The Short Military Career of my Uncle, David Andrew Hubbell

My uncle David Andrew Hubbell was 17 when he signed up for the Royal Canadian Air Force. He wanted to be an aerial gunner and trained at night at a local high school auditorium in Toronto. However in early 1945 he was quietly taken aside by the C.O. at the training centre and told that it appeared that the war was winding down and the RCAF wouldn't be needing him anymore as a gunner. But, added the officer, with the ongoing war against Japan, the Army was short of manpower and was looking for volunteers. According to the official record, David wasn't terribly happy leaving the RCAF, but decided to join the Canadian Army and volunteered to take part in the planned1946 invasion of Japan as part of the Canadian contingent. He signed up and there are photos of him in training at Camp Ipperwash on the shores of Lake Huron (now a popular provincial park, although the former military camp is off limits in places as ordnance is still being cleared from there, at least as of 2020). The war in Europe ended and I believe he was transferred to Niagara for further training but when Japan surrendered later in the year he apparently went AWOL to celebrate. (Apparently this went unpunished, so I am guessing the whole camp probably emptied out). He was demobbed either late 1945 or early 1946 and returned to civvy street, where he had hoped to become -- like his father -- a real estate broker, although he initially took a job as a delivery boy for a local butcher. However, while on the job he complained of feeling weak and fatigued, and thought he was low on iron, and so started a diet of organ meat from the butcher's he was working at but it didn't help. Taken to a doctor he was diagnosed with leukaemia. The doctor told his parents that surgery could be done but it would only be a temporary fix (if it even worked) and he shortly would be in even worse condition than he presently was. I don't think David was told that, to spare him, for good or for bad. He took a sudden turn for the worse in early December and died of an internal haemorrhaghe shortly before Xmas, 1946. He was all of 20, only a few weeks away from turning 21. He is buried in Toronto's Mount Pleasant cemetery alongside his Mother and Father.