Page 22 - December 2018

Jack ends his book with a section called “My Nine
They also served
– those who had to stay in Canada and teach
wireless use to RCAF aircrew.
Typical was Jack Boan.
He was born on the family farm near Briercrest,
Saskatchewan, in 1917. He was working on highway
construction when the war broke out in the summer
of 1939. By the next summer, he’d been accepted in
the RCMP when he heard of a program teaching
wireless signalling. The RCAF was keen, naturally, to
take its graduates, and he took it.
He spent only two weeks at the RCAF’s 2 Manning
Depot in Brandon, then was posted to 2 Wireless
School in Calgary as a wireless instructor.
An overseas posting was interrupted by a hernia and
he returned to 2 WS. “With Training Command, it was
almost impossible to get out, especially if you were
doing a good job. The authorities must have liked my
work because I got two rapid promotions — then I hit
a dead end as a sergeant. I didn’t get any further,”
wrote Jack in his memoir Spaces To Fill — And a
Century To Do It, released in November 2017.
2 WS used the Norseman, the Tiger Moth (with one
set of controls replaced by a wireless set for the
student), the Fleet Fort (which turned out to have oil
lines with a frustrating tendency to break in flight)
and the Harvard. As the European war was winding
down in the spring of 1945, Jack was posted to
Western Air Command and a radio post at Coal
Harbor, BC, from which Canso flying boats operated.
Later, he spent a short period at Bella Bella, helping to
close this station.
He was discharged in November 1945 and began
university classes at Carson College, which he
remembers as being on an abandoned air force
facility several miles north of Saskatoon —
presumeably Osler, one of the relief landing fields for
the wartime 4 SFTS at Saskatoon.
Lives”, which covers his brushes with death. Two are
from his air force days. Yes, wireless training turned
out to be dangerous.
The first brush was early in the Second World War,
when he was a wireless instructor at Calgary.
Normally, aero-engine mechanics would be called to
start the school’s Tiger Moths, but for 30-minute
flights this was deemed too time-consuming. So the
school’s commanding officer authorized wireless
instructors like Jack to train to do this themselves.
Jack admitted he got “a little careless” one day and
forgot to shout “Switches off, throttle wide open!” He
then swung the propeller — at which time the engine
immediately started and he found himself mere
inches from a whirling propeller, The aircraft was held
back only by the chocks in front of its wheels.
“I inched my way backward until I got two or three
feet away, then walked to the side, shaking like a
leaf.”
In the summer of 1942, Jack was sent to RCAF
Station Patricia Bay near Victoria, to get a feeling for
what wireless school graduates would face when they
went through operational training. Thus did he find
himself in an RCAF Beech 18 with a staff pilot, a
student navigator and a student wireless operator, all
heading out over the Pacific one evening.
The weather begin closing in, so they were told to
return to Pat Bay.
The pilot asked the student for a navigational fix.
The student replied he had stopped navigating when
they’d turned around.
The pilot then asked the trainee wireless operator to
use his direction-finding equipment get a fix on Pat
Bay. The student replied the equipment was
unserviceable.
“I began thinking about how cold the Pacific is, how
one could survive for only 20 minutes,” Jack wrote. “If
we had to ditch, we may have 25 or 30 minutes to
live. But how would anyone find us? Flying aimlessly
in the direction of base, we stood a good chance of
colliding with a mountain.”