Wilburt Lynn Lynn Cantlon

I came off a farm in southwest Manitoba. And my older brothers - three older ones - were in the service and I joined and I had never been off the farm and that was after the Dirty Thirties, so we never had traveled anywhere. And Winnipeg scared me when I first went in, a big city and I had never been in one. But it didn’t take long to get adjusted, with all the other young ones that are in there, younger people with you and you went along with the stream. And then that was just for the recruitment and they sent us to Brandon, Manitoba, and they were opening little airports around at the time for flying. And they moved us over to Souris. We were the first bunch in there and we went there for our basic training; that’s what they called it at that time. That was learning how to march and use guns. And that lasted for three months. Then, they shipped us to Quebec City and we took our Ground School as an air gunner. And when we finished the ground school, they sent us to the airport that they had going on the Saint Lawrence River, it was Mont-Joli, that was M-O-N-T - J-O-L-I. And we took our flying training there. And then we got embarkation leave and we arrived in Halifax and we were there for three days and then we went overseas on the [RMS] Queen Mary, landed at Greenock [Scotland]. They moved us down to a place called Bournemouth [England], to see where they were going to send us for training. And we went to a place called Gayton in England, for to take, this was OTU, Operational Training Unit. While we were at the OTU, we had a couple of crashes with our plane during there; none of us were injured badly. We took our OTU on Wellingtons. That’s where we crewed up: the rear gunner, or the pilot, navigator, bomb aimer, wireless operator and gunner were made into a crew, crew of five at that time and that was a twin-engine plane we were flying in and only required five people. So we were there, took our OTU. When we finished that, we had three days’ leave and then went to a conversion unit, onto four-engine bombers there and we were at [No.]1664 [Heavy] Conversion Unit at Dishforth in England. And on the conversion unit, we crashed on our last training trip and my tour departed the aircraft and I was badly injured and put in the hospital for three months. I had my back broken and my knees. And when I got out, they were going to send me home but my brothers were still there and I stayed in. I told them that I’d finished training. So I went to [Royal Air Force Station] East Moor, which was the bomber squadron, they sent me there as a spare gunner. And the spare gunner was one where if their, their rear gunner was sick or anything, I would fly with that crew. And we got shot down on our first operation. We went in there in the full moon to bomb a marshalling yard in Haine-Saint-Pierre in Belgium and on the way out, a fighter got us.