Quote:
Originally Posted by Keith Webb
The photo outside a Nissan hut looks like it might have been at his Elementary Flying Training School in Australia. The Harvard/Yale data sheet would indicate that at his SFTS in Canada he was being streamed for single engine aircraft, but on arrival in the UK many of those were reclassified for multi engine training which was likely where the demand was.
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Three of my father's uncles flew multi-engine aircraft in WW2. The smallest man Darryl R Paige was supposed to go to fighters, but was streamed as stated to where the need was greatest. He did all his trips, and came home with a DFC for kicking burning incendiaries out a hole in the fuselage of their Halifax. Older brothers Milton and Osborne Paige were lost on missions. My brother did a pilgrimage to Denmark for one.
My aircrew story is about the puzzlement I felt as a youngster watching these fat, gray haired, men from town marching on 11 Nov parades. There was no Legion, but a parallel veteran's service club called the Army Navy Air Force Veterans or ANAVets, which was operated "The Hut". How could Mr. Sample, Mr Beaulieu, or Mr Doherty ever have been able to fit into the cockpit of a fighter aircraft, I remember asking myself?