Читать книгу Behind the Glory - Ted Barris - Страница 13
ОглавлениеIT WAS A CRISP WINTER’S MORNING when the power-brokers who had negotiated and signed the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan agreement assembled for a photograph on the steps of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa. Lord Riverdale, chief negotiator for the United Kingdom, stood with J.V. Fairbairn, Australian minister for air, Prime Minister Mackenzie King and his key cabinet ministers—including J.L. Ralston, Norman Rogers, and C.D. Howe—and representatives from the Royal Australian, Royal New Zealand, Royal Canadian, and Royal Air Forces. Bundled up in heavy winter coats, gloves, and fedoras, this assembly of politicians, bureaucrats, and military brass turned to smile at the camera.
Even though Prime Minister King basked in the limelight as the individual most responsible for launching the plan, the BCATP did not owe its success to the negotiating sessions in London and Ottawa in 1938 and 1939, nor to the politicians and military strategists who signed it. The credit for the success of this massive scheme belonged to thousands of anonymous men and women who, like Charlie Konvalinka, shared the love of flying.
In that sense, the plan originated in 1927, when a lanky, soft-spoken aviator landed his Ryan NYP monoplane, the “Spirit of St. Louis,” at Le Bourget Airport in Paris, after a 3,600-mile non-stop flight from New York. Inspired by Charles Lindbergh’s achievement, a young architecture student from Auburn, New York, abandoned his education to pursue a flying career. Maury Dillingham was one of many Americans who joined the RCAF before Pearl Harbor and who served as a flying instructor in the BCATP.
An innovator of another sort captured the imagination of Argentine-born Ted Arnold. The summer of the Lindbergh flight, when he was on vacation from his British public school, Ted got an invitation to visit an airfield just outside Southampton on the south coast of England. He’ll never forget seeing “this aeroplane with a great revolving wing on top.
“The pilot was an amiable Spaniard. The aircraft had a regular motor and propeller on the front. But just before he began to move forward along the ground, they pulled a rope to get this big wing on top revolving. And it helped lift the plane into the air. I had the feeling I had just seen the future.”
Young Ted Arnold was right. The aviator was Spanish aeronautical engineer Juan de la Cierva. The crash of his trimotor plane in 1919 had led Cierva to develop the autogiro, a more stable form of aircraft. The prototype that Ted had seen in 1927 gained wide use in France, Germany, Japan, and the United States before the Second World War and was the forerunner of the helicopter. Although Cierva was killed in an airliner crash at Croydon aerodrome near London in 1936, Ted was not dissuaded from flying; he went back to Argentina, later joined the RCAF, and instructed scores of pilots in the BCATP.
The passion for flying affected youngsters even in remote regions. Ren Henderson spent his childhood on the island of Samarai, at the eastern end of Papua New Guinea, where his father was the magistrate, dispensing Australian justice. In the 1920s there were few roads and no cars, so there were really only two ways to get around—on foot and by air. The first aircraft Ren ever saw was “a weird-looking contraption that belonged to the Australian Air Force, with the engine and propeller pointing backwards. It had two wings and all these damn wires. You could have let a cockatoo go in there, and it would never have found its way out through all those wires.
“I remember a native standing there watching this thing land on the water and taxi up to the beach,” Henderson said. “He turned to someone beside him and said, ‘It’s the motor car that belongs to Jesus Christ.’”
Ren Henderson was among about 10,000 Royal Australian Air Force air crew shipped to Canada for BCATP training. Like nearly all of his mates from home, Henderson was itching for an overseas combat posting. Instead, he was one of the first three RAAF pilots to become a BCATP instructor. Ren finally got a crack at flying fighter sorties in mid-1944, and there, in the skies over Dieppe, “it was what I learned as an instructor that saved my life.”
For Jack Meadows, flying was like “a germ spreading” through his life. As a boy in England his favourite books included a 1910 history of the Daily Mail London-to-Manchester air race, stories about the aircraft in the Great War, and biographies of such flyers as Mc Cudden, Mannock, Ball, Bishop, Boelcke, Immelmann, and Richthofen. When he was about ten he attended Alan Cobham’s Flying Circus and invested his month’s allowance—five shillings—for a “joy ride” in the rear cockpit of an Avro 504K. He studied aviation periodicals, and one—The Aeroplane—published his account of an air display at Ipswich Airport.
The “germ” grew at prep school when he was riveted by the sight of a close formation of Bristol Bulldog fighters flying overhead, and at college when he participated in anti-aircraft drills, firing blanks from a .303 Enfield rifle at an attacking Hawker Audax. Flying became “a full-blown fever” in 1937, when he invested his life’s savings—£35— in flying lessons at the Ipswich Aero Club. Meadows had set his sights on an RAF career, carrying on the military aviation traditions of his bookshelf heroes. Instead, he would log 1,600 hours instructing Allied pilots on thirty aircraft types across England and Canada before he eventually went day-fighting in Spitfires in 1943 and later night-fighting in Beaufighters and Mosquitoes.
