Henry Hubert Hank Seewald

My decision to enlist: because I got drafted in the army and I didn’t want to be a, an officer in the army, so I would join the air force. To stay in university, you had to take the [Canadian] Officer’s Training Corps. And then on graduation day, they offered you an officer’s position, if you wanted it. Some that took it but I didn’t. I know a person of the class, he took it but he got killed in Dieppe [August, 1942], so that’s why I enlisted in the air force. One teacher, he thought I was exceptional. We would build radios. Everybody would build a radio. Well, when I built one and it ever worked good and two other guys were working on one radio and they couldn’t make it work. And the teacher couldn’t make it work. So they gave it to me and I found the trouble and it was a wrong colour code. That’s why even the teacher couldn’t find the trouble. But for some reason after that, anything wrong, they’d send it to me. We were in Moose Jaw [Saskatchewan] and built a transmitter and I’m on the air and Canada calls us up and gives us hell and tells us to get off the air. I was on repairing radios, building radios and repairing them and they sent us to the station to check the radio every night. The day the war ended [May, 1945], I had checked it out and said it worked and the pilot said it wasn’t working. So I says, well, we’ve got to take me up and see why it doesn’t work upstairs. And that’s where I was when they announced the war was over with. He was practicing landing on Grand Bend runway [Ontario] and boy, we had a holiday.