Читать книгу Behind the Glory - Ted Barris - Страница 12
ОглавлениеIN THE SUMMER OF 1944, the troopship Aquitania completed a transatlantic crossing from Halifax to Scotland. Up the Firth of Clyde at the wartime docks of Gourock, she discharged a precious human cargo—thousands of freshly trained Allied air crew now ready for operational training and ultimately for active combat in the air war against Germany.
Among the thousands of disembarking servicemen was a young RCAF officer named Charlie Konvalinka. Three generations before, his ancestors had left Europe for a new life in America. Until now, he had never paid a return visit. Konvalinka’s first experience of Britain was a train ride in the middle of the night through blacked-out cities and villages. In the morning, he and his fellow air crew members arrived at the seaside resort town of Bournemouth, on the south coast of England.
Bournemouth was full of Canadians. For nearly four years, RCAF airmen like Konvalinka had arrived by the thousands to be billeted at city hotels. Wartime had transformed Bournemouth into No. 3 Personnel Reception Centre, and as such became the temporary quarters for air crewmen from Russia, Australia, New Zealand, France, Poland, South Africa, and the United States, but mostly from Canada.
With each new group of airmen that arrived in Bournemouth, there was processing to be done. Within the first few days of Konvalinka’s arrival, he and several hundred other former flying instructors were assembled for a briefing in one of Bournemouth’s old motion-picture theatres. The newly posted operational pilots were informed it would be a kind of orientation session, at which they would be told what life was like overseas. When all the pilots had taken their seats, out came an RCAF officer—a flight lieutenant, like Konvalinka—to begin the session.
“Well, you instructors are finally out here now,” he began. “Bloody bunch of cowards!”
This wasn’t at all what Konvalinka and his colleagues had expected.
“You guys probably don’t have the guts to do what we do,” the officer went on. “To fly a bomber on a straight and level when everybody’s shooting at you, or take on the enemy in a fighter one-on-one.”
The theatre remained silent. Konvalinka felt his blood boiling.
“If you had any guts at all you’d have been over here fighting. We’re the brave ones. You’re not!”
Konvalinka couldn’t restrain himself for another second. Before he realized what he was doing, he had called out, “And who, for Christ’s sake, taught you to fly? God?”
The presiding officer peered out into the theatre in search of the speaker. “Who said that?” he stormed.
Konvalinka stood up immediately and said to the sea of astonished faces around him, “I did. I said it!”
Charlie Konvalinka had never flown a combat mission in his life. Yet he had accumulated more than 1,850 hours of flying time; he was expert at the controls of every aircraft used for training service pilots in the Allied arsenal—aircraft such as two-seater Harvards, twin-engine Ansons, Lockheeds, Cessna Cranes, Airspeed Oxfords, and even biplane trainers such as Tiger Moths and Fleet Finches. At the age of twenty-six, Konvalinka was considered old by a fighting air force whose combat pilots were mostly nineteen, twenty, or twenty-one.
Before he received his overseas posting, Konvalinka had been an RCAF flying instructor. In four years of service in the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, he had taught perhaps a hundred other young men to fly. He’d shown some of them how to dodge and weave and throw a fighter aircraft around the sky to elude an enemy closing in for the kill. He’d instructed others how to bring a multi-engine aircraft home on just one engine. In short, he’d taught them how to survive.
Some of his students, now on operations, had flown fighter cover in the campaign to retake North Africa. Others in Bomber Command had completed full tours—thirty missions or more—over Brest, Hamburg, and Berlin. Still others of his students—Australians and New Zealanders—had gone home to squadrons in the South Pacific and were flying operations into Burma, over Singapore and even hit-and-run bombing raids on the Imperial Japanese Navy. And yet here it was, the beginning of 1944, and RCAF Flight Lieutenant Charlie Konvalinka had never fired a shot in anger, had experienced no combat duty.
From the beginning Konvalinka had had his heart set on becoming a fighter pilot. He had the physique of a fighter pilot—a short, compact build—a legacy of his days as a sprinter competing for Canada on the international track and field circuit. He had the right attitude too. Anything his taller friends could do, he could do better. And it was only half in jest that he claimed: “I’m the best pilot I ever saw.” But all he really wanted to do was get his hands on the control column of a Spitfire and put it through its paces.