For Gene Vollick, who lived in Hamilton, Ontario, a summer morning when he was nine years old changed his whole life. Somewhere between six and eight o’clock on the morning of August 11, 1930, the British dirigible R100 motored overhead en route from Toronto to Niagara Falls as part of its North American publicity tour to promote commercial airship flights. Gene was thunderstruck. From that moment on, he abandoned his old hobby of collecting baseball cards and began to collect aviation cards. When the war began, he enrolled in an aero-engineering course at the Galt Aircraft School, but later remustered into air crew and trained RCAF pilots at the Service Flying level until the war ended.
The R100’s trip over southern Ontario affected many others who saw it. The night before, August 10, the dirigible passed over Ottawa, and as she reached the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill six powerful searchlights illuminated her silver shape, creating an unforgettable sight. American millionaire Howard Hughes was rumoured to have offered $100,000 to have the R100 do a fly-past over New York. Toronto motorists got a free look as they stopped their cars in the streets to watch her circle the city.
One of the best spots for dirigible viewing was a house in the Cabbagetown section of Toronto. As the R100 circled the city, thirteen-year-old Allister Rutherford scrambled to the rooftop of his Winchester Street house and gazed at it until it was a speck in the distance. Rutherford lived with his bicycle at the ready; whenever there was the slightest indication of air traffic at the Leaside Aerodrome, he and his friends were off like a shot, pedalling uptown to watch what they called “the flying circus.” His fascination for flying as well as mathematics led him into navigation instruction for the wartime RCAF; he served the Air Training Plan from coast to coast, from Chatham, New Brunswick, to Comox, British Columbia.
The Roaring Twenties and the Dirty Thirties—the best and worst of times—provided youngsters with plenty of opportunity to fall in love with flying. Wing-walkers, barnstormers, transoceanic daredevils, former First World War aces, aerobatic teams, and flying circuses of every shape and size gave demonstrations and shows all across Canada. On June 5, 1928, Amelia Earhart stopped in Halifax en route from Boston to Wales; on June 17, she became the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air. Ford Trimotor airplanes conducted National Air Tours that stopped at centres all across North America in the 1920s. In April 1930, the RCAF inaugurated a demonstration flight of Siskin fighters; they were Canada’s first touring aerobatic team. In July 1933, Charles Lindbergh made short stopovers in Halifax and St. John’s on his way to Greenland, and Edmonton’s Blatchford Field welcomed Wiley Post and his Lockheed Vega “Winnie May” in the midst of a solo round-the-world flight.
Owen Sound, where teenager Charlie Krause attended high school in the 1930s, was the birthplace of Canada’s most celebrated fighter pilot, Billy Bishop. Krause remembers one of Bishop’s homecomings, when he landed in a farmer’s field on the outskirts of town. But the event that left a greater impression on him was a fly-past that didn’t land in Owen Sound.
In July 1933, pioneering Italian aviator General Italo Balbo launched his historic Second Atlantic Aeronautica—a six-week mass transatlantic flight of seaplanes from Orbetello, Italy, to Chicago and back. Balbo wanted to commemorate the first decade of fascism in Italy and to impress his superior, Benito Mussolini. About noon on Saturday, July 15, Balbo’s aerial armada of twenty-four Savoia Marchetti seaplanes (en route from Montreal to Chicago, where a huge reception awaited them) passed the southern edge of Georgian Bay, right over Charlie Krause’s home town. “I always wanted to fly,” Krause recalled, “I guess because for a country kid growing up on the farm, airplanes were fascinating. But the day that Italian outfit flew over town, that sort of sealed it.” Eight years later Krause would join the RCAF, serve several years as a pilot instructor in the BCATP, and still make it overseas in time to fly night operations in Mosquitoes and survive the war.
Young Charley Fox of Guelph, Ontario, used to listen to his father’s war stories. Thomas “Will” Fox had fought in the Boer War, serving with the British cavalry in the 10th Hussars, the same regiment as Lord Baden-Powell. As a result, Will Fox raised his sons, Ted and Charley, in a pretty strict fashion. But Charley’s decision to join the war effort had much more to do with a summer day in 1934 when the RAF paid an unexpected visit.
“I never was one to make airplane models, or even think of getting up in the air,” Fox said. “In fact, one time when they offered me a flight over the fair in Hamilton, I said, ‘No. I’m afraid I’ll be sick.’ But that year there was a flight of Hawker Furys visiting from No. 1 Squadron of the Royal Air Force. I had read about them. They were silver-coloured fighter biplanes. They were doing demonstrations over Ontario and Quebec. And all of a sudden one day I hear this roar. Five silver airplanes came zooming from over the top of College Hill, glinting in the sunlight. Then swoosh . . . they were gone. But I never forgot it.” By the time No. 1 RAF Squadron was in full combat back in Britain in 1940, Fox had enlisted in the RCAF. Before he went overseas in 1943 to fly Spitfires, he taught scores of BCATP trainees how to prepare themselves for the toughest flying assignments of their lives.
Others caught the aviation bug in more casual ways. Alan Stirton, the third son of six children in a Saskatchewan farm family, was smitten by flying entirely by accident. Each weekday he would hitch up the family pony, Fanny, to a buggy and head out for the Petrolia schoolhouse near Moose Jaw.
“One day in the fall of 1930, luck was with me. I was driving home from school, and a small airplane landed in our neighbour’s stubble field. We hustled old Fanny into the barn and ran across the fields to admire this wonderful machine. Lo and behold, if the pilot didn’t offer me a ride. What a thrill. I was only twelve at the time. But from then on I dreamed of becoming a pilot.” Stirton did learn to fly, but getting his pilot’s licence was a painful experience.
