They’d shoot first and ask questions later
Interview with John A. Gould from Dawson .

I was a pilot in the Canadian Air Force and I was over there in Europe, but I never got into action. I spent all of my time in England, Scotland and Wales.  I had a brother with the Winnipeg Rifles, who went in on D-day with the second group and I had an other brother who went in about a month later up to Holland and right into Germany. One of my brothers, Bill, is living on Vancouver Island and my brother Allan, who went in after him, passed away four years ago. By the time I got over to England I was 26 and was considered too old to get into action. They wanted fighter pilots of 19, 20 and 21 years old; young, mortal and foolish. I flew a single engine aircraft, mainly for training for the army’s gun pits and for the radar. I used to fly around southern England for the gun pits, fly in close to the ground and kind of surprise them and the same for the navy on the Thames River. The British army had machine gun pits in the corners all over the farms along the coast and they watched for the fighters coming over. They had to learn aircraft recognition and they had to be able to swing their machine guns and quickly follow the aircraft as it comes in, so they were able to hit them.
I used to fly over these gun pits in order to train them. They were told ahead that the British Air Force was coming, so that they knew it was just a training schedule, some of their aircraft recognition was terrible, so if they weren’t warned they might shoot us down. I was in the Canadian Air Force and we were attached to the Royal Air Force, the R.A.F. No Regiment or so, just a squadron. 598 was one of them. One or two of my buddies weren’t quick enough to notify the people at the gun pits and they got shot at. There were some people who didn’t really study their aircraft recognition and didn’t really recognize the aircraft that came over and would just shoot. They’d shoot first and ask questions later.  My buddy was lucky, he didn’t get hurt. He saw the ammunition coming his way and he just ducked away and went back home. He was a man from Montreal, his name was Keith Mosher and he managed not to get hit by friendly fire. We didn’t have any armament, we were just an aircraft and flying low. I was over there in late ’43 and stayed there until after D-day. I went back to Canada in August of 1945.
I didn’t train pilots, I was just there to train ground people and the Air Force to use radar trying to follow aircrafts and determine who the aircraft were. I was stationed way up in northern Scotland for about three months, in the coldest part of the year, December, January and February. There were no special missions for me. There was a Polish squadron, fighters, who did some missions, low level flights to the Norwegian coast. They would go out practically every day, depending on the weather of course, they made low-level trips over the ocean between Scotland and Norway, attacking the German forts.
I don’t remember the name of this Polish squadron. As a historian I don’t write about the war, I’m into the history of Klondike Gold Rush and that type of thing and there’s a fraternal organization here called the Yukon order of pioneers and right now I’m doing a history of them. They are the oldest organization in the Yukon Territory. They were formed in 1894, before there was a Yukon.  I was a member, I joined in 1951. I knew a lot about the old-timers, Stan Peters and the people who came before and during the gold rush. I knew them quite well and I got interested in their history and started researching them. I’m also doing a research on our legion here, the Dawson legion, they got started in 1918, at the tail end of WWI.  There were 620 people that left the Yukon for WWI, and probably close to 600 of them came from Dawson.  They went over to fight the “war to end all wars.”  It’s quite interesting to read about these people and what they did.