Harry Bishop spent 24 years in the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) almost to the day.
When Bishop pulled the pin he was running a crew of 25 machinists, welders and sheet metal workers out of a hanger on Canadian Forces Base Edmonton.
“Our aircraft were old. So we were doing major repairs instead of minor repairs. Sometimes we’d have three of them in the hanger all torn apart and I’d have crews working around the clock.”
Bishop said he started from scratch in the military. He signed up in August but he did not actually start his training until October.
“My boot camp and my apprenticeship.”
He said there was a mix-up when he finished his basic training and instead of going directly into his apprenticeship he was transferred to Trenton, Ontario making him six weeks late to start his sheet metal training.
The delay did not hurt his training too much and he ended up graduating the program with honours and getting what he called his “super duper certificate.”
“I screwed up when I got it presented to me by the base commander. He had to take a half pace forward to hand it to me,” he laughed. “I was supposed to stop a half a pace in front of him and I didn’t - you’re nervous, you’re scared, you’re a rookie.”
Bishop was posted to his first active base, CFB Moosejaw before being sent overseas. Ten days after he got married in 1957 he was shipped over to 2 Fighter Wing in Grostenquin, France on a six-month posting.
“The military operates this way. Up to six months it’s a posting, beyond six months it’s a transfer,” he said. “You become one of them.”
RCAF Station Grostenquin, also known as 2 Fighter Wing or 2 Wing, was an RCAF station located five km north of the town of Grostenquin in the Moselle department, Lorraine, northeastern France.
It was one of four RCAF wings, consisting of three fighter squadrons each, established in Europe in the early 1950s at the beginning of the Cold War. The other three wings were located at RCAF Station Marville (1 Wing) in France, and RCAF Station Zweibrücken (3 Wing) and RCAF Station Baden-Soellingen (4 Wing) in West Germany.
It took seven days to make the trip from Halifax on the MS Italia. In those days there were six bases in Europe. There would be all the trades and personnel gathered going over on what they called a draft.
“They collected them all in one lump and said ‘this is your ship and you’re going’,” he recalled.
Bishop said he was unsure what military forces might be in Europe today saying he lost that part of his military career when he got out and “became a civilian - sort of.” He clarified the comment by stating that you can take the boy from the army but you never take the army or the airforce from the boy.
“We always identified ourselves as a junior service. Air Force was always a junior service. And the army was second and the Navy was senior. I’d always say to a grunt -we called the army guys grunts. They’d come out of the back of a C 130 Hercules … I said you never see an airman jump out of a serviceable airplane but army guys do,” he said smiling.
Bishop talked about taking a special metals welding course in Toronto. He’d never taken a course in all his years in the military beyond basic training. The rest he learned on the job. The welding school was held at the Quality Assurance Branch where they had the ability to magnify a weld 800X and see if a weld might be a crack in the making.
“You put that into service and through vibration and whatever that part will eventually crack. Well, you’re welding first-stage and second-stage nozzles on the turbine engines on the aircraft and they don’t want one of them to let go.”
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He went through the course and a year later was sent back as an instructor with the rank of Corporal. By taking the position he missed out on being promoted to the rank of Master Corporal at his previous posting.
When he joined up a corporal was like a god. Due to changes in how trades advanced going from rookie to corporal in 48 months, Bishop said they suddenly had a military full of corporals. The rank of Master Corporal was created to fill in the gap between corporal and Sergeant.
As the instructor at the welding school Bishop was a corporal teaching a roomful of corporals how to weld. He went to his boss and said this left him without any strength in his position.
“Somebody has to be the boss. So I got a Master Corporal position out of it which gave me about $12 a month more out of it but it wasn’t the point of it.”
Bishop also served in Egypt with the UN. He walked the 14 stations of the cross through the old city of Jerusalem, where they said Christ stumbled. He said prayers at those 14 stations and explored the surrounding areas.
His best memories of his years in service were his two years in Nairobi, Kenya. He went there as part of a contingent created to implement the very first apprenticeship training program for trades in Kenya. Until then, the industry trained its own people and there was no consistency.
“I had guys coming in from the shipyards in Mombassa to upgrade their welding career, barefoot. And they’re working in a shipyard like that. Probably never seen a hard hat.”
Bishop said the United Nations Development Program and the International Labor Organization provided all the tooling that they required for trade training. At the end of his tour a new group came in to replace them as there was still work to do.
Bishop referred to a book put out free by the Legion each year that covers all the major wars.
“I’ve been reading my nose in that book ever since because there are several stories, some army people, some navy people that were lost, or some weren’t they came back from World War One, World War Two and Korea. I was 17 when I joined Air Force, too young for the Korean War. But then I went over to Egypt in 76 as a peacekeeper, with the United Nations,” he said. “And I didn’t even have a gun issued.”