In spite of British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s assurance from Hitler in September 1938 that there would be “peace in our time,” the Canadian government prepared for war by offering private flying clubs a $100 grant for every student pilot who received a licence. Dick Ryan, a First World War fighter pilot who managed the Moose Jaw Flying Club, placed ads in local newspapers offering to split the grant with any aspiring pilots.
“One free ride to assess your ability to become a pilot,” Ryan promised, and offered a private pilot’s licence if the trainee passed the tests after twenty hours of flying time. Total cost to the student: $150. The ad attracted a local RCMP constable, a couple of auto-mechanics, and a few others, including Al Stirton, who admitted, “I didn’t know a rudder from an aileron.” But it didn’t take him long to scrape the cash together, and by October 1 he was airborne in a ten-year-old Gipsy Moth with Ryan himself. After seven and a half hours of dual instruction, Stirton did his first solo flight. And on November 14, 1938, he took his private pilot’s test from an examiner visiting Moose Jaw from Edmonton.
“In those days,” Stirton remembered, “no examiner dared risk his life by riding in the airplane with a student, but stayed on the ground and ‘observed’ the flight from the seat of his car. I was instructed to climb above the aerodrome, do a medium turn to the left, then one to the right, followed by a steep turn each way; then put the aircraft into a spin and recover; then fly to Ross Collegiate about one and a half miles distant and back; then circle the water tower in figure-eight turns; then do a spot landing back at the aerodrome.
“The examiner had positioned a square canvas sheet with a red X on the field. When I was downwind, he would wave a white flag and I was to close the throttle, glide down, land, and stop within fifty feet of the spot. All went well. And I stopped with the spot under the right wing.”
At that point, Stirton noticed the instructor, Bob Eddie, speeding towards the Gipsy Moth in his car. Eddie leapt out of the driver’s seat and proceeded to tear a strip off the pilot trainee.
“What did you do that for?”
“Do what for?” Stirton asked.
“I’ll give you credit for getting down to the spot,” Eddie fumed, “but you were turning at too low a height. You know you can’t turn below 400 feet. Go up again, and if you’re too high, side-slip off some height. But for God’s sake don’t turn so close to the ground!”
“A side-slip,” Stirton repeated. “Okay.” And off he went.
Unfortunately, Stirton had never been taught how to side-slip. On the second approach to the field, he throttled back, turned the Gipsy Moth to line up with the examiner’s canvas sheet, noticed he had a bit too much height and lowered his left wing to slip sideways down closer to the ground.
“Suddenly, the aircraft stalled and sank like a brick,” Stirton recalled. “I had forgotten to lower the nose to maintain flying speed as I came out of the side-slip, and the poor Gipsy Moth hit the ground so hard that the undercarriage was punched up into the fuselage. The wings drooped down onto the grass. And I cracked three ribs.”
The crash of Gipsy Moth CF-ADI nearly put an end to Stirton’s flying ambitions. But by January 18, 1939, the aircraft had been repaired and was flying again, and Bob Eddie’s blood pressure was back to normal. Al Stirton passed and received his pilot’s licence. In May, he had accumulated seventy hours on airplanes at the Moose Jaw Flying Club, and earned his commercial licence. But flying jobs were few and far between that summer, so he just took friends for rides to build up his hours.
If he had stopped flying after that crash landing, Stirton might never have been invited to join the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. He wouldn’t have taught the basic principles of flying to hundreds of young military pilot trainees at St. Catharines Elementary Flying Training School or flown any anti-submarine patrols in Sunderland flying boats with No. 423 RCAF Squadron over the North Atlantic.
In fall 1939 the Blitzkrieg against Poland began in Europe. Britain declared war on Germany on September 3. A week later Canada did the same. And that’s when the war came looking for Al Stirton. The day after Canada declared war—September 11—Stirton received a telegram from the minister of national defence inviting him to serve in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Naturally, he answered yes, “thinking that I’d become a hero as a fighter pilot.”
Similar missives arrived on the desks of flying clubs and private aviation companies from Halifax to Vancouver to Yellowknife. Just about everyone who was anyone in the commercial flying business in Canada received a telegram.
Wilfrid “Wop” May received one in Edmonton. A former Royal Flying Corps pilot, May had returned from the First World War a hero with a DFC and twelve enemy aircraft to his credit. The following year he had launched the first air service at Edmonton’s Blatchford Field. May is credited with the first commercial flight from Edmonton, the first freighting flight for Imperial Oil into the Northwest Territories, and the first commercial passenger flights into the Peace River district of Alberta. May’s mercy mission of flying diphtheria vaccine in an open cockpit Avro Avian from Edmonton 500 miles to Fort Vermilion on January 3, 1929, captured world attention; as did his participation in the pursuit and apprehension of Albert Johnson (dubbed the Mad Trapper) in 1931. Wop May, like Al Stirton, answered the telegram (and for his role in the BCATP was eventually awarded the American Medal of Freedom).
