Family Values II - Left Seat or Right Seat ..?
In Post # 185, I introduced my Mom's clan, the Dinsmores.
Gunner Arthur D. Dinsmore went overseas in 1916 with his Dad in the artillery, returning in 1918, Pilot Officer Arthur Dinsmore. Peacetime brought new challenges but few of them in military aviation. Arthur, now 20, took accounting and migrated to Detroit where the automobile industry was creating a new kind of industrialization and consumerism. He worked for the Dodge Brothers as a purchasing agent. He was making good money and used it to keep his flying hours up.
In April, 1924, the Canadian Government launched the RCAF and Arthur returned to Canada to get on board. Before anything amounted to much, a massive fire at Camp Borden destroyed the few aircraft assembled along with facilities and that effort put an end to a military career for Arthur. Back to the Dodge boys, he went. Still flying with every cent he could spare.
The Depression of 1929 devastated America along with the rest of the world and Arthur returned to Toronto and joblessness, eventually finding work with Union Carbide where he worked until Canada launched the Commonwealth Air Training Plan at the outset of WW2, in 1939.
Based in Windsor Mills - just south of Montreal, Arthur worked as a Civilian pilot, flying Canadian-built Avro Anson's for Navigators-in-training. He was driving a windsor gray 1938 Dodge.
When Arthur learned that RAF Ferry Command was hiring civilian pilots out of Dorval airport, Montreal, Art and a couple of mates drove up and applied as pilots. After checking his log book and reviewing his experience, a stern civilian recruiter (the operation was managed in Canada by the Canadian Pacific Railway) posed the decisive question: "You depart Gander flying northeast. At a given set of co-ordinates you descend to sea level and turn north up a fjord in Greenland, and land with the wind behind you. No second tries. Can you do it, Dinsmore ..?"
Arthur replied that he could do it, but opined that it might be smart to make the first run in the right chair, along side a Captain who had already done it. Wrong answer
. Arthur flew the rest of the war in Ferry Command as First Officer Dinsmore, relegated to the right seat. He mostly flew for younger, less experienced pilots, but in his telling of this story to me, I never heard complaint or bitterness about his fate. He had already survived Paschendale and one war, and he knew it.
So, from his vantage point, he ferried Hudson's, B-25 Mitchell's, Boeing Canada-built PBY Catalina's to Britain. His age and experience were recognized and he was assigned to the Command's Communications Squadron, flying stripped B-24 Liberator's to Europe, the Middle East and India via Bermuda. The crew were never given disclosure of their cargo or passenger manifest. In this role he flew until the Command was closed in Canada. In peace, he and his wife Vera travelled coast-to-coast in the '38 Dodge, looking for a place where they would be happy. They settled near the 1,000 Islands. He renovated a farmhouse and opened a Guest House. It was beautiful -- and it failed.
PHOTOS: Anson. '38 Dodge. Dorval Ferry Command. Bluiefijord - various views: today and back then. Catalina at Bluieiford. Communicatiobns Liberator over Montreal. The calmest man I've ever known.
MM
Proud Canadian