Читать книгу Amazing Airmen - Ian Darling - Страница 9

1 THE CAREER OFFICER

Keith Ogilvie wanted to join the Royal Canadian Air Force, but the air force turned him down. In the pre-war era it wanted university graduates. Ogilvie, who was twenty-four, was more athletic than academic. He had graduated from high school and worked as a clerk in an Ottawa stock brokers’ office.

Ogilvie decided he would try to join another air force. In August 1939, he submitted his application at the Ottawa office of Britain’s Royal Air Force. The office recruited him two days later, quickly gave him a medical exam and sent him to England on the ocean liner Letitia.

Within a month of Ogilvie’s arrival the British government declared war on Germany. When he sent troops into Poland on September 1, 1939, Adolf Hitler demonstrated that he had no interest in what British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain called “peace for our time.” Hitler wanted to use military force to expand German influence in Europe and around the world. Poland was the first country to fall. The Netherlands, Belgium, and France soon followed.