Ottawa also sent for Clennell Haggerston Dickins in Winnipeg. At the time “Punch” Dickins was in his thirties and working as the general superintendent of Canadian Airways. He was in charge of all air mail service from the Great Lakes to the Pacific and the Arctic. Dickins, like May, was a First World War veteran in the Royal Flying Corps with a DFC to his credit and had pursued his aviation career in the bush, flying in and supplying prospectors in the North. His flight for Dominion Explorers in 1928 was the first ever to survey the barren lands of the Arctic. In 1929 Dickins had been the first pilot to fly over the Arctic Circle in Canada. The call from Canadian Pacific president Sir Edward Beatty about “a wartime job” for Dickins turned out to be crucial to the launching of the Atlantic Ferry Organization.
Calls also went out to a couple of commercial pilots flying in Quebec— Charles Roy Troup and Walter Woollett. “Peter” Troup had served in the RAF’s peacetime No. 39 Bomber Squadron but had resigned his commission, emigrated to Canada, and pursued a career in Quebec’s bush country with Fairchild Aviation. Not long thereafter, “Babe” Woollett did the same, leaving No. 29 RAF Fighter Squadron to seek his fortune at Fairchild in Canada.
Between them, Troup and Woollett did every conceivable kind of flying in the 1920s and 1930s. Troup raced seaplanes at the Canadian National Exhibition and led the Trans Canada Air Tour of eight Bellanca aircraft as part of a sales promotion. Woollett flew some of the first survey crews into northern Quebec and Labrador, flew an international mail route, and led countless rescue missions, including one to locate and retrieve his friend Peter Troup. But the greatest of their collaborations cast Troup and Woollett as co-designers of the BCATP Air Observer Schools, right after war was declared.
The skill of the air observer was viewed by the RAF military establishment with awe that bordered on reverence. In its air crew training manuals the British Air Ministry went so far as to say that “in many respects the air observer has the most responsible and exacting task in a bomber aircraft. . . . Mentally he must always be on the alert. . . . He must estimate and plot the course, be able to take snap readings, judge weather conditions, look out for ice and keep alternative objectives and landing grounds in the back of his mind . . . He must show a marked ability to handle figures, and be sufficiently skilled in signals to take a portion of work off the wireless operator. Above all he must never make mistakes . . . He is a wise and considerate pilot who appreciates the difficulties of his air observer.” Few flyers had greater respect for the air observer than did Babe Woollett.
Woollett’s high regard for the skills of air observation came from one of his earliest flying experiences. As an RAF elementary flying student training at Duxford EFTS in 1924, Woollett quickly adapted to doing “circuits and bumps” with the instructor in the second cockpit of his trainer aircraft, an Avro 504K biplane. On the day he soloed, leaving his instructor, Flight Lieutenant Sutherland, on the ground, Woollett became so enraptured by the sights of nearby Cambridge that he headed for home in the wrong direction. After buzzing the horseracing crowd in the grandstand at Newmarket on Classic Race Day, “my main concern became finding my way home. Fortunately, I happened to know that the main road from Newmarket to London ran right through the middle of Duxford Air Force Station.” When he finally landed back at Duxford he was nearly court-martialled for flying so low over the standing-room-only Newmarket grandstand; but he gained a life-long respect for those who navigate aircraft to and from given points on the map.
Probationary Pilot Officer Woollett advanced from his Avro trainer to the presentation of his RAF wings and confirmation as a pilot officer. After five years of peacetime service in No. 29 RAF Fighter Squadron, he emigrated to Canada in 1929 and spent ten years “flying in the backwoods of [northern Quebec and Labrador with its] uncharted lakes. . . . We’d go through the ice, hit rocks and driftwood . . . through a lot of very dangerous and dashing flying.” In addition to navigating his way around the bush, Woollett had worked his way up to operations manager of Dominion Skyways, based in Rouyn/Noranda. But in 1939 he was prepared to leave all that behind to fly once again with the RAF.
Two things prevented his repatriation to England: at thirty-three he was too old by air force standards for Fighter Command, and secondly he was encouraged by an old RAF friend to stay in Canada to play a much larger role in the war. “Air Chief Marshal Sholto Douglas wrote back to me,” Woollett said, after appealing directly to Douglas to pull a few strings and get him back into the RAF. “Douglas explained that . . . the same way they were going to call on the private aero clubs [in Canada] to operate the elementary flying training schools in the BCATP . . . they were going to call on civil air operators to help set up another dimension of the BCATP. . . . They felt that from this colossal group of experienced and resourceful people— the mechanics [or air engineers] and bush pilots—they could develop schools [in Canada] operated without drawing on the people with potential fighting or military value.” That’s how “Dougie,” as Woollett knew him, wanted him to fight the war.
Thus, as Lord Riverdale and the British delegation grappled with Prime Minister Mackenzie King over quotas, national identity, and the budget of the air training plan, the civilian operators were invited to study the requirements for running Air Observer Schools (AOSs), to draft construction and operating plans, and to submit tenders to the government.
The original BCATP document, signed December 17, 1939, called for ten AOSs, capable of graduating 340 observers a month, or about 4,000 a year. Most AOSs would be at municipal airfields, sometimes sharing facilities with EFTSs. The RCAF would supply the basic facilities and equipment, while the former bush flying companies would organize and carry out all operating services—from catering to classroom maintenance. In addition, the civilian companies had to hire civilian pilots to chauffeur the air observers on training flights.
