George Joseph Arthur Bentley Mitchell

1943, high school in Victoria [British Columbia]. 1944, [Royal Canadian] Air Force in Alberta, and in [RCAF Station] Lethbridge. There, I was honourably discharged; and I was involved with moving aircraft on No. 8 Bombing and Gunnery School [Lethbridge, Alberta] and this was my job for working there, to move aircraft, so it was a ground job. And this was fine and I was able to do this; and for some months, it seemed that things were changing because, suddenly, rather than have two or three aircraft fly in from the mountains in Alberta, we got many, many more than that. And, as a matter of fact, all of the people that were coming after that time were really very mad and really, there’s other words we could use, but they’re very, very mad because they had been preparing to get their commission for flying. And they’re told now, having come from the mountains in Alberta down to where we were, they said no, we can’t do that, you’re not going to do it and you cannot, you’re not going to get your commissions. I was there and I said, what’s the problem? They said, well look, we’ve been all through here; and he said, we just found out that we cannot become air pilots and so we’re really p’d off about the whole thing. So we just hated it. So this is what happened and after that, it was sort of what do we do next? And they got their heads together, I guess somebody did down there, and said, well, we’d like you to go to the army because they need you out there and, but we said, if you don’t want to go to the army, you can do something else. We were told that the air force would supply us with sponsorship of the UBC [University of British Columbia] materials.