Lorne Stuart Yule

I enlisted in Manitoba and took basic training, which is boot camp. And you take all your basic training. I was there about a couple of months I guess, I’m not exactly sure, in Brandon [Manitoba]. And then they shipped me down to St. Thomas, Ontario, where I took my training for the aero engine, aero engine mechanic. And that took me about, I don’t know, a couple of months maybe, I took in St. Thomas, Ontario. And from there, I was shipped to Vancouver. And that’s where, I was shipped there and worked there for about three or four months. And then I was shipped overseas, to work as a mechanic, military mechanic. And we were posted to squadron, that’s 424, that’s the squadron that I was posted to, to act as a mechanic. And I worked there, I worked several places in Britain, I don’t know, I was northeast, I was in the British squadron and I was posted right out to the field and it was 418 or 424. And I worked on the bombers from there. They had various squadrons and various jobs I was working on engines all the time because that’s what I was trained, as in engine, so that’s what I did. And those were four engine Bristol [Blenheim] bombers. And that was the only type of engine that I worked on. Usually, if you had to work overnight, you didn’t work the next morning, but if you didn’t, you’d be out there the next morning at the planes. Like a squadron is 15 aircraft. So you’d be in one of the 15 and your job was, A, to look after the aircraft. You had to do the daily inspection and you had to do the various work and you had, the highest person on that was a sergeant, and they had the sergeant and the sergeant looked after the squadron. And we looked after the aircraft. They look after the guns and another outfit would look after the bombs, and we looked after the engines and there was that many different trades. There was about four or five different, everybody did different things. And they came out and usually you had to talk to a sergeant or something and he’d send you out to put your stuff on, and at night, you had to help them take off too and you had to be there when they came back. When they came back, you had to help them. That was all you had to do, but see that they went up and see that they took off and when we came back, we had to … And the main thing we had to do was put gas and oil and that kind of stuff in for the next day. Even though they mightn’t be used the next day or for, maybe if it was raining, they wouldn’t be used for a week, when not anybody would be using them. And of course, you had to have good weather and all the rest of it before you’d be taking off. The memory that I have, and have always boasted about it, is that the Bristol motor was the best one, it was better, the other one, [Avro] Lancaster, it was the same except that it had four different engines, they had four inline engines, which are liquid cooled engines, liquid cooled. And they had Lancaster engines. But we had the Lancaster Bristol, which was 12, say you had 1200 horsepower in each one of those motor that’s what you had. That’s what all, frankly, all of the Canadian aircraft had the Bristol bomber motor. And that’s what I had and that’s all I worked on because that’s what I was trained in. So I only worked on the Bristol bomber. And I thought it was a good engine.