Grostenquin France

The place: RCAF No. 2 Fighter Wing, Grostenquin, France.
The time: November 1964

Now (1964) aviation editor of the Ottawa Citizen, Sgt. Norm Avery, was one of the first airmen posted to 2 Wing, Grostenquin, when that No. 1 Air Division base opened in 1952. After serving a tour at Air Div. HQ in Metz, he transferred to the public relations branch and returned to Canada where he was stationed at Air Defense HQ, St. Hubert. This fall he revisited "The Big Swamp" (literal translation) and witnessed the RCAF withdraw from 2 Wing after 12 years occupancy.

It is unlikely in times of peace that RCAF personnel ever put up with, and eventually enjoyed, more hardships than those associated with the opening of 2 Fighter Wing at Grostenquin, France.

Certainly the first winter there left a scar on my psyche: no heat, no light, no sun and no water for drinking, laundering or bathing… all the problems of adapting to a mild but bone-chilling French winter. It was a victory just to survive the endless moaning of the married unaccompanied men who amused themselves by waging psychological warfare on we single types, still hopping for the "joie de vive" French travel brochures had promised.

This fall I returned to Grostenquin and with shattering nostalgia recalled a once-facetious slogan: "Someday we'll laugh about this." We with the "mud on our boots" will laugh all our lives about this.

In September 1964 GT was in the painful throes of death and the morticians were laying her out gracefully as possible. No scream of Sabers wafted over the hills and no fragrant whiffs of JP4 garnished the pleasant odours of the soil. Instead, the magpies were shooting circuits on the dandelion-decorated grass, only interrupted by a shepherd and his 500 lawn-mowing sheep.

The street scene made me feel like the discoverer of some recently vanished population… just like a modern ghost town. Driving around the station was an eerie experience. Desertion was everywhere and even the spacer cracks in the runway concrete were sprouting neat rows of weeds. Apart from the poplar trees that have shot up some 30 feet all over the base, things looked much like they did in the spring of 1953. That was after the cruel winter of '52 and the station was beginning to take some semblance of military shape.

The years had not upset my memories of the first day on camp at the end of September 1952. Our group arrived on the first North-Star-load of ground crew for No. 430 Squadron. We lost track of the days in the long, numbing haul from North Bay to Goose, Keflavick, London, Paris and finally Grostenquin.

The evening meal was anticipated enthusiastically after a succession of awful box lunches. Disembarked, stiff from inactivity and reeling deafly with North Star ears, we walked the planks through the drizzle to the temporary mess hall set up in the carpenter shop.

There was no electricity. Shop mules driven up inclined planks and parked with their headlights glaring inside provided our lighting. Heating was by Herman-Nelsons whose powerful firepots belched the direst and hottest air we felt all winter. By shielding our eyes from the lights we could make out the food, which was served on catchall aluminum trays loaned by the US Army. The US Army also supplied the food in those days we often suspected they decorated the Quartermaster GI who got rid of all those dried lima beans on us.

After this crude but welcome repast we took the plank route to the barracks. The planks, incidentally, offered some insurance that we would not go over our boot tops in the mud. When it rained it was murder. And it rained all winter. The barracks were heated (in theory) by a portable Rube Goldberg device that devoured coal and gave little in thanks for it. After its French attendant had filled it up and twiddled a few knobs and checked its gauges we would sit in the darkness with our hands on the radiators waiting for the heat. But before it could reach the wings of the building, someone would attempt to fix the system behind the Frenchman's back. This usually resulted in a burst of Gallic scorn and a short, sharp lesson in central heating for the airman who had upset the delicate machinery. We rarely felt the proof of either's theory.

Our first morning was spent getting outfitted with rubber boots. The supply section had been thrown into utter chaos and so it became less painful to buy the boots from a local merchant who showed up with a truckload of them. Supply men ran in circles trying to find articles from a giant pile on the tarmac. But the combination of facilities, weather and help forced them to all but abandon approved supply procedures and we were getting fitted out for everything like flying operations.

Meanwhile, we slogged through the mud and delighted in greeting planeloads of fellow squadron members who followed at two-day intervals. The rally cry of the old timers was" Get some mud on your boots!" We also delighted in hearing the standard first question, "What's it like?" But nobody could exaggerate enough to concoct an answer that was anything but the truth.

Usual standards of dress and deportment went by the board. Keep warm and dry was the only aim. But other discipline and morale (discounting the barracks binding) remained high. About a week later, an all-ranks mess was opened for a one-night stand in what later became the armament section. Canned beer from Scotland was the fare. It helped the conversation as we poked through the candlelit, half-built shed looking for familiar faces.

Then some of 430's more resourceful scouts discovered a bullet-riddled café in the manure-bedecked hamlet of Hemering a couple of miles away. They brought back the word and the whole squadron descended on the Café Klein Charles and made the acquaintance of "Ma Hemmering."

This kindly lady had laid in a huge stock for the boom that just hit town and manned the pumps for long hours helping fill the sudden void that had befallen the airmen. She learned a form of commercial English and played host to a standing -room-only crowd each night. Somebody got the idea of donating publicity photos of squadron members to her and she pinned them on the wall in acknowledgement of proprietary rights.

Twelve years after I first entered Ma's establishment and a good ten years from my last visit, I dropped in to renew acquaintances in September. My eyes had not adjusted to the darkness when she pointed her finger at me with a broad grin and shouted "Norman!" There followed a two-hour chat in which I learned where many of my squadron buddies were. I got the full rundown on when and whom they married, where they are now and how many kids they have. Her own family has grown up since our days, and I was brought up to date on their present status, too. She talked of Pete (Peters) and Yak (Yakowitch), Pinky (Humphrey), Howard (Portman) and "the other Norman"(Sgt. Roy Norman) and many others. She hears regularly from some of them and at Christmas from others.

Ma Hemmering provided a variety of services. Apart from her duties at the bar, she changed money, made sandwiches, tutored French and German, broke up fights and sent remorseful husbands home with a bouquet of flowers from her back garden. But everything is finished, she conceded. Taxes and the closing of the air base make further business not worth the bother. October was her final month of operation. She is now 54. Her memories span the 12-year life of the base and its many faces but the 430-gang stand out most. The photos she plastered all over one wall have crumbled and had to be removed but she keeps the pieces as souvenirs.

For those local Frenchmen whose tranquil way of life was shattered by the roaring jets and the occasional impatient Canadian, things have taken a serious turn. Some 500 of them worked at the base at one time and local merchants built a brisk trade with the Canadians. In September only 27 civilians remained to help the 44 servicemen close the base. This number was dwindling steadily.

Two Wing was never the beauty spot among the four No.1 Air. Div. Fighter bases but its Spartan comforts contributed to the high morale of its troops. GT will be fondly remembered by thousands of Canadians long after it has again sunk into the mud.