Image: Sergeant Pilot Omer Levesque is assisted into his parachute prior to flying a mission while assigned to No. 401 Squadron, RCAF, on July 7, 1941, during World War II.

Omer “Trottle” Lévesque served as a pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) during the Second World War. He flew many sorties over France and regularly flew across the Channel from England. He was shot down, captured, and spent the last three years of the war in Stalag Luft III.

Today, he is best remembered for flying F-86 Sabres with the United States Air Force (USAF) during the Korean War.

Lévesque was born in 1920 in Mont Joli, Quebec. Before joining the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF), he was a local militia lieutenant and enrolled at the University of Ottawa. Later, he transferred to the RCAF as a second-class aircraftman. In 1941, he graduated after several months of training at the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan (BCATP) facility at the Flight Training School at Portage la Prairie, Manitoba. During World War II, Levesque flew with the RCAF and was the first British Commonwealth pilot to shoot down a German Focke-Wulf Fw-190.

After being sent overseas after his training, Levesque was assigned to the No. 55 Operational Training Unit in Scotland, where he took another 65 hours of flight training, becoming familiar with the Hawker Hurricane. His combat career started with the RCAF’s No. 401 “Ram” Squadron, which operated the Supermarine Spitfire V. Regarding his first few months of comabat, Levesque remembered, “Most new pilots bought it after two or three sweeps. Once, we nearly lost the whole squadron, losing nine pilots in one sweep. We were just about decimated. In the Battle of Britain, you could be bailed out and sent home the same day, but you were a prisoner in France. And the Germans were so powerful and cocky in those days. They’d sometimes chase us right back over the Channel. They were wiping us out.” Because of the high mortality rate among pilots, newer recruits quickly advanced in rank.