401068 Peter Stuart Isaacson - Course 33

I got my wings in Ottawa, Canada. That was a great day. We became sergeants. There were a few who got a commission. The top ranking students got commissions. There was probably about three or four of them, I’m not sure how many. And then the rest of us became sergeants and we got our wings and our sergeants stripes. There was always this fear all along the line of being scrubbed. But we had our first fatality. That affected us a bit. It was the first realisation that aeroplanes were lethal. Could be lethal. The training was very good. They took you through it very gradually, and the instructors were good. One of the other interesting things that happened there, they made a film with some old time film stars you probably wouldn’t even know. James Cagney was in it, Brenda Marshall and Alan Hale. It was called Captains Of The Clouds. It was about these bush pilots who flew around the northern part of Canada, in the bush, and then when the war came, they joined the air force. And the air force advisor to the film crew was a very famous First World War pilot called Billy Bishop, who at this stage had been brought back into the Canadian Air Force as an air commodore or something like that. But he had won the Victoria Cross and the Distinguished Service Order and I think a Distinguished Flying Cross in the First World War. He had really been one of the fighter aces in the First World War. So it was a great thrill to meet James Cagney, Brenda Marshall and Billy Bishop. We didn’t do very much. We did a formation flying and they photographed. The other thing we had do was march up and down while they took a sound recording of our feet, marching. I think that was about the extent of my involvement in Captains Of The Clouds. I didn’t become a film star. Nobody picked me out as a film star or anything like that. But the rest of the time went, as I said, in a fairly hedonistic way. Ottawa was a lovely city to be in. And the people there were very good to us. As I told you we went down to New York, and before that I’d gone down to Niagara Falls, which was a great experience.