Paul W Baytor

I was born on April the 2^nd, 1922 in Kluknava, Czechoslovakia, Europe. My father emigrated in 1927 and later on, he brought us, my mother and my two sisters to Canada in 1929. I only had high school schooling … so I tried for a while as air gunner. We went nine months to Guelph University; the Canadian government had some classes there reserved at the university for that specific reason, to learn the Morse Code. That’s why we went there until we graduated.

And after, I was an instructor there for nine months and then, and then only, did they send me overseas to England. We got stationed to OTU in Scotland, we got stationed in Scotland and we got an Operational Training Unit and that’s to fly over England and get to know the country. It’s called OTU, Operational Training, so we were sent over from Scotland; we flew aircraft from Scotland and got to know England pretty well, parts of England. So for some reason, we had to get to know parts of England, different stations and all that. So that was when we got there, this was before they sent us to our squadron. And later on, end of 1944, they send us to our squadron in Lissett; 158 Squadron in Lissett, England in Yorkshire.

Being a wireless air gunner, you’re also in contact with the radar and with the station back home, like at the station. We had, the wireless air gunner was in contact with the home air base in London and Yorkshire, at Lissett. So we had to contact there with any changes in the status; they would phone our aircraft and let us know if the thing has been scrubbed or changed. We were sent over to bomb the shipyards of Hamburg. And we got down there and we got some, lots of anti-aircraft fire and some enemy German fighters came up also on that particular flight. That was about the biggest one, city of Hamburg, which is in the north part of Germany. And it was a part of my life that I can never forget, the three years I spent in the air force.