Two Hundred Men Under Strength.

I saw the pressure about getting in the air force and that is when I took the tests, and they phoned back, at least they wrote back, I got a message back, from Petawawa to become an instructor and I tried all the avenues but they wouldn’t let me go because we’d already been warned for overseas, we were all to get ready to go away you know. So within a week, no, I guess we all had, we had about a weeks leave, home leave, and when we got back we had about two weeks to get ready and we were on the way, on the train to Vancouver to go to Hong Kong. We were about 200 men under strength. We had some medical trouble of our own men, they were off sick and so on, so we recruited about six or seven officers from Fort Osborne Barracks, junior officers, that had just done their training and about the same number of men. They had no basic training at all, some of them - most of them. Their medicals were C or even D category. They just took every man they could get, in order to fill up their ranks. As a matter of fact the whole battalion wasn’t properly trained if you’re comparing them to the regiment, 1st battalions over in England. Pre-battle training and all that sort of thing, we never had any of that, very basic firing machine guns and rifles on the range and that’s it. As a matter of fact, I never saw and I don’t think we did have even had a two inch or a three inch mortar to train on. I think we had them over in Winnipeg in the Fort Osborne Barracks to see, you know, but they were very, very brief. Even my own experience with it we were just shown how it worked and a few little dumb shots and that was it.