He had joined the Royal Canadian Air Force early enough, a few months after Canada declared war on Germany in September 1939. When he’d taken his school documentation and a couple of letters of recommendation to the RCAF recruiting centre on York Street in Toronto, it was the time of the “Phony War.” The Germans had invaded Poland and Czechoslovakia (including Bohemia, the birthplace of his great grandfather). The Low Countries had fallen before the Blitzkrieg, and most people thought France would need lots of pilots to fend off the Germans. So there would still be plenty of time for Konvalinka to get into the thick of it. Still lots of Spitfire time to log.
Charlie Konvalinka had not joined the air force because he wanted to kill Nazis. At a pivotal moment in his training, late in 1940, while the Battle of Britain escalated between Churchill’s “few” and Göring’s mighty Luftwaffe, Konvalinka had been interviewed about his wartime aspirations. He could have given the patriotic answer (“To go fight for the King and to shoot down Nazis”), but he didn’t. He was honest enough to say he’d joined because his passion was to fly. And he was marked high for his honesty. However, the one thing Konvalinka had learned even in the first months of his training: the air force sent you where it wanted, not where you wanted.
And so, in late 1940, when Charlie Konvalinka graduated with a “distinguished pass” at No. 2 Service Flying Training School at Uplands, near Ottawa, and received his wings, he wasn’t posted to an operational training unit and sent overseas to shoot down Messer-schmitts. The RCAF sent him to Central Flying School (CFS) in Trenton, Ontario, to become a military flying instructor.
As an instructor he had worked at CFS, then in Moncton, New Brunswick, Stanley, Nova Scotia, and Souris and Gimli in Manitoba, from the middle of 1941 until July 1944. Perhaps to alleviate the initial disappointment of not being sent overseas himself, he referred to the scores of pilots he’d trained as his “calling cards for Hitler.”
Charlie Konvalinka had never expected any reward for being an RCAF instructor. The DFC (Distinguished Flying Cross) and the DSO (Distinguished Service Order) were the recognition reserved for successful combat pilots and crew. And only a few instructors were ever decorated with the AFC (the Air Force Cross) for outstanding service in Training Command at home. Nor was there ever in Konvalinka’s mind a sense that teaching young men to fly military aircraft was as heroic as getting shot at on a fighter sortie or bombing mission over Europe. He did, however, believe himself to be a professional. And he had proved it the very first time he got into trouble in a Harvard trainer during the summer of 1941.
“I had just begun instructing at Trenton [RCAF Central Flying School]. A sergeant pilot named Charlton was my very first student. I was training him to be an instructor,” Konvalinka said.
“We’d gone up this one day to do the sequence on spins. The little red patter book says that you’re supposed to climb to around 6,000 or 7,000 feet. And you go through the patter—the instructional jargon that we used. And right from the book Charlton recites: ‘I will now do a spin to the right and the recovery.’ So he throttles back, pulls the nose up until just above stalling speed, then applies full rudder to the right, and the Harvard falls into a spin.
“Now, a Harvard spin is a bone-shattering experience under normal conditions. It bounces and jumbles its way around when it spins.
But this one didn’t. It was like a knife cutting through butter. And it was new to me. I’d never experienced anything like it.
“I guess we were down around 4,000 feet and I got on the intercom tube and said ‘That’s good. Take her out now.’ And I hear this shaky voice from the rear cockpit say, ‘I’m trying . . .’
“I said, ‘I have control’ [and took control via the dual controls in the front cockpit].
“The standard recovery for a spin to the right is to kick on full opposite rudder—in this case the left rudder—push it down all the way, and centre the control column laterally. The Harvard will then kick out to the left. And as soon as it does, you centralize the rudder pedals, stand on them, hold them straight, and let the airplane find its way out of the spin . . .
“Well, I did all this. Nothing happened. It just didn’t work. But I knew there were secondary things you could do. Use the engine. When it’s spinning you’ve got the power off. So I put the power on. No good. I tried everything: put the flaps down, then up. Nothing. Then finally a combination of flaps and using the engine, and it started to come out, awfully damn low. There was no way we could have bailed out and made it. We were below a thousand feet and coming down fast.”
When Konvalinka returned to the station and reported the Harvard’s extraordinary spin conditions to the Trenton aircraft riggers, they concluded that the wing had been “out of rig” (that is, improperly aligned). This resulted in an aerodynamic instability, which produced the nearly uncorrectable spin. In other words, the wing could easily have torn itself right off and the Harvard would certainly have crashed, taking both Konvalinka and his student to their deaths.
