I can remember quite clearly those Sunday morning drives in the country back roads of Southern Alberta with my father. We had a 1964 Plymouth Valiant with a push button automatic transmission, bench seats, a hole in the floor board on the driver's side where you could watch the road fly by and of course the ash tray where my father would keep his ever present tobacco pipe on standby. There were many a great adventure in that car as I discovered and developed my own version of my dad's thirst for discovering local history by traveling the gravel pathways that crisscrossed the prairie in very orderly divisions.
On one of the great many expeditions we would undertake in our maroon "historymobile" was to drive west of Lethbridge, Alberta along Highway 3, past the town of Monarch, up the coulees of the Oldman River and further west to a range road that was marked to the north as Pearce and to the south as Orton. We would turn right and drive through what had obviously once been a more populous and prosperous little village at some point in time. By this point in history, Pearce was little more than a very small collection of homes surrounded by a few outlying farms. The Canadian Pacific Railway line passed through the old place as it wound its way between Lethbridge to the east and Fort Macleod and the Crowsnest Pass to the west. I discovered a photo of a small train station that had once stood in this community, something that I could find no evidence of in modern times. The station was the first introduction for many a British aircrew candidate to the wide open prairie lands that would be their new temporary home for learning the skills to fly and fight. I am sure also that this would have been the candidates first introduction to the nearly always present strong winds of southern Alberta, winds which quite regularly gust more than 40 miles an hour and sometimes reach 70 miles an hour.
About five miles north of the village of Pearce was a small collection of farms that to a ten year old boy looked nothing like what he imagined a World War II pilot training aerodrome would have looked like. By the mid to late 1970's when our adventures would bring us to the former military installation, none of the original structures that had formed the little world unto itself still remained. I would strain to see if I could discern any patches of pavement that might have indicated where even one of the 3 runways and their associated parallel taxiways would have been. I never could find any physical evidence that this once bustling aerodrome had even existed here in this somewhat remote location. I think that the fact that I couldn't locate any tangible proof that this place had once been so vital and busy a place just served to foster much greater desire to learn and discover more about this mysterious place. My father had somehow acquired a Canadian Mines and Resources map of the Lethbridge area and I remember very clearly seeing the aerodrome at Pearce marked on that map about the half way point between Lethbridge and Fort Macleod.
After visiting this ghostly expanse of flat land with knee high grass and grazing cattle I would often find myself dreaming about what this place had once been like. I could imagine all those young men who came across the Atlantic by ship, facing the peril of having their convoy attacked and their ship sunk by prowling bands of German U-boats, leaving all that they had always known behind in war ravaged England. Those same men landing in east coast harbours and then boarding steam powered trains that would travel what must have seemed like an impossible distance both day and night to bring them to such remote places so far away from home. I would wonder about what the men would do when they weren't learning the basics of aviating. Did they attend dances, write long letters home to their loved ones, travel the countryside by bicycle, catch a train into Lethbridge to check out a movie or a hockey game? I imagined all the large hangars that held the training planes, the many barracks that held all the promising young recruits, the classrooms where they would learn navigation, engine management, aircraft recognition, basic armament, weather and the multitude of other facets that would be crammed into those young minds to make them proud new pilots.
It wasn't until I was much older and was working on my commercial pilots license that I ever got to first see for myself from the air just how significant the Pearce Aerodrome had once been. It was in the year 2000 when I had recently returned to southern Alberta and I was building time for my license by flying friends and family around to various interesting destinations. One of my very first of these flights I took along my father who so many years ago had lit the fire that now burned in me, hungering for knowledge about this program that had created so very many air facilities in such close proximity to one another , facilities that now had been wiped from memory and left to slowly be forgotten as the prairie reclaimed the once vibrant places. We flew northwest of Lethbridge (which itself had been a part of the BCATP as first an elementary flying training base and shortly afterward a bombing and gunnery school) along the #3 Highway past Coalhurst and Monarch following the Oldman River and the Canadian Pacific Rail line as they both wound this way and that across the landscape below. And then you see the pavement of the old great base...the highly recognizable triangle of runways and taxiways which still defy the prairie's bid to swallow and reclaim the old asphalt. The concrete pads that had once been the foundations for the hangars, drill hall, maintenance shop, motor pool, barracks and other such buildings now being torn up for their valuable gravel to pave nearby dirt roads. It was like final confirmation that the rumours of this place had all in fact been true, the aerodrome really only existing as a view from the air....how appropriate for this once very busy place.
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