AIR LEGIONS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 11 July 1941, Page 6

AIR LEGIONS

PROGRESS OF TRAINING LN CANADA MINISTER’S SURVEY STORY OF TREMENDOUS ACHIEVEMENT. THOUSANDS OF GRADUATES ALREADY FIGHTING. (British Official Wireless.) (Received This Day, 11 a.m.) RUGBY, July 10. The Canadian Minister for Air Power, who is now in Britain broadcast tonight on the Commonwealth air scheme. “The whole training plan was, under the original agreement, to have been in operation in April, 1942,” he said. “It was decided to disregard the original set-up and aim at full capacity operation by September, 1941. Today, with approximately 85 per cent of all units going at full blast, we are in a position to state that this latter objective will be reached approximately six months ahead of schedule.

' In May last year we started training 168 pupils. Today, in pupils and graduates. we have one hundred fold that and many more —more in number than a division of infantry in the last war and this, and what a division, a division such as has never been known before in this or any other country. A year ago our greatest anxiety, and it was a real one, lay in the lack of supply of training aircraft. The number on hand was infinitesimal compared with the task .required of us. Then we counted them in hundreds. Now we count them in thousands and we will get more. For nearly a year, emphasis was placed on training and training alone. The time has now come when it can be said that the British Commonwealth air- training plan is training, and training in ever-increas-ing numbers, but its men are fighting too.

Graduates of the British Commonwealth air training plan are overseas today in their hundreds, nay in their thousands. They have taken their place alongside their R.A.F. comrades. They are playing their part in bringing home to the Nazis the reality and ruthlessness of night bombings. They are ‘delivering the tools’ by navigating those mighty bombers which form a winged bridge across the Atlantic Ocean, and in the fighter squadrons they are clawing the Hun out of the skies of Britain and France.”