So although Konvalinka couldn’t yet claim to have faced the cannon and guns of a Messerschmitt 109 in a dogfight, nor to have steered an eighteen-ton Lancaster bomber through a sea of exploding flak, he’d faced death in the cockpit of a Harvard trainer.
“In that emergency,” Konvalinka said, “I had gone cold. The emotions were entirely deadened. The brain took over.”
On the day his son was born in a mission hospital in Gimli, Manitoba, in July 1944, Flight Lieutenant Charlie Konvalinka got the news he’d been waiting for. At long last the air force had posted him overseas to operational duty (or “ops” as it was familiarly called). He would see England and prepare himself for what he called “the most dramatic and traumatic event of a lifetime.” (Other combat pilots described ops as “long periods of boredom interspersed with a few seconds of sheer terror.”)
All his experiences seemed to flash before him, however, when he was called a coward in a Bournemouth movie theatre.
Konvalinka and the orientation officer were hustled from the theatre and into the office of the station commander for an explanation. His years as a flight instructor and a flight commander told Konvalinka how to deal with this kind of confrontation. He described the theatre incident as “a difference of opinion between two officers of equal rank.” Apparently, the station commander didn’t see the need to discipline either man for his outburst. The issue was dropped. Charlie Konvalinka advanced to operational training and eventually realized his dream to fly Spitfires.
But the question remained: who had taught this pilot and nearly 50,000 other Allied military pilots to fly? Who had trained the nearly 150,000 qualified navigators, wireless operators, bomb-aimers, airgunners, and ground crew who were poised for the invasion of France, Italy, and Japanese-occupied Asia? Who had turned the tide of the air war after the retreat from Dunkirk, near-defeat in the Battle of Britain, the devastation of the Blitz, and the air routs at Pearl Harbor and Hong Kong? In short, who had transformed the Allied air forces into the most powerful weapon in the world? The answer: Konvalinka and hundreds of instructors like him in the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan.
Rooted in the First World War, when thousands of airmen were recruited and trained for the Royal Flying Corps (later the Royal Air Force) in Canada and the United States, and then formally planted in Canada with much greater Canadian control at the outbreak of war in 1939, the BCATP (or JATP for Joint Air Training Plan, or EATS for Empire Air Training Scheme) was a program to standardize the training of air crew for military service.
In its five-and-a-half-year lifespan—from December 1939 to September 1945—the BCATP would expend about $2 billion in the training of air crew from nearly every nation of the free world. It would ultimately deliver air superiority to the Allied war effort. The product of its training—nearly a quarter of a million air and ground crew—would spearhead the major land and sea operations to take back Europe, North Africa, and much of the Pacific. It would supply RAF Bomber Command with the trained airmen for a third of a million sorties. It would produce some of Canada’s 160 fighter aces who accounted for more than a thousand victories in the Second World War. It would help sustain the flow of bomber and fighter aircraft to the European theatre of war by supplying trained pilots and navigators to Ferry Command. And it would ensure the success of military operations on all fronts with the qualified airmen of Transport Command and Coastal Command. It would, in Winston Churchill’s words, be “one of the major factors, and possibly the decisive factor of the war.” And it happened almost entirely in Canada.
Nobody could have foreseen the plan’s success in 1939.
Even though a confederation of four Canadian provinces had negotiated national independence from its colonial parent in 1867, and had grown politically to nine provinces and geographically from the Atlantic to the Pacific by the twentieth century, Great Britain maintained a strong military presence in Canadian air space.
Even though the first controlled flight in the British Empire had been recorded by a Canadian in Canada in 1909, it went down in history as the achievement of a British subject, John McCurdy.
Even though Canada had trained and sent 2,500 pilots overseas to serve the Allies in the First World War, Canadian airmen never flew in combat in a Canadian flying service. Ten of the twenty-seven leading Allied air aces were Canadian, but even W.A. “Billy” Bishop, the most decorated Canadian airman in the First World War, flew missions against the Germans as a member of the Royal Flying Corps.
Even though by 1915 pilot training was being carried out at two flying schools in Canada—at Curtiss Aviation in Toronto and the Aero Club of British Columbia—the instruction and graduation of military pilots and air observers remained under British authority. Instructors and students were duty-bound solely to the War Office in London, England. The entry qualifications, the training syllabus, and the graduation standard (or awarding of “wings”) were all set by the Royal Naval Air Service or the Royal Flying Corps (amalgamated in April 1918 as the Royal Air Force).
