Behind the Glory by Ted Barris
Author:Ted Barris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS027100, HIS027160
ISBN: 9780887622120
Publisher: Thomas Allen Publishers
Published: 2010-11-10T16:00:00+00:00
9
TOO VALUABLE TO RISK
EVEN THOUGH the news from overseas in 1941 and 1942 was discouraging, the war did not preclude all celebrations. On the home front in Canada, there was still room in people’s lives to attend a school convocation, dance to the music of Mart Kenney or Trump Davidson, or even celebrate a wedding in the family (although wartime rationing meant not throwing rice over the bride and groom). Imperial and national holidays certainly didn’t fade away either; in fact, civilian and military officials took full advantage of events such as Queen Victoria’s birthday and civic holidays to demonstrate that Canadians were “keeping the home fires burning.”
On occasions like these, the Patriotic Salvage Corps ran drives for metals, rags, paper, bones, rubber, and glass to be recycled into war supplies. The IODE promoted the sale of Victory Bonds and War Savings Stamps. The Wartime Prices and Trade Board hired Toronto broadcaster Kate Aitken to encourage Canadians to remodel and recycle clothes and household furnishings. Red Cross volunteers invited the families of prisoners of war to assemble ditty bags and to write letters of no more than twenty-five words to their loved ones. Meanwhile, the air force sent war heroes—including Billy Bishop and, later, Buzz Beurling—across the country to visit cities and towns and BCATP stations to boost morale.
On July 1, 1942, the city of Windsor staged its annual Dominion Day celebrations—the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of Canada—in Jackson Park. The official program included a civic parade and a military review with precision drill by servicemen and speeches by high-ranking army, navy, and air force officers. It certainly did not include a fly-past by two Fleet Finches from the Elementary Flying Training School at Windsor.
“There must have been five or ten thousand people in attendance,” Brick Bradford recalled. Because he had been among the first to enlist in the RCAF with a private, a commercial, and an instructor’s licence, Bradford had been whisked off to Trenton’s Central Flying School to become an instructor right at the beginning of the war; he had then been posted on indefinite leave without pay to the civilian EFTS at Windsor to teach other recruits how to fly. He’d been there for just under two years. Similarly, the RCAF had snapped up Frank Vines when he enlisted, sent him off to Trenton, and posted him to Windsor; he had put in two years as well. However, instructing was losing its lustre, and Bradford and Vines were getting impatient for a posting overseas to the battle front.
As Frank Vines puts it, “After six months of instructing, I thought anybody could do it—and wished they had. It was just the monotony of it. You’d just get a guy to where you thought he could fly and you’d lose him. Then you started all over again with another bunch of new students.”
“So Frank and I got in a couple of Fleets,” Bradford continued, “and flew low formation over the Dominion Day event. We did a slow roll and a couple of loops down over the park.
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