Description
Mr. Finley describes his experience at Manning Depot shortly after enlisting and being accepted into the Air Force.
Hartland Ross Finley
Hartland Ross Finley was born on August 19, 1921 in Montreal, Quebec. His father served in the First World War with the 42 Battalion (the Blackwatch of Montreal). Mr. Finley joined the Air Force shortly after the start of the Second World War. His training took place in Ontario, Quebec and Prince Edward Island. After the completion of his training, he remained in Canada to be a flight instructor. One year later he went overseas into action. On his first mission his plane was damaged and crashed into the English Channel. Mr.Finley went on to fly many successful missions and he finished the War with five confirmed kills. Approaching the end of the War, Mr. Finley was shot down and evaded capture for two days. After leaving the service, Mr. Finley went on to have a very successful career as a commercial pilot.
Transcript
And then once I had been accepted then of course they told me to pack my bags and get up to Toronto as fast as could. They gave me travel money and that sort of thing to get there.
Well the purpose of Manning Depot is to have a collection point where you could bring in people from all across, well I say all across the country. I think there was a Manning Depot somewhere out west, I'm not exactly sure whether it was Regina or something like that. Comparable to the one in Toronto but not as big, the one in Toronto was pretty massive, it was down on the old grounds, what do you call them? Down by the water front anyway, it was the old exhibition grounds and there was lots of big buildings there so they were able to cram in just piles of these upper lower bunks and that sort of thing. And those are the sort of things we were sleeping in. I remember the food was absolutely horrible. Everybody was complaining about the food and there was almost a strike over it, not that it would have done us much good. But I think they had hired, taken on some caterer and he just was skinning them, the government blind, because he just turned out slops, it was terrible.
Well, this was only the beginning. Manning Depot was really to collect these people, to put them into uniform, to give them inoculations and to do all the things, all the administrative things that had to be done in order to sort them out. And then they, in order to off load the tremendous numbers they would take a group, quite a large group, perhaps fifty, sixty and they'd say, "Okay you sixty guys are going to Dartmouth, Nova Scotia on guard duty."