At the Armistice, Canada’s air strength consisted of 110 airplanes, twelve airships, six kite balloons, some camera equipment donated by the British government, and about 1,700 air crew returning from the European war. That number declined in the peacetime years that followed. In 1920, under the jurisdiction of a Canadian government air board, Camp Borden opened an air training facility, offering a combination of ground school and flying instruction aboard either SE5a fighters or de Havilland 9a bombers. Service in Canada’s nonpermanent air force consisted of no more than four weeks’ training every two years. Moreover, its objectives were largely non-military— to license pilots for civil aviation, to conduct government air operations (forestry and fish patrols and photographic surveys), and finally, should the need arise, to defend Canada.
Encouraging recruits to enlist was not a priority, so young men did not flock to join Canada’s ad hoc air force. Even though the Canadian Air Force gained permanent status from the government in 1923 and, in 1924, permission from the King to be called the Royal Canadian Air Force, in 1931 the RCAF graduated only twenty-five pilots—and because of restricted budgets granted only one of them an active appointment. Canadians were still given an option to join the RAF; each year, Britain reserved permanent commissions for two Canadian university graduates. However, during the general prosperity and relative peace of the 1920s and then the depression of the 1930s, Canadians did not rush to train and serve in the RAF.
An emphasis on air training re-emerged in the late 1930s. The British government, aware of the renaissance of the German air force, planned the construction of seven air training schools. One would be located in Canada. It also launched an RAF recruiting program in the Dominions; under its Trained in Canada Scheme, fifteen candidates for the RAF would be selected by the RCAF, sent to the facilities being built at Trenton, Ontario, and trained according to the RAF regimen.
Group Captain Robert Leckie, a Canadian member of the RAF, was among the first to promote the advantages of permanently establishing military flight training in Canada. His service as a distinguished flying-boat pilot in the Royal Naval Air Service during the First World War and his postwar appointment as Superintendent of RAF Reserves gave him plenty of credibility. His “Proposal to Establish a Flying Training School in Canada” had three selling points: first, Canada was fairly close to the United Kingdom; second, it was close to a highly industrialized United States; and third, revitalized training in Canada would increase the flow of air crew into the RAF.
The proposal was shot down by Prime Minister Mackenzie King, who disapproved of the use of Canadian territory to train British airmen. Throughout 1938, despite repeated pitches by British industrialist J.G. Weir and the British high commissioner in Ottawa, Sir Francis Floud, King maintained that Canadians were “prepared to have our own establishments here and to give in those establishments facilities to British pilots to come and train here. But they must come and train in establishments which are under the control of the government of Canada.” King also refused to make any decision that committed Canada to enter any future European war on the British side. He felt that by siding with Britain, he ran the risk of angering the French-speaking Quebec electorate.
The prime minister’s outwardly staunch Canadian nationalism signalled his commitment to keep any training scheme in Canada Canadian-controlled and his determination to be personally involved in its orchestration. Thus began the political give and take. In July 1938, Mackenzie King invited another British delegation to negotiate an acceptable air training program. The British secretary of state for air responded by sending Group Captain J.M. Robb, commandant of the Central Flying School of the RAF, to discuss training facilities in Canada.
This move did not bring the two sides any closer together. Britain still wanted Britons and Canadians trained in Canada for the RAF; King still would not commit Canada to training pilots for Britain. The prime minister also felt that the proposed scheme undermined Canada’s own defence requirements and—if the RCAF were required to recruit for the RAF—the autonomy of the RCAF. (Even though the RCAF came into being on April 1, 1924, as a successor to the Canadian Air Force, it remained under the control of the Canadian Army until December 13, 1938.)
By January 1939, the two sides were back where they had started. All they had to show for many months of negotiation was a lot more misunderstanding and thirteen new military pilots (graduates of the Trained in Canada Scheme) trained by the RCAF under the RAF syllabus for RAF service. Two months of renewed negotiation followed, resulting in an agreement to jointly train fifty British pilots for the RAF and seventy-five Canadians for the RCAF.
These negotiations resulted in alterations to the RCAF training organization. Instead of the existing RCAF ten-month pilot training course, pilots would now be trained in three stages of sixteen weeks each, according to a revised RAF syllabus. The most innovative feature of the joint training plan was that the elementary training would be contracted out to eight civilian flying clubs across Canada. This was the idea of another Royal Flying Corps veteran of the First World War, Major Murton Seymour. A Canadian, Seymour had trained in Vancouver at one of Canada’s first two civilian schools; that connection would help establish civilian leadership in what became the Elementary Flying Training Schools of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan.