“We gathered in Ottawa,” Woollett remembered. “All the major bush contractors throughout Canada were requested to submit estimates to the Department of Defence: Dominion Skyways, Yukon Southern, Canadian Airways, Wings, Prairie Airways, Mackenzie Air Service, Starratt Airways, Leavens Brothers, Ginger Coote Airways, Quebec Airways, and others. . . . While a lot of us were under the umbrella of Canadian Pacific, the companies retained their individual identities . . . ensuring the government a real competition, plus a variety of approaches and totals from which to choose.”
Peter Troup and Babe Woollett virtually lived at the Château Laurier hotel in Ottawa as they dug up every shred of information they could to win for their company, Dominion Skyways, the business and the honour of organizing the Air Observer Schools. Among the big questions facing the “Château Rats,” as they were called, was the cost of heating. None of the bush operators had heated more than sheds and hangars to that point, and the BCATP required the heating of administrative buildings, mess halls, barracks, classrooms, and other structures at each of the planned ten schools. Feeding the AOS recruits posed another problem. How could the schools guarantee the highest quality of food—such as meat—for air observer students, while such food was rationed in the civilian communities where the schools were to be located? Then there was the janitorial problem. What would it cost to hire staff to clean everything from sheets and kitchens to washrooms? On the flight line they had to estimate the costs of aircraft maintenance, fuel and oil consumption, and maintenance crew salaries, all “pretty monumental considerations for a bunch of half-assed bush pilots.
“Eventually, our group had to wind up our effort to make the presentation deadline for the Department of Defence,” Woollett said. “We bundled the necessary sets of papers into their separate envelopes, and I stood waiting to take over the baton, like a chap in a relay race. With only about thirty minutes to get over to Defence Headquarters, some meticulous member of our team suddenly gasped: ‘My God! We haven’t any sealing wax, and they have to be sealed!’
“Finally, I had to run over to this office and hand in our submission without sealing wax, but with the prescribed number of copies all sealed in separate envelopes with tape . . . I was out of breath as I handed the bids over to some rather stuffy old general, who refused to accept them because they were not all sealed with red sealing wax . . . I rushed to the outer office where they helped me get the damn things sealed . . . and got it signed in. There was only five minutes left before they lowered the boom.”
The proposals varied widely from company to company. Some of the highest bids were ten times that of the lowest. Other submissions were presented on a single sheet with only the bottom-line figure attached. The Department of Defence tossed them all out, but recognized the sensible cost breakdown in the Dominion Skyways bid.
“He called us back in and explained they were not satisfied, but would we sit down with Leonard Apedaile, who was financial adviser to the minister, and thrash this thing out . . . [so] the operators could handle the scheme without making a colossal profit . . . [nor] go belly up.” Woollett and Troup were asked to form a subsidiary company, Dominion Skyways Training Ltd., to operate the first Air Observer School on a non-profit basis.
They opened No. 1 AOS at Malton, Ontario, on May 27, 1940. It became the template for the nine AOSs that followed, and in Woollett’s view “one of the most important factors in the success of the whole cooperative effort between the RCAF and the civilian operators.” By New Year’s Day 1941, the Troup/Woollett-managed Dominion Skyways Training school (and three others up and running in Edmonton, Regina, and London) had graduated 115 air observers, who, unlike Woollett on his first solo, could guide an aircraft home.
Scores of other civilian flyers were contacted by the minister of national defence. Johnny Fauquier left a charter operation on the lower St. Lawrence to teach instructors at Trenton and then became one of the RCAF’s leading bomber pilots. Matt Berry left bush flying to run the No. 7 Air Observer School at Portage La Prairie. Moss Burbidge was called out of retirement after 15,000 flying hours to become chief flying instructor at No. 16 EFTS in Edmonton. Stu Graham went from pilot testing to designing BCATP aerodromes. Don Watson left Canadian Airways to assist technical training. Dennis Yorath, a pilot with the Calgary Flying Club, took up duties as manager of No. 5 EFTS Lethbridge. Fred McCall helped organize Canadian flying clubs to support the EFTS system. Harry Kennedy left Trans-Canada Airlines to teach instrument and night flying. Arthur Wilson brought his skills as a flying club instructor to several Service Flying Training Schools. R.S. Grandy left commercial flying in Newfoundland to instruct pilots at Camp Borden. Jock Palmer stopped flying explosives into the north to instruct pilots in the BCATP. Romeo Vachon, who had pioneered air services along the north shore of the St. Lawrence, organized aircraft overhauls. And Grant McConachie, who had pioneered air mail and passenger service from Edmonton to Whitehorse, later became responsible for managing Canadian Pacific Airlines’ western operations, including four Air Observer Schools.
That summer, one of Grant McConachie’s part-time pilots at Yukon Southern Air Transport was nineteen-year-old Russ Bannock from Edmonton. He’d grown up within cycling distance of Edmonton’s Blatchford Field, where he’d witnessed the early comings and goings of the best bush pilots in the North—Punch Dickins flying his Fokker Super Universal, Leigh Brintnell aboard his tri-motored Fokker, and Wop May and his Junkers W34. And he’d been dazzled by the aviation celebrities who had passed through Blatchford, men such as movie actor Wallace Beery flying his Bellanca Skyrocket, Wiley Post on his around-the-world solo flight, or American speed pilot Frank Hawks arriving at the 1930 Air Show with his Travel Air Mystery Ship, the Texaco 13. He’d seen the fleet of ten Martin B-10 bombers en route to Alaska, the Ford Reliability Tour, and the Pitcairn Autogiro.
