James Francis Edwards was born in Battleford, Saskatchewan in 1921. His youth in the depression-era prairies was fairly typical of the time. He grew up with sports, primarily softball in summer and hockey in winter, hunting, trapping and work. When he was nine he started his first job delivering milk in the early mornings with his brother Bernie.

In the winter he and his brother Bernie jogged alongside the milkwagon to keep warm. The dairyman paid them in milk, for money was in short supply. At home he did chores, primarily a lot of wood chopping to keep the stove going and the house warm. It took a lot of wood to heat a house in the Saskatchewan winter when temperatures could easily hit -40 C for weeks at a time. On the weekends he checked a trapline he ran along the Battle River for muskrat, beaver, fox and especially ermine.

He starting plinking at birds and gophers with a .22 in the fields when he was nine. Before that he made do with slingshots and home-made bows and arrows. By the time he was twelve he and Bernie were using the family 12-gauge pump shotgun for hunting Hungarian partridge, prairie chickens, ducks and geese. By the time he was eighteen he was known around Battleford as a good shot. As with many other aerial aces, this form of hunting was probably crucial to understanding how to lead a bird, or an aircraft, so that he could hit a rapidly moving target.

In the summers, he and his brother worked on a dairy farm. The cows were milked twice daily, once at 4:30 AM and again in the evening. By 7 AM they were in for breakfast then a full day of mowing or raking hay. By 4:30 PM they were milking again, then it was in for supper. Following this was a milk-run for local customers. The hard work ensured that they slept well at night.

By High School Jim was an excellent hockey player. His love for the game nearly got him a try-out for the Chicago Black Hawks, but the war interfered with those dreams. In 1939, he and his friends spent hours discussing the early war activities and all agreed that the RCAF was where they wanted to be, despite never having been close to an airplane. All of them became fighter pilots. Of his two friends one completed two tours on Spitfires and ended the war as a Squadron Commander, the other was lost in the sea off Sicily.

In 1940, he graduated from grade 12 and hitch-hiked the 100 miles to Saskatoon to the RCAF recruiting station. He passed the physical easily and broke the time record for holding his breath. After the tests and forms he was sent home to wait for his call-up notice. That summer he worked on a friend's farm in northern Alberta, returning to the Battleford area in time to drive a team of horses during harvest.

Finally, he got his call-up notice, a rail warrant, and meal tickets and was instructed to proceed to Manning Depot, Brandon, Manitoba. By October he was in the RCAF as a Leading Aircraftsman. The first weeks were spent at Manning Depot with orientation, indoctrination, etc.... Then he was off for six weeks of guard duty at the MacDonald Bombing and Gunnery School.

Eventually he starting training to be a pilot at Initial Flight Training School in Regina, Saskatchewan. He graduated to No. 16 Elementary Flying Training School in Edmonton, Alberta where he started flying on the venerable de Havilland Tiger Moth. His first flight must have been a chilly one on January 30, 1941. His instructor drilled into him that a stall meant loss of control and that was bad. They showed him how to maintain speed and control the aircraft in tight turns, and in landing, two of the most critical times when stalls will occur. He logged 83 hours on Tiger Moths and graduated to Service Flying Training School (SFTS).

In April, 1941 they got to No. 11 SFTS at Yorkton, Sask. to start training on North American Harvards. SFTS introduced the men to the more complex topics of flying, particularly navigation, gunnery, and formation flight. By June 20 he had another 102 hours in the air, with 17 at night. Because everything at Yorkton was new, including the instructors and the curriculum, they got more flying time than would occur later in the war. He graduated as a Sergeant Pilot in the RCAF and was posted to overseas duty, departing for Scotland from Halifax, Nova Scotia.

The troop train took five days and nights to reach Halifax, with only a few unscheduled stops along the way. The billet in Halifax was a stone warehouse along the docks. Halifax was a totally new experience: the ocean, the buildings, the rank smell of fish on the wharves. By the middle of July their convoy had formed up and they were embarked on the troop ship Ausonia.

