My name is John R Newell, I was born in Ottawa in 1922, on the 26th of September. It was a great early childhood, and then I moved onto growing up into the Great Depression that Canada and the United States went through. It was a horrible time and most of the people were out of work.
After the Depression, the Germans started infiltrating parts of Europe, which started the Second World War. Great Britain was sort of unprepared to face the German airforce that continually bombed London and the rest of the United Kingdom. They needed to recruit and train new pilots, build planes and do all sorts of things to be able to fight back the Germans. So the Canadian Government undertook the mission to become the aerodrome for the United Kingdom. That was in early 1940, we started the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. This plan encompassed airports across Canada to be used as centers, to provide air crew and ground crew members place to train. Canada employed thousands of people to build this system, multiple aircrafts had to be purchased, aerodromes had to be built, the whole works in order to make this plan work. It took off and as a result we trained a 139,000 airmen to go overseas and fight the Germans.
As the war progressed, and I became of age, I joined the RCAF (Royal Canadian Air Force), hoping to become a fighter pilot. When I came home that day, I said to Mom and Dad: "Dad, Mom, I enlisted in the Air Force." Well, you should've seen my Dad's face drop, because for centuries my family were army men. My Dad was in the Royal Horse Artillery in the First War, my brother was in the Royal Horse in the Second War, and here I come home and say "I'm going in the Air Force." That was in 1941.
I started out at the Manning Depot in Lachine, Quebec. This is where you learn the basics of military life, and there was initial training, and you received your uniforms and clothing materials, and you started learning how to parade, how to drill, and do all that muscular stuff. After about four weeks at the Manning training I was sent to the elementary flying school, which was in Victoriaville, Quebec. This is where you learned the basics of flying, and the aircraft used was a Fleet Finch. It was a two-wing aircraft, similar looking to those aircraft used in the First World War. It was a beautiful plane to fly. We did all kinds of courses at this school, learning how to navigate, learning the drills of starting the engines, how to control the aircraft.
For service training I ended up at Uplands, in Ottawa here, to my good luck, because that's where my family was. And on top of that, most of the crew that I was at elementary with went with me, so I had few friends here.
The service aircraft was a Harvard, and if you could fly the Harvard, you could fly any fighter plane within a very short time of familiarization. Learning where the controls were, learning where the handle was, all the little different items that you have to know in the fighter type of aircraft. This course lasted for about three or four months, and we spent hundreds of hours studying. Besides learning to fly, you also learned navigation, wireless, all the things necessary to be able to find out where you are, where you're going and how you're going to do it.
We practiced false landings, we would fly out to the aerodrome, to a farmer's field, and practice coming in as a landing, but would never touch down. You just came in, brought it down and took off again. And you did this, and you had to be careful of the fences that guard the approach to the field, the bushes that normally surround the farm, you had to make sure that you left the ground soon enough in order to get above those trees. During the training period in the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, Canada lost quite a few students and instructors, mainly because of pilot error, being lost, running out of gas, and things like that. I remember, even twenty-five years after the war, a Harvard aircraft was found in a farmer's bush, and in all those years the farmer never went in there.
Besides the training, we were learning all the things that you have to know to become a fighter pilot - machine guns, bombing exercises, mechanics, how to operate cameras and few other things.
After we learned the bombing exercises, what they did, they took the guns out of the aircraft for air-to-air firing, and they put cameras in. And then two of you would go up, and one would be the good guy, and the other one would be the Canadian, and you would take half an hour each trying to shoot down the other aircraft. And as you did this, the cameras moved, and when you came down, they developed the movie and told you whether you lived or died. So, anyways, that was fun. And I should also mention that we used to have to put our parachutes in for repacking every now and again, and the favorite saying by those chaps who did the packing was, as we were leaving: "If it doesn't work, bring it back, and we'll give you a new one." After all the air training at Carp for learning how to be a real fighter pilot, then we graduated. I graduated, I received my pilot wings from our Governor General, the Earl of Athlone. His back was as straight as a ramrod. And a very handsome man. And he presented me my wings and he also presented me with my commission, which made me an officer in the Air Force.
Unfortunately for me, because of my high marks and my different abilities, that instead of becoming a fighter pilot like I had trained to become, they made me an instructor in the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. And this plan, as I mentioned earlier, was started in 1939 and took place from 1940 until 1945 when the war ended.
At the peak of the Commonwealth Air Training Plan, 94 schools operation 211 sites across Canada. 10,800 aircraft were involved, and the ground organization numbered 104,113 men and women. Three thousand trainees graduated each month at a cost of more than 1.6 billion dollars. A 131,553 pilots and other air crew members were trained to go across the oceans to fight the Germans. This Commonwealth Air Training Plan had a lot to do with the early cessation of the aircraft battles during the war.
