Still had the Pacific

We were sent to the, back to one of the OTUs my buddy and I, I hadn’t seen or hadn’t flown with since instructor school back in Trenton in ‘42. Jack Lumsden and I, we were sent to an operational training unit to presumably to do six months duty and go back on Ops. So I wasn’t there very long until they said, “Oops we made a mistake, Ireland head home for 30 days leave and come back over to the squadron”. So that’s how I ended up in mid Atlantic VE-Day on a dry ship. Everybody was glad the war was over. Well one war was over. We still had the Pacific, you know, in the back of our minds, you know. We should have had, everybody had. So it was just well we got rid of that one now it was the future with a big question mark. Are the Canadians going to participate? Are they going, what are they, if they do what are they going to send? Are they going to send fighters? Are they going to send bombers? Are we all going to be converted to bomber pilots or what’s going on? So there was a big question mark. Imagine if you were ashore and had enough enthusiasm all around you, you could have celebrated. But on the boat we didn’t do much celebrating. It was mostly, well now what comes next because there wasn’t much else to do on the boat. I was going to play it cool. If the air force wanted to keep me in well I’d consider it very closely and if they didn’t I’d have to look elsewhere for civil employment as far as I was concerned, but I had no intention at that point of starting another career, to me my flying was my career. Well I had found something that I was able to do in all humility perhaps a little bit better than most other people. I don’t know if it was a gift, or natural or whatever you want to call it. I found that I could probably do things with an air plane that other people couldn’t cope with and couldn’t handle so I felt that that was my profession and if I could make it so. As soon as the plans were announced that there would be a tiger force sent to help quiet Japan down then became a chance to volunteer to stay. If you had any interest in staying in the air force, post war, you volunteer. If you didn’t, next boat out Jack, next gig so. There was a decision to be made then as soon as the plan was made, yes, so I was a volunteer. I wanted to leave my options open.