Page 21 - July 2019

Air Observation Post b y W i l l C h a b u n
Cliff Ashfield needed a little help. Between the two world wars, the young RCAF, emulating
the RAF, took over "spotting" duties from the Canadian
It was the summer of 1944 and the young officer had
army, using the
found himself yanked out of an artillery regiment and
dispatched, because of his family's experience with
weekly newspapers, to the army 2 Public Relations
Group in the Mediterranean.
The unit was half military and half civilian; attention
was turning to the "second front" in Western Europe.

Desperate to escape this post, he was able to get the
help of another artilleryman with roots in eastern
Westland Wapiti
Saskatchewan, Major. E.M. McNaughton, senior staff
officer, air, for the army's I Corps in Italy -- and
eventually landed in a little-known corner of
Canadian aviation history.
Sketching the history of what has come to be called
"army aviation", Ashfield took those at the Oct. 13
meeting of the CAHS back to the First World War, and Lysander.
when spotting and artillery observation was done by "It was called army co-operation -- and it didn't work," said
tethered balloons, Ashfield. When the Second World War broke out in 1939,
there were "scraps" between the services over how this
work was to be done. "This went on for years with the
result that nothing was done at all.
The army knew what it wanted, but the air force said that
anybody who piloted had to be from the air force."

In August 1941, the British Army set up its own unit, No.
651 Squadron. Two officers were assigned to train as pilots,
but they didn't get their "wings" until the following spring.
(A sidelight: one of these officers, a chap of considerable
curiosity, decided to use his Auster lightplane (a British-
built Taylorcraft) to answer an age-old question: can a hen
fly?

armored platforms atop tall, telephone pole-like
platforms ("artillery captains used to go up like
telephone linemen and observe from that perch")
and, of course, the rickety aircraft of that war. "Out of
that came the Billy Bishops and the Manfred One of the fowls was taken up to 5,000 feet, then dropped
Richtofens". Arguably, this was the very genesis of out. "It got into a tight spiral and landed safely," reported
military aviation. Ashfield.)