Several squadrons of Canadian pilots and Australian groundcrew who had completed their training in Canada were embarked together. It was a fast, armed merchant cruiser that was excellent for ferrying troops. They stuck with the convoy for three days then split off for a fast run to Iceland. There they spent ten days waiting for another ship to get them to Scotland. They tried to teach the Aussies softball but it usually resulted in confusion and hot tempers as the Aussies thought they were just making up the rules as they went.

Eventually an old steamer, the Leopoldville from the Belgian Congo, took them to Greenoch, Scotland. There they boarded a train for Leamington, England and a Pilots Pool Depot. At Leamington they waited for their assignments to an Operational Training Unit (OTU) in either Fighter, Bomber or Coastal Command. He was posted to No. 55 OTU at Usworth, Durham. He would fly Hawker Hurricanes for Fighter Command.

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OTUs were the last training stop for pilots prior to operational flying. With Fighter Command they were introduced to fighter aircraft, albeit obsolete and clapped-out Hurricane Is, but they were a far cry from Harvards. These aircraft had survived the Battle of Britain, so they were well worn by time they were shipped to an OTU.

On October 1st, 1941 he was on his fifth flight of the day in a Hurricane when he made his first serious error. The engines of the Hurricanes had been cutting out on take-off. The mechanics and instructors figured out that if they used the 35-gallon reserve tank on take-off, rather than the main tank, the aircraft could get airborne. Once up the instructor would call out "switch over to main tank". Jim didn't hear the order as he was concentrating on flying formation with his leader in a dark cloud bank.

Suddenly his engine cut out and he started down. Keeping his head he radioed his predicament to base and came down slowly through the cloud. He had only 500 feet of air left before he hit the ground so he side-slipped the Hurricane towards a farmer's small field. He cleared the stone fence and slid to a halt within 75 yards. This was good as the field was only about 100 yards across.

The Hurricane suffered less damage than did Jim's pride. The CO made sure he understood what had caused the failure and that it was all good experience and hoped that he learned from it. He was back in the air the next day. Jim completed the course on October 20 with 40 hours on the Hurricane I. There was no training provided on actual combat drill, and it likely wouldn't have helped much, as the RAF flight drill was also outdated. But there was also no mention of what to do when your flight was bounced by Messerschmitts, how to counter the enemy's moves in the air or how to get into a good firing position, all crucial points for a successful fighter pilot.

He was shipped out in a convoy for the middle east. To get there they took a route down the west coast of Africa (due to the likelihood of being spotted by U-boats or aircraft and sunk in the Mediterranean). Their destination was Freetown, Sierre Leone and then by aircraft to a dirty little town on the coast of Ghana called Takoradi.

At Takoradi there was an RAF Ferry Unit base where the pilots were familiarized with the Hurricane IIb fitted with long range tanks. Their mission was to ferry the Hurricanes, and themselves, to Cairo via a string of small bases across the heart of Africa and up the Nile River. If an engine failed or a pilot became lost, his death was almost a certainty in the thick jungle of central Africa or the blistering heat and sand of the Sahel. Little help was available.

His first day took him to Accra and Lagos, Nigeria. Next stop was the town of Kaduna in the uplands of northern Nigeria, then to Maiduguri near the border of Chad. There his Hurricane was declared unfit for further duty, which must have made him feel good about making it that far. He returned to Takoradi on a commercial DC-3.

His second trip across Africa was as a second pilot in a Bristol Blenheim IV, despite not being checked-out on twin engine aircraft. This trip went better with stops at Kano, Nigeria; El Geneina, El Facher and Waidi Sadena, Sudan; Wadi Halfa on the Egyptian border and Luxor, Egypt. In Cairo he again entered a pilot pool waiting for assignment. Here he met up with his comrades from the ship, it had taken them all two weeks to get to Cairo.

War in the Western Desert

The middle east air war was not as glamorous as battling with the Luftwaffe over France, but it was equally dangerous, and more brutal. No pilots trooped off to the local pub to lift a pint, and their spirits, after a day in battle in the middle east. All they had were meager rations of water, and bulley beef, and all of the sand they could eat. Scorching hot by day, nearly freezing at night, the north African desert was unforgiving, featureless and omnipresent. At least their Landing Grounds (LGs) were usually built back from the coast to avoid the hordes of flies that infested the inhabitable areas ...

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