Mr. Colin Reginald Heathcote.

I was with the English Royal Air Force, and I went to the Middle East, but that was after the Second World War.  We went to Suez in 1956.  I’m not a WWII veteran, I am 68. 

 

In WWII,  I was on the receiving end of bombs, because in England we were bombed quite heavily by the Luftwaffe.  I was a school kid throughout the war.  I remember an uncle, and he stopped by our house.  I was a young kid at age 3.  I remember him being there, he had just gotten out of uniform and he carried a rifle.  I actually remember that he left shortly afterwards on his way to Singapore.  Of course, he ended up a guest of the Japanese Imperial Army and so on…I think he died out there. I was a corporal with the English R.A.F.  In the RAF, I was a paramedic.  You’d go out on the airfield and treat people suffering with wounds, bullet wounds and such, in a small hospital or a small unit on a base. I joined the RAF in 1955 to 1958. I spent some time in the Middle East.  We were based in Malta for 2 years, but only had a few weeks of fighting, when Colonel Nasser had commandeered the Suez Canal. Of course, we went over there to seize the canal back from Colonel Nasser’s Egypt, because it was one of the trade routes, and we built the canal back in 1880. It was formerly a British business project, but Colonel Nasser seized the Suez Canal, purely for Egypt, so he could charge people fees for using the canal.  One of the best things we ever did in that time was that we held a sports activity on this base called Luqa, and what we did was, we invited all the civilians, all the Maltese people for a sports day.  We pitched a tent with a big red cross on it, because we were medics, and we were treating any people that would injure themselves in the sports day, but we found ourselves there for a couple of days.  People didn’t have a medic-care system like we had, so we didn’t only have sports injuries coming into the tent, there were small children that had injured themselves, chronic illness, pregnant women, they needed treating and we didn’t mind.  It was quite nice, in fact, I quite enjoyed that. Later on, I was a captain with the Canadian Air Force, I just retired. That was the C.I.O.  We were called on the Civilian Instructor list.  It’s part of the Canadian Air Force, but it’s the category being in reserve. We do that, because we formed air cadet squadrons, to do that and to put on a uniform, you have to go away, do officer training and qualify for that.  You have to go back to Alberta again to qualify as a lieutenant and also qualify as a captain.