Although he loved flying, Bannock had his sights set on a job in mining, and he settled down to a routine of school in the winter months and summer jobs to earn the money for tuition. In 1937 he landed a summer job as a bar steward aboard a Hudson’s Bay Company steamer heading north down the Mackenzie River. The Distributor made two trips each summer, pushing a cluster of barges loaded with supplies for the communities along the river. On the second trip, he heard that a company in Yellowknife, Consolidated Mining & Smelting, was recruiting workers for mineral exploration work. So he jumped ship in Fort Smith and looked for a way to Yellowknife.
The only quick route north across Great Slave Lake to Yellowknife was by air. Bannock bought a ticket and went to the seaplane dock on the Slave River, where he found Stan McMillan loading his Fairchild 71 for the next leg of his freighting trip to Yellowknife. McMillan was another of the flying legends of the North. Although he began flying in the officers training corps and earned his military wings with the fledgling RCAF in the mid-1920s, Stan really cut his teeth in aviation by flying mail, men, and supplies to Hudson Bay and the Arctic. In late 1929 he had flown one of two aircraft for Colonel C. MacAlpine of the Dominion Explorer Company. The north-bound expedition planned to survey 12,500 square miles of uncharted territory from Churchill on Hudson Bay to Aklavik at the mouth of the Mackenzie River. Along the way, weather forced the eight-man expedition down, and it took them fifty-four days to trek out of the frigid Arctic wilderness to Cambridge Bay on Victoria Island. (McMillan would later join the BCATP to manage several Air Observer Schools.)
Bannock watched McMillan packing the Fairchild and wondered whether there’d be room enough for a passenger.
“I thought I was supposed to go on this flight,” he said to the pilot.
“You are,” McMillan said.
“Where am I going to sit, then?”
McMillan pointed at the freight compartment, where there was just enough space for a man to lie flat between the pile of freight and the roof of the airplane. “Just climb on top of the load,” he said.
All Bannock can remember of his first plane ride was the cramped space and the rough ninety-minute ride to Yellowknife. “The weather was bad, so we flew across Great Slave Lake and never got above a hundred feet. I’ll never forget it.”
Bannock made it to Yellowknife and joined Consolidated for the summer. That fall, back in Edmonton, he told his father he was going to become a flying geologist, and he took lessons at the Northern Alberta Aero Club for his pilot’s licence. By the summer of 1939 he had earned his commercial pilot’s licence. Then Grant McConachie asked him to join Yukon Southern Air Transport. Bannock accepted and that summer he flew as co-pilot and mechanic for McConachie between Edmonton and Whitehorse. He earned little but learned a lot. When he heard that the Calgary Auxiliary Squadron was flying Westland Wapiti bombers, he applied there. But before he could be accepted, his telegram arrived from the minister of national defence.
Even though the full extent of his flying experience was two summers in the bush—one in mineral exploration, the other as a co-pilot flying mail for Grant McConachie—Bannock was prime material for the Royal Canadian Air Force, a force desperate for trained pilots. At the outbreak of war, the RCAF total strength was 298 officers and 2,750 airmen, with an auxiliary force of 1,013. Its flying arsenal consisted of 270 aircraft.
As well as an obvious shortfall in aircraft and trained airmen, when the war began the RCAF had only five operating aerodromes and half a dozen under construction, and there were only two construction engineers in its employ. With a scheme of such mammoth proportions before them, the air force called on the experience of private industry for help.* The RCAF formed the Directorate of Works and Buildings and appointed R.R. Collard (the vice-president and general manager of a Winnipeg construction firm) as its first commander.
Despite the impossible deadlines, congested working conditions, and a shortage of staff, Collard’s group produced more than three-quarters of a million blueprints and 33,000 drawings, which were used to build 8,300 hangars, drill halls, and barracks blocks. From fall 1939 through to spring 1940, an army of engineers, teamsters, carpenters, plumbers, and thousands of other tradespeople excavated and graded sites, dug wells for water, erected and framed buildings, and poured enough cement to have made a twenty-foot wide highway from Ottawa to Vancouver. So rapid and massive was the BCATP site construction that communities such as Rivers, Manitoba (where a navigation school was built) compared the arrival of the BCATP to the arrival of the railway at the turn of the century.
However, at the end of 1939, the master scheme—the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan—that would deliver a force of professional military air crew to the war effort was still just a piece of paper.
It would be another six months before the organization could start processing BCATP trainees at its seventeen recruiting centres. It would be just as long before raw recruits arrived by the thousands at three Manning Depots across the country to be introduced to air force discipline and guard duty. The seven Initial Training Schools were not yet ready to stream men into the three basic air crew functions: pilot, observer, and air gunner. The elaborate and expensive scheme to have civilian aviation organize twenty-six Elementary Flying Training Schools and ten Air Observer Schools was still being thrashed out at the Château Laurier in Ottawa. And the first of more than forty Service Flying Training Schools wouldn’t put their first trainees into Harvards until mid-1940.
