During the Second World War, Ethel Northcut trained hundreds of wireless air gunners who passed through Winnipeg before going overseas to take part in dangerous missions in enemy territory.
It was during this time that more than 100 schools were established across Canada to help train aircrew from the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF), the Royal Air Force (RAF), the Royal Australian Air Force and the Royal New Zealand Air Force.
Originally, from Weyburn, Sask., Northcut was enrolled in teachers’ college at the time but later quit and joined the Royal Canadian Air Force Women’s Division in September 1942 after an unpleasant incident with one of her superiors.
First sent to Montreal, she learned how to send messages using Morse code and all the theory behind the procedure.
She was later transferred to Winnipeg where she began training wireless air gunners, who were primarily responsible for sending and receiving messages to and from the ground or from other planes.
For her part, Northcut trained aircrew in a room with 24 cubicles, each with its own receiver and transmitter.
“They had to set it all up, get tuned in and they had to send messages to us, they had to send messages to each other and then, when they left us, they had to go up in a plane and send messages air to ground,” she said.
During the war, the RCAF flew Halifax bombers while the RAF flew Lancasters.
Northcut said each plane had a crew of seven that included a pilot, an upper and rear gunner, a bomb aimer, a wireless operator, a navigator and a flight engineer.
“Now, if something happened to those gunners, if they got injured, then the wireless air gunner was trained to take over for them,” said Northcut.
In Winnipeg, Northcut said gunners trained over the Assiniboine River by taking aim at a large cloth tube, called a drogue, that was pulled behind a plane ahead of one used by aircrew.
“The air gunners would come up behind and their bullets each had a different colour of paint on them so they would try and hit this drogue. When they were done, they could tell by checking the drogue how many hits the gunner had made,” Northcut said.
“The sad part of it was that, at the peak of the blitz, there were very few wireless air gunners that survived so actually when they graduated, it wasn’t really such a wonderful occasion because they knew that once they got overseas, there was going to be a large number of casualties,” she said.
“It wasn’t really a very happy occasion. So many of them didn’t survive.”
Regardless of her bad experience as a teacher, Northcut said she probably would have joined the women’s division either way, since both her husband at the time, Leonard Northcut, and her brother, Jack Steele, were fighting overseas.
While her husband, who saw France, Holland and Germany during the war, eventually returned to Canada, her brother did not.
After he got lost on a training run in Montana and was held back a month, Steele was attached to the Royal Air Force and flew a Lancaster.
During a mission on April 9, 1943, his plane was shot down just outside of Doornspijk, Netherlands.
All seven men were buried in a civilian cemetery in Doornspijk, said Northcut, who has been to the Netherlands seven times since her brother’s death.
In talking to locals over the years, some of whom actually witnessed her brother’s plane come down, Northcut eventually learned more details about her brother’s passing.
“While it was disturbing in one way, it was good to know because they came down between two little towns that were only three miles apart and nobody in the towns was injured. The plane was hit right in between the two of them. As it turned out, the Germans buried them and they buried them in coffins, not in body bags — gave them a proper funeral,” Northcut said.
“And the Germans saluted them, and because they had a proper burial, they never moved them to a bigger cemetery,” she said.
Back home in Weyburn, Northcut’s family waited patiently for word on her brother. Before receiving confirmation of his death, the family received almost weekly letters from military personal confirming his missing in action status. Northcut has saved all of these letters, including a letter written by Steele in the event of his death.
Two days after Steele’s death, Vern Tompkins, who later became Northcut’s second husband, was sent to the Netherlands where he bombed Doornspijk.
Northcut said Tompkins flew a total of 28 missions over enemy territory but was always reluctant to speak of the experience.
“The bad parts of the war, they just put out of their minds, they didn’t want to talk about it,” she said.
During a trip to the Netherlands in 2005, Northcut took part in a special ceremony which saw Steele’s revolver, which had been found by a local resident after his plane crash, donated to a local museum.
In the Netherlands, Northcut said children are taught at a very young age about the sacrifices made by soldiers during the Second World War.
Each year, she said, a different class of school children will assume responsibility for tending to the graves of the seven airmen who perished in Doornspijk on April 9, 1943.
Northcut said she doesn’t think enough is done to honour veterans in Canada or to teach youth about the sacrifices made during the First and Second World Wars.
“I don’t think the children are taught enough about what it was all about and how futile the whole thing was. Nobody wins a war,” she said.
“Just a huge loss of life is all it amounts to when it’s all set and done.”
