunners. They didn’t like it no more than I wanted to be a wireless air gunner. I wanted the full wing. So that selection board decided where you ended up and you just took it. I might say that probably what, probably, planted the seed in the selection board was that I had mentioned that I’d taken a dit dah course, a Marconi course. Which mean I knew the code. I did, I had taken that when I was in high school at Nova Scotia Tech in North Sydney at nighttime in grade ten or eleven I think it was. So once I said that, bango, “You’re going to be a wireless air gunner.”