The British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, what one journalist of the time later called “the greatest single achievement of the Canadian people since our provinces came together in the Confederation that is Canada,” was a long way from delivering on its promise of 19,500 trained air crew a year, let alone delivering a death blow to the Luftwaffe.
In December 1939, the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan consisted of committee minutes, accounting ledgers, designer blueprints, munition requisitions, manpower quotas, and a legislative document with a deadline. What it needed was a core flying force whose experience wouldn’t be used in fighter sorties over the English Channel nor in bombing runs over Germany, but in training the air crew that would. Consequently, although it was never really announced as such, building a nucleus of military flying instructors became one of the early objectives of the wartime RCAF. There was no time to lose.
Zero Day, the day on which training under the plan was to begin, was April 29, 1940. The first fully trained graduates were scheduled to receive their wings that autumn at the earliest. In the meantime, civilian flyers from the bush, from commercial aviation, from the barnstorming circuit, and from the string of small flying clubs across the country were lining up to become military pilots and get into the fighting. They would have to fill the gap until the plan began to produce new pilots.
“Civilian pilots were the initial backbone of the training plan,” Russ Bannock said. “Most of them, like myself, had never been in the air force. The regimentation was quite strange at first. I was sent to a coastal squadron equipped with Avro Avians. But when they realized I had only forty or fifty hours of flying experience, I was seconded to the flying club in Vancouver.
“There [at the British Columbia Aviation School] I was taught basic aerobatics and instrument flying, the equivalent to the Elementary Flying Training School in the plan. We were the first wartime course; it was called the provisional pilot officer course. None of us had any uniforms. We were all in civilian clothing, but we were still called pilot officers.”
The RCAF had traditionally enrolled pilot recruits as provisional pilot officers, or PPOs, perhaps to make up for the air force’s shortage of official uniforms. But a month after Russ Bannock arrived at Trenton for officers’ school, he was in uniform. At the beginning of 1940, he was on his way to Camp Borden, near Barrie, Ontario, the only service (or advanced) flying level school in Canada at the time.
“My first instructor at Camp Borden was a sergeant pilot. He wasn’t a very good instructor. In fact, he scared himself whenever he put a Harvard into a spin. It was the same with aerobatics. One time he was trying to teach me a loop, and it must have been a bad one, because we fell into a spin. So he never attempted to teach me loops again. I had to teach myself once I went solo.”
Another PPO who came to Borden from civilian flying was a twenty-one-year-old Nova Scotian, Fred Macdonell. Both of his parents had served in the medical corps during the First World War—his father as a doctor, his mother as a nurse—and Fred was born in London, England, in May 1918. On the night of the armistice, November 11, 1918, Macdonell’s parents went to the theatre to see Peter Pan, and his father fell sick with influenza. He died four days later. Fred had intended to follow in his father’s footsteps, to become a doctor. But the declaration of war in September 1939 changed his plans too. Once they signed him up, the air force sent him for basic flying instruction to the Halifax Flying Club and then on to Camp Borden early in 1940.
“I trained on Anson Is,” Macdonell explained. “They were pretty primitive. The brakes worked on air pressure, so they had to fill up tanks [with compressed air] so you had brakes when you landed. And each time you used the brakes, the pressure would go down.
“I remember I had my first solo at the island airport in Toronto. It was a really tiny runway for an airplane like an Anson. And with those funny air brakes in the Anson, I had visions of going off the end of the runway. I thought I wasn’t going to land without going into the water. It wasn’t really frightening. You were young and you sort of took it in stride. You were more on an edge then.”
Frank Montgomery was quite used to “primitive” aircraft. His family had farmed near Vanda, Saskatchewan, where he was born in 1916, but a series of crop failures forced them to move to Saskatoon. There he discovered the Saskatoon Aero Club and started flying, financing his lessons by doing odd jobs—painting houses and picking rocks from farmers’ fields. He flew a Gipsy Moth and a Waco 10. He took his flight test for his private pilot’s licence in an old Avian, while the district inspector, who’d travelled up from Winnipeg, watched from a deck chair on the Saskatoon airfield.
Montgomery was working on his commercial licence when he received his telegram from National Defence on November 3, 1939. He got on the train in Saskatoon and arrived at Camp Borden three days later.
“They put me right into a Harvard,” Montgomery said. “Now, I’d flown nothing but Gipsy Moths and that old Waco. Well, it didn’t make any difference [to them]. You were supposed to be able to fly. If I’d had more experience, I might have said, ‘Hey, what about a check flight?’ But in those days, if you could hack it, you were in. If you couldn’t, you were gone.”
Experience in the air was a rare commodity in Canada. Even a few extra hours and a slightly higher designation made all the difference to an individual’s prospects. For example, twenty-three-year-old Don Rogers had his civilian instructor’s licence from the Hamilton Aero Club, so when the RCAF contacted him in August 1939, he was offered a special course at Camp Borden. Rogers was checked out and quickly reassigned back to the Hamilton Aero Club, where “in mid-September we received the first four of a year-long series of PPOs to train to the equivalent of private pilot’s qualifications.”