This first attempt at joint air training never really came to fruition. Of thirty-three Canadian student flyers who entered elementary flying at the civilian aero clubs, twenty-seven were due to receive their RCAF pilot’s flying badges when war broke out in September 1939. Meanwhile, the fifty British pilot trainees who were destined for service training in Canada never left England. In late 1939, they finished their training at home and were immediately posted to RAF operations against Germany.
However, the 1939 bilateral pilot training proposal capitalized on the strengths of both the RAF and the RCAF training traditions to develop a common training approach. Both sides had discussed requirements and the availability of training aircraft. Civilian flying schools had proved their worth in sharing the training load with both air forces. Canada had come to understand Britain’s anxiety over the growing air power of Germany. And the RAF had come to understand the RCAF’s aspirations for autonomy in air crew training in Canada.
Partly as a statement of national autonomy, the Canadian Parliament made its own declaration of war on Germany a week after Britain. On that day, September 10, 1939, discussions between the British Air Ministry and Canadian air force officials began in London to build upon the RAF-RCAF joint training experiment of the previous twelve months. British Air Ministry officials calculated the number of pilots each Commonwealth dominion might contribute to the war effort. All agreed that three or four times the number now being produced in the dominions would be required to counteract the German threat.
The discussion turned to Canada’s role in training air crew, including the effect of Canadian winter conditions on flying training, where instructors and trainer aircraft would come from, how American flyers might be recruited, and what airfields would be available. The influence of Mackenzie King prevailed; it was agreed that any air training in Canada would be under the control of the RCAF.
The notion of a “commonwealth” air training plan arose three days later. Vincent Massey, the Canadian high commissioner to the United Kingdom, spoke with his Australian counterpart, Stanley Bruce, about Britain’s weakness in the air. They then talked to RCAF Group Captain A.E. Godfrey and to two Australian officers, and finally to the Dominion Secretary, Anthony Eden, and other members of the British cabinet.
Massey claimed to have been the first to propose “that Canada might be able to make a decisive contribution to the common war effort by training Commonwealth airmen.” At a high commissioners’ meeting on September 16, 1939, the Canadian and Australian representatives together suggested that Eden consider “a scheme whereby Canadian, Australian and New Zealand air forces should be training in Canada on planes to be specially built in Canada.”
When British prime minister Neville Chamberlain sent a telegram containing the Massey-Bruce air training plan to Mackenzie King, he concluded his request for Canadian approval by saying, “We trust therefore, that this co-operative method of approach to the problem will appeal to your Government. The knowledge that a vast air potential was being built up in the Dominions where no German air activity could interfere with expansion might well have a psychological effect on the Germans, equal to that produced by the intervention of the United States in the last war.”
The proposal appealed not only to King’s sense of history, but also to his sense of political survival. As Canada’s major contribution to the Allied war effort, the mounting of a commonwealth air training scheme would not result in long casualty lists, nor would there be the political risk of conscription for a large army, because the Canadians in the RCAF would be volunteers. On September 28, King presented the proposal to his cabinet and wired Chamberlain Canada’s acceptance of the plan in principle, with a proposal for further discussions.
The horse trading began when the British negotiating team, led by industrialist Lord Riverdale, arrived in Ottawa in October 1939. Riverdale began by laying out the round numbers; the British proposal called for the training of 29,000 air crew (pilots, air observers, and wireless operator/air-gunners) each year. Elementary flying training would be conducted in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, with all service flying training to be done in Canada. In Canada, there would be twelve Elementary Flying Training Schools (EFTS), twenty-five Service Flying Training Schools (SFTS), fifteen Air Observer Schools (AOS), fifteen Bombing and Gunnery Schools (B&GS), three Air Navigation Schools (ANS), and a large Wireless School. Five thousand training aircraft would be required and 54,000 air force personnel. The total estimated capital and maintenance cost for three years (the length of time the war was expected to last) would be almost $1 billion, with three-quarters of that paid by Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. While most felt the components of the scheme were appropriate, it was the bottom line that caught the Canadians off guard.
Mackenzie King and his finance minister, J.L. Ralston, proposed scaling down the costs and getting Britain to shoulder more of the financial burden, since this “was not Canada’s war in the same sense that it was Great Britain’s.” At the same time, the Canadian government expected Britain to buy more Canadian wheat, and it demanded that a ceiling be put on the amount of Canadian credit extended to the United Kingdom for war purchases. Riverdale had to weigh the value of this vital air support scheme against the loss of some credit purchasing power and increased spending on weapons and wheat. The plan won out. In return for this commitment, however, Britain asked that the air training scheme be given the highest priority in Canada.
