119 The Royal Canadian Legion MANITOBA & NORTHWESTERN ONTARIO COMMAND www.mbnwo.ca ERICKSON, Carl Jhalmar WWII When Carl enlisted in the RCAF in December 1941, he was 21 years old, and living in Minnedosa. MB. As he had been born in Sweden, in 1920, he had to be screened for one year due to his birth country being neutral in the Second World War. Immediately after his medical in Winnipeg, he was dispatched to Vancouver for guard duty. This was during the time of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, and so he missed Manning Depot and all the preliminaries normally associated with joining the RCAF. As soon as Carl arrived at Uculet, a seaplane base on Vancouver Island, a full-dress parade was ordered. He had not checked the uniform he had been issued and to his horror, found the great coat was two different sizes sewn together - one long and one short. He had no choice but to wear it and was promptly marched off the parade square and back to clothing at once. (“I often wondered who got the other two halves!”) One interesting tidbit of his time there is that the Trans-Pacific Wireless Station (with lines across the Pacific Ocean), Banfield, which was off the coast of Vancouver Island, was the target of 25 Japanese shells; the only enemy shells to land on Canadian soil during the war. In the spring of 1942, Carl was sent overseas to the U.K. on the Empress of Scotland, formerly the Empress of Japan. The name, of course, had been changed due to Pearl Harbor. They left Halifax unescorted and were to have taken a north passage but due to a line of German U boats, they detoured down the American coast and came across at North Africa, then around Ireland, landing at Liverpool. Carl was posted to Dalton in Yorkshire as a firefighter on a crash crew. Their primary job was to attend to all aircraft crashes, with fire engine and equipment. His next posting was to Wombleton, a new conversion unit, where aircrews were trained on four-engined Halifax and Lancaster bombers, which were capable of delivering an 8,000 lb. bomb load. Carl served here until the end of the war, with the #6 R.C.A.F. Bomber Command. They attended some terrible crashes. Most often when a plane crashed it burst into flames and the result was a horrible fire with a constant barrage of exploding ammo and (sometimes) bombs. In most crashes the crews were killed instantly. Rarely did anyone survive a serious crash. Carl tells the story of a dance being held at Wombleton Aerodrome, where the local hospital staff (nurses) had received an invitation to attend. Most of the airmen were at the local English pubs, though, and so the embarrassed entertainment officer literally stood outside the dance hall and ordered every airman passing by to “Go into the dance and dance with those girls!!” Dressed in battledress, as he’d been working, and wearing rubber boots, Carl was also ordered to attend. “Result? I asked a teacher from the hospital, named Brenda Downe, from Queensbury, Bradford, Yorkshire, to dance - a slow waltz! The rubber boots on a cement floor and my attempt to waltz Canadian style, and my partner taking long, slow steps, was really something of a disaster. After the dance I took Brenda back to her seat - and as she sat down, her chair collapsed and down she went. She really fell for me in a big way the first time we met.” Carl remembers Eddy Brewer from Minnedosa being the operator at the picture show flicks they sometimes attended. In November 1945, Carl was repatriated back to Canada via the Queen Elizabeth. He landed in Halifax, took the train to Lachine, Quebec, and then headed west to Winnipeg. He got his discharge in December 1945, and returned to Minnedosa. Carl and Brenda corresponded back and forth for two and a half years. Finally, in the spring of 1948, she had waded through all the red tape to come to Canada. As they had not married in England, she was not a ‘war bride’, so the process was considerably more difficult. Carl had purchased a house in the northeast corner of town, the “Pete Robinson house”, down by the river. This was May 1948, when the Minnedosa dam broke, and so his last letter to Brenda, before she left England for Canada, was to tell her that he could see the roof of the house, sticking above the water, but the garage and playhouse in the yard had gone down the river and smashed to pieces on the railroad bridge! However, Brenda came as planned, and they were married in Winnipeg the day after she arrived. They set up house in a room above Alden’s Clothing Store on Main Street for three months before moving into their home. They lived there happily by the banks of the Little Saskatchewan River on the northeastern edge of town. Carl worked for the CPR for ten years, then another ten as Custodian of the North School, followed by eighteen years as Custodian of the Court House. “After I left the CPR, Vern Quesnel and I operated a landscaping business for a couple of years.” Brenda started a greenhouse as a hobby, which grew and grew. They enjoyed operating it together for several successful years. He retired from the Court House in 1990. He and Brenda had one son, Martin, and a daughter, Melanie. Carl died on February 9, 1993, and is interred in Minnedosa Cemetery. He received the Canadian Volunteer Service Medal and Clasp, Defence of Britain Medal, 1939-1945 Star, and War Medal 1939-1945.
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