I was an instructor up until the end of the war. I continued instructing after the end of the war, and we put quite a few airmen through. Very few of them failed. In fact, none of the courses that I participated in, actually failed a chap going through as a fighter pilot. The Canadian boys had a keen interest to become fighter pilots and go overseas to help fight the war. It was a great honor to be able to train young men with that ambition to help end the war. Their studies, like mine, were quite intensified. You had, besides all your training to become a pilot, your navigation, your wireless, your everything, your gunning practice. Everything involved, you had to study, when you got done flying for the day, at the evening. So, your day was pretty well spent, and generally you were pretty tired when you went to bed at night.
It wasn't all training and everything else, there were few times when you had a good laugh. For example, there was an English chap with us at my station, and apparently, from what I understand, he would just take his detachable collar off his uniform and his boots, and he would climb to bed. Well, after a couple of days like this, he began to reek, so the boys around his bunk said: "You're gonna have a bath tonight, eh?" And he told them "I will have a bath when I want." So they picked him up and put him in a cold shower, with his uniform and everything on. They let him soak there for about twenty minutes. When he came out, they said: "You're going to get a regular bath, aren't?" and he said "Oh yes, oh yes." Another time, at that same station, we had the oldest chap in our group, and we called him Pop. Because we were just 20, and he was 25, I guess, when he went through, and he was a wonderful guy. One day was having a shower, and so one of the chaps went outside - this was in February - and he got a bucket of water from the fire water barrel outside the building, and he brought it in, and he poured it over the curtain, in the shower, onto Pop. Well, when Pop caught his breath, the door opened, and out he came, bare naked, and the guy's standing there, laughing, and when he saw Pop charging at him, he took off and Pop chased him outside into the snow, and if he'd ever caught him, he would've killed him.
Naturally, every weekend or two weekends or so, we would go up to the chief flying officer's tower and we would request overseas posting. And, of course, we knew that they threw our requests in the garbage before we even left the door. We had one job, and it was instructing, for quite a few years, and so every now and again we would fly to out west, to the Toronto area, and maybe deliver Air Force top officers for meetings or something like that. One of our instructors, Cap Borden was gonna pick up an officer to bring him back home. When he went in, he streaked that airport, he flew between the ground and the top of the flag, right past the observation tower, and rolls, acrobatics, everything that you don't do over an aerodrome. So when he landed, it happened that the chief of our area, happened to be at the meeting at that time, he was the one he was gonna pick up, and he said to the commanding officer of the station: "Are you gonna charge him or am I?" Well, the station officer had no choice but to charge him. He was court martialed, and they asked him why he would do such a stupid thing? And he said: "I've been training pilots for years. I'm so bloody fed up with it. And like everybody else, I trained to be a fighter pilot, and I just couldn't help it, I had to let myself go." He was court-martialed and he was reduced to the rank of sergeant, and they said to him: "You are going overseas. You are going to become an elementary flying instructor in England." And that's how he spent the rest of the war, doing elementary flying instead of service flying. He paid his price, but he made his point.
The war was coming to an end in Europe, so there were a lot of publications - what was never known before, started to appear in the papers, so you were up to beat on that. And when the war ended, Ottawa had quite a celebration for that - it went on all night.
I was disappointed that I never got to go overseas and fight. That was my purpose when I was starting out. After the war was over the Air Force offered me a job, but I turned it down - I was fed up with them.
So I left Air Force in 1945 and started my civilian life. It wasn't hard for me to find work because I was a great student and won all kinds of medals and stuff like that. So I started working in the British-American Banknote Company, which is a printing company that printed Canada's money and all kinds of bonds, certificates, Canada's postage stamps and many other things. We even have the contract to print all the Visa checks all around the world, all types of jobs like that... We were very-very successful, we even printed the Chinese money, and we had to ship those packages of money in a wooden case with a tin liner inside, in case the boat got sunk, they could retrieve it.
A funny story happened to me shortly after I came back home and started my job. During the war we got a word that one of the chaps I trained with was shot down and apparently killed. And that day I had to take the bus to work, because I had my car in for repairs, and I'm walking towards the end of the bus, and here's this fellow, sitting there, and I nearly dropped dead. And then I looked at him and I said: "Aren't you so and so?" and he says: "Yeah, and you're Johnny Newell, aren't you?" And I said: "Yes." And I said: "We got word that you were killed." "Oh, no, - he says, - I was shot down, but I was taken prisoner." But the word we got, he was killed. And so it was quite a shock to see him sitting in the back of that bus.
I worked in the British-American Banknote Company for forty-seven years, and I became the person in charge of production and inventory control. I trained a lot of people in the business, and they ended up as supervisors of different departments and things like that. Eventually I trained one person to do my job and I retired in 1986, and the insurance companies hate my guts, because I've been retired for 30 years now, and they've been paying my pension ever since.