The second phase of negotiations began when the Australian and New Zealand delegations arrived in Ottawa with their counterproposals. The plan’s price tag was on their minds too. Not only was it too high but so was the ratio of trainees they were expected to contribute. These figures were recalculated to reflect actual population ratios—57 percent of the trainees would come from Canada, 35 percent from Australia and 8 percent from New Zealand. Consequently, the size of the scheme was adjusted. Generally, the number of schools was reduced: the number of SFTSs was cut from twenty-five to sixteen, the AOSs and B&GSs from fifteen to ten, and the ANSs from three to two. There would be twenty-six smaller EFTSs instead of thirteen large ones, and four Wireless Schools instead of one large one. As well, the aircraft requirement was scaled down. The overall projected cost was pared back to just over $607 million—of which Britain would pay $185 million, Canada $287 million (excluding EFTS costs), Australia $40 million, and New Zealand $28 million— from the inception of the plan to its agreed termination on March 31, 1943.
Because of Mackenzie King’s earlier demands, there was no question about the control of the training plan. It would be administered by the Canadian government and commanded by the RCAF. With that battle apparently settled, the British wanted the agreement initialled as an “essential step forward in our joint war effort.” However, the Canadian prime minister was not yet ready to give his blessing. Mackenzie King wanted to protect his political interests at home (particularly among those Anglo-Canadians who might question the emphasis on an air training plan over and above the traditional mustering of a large land force). Just as the British had demanded that the plan be given top priority by Canada, King expected the British government to reciprocate by stating “that the air training plan should take priority over all other Canadian commitments not already entered into.” Believing this to be the last hurdle, Prime Minister Chamberlain agreed.
But King wasn’t finished. Even as the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan document was being put into its final form, he had second thoughts about the status of Dominion squadrons in the field. The agreement suggested that the United Kingdom would “initiate discussion” on the matter later. That wasn’t good enough for King. He was afraid that Canadian graduates of the BCATP would lose their RCAF identity completely and, after overseas posting, be swallowed up by RAF operational squadrons. The British Air Ministry dug in its heels. Even if an operational squadron were manned largely by RCAF air crew, its ground personnel would be largely RAF and would consequently outnumber the RCAF air crew; thus, the ministry would refuse RCAF designation of such a squadron. By December 15, 1939, the two sides had come to a stalemate.
Riverdale was at his wits’ end. King was adamant, but he wanted the agreement signed. He telegraphed Anthony Eden, the Dominion Secretary, to say that the entire BCATP was “imperilled.” The telegraph and telephone lines between London and Ottawa buzzed with new urgency. British Air Ministry officials huddled. King entreated the Governor General, Lord Tweedsmuir, who was ailing and bedridden at Government House, to support the Canadian position.
In spite of his political and nationalistic posturing, King was determined to finalize the BCATP agreement by mid-December. His resolve had little to do with the priorities of the Canadian government or the growing air war. December 17, 1939, would be his sixty-fifth birthday, and he wanted the agreement completed in honour of that occasion. He succeeded. By midnight on December 16, Lord Riverdale presented a formula to the effect that “Canadian pupils when passing out from the training scheme will be incorporated in or organized as units of the Royal Canadian Air Force in the field.” For the time being, though not forever, Mackenzie King had preserved the Canadian factor in the creation of the BCATP.
On Sunday evening, December 17, 1939, the prime minister addressed the Canadian people, stressing the important role the BCATP was about to play in the war. “In making provision for this vast undertaking,” he said, “the government has done so knowing that nothing can be left to haste or to chance. The intricate machine must be perfect. In every phase of their work, the men must be trained by the highest skill, and under the best conditions it is possible for the country to provide.
“Let there be no mistake about the significance of the present war. It is a desperate struggle for existence itself. On its outcome will depend the fate not of Canada alone, nor even the British Empire . . . but of humanity itself. To save mankind from such a catastrophe, the airmen of the British Commonwealth, whether setting their course by the North Star or the Southern Cross, are dedicating their lives.”
Just before the prime minister retired for the night, he recorded in his diary that “it was certainly a memorable birthday. I suppose no more significant Agreement has ever been signed by the Government of Canada, or signature placed in the name of Canada to [such a] definitely defined obligation.”
