Alicia Chambers (Primary Source)

Transcript

My name is Alicia Chambers. In the Air Force I picked up the name of Kenny. When I enlisted I was Alicia Kent from New Dayton, Alberta. I enlisted in Calgary. I went to Calgary to go to normal school to become a schoolteacher. In those days the new teachers were sent to the rural areas, or to places that would even be unattractive – a Hutterite colony. So I wanted to shy away from that, and when I read in the paper that RCAF Women’s Division (WD) were taking on women as photographers… this involved a training course of three months. When I enlisted it was September 1943. When we arrived from Manning I think there was three hundred of us in the Squadron. There were many wanting photography, so they sent us out to Dauphin, Manitoba for what they called ‘Contact Training.’ We were there from October until March. By March, they had openings in the photo school – which was also at Rockcliffe – so we took the course in photography. We chose to go to Summerside, Prince Edward Island. We were stationed there for fourteen months. Summerside was a ground reconnaissance school and they sent in aircrew. And we, more or less, helped with the training. We would send the trainees up with aerial cameras, and they were supposed to literally pick spots – in later years when they became active – that they would be able to recognize from the air. We’d give them the camera and we’d give them these various points to take pictures of. We would pick up the film from the hangar and develop it, take the film to the course instructor and he would see how well these students were able to pinpoint places that, in theory, they were to be bombing later.