Canadians in Radar
A Collaborative Oral History of World War II Veterans
proudly presented by
The Secrets of Radar Museum
One Station to Another: Travelling in the Air Force
Constant travel is a staple in the wartime recollections of radar personnel. Once enlisted, they would travel to a training base where they would stay for a short time before being sent to their first placement at a radar station. From then on, radar personnel would be expected to pack their bags and head out to a new station with little advance notice. Though it was often difficult to continuously be saying goodbye to new friends and colleagues, many men and women who served in radar learned to adapt to the sense of friendship and community in radar stations that came with working in close quarters and sharing similar experiences.
Janet Bates
Janet Bates: But eventually I got back to Hawkshill and that’s where I… now, I didn’t really stay there all the time. They shuttled be back and forth from Hawkshill to RAF Swingate which was Dover. And that was just as good as Hawkshill, just as busy. The only trouble there was that you got a lot of shelling from across the channel and you had to, you know, take shelter from that. You also had all those darn doodlebugs, V1s coming over that you had to contend with. But I eventually got back to Hawkshill 6.
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Janet Bates: So then I got sent down to RAF Whitstable which is on the mouth of the Thames. Now that was busy, because, you know, you had bombers coming in all the time. And while I was there I had the stupid idea that maybe I’d like to go in for a commission. So they said, “Well, if you do, you’ll have to have some experience on CH. So I said, “Well, that’s okay.” So I went down to Dymchurch which is near Folkstone. Wasn’t there very long and I don’t like this CH stuff. The other thing that bugged me was that I realized that a WAAF officer in radar would be a very lonely experience because most of the stations didn’t even have a WAAF officer, technically. They had an administrator. So I thought it over and I thought “Do I really want to do this? I think maybe I’d have more fun if I stayed with the other ranks.” So I said “I’d like to go back to Whitstable." And they said “Have you changed your mind?” and I said “Yes, I have. I’d like to just continue as an operator.” So when I was at Whitstable for the second time I got called to the office one day and the question shot at me was “Do you have any scruples against bombing?” I said, “No.” I said, “England has had, the British Isles really, thrown at us all kinds of, you know, bombs, fire bombs.” So they said, “Well, we have just got a new type of radar now and we think maybe you’re capable enough operator that we’d like to send you on the course.” So I was packed off down to Swanage and Dorset to take the Oboe course. And I graduated in that and I got sent to Hawkshill 1 which is outside Deal, in Kent.
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Joseph Lesley Brown
Joseph Lesley Brown: Course, we didn’t know where we were going, we had no idea, we were on a train going somewhere, and we were on the train one day, one night, and the following day, and the next day the conductor came at night and drew all the blinds in the train and said, “We are now in a war zone.” And we arrived in Halifax, by this time we knew it was Halifax. Still didn’t know where we were going until our pay parade. We were all paid in sterling. We then knew where we were going. So we were in Halifax about a week and eventually we went aboard a ship and there was a very large troop convoy, that particular one I was on. The ship I was on was called the Artia. New Zealand ship, wasn’t very good at all in the North Atlantic, it rolled a lot. And it was a usual convoy procedure where the whole convoy zigzagged its way across the Atlantic. I think we must have gone out pretty close to Iceland because one day it was terribly cold, very cold. I can’t remember how many days it was, it was something like ten or eleven days across it because of this slow zigzagging. A convoy cannot proceed any faster than the slowest vessel. As for cover, the first three days out we had three Catalinas circling over us. And then many days, nothing at all, but with us we had a cruiser, I don’t know whether it was Canadian or British, I have no idea. And a couple of destroyers. And we had onboard ship, very cramped conditions. To get to the quarters that I and others had we had to go down a ladder, down a hatchway and there were a lot of tables and benches and hammocks. So some of us slept in hammocks, some of us slept on the tables, some of us slept under the tables. A lot of people got very seasick … that was not nice.
Interviewer: How many people were on the ship?
JLB: I have no idea. I have not the faintest. Seemed an awful lot to me. We had two meals a day, not three, but each meal was very substantial, I was quite happy with that. One of our number, someone called Reg Castleman... Once aboard the ship, the ship didn’t move until the following morning but it moved gently with the swell, the tide up and down and he got seasick, we hadn’t even started yet. We were very worried about him because he was seasick the whole way over. And we were very concerned about him jumping overboard, he was so ill. He come off in Glasgow on a stretcher vowing never to return to Canada.
I: Do you know if he did?
JLB: Oh, he did and he came back to England. He worked for the Canadian government in the high commission office in London. The most exciting thing afterwards, as we were approaching Ireland - of course we didn’t quite see the land at this state – three spitfires came out and did victory rolls over the whole convoy. We all cheered and shouted. And then the convoy split up, some of it went to Liverpool, some of it went to Southampton, my ship went to Glasgow. And as we sailed up the Clydebank the factory girls were leaning out of the window, all waving at us, and we went “How did they know we were coming?” Well, they saw the big ships so they just waved. So that was the start of that. Then we went aboard a train the following morning, and we were eighteen hours in the train getting to Bornwith, which was a reception center for the RCAF. We … the train stopped sometime outside Beith, why we were going that way I don’t know, but I did discover this: because a raid was going on. So we arrived in Bornwith, it was about three am, we went aboard double decker busses that were all blacked out, everything was blacked out, and we went to a hotel where we had a superb meal, and we thought, “What’s all this about rationing in Britain? This is marvelous!” We didn’t know it at that time, but this was provisions leftover from the ship. After that we were on the rations.
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Jack Jillman
Jack Jillman: We got to Vancouver, 33 Repair Depot, we were there for a little bit to see where we were going to go. I was told I was going to Marble Island. Sounds nice, could be a resort there. It wasn’t, it wasn’t. They told me, I won’t use the words they used, but the worst place on creation, in the service, and that’s where you’re going. So we got up there and it was sure rough.
Edna Simpson
Edna Simpson: Well, Eddie and I, my friend I met on the first day when I joined up and I was with right through until we went to Cornwall, I was with her. We both went to Walton on the Naze together, we both went to Yatesbury together, we both went to Southwest together, but when we went to Cornwall, I was sent to one station in Cornwall and she was sent to another. So I… the thing was, I mean, you made friends because it was a small station. You made very good friends but then if a posting came through you just packed all your belongings up into a, what do you call it, a knapsack.
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Interviewer: What was the reason for moving people? Why wouldn’t you just stay in the same place?
Edna Simpson: I’ve never known why that was. I often asked that question myself, but that was just something that they did. And I don’t know why they did that. And the same thing happened to Doug, you know. He’d be in one place … well, he was in Jacka with me and then he was sent to Wales.
I: maybe to prevent people from getting too attached?
ES: It could be, it coud be something like that, or… I don’t know. That was part of the executive thinking that we didn’t understand