Gordon M. Toole.

My dad was in the Air force, he was a navigation instructor.  He was a veteran of the First World War and the Second World War.  He was at Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where he was stationed most of the time.  His name was Laurence Allison Toole.  He was a flight lieutenant. In world war one, he was a private in the army. He was only seventeen when he was overseas in the trenches.  He talked with his buddies when they got together on Remembrance Day, but he never did talk about his experiences.  He lost a lot of real good friends and it was just too hard for him. In the Second World War, he was in Canada only.  He was doing training.  Aircrews and personnel came from all different countries to Canada to train as pilots, navigators, gunners, whatnot. He was one of the men that trained navigators, basically.  Ground school for navigation purposes. I was born October 20th, 1925.  In 1943 I tried to join the air force, but I was 17 at the time, and there was no way I could get in.  I was pretty disgruntled…the only way you can get in when you’re 17 is when you have your parent’s consent.  And under no condition was I allowed to go.  In my father’s position in the air force there, if I had lied to get in, he would have definitely found out about it and I would be kicked out. Then I got employment with the federal government at the emergency landing fields in Alaska, when they were flying aircrafts up to Russia. I was stationed at one of the remote stations for the next 5 years, so I was not in the armed forces. All the bases that I was stationed at were run by the Royal Canadian Air force, it was only RCAF personnel at the station, other than myself, and some of the radio operators. This was in the Northern Yukon, right next to Alaska.  The Alaska Highway was being built there.  The reason for the Alaska Highway was to supply Alaska.  It was close to Russia.  Russia was at war with the Germans as well as Canada and the States, the Russians needed aircrafts, so they entered into agreement with the States.  It was lease, they supplied them with aircrafts.  The Russian pilots would pick them up in Alaska and bring them to Russia from there. 
What they had to do was to build flight strips all the way from Edmonton, Alberta, right up to Fairmount and have the flight strips within probably around 150 miles apart, and they had to have radio and weather personnel there, because the Russian pilots at that time were not instrument trained.  They weren’t trained to fly the aircraft on the instruments. They had to fly following the highway and they had to fly in contact with the ground.  If they ran into bad weather they had to land on one of these emergency landing fields. 

They were basically stripped, bulldozed out of brush.  Usually they were about a mile long and about a quarter of a mile wide, just for emergency landing. The Royal Canadian Air force, operated, ran the base, did the maintenance.  It was the department of transport people that were civilians on the base, the radio and weather personnel. The Russians normally, the majority of them, were picked up in Fairbanks.  Occasionally there were crews that were brought all the way down to the States and picked up the aircrafts there. Snag is about 30 miles from the Yukon to Alaska border.  I spent 5 years there. I was an officer in charge of the meteorology there.
I would give information to the pilots concerning the weather. In 1943 the station was just built, or being built.  During the winter ’43 we slept in tents, even if it was 40 or 50 below zero. They were Russian airmen, aircrew, but they also had a couple of personnel.
Most air traffic was twin engine bombers.  They wouldn’t communicate. They picked the planes up way down in Alaska, and then they were just flying them up. If you’ve gone hundreds of miles from Great Falls, Montana, and then well…back home to Russia.
They didn’t have to land at the Snag base, but if the weather was bad further up, they had to land there.  If you’re flying with visual contact to the ground, if you’re going to lose contact, you can’t see where to go, they weren’t instrument trained, they weren’t trained to fly on instruments, so they would probably fly into the ground or a hill or something.
I should mention this, once I was employed with the weather service, it was considered an essential position and we were advised by our head office in Toronto, that no-one would be released to other forces.  They had priority over us.  Some of the fellows did join the other forces when they were out on leave but they were tracked down and discharged and then sent back to their post up north. We were trained in the weather service and radio and it was essential to the war effort. The government of Canada didn’t want to lose their personnel. The bases had to be manned 24 hrs a day. It was essential to have these bases all manned, and providing services to aircrafts coming up to Alaska.  If we were not there, there wouldn’t be any movement of aircrafts.