Another seasoned flyer pressed into early military service was Len Trippe. Like Peter Troup and Babe Woollett (who had left the RAF in England to fly bush runs along the lower St. Lawrence and north into Quebec), Trippe left the Air Force Reserve in England, arrived in Canada, and joined the Ontario Provincial Air Service based in Sudbury. He did his first bush piloting in flying boats in 1924. In the late 1920s he began instructing at various southern Ontario flying schools. When times got tougher and flying students fewer in the 1930s he barnstormed to boost business. Trippe and his colleagues dreamed up “death-defying” acts, including parachute jumps and wing-walking, and improvised stunts such as the one they used to entertain a crowd at a Victoria Day celebration at Port Dalhousie on Lake Ontario. “We tied an inner tube to the undercarriage of the Moth,” Trippe recalled. “Then once we were in the air over the water [parachutist George Bennett] crawled out of the cockpit, hooked his legs through the inner tube and hung head down, no parachute or anything. George couldn’t even swim a stroke.”
By the late 1930s Trippe found himself at one of the busiest private airfields in southern Ontario—Barker Field, in what was then northwest Toronto. Three aviation firms ran businesses there: Patterson and Hill, Fred Gillies Flying Service, and Leavens Brothers, where Trippe found work instructing. President Clare Leavens toured the countryside with a sound truck selling flying lessons and passenger flights at a cent a pound. On any given Sunday there’d be twenty-four or more aircraft taxiing around Barker Field, taking off and landing without the aid of air traffic control. There was never an accident.
“In 1939, the government came to Leavens Brothers,” Trippe said, “and asked if Leavens could gather up all the private pilots they could possibly find that were interested in becoming instructors for the RCAF. These pilots [the provisional pilot officers] were given a living-out allowance, AC2 [Aircraftman 2nd Class] pay, and their flying free—a hundred hours with us—still in civilian clothes.
“So we gathered up a bunch of pilots, including private pilots from the States. We bought six Tiger Moths and the RCAF gave us six Fleet Finches. All we had to do was supply the gas and oil and service our own aircraft. We had about fifteen students there at a time. And we rushed them through.”
“For us as instructors,” Don Rogers added, “there were the few minutes of nervous tension, watching your student’s first solo, and the extended period of tension, waiting for him to return safely from his first solo cross-country flight. Yet we knew we were performing an essential task for the war effort. It seemed like a relatively lowly first step to operational flying.”
Operational flying, or combat flying, was the objective for nearly all young pilots joining the RCAF in fall 1939. They didn’t have to read the editorial columns in the Globe and Mail or listen to Lorne Greene’s “Voice of Doom” on CBC Radio news broadcasts to realize that RCAF-trained fighter and bomber pilots would soon be on their way to Britain in support of the Royal Air Force and the British Expeditionary Force in Europe.
Bush pilot Russ Bannock wanted to be a fighter pilot. Medical student Fred Macdonell wanted to be posted overseas as his father had been in the Great War. Saskatoon Aero Club pilot Frank Montgomery had grown up listening to stories of First World War combat from his neighbour, former RFC/RAF fighter pilot Vic Graham, and he longed for the same kind of adventure. And Don Rogers figured a short stint teaching PPOs elementary flying was a sure stepping stone to an operational posting.
It wasn’t to be. The irony was that their experience and eagerness to enter the RCAF worked against these ambitions. Because they were so quick to enter the air force, which was now committed to producing nearly 20,000 qualified air crew a year, their dream of flying combat missions at the controls of Hurricanes or Spitfires could not be realized. For many of the qualified pilots who joined the RCAF in 1939 as provisional pilot officers or civilian instructors, there was a much less heroic and yet more crucial role to play.
The RCAF dragnet for pilots qualified to teach caught a former Winnipeg barnstormer named Wess McIntosh just as he’d made up his mind to fly in the air force. Six years before, his grandmother had died and left him $500, and he’d convinced his father to let him invest the money in flying lessons at the Northwest Aeromarine flying school in Winnipeg. Within a year he had earned his certificate of competency. His first flying job was with the flying club in Winnipeg, doing test flights of various aircraft. By 1935 he was barnstorming, taking up thirty to forty customers on a good day at $1.50 per ride.
“Sometimes, I would go into factories and sell tickets for 25 cents each,” McIntosh recalled. “Then as soon as I sold a dollar-and-a-half’s worth, I’d put the names in a hat and draw out the name of the guy who’d won the airplane ride. He’d come out to Stevenson field and he’d get a flight over Winnipeg and back. We didn’t play around at all. No aerobatics . . . I didn’t know how to, anyway.”
By 1939 McIntosh had 407 hours’ flying time. But try as he might to get more substantial work with Connie Johansen’s air chartering company or Punch Dickins’s Western Canada Airways at Stevenson Airport in Winnipeg, it never worked out. McIntosh joined the Canadian Naval Reserves, who were looking for volunteers to ship out overseas to take delivery of a destroyer that the Canadian government had purchased. If all else failed, McIntosh figured he might get an interview in Britain with Imperial Airways, who were hiring Canadians.
“Just as I got to Halifax, war was declared,” McIntosh continued. “So they shut the gates on us. We sat there for the seven days it took Canada to declare war on Germany.” McIntosh believed that the Canadian government deliberately declared war on Germany a week later to allow its two destroyers—the St. Laurent and the Fraser— to steam from the Pacific through the American-controlled Panama Canal to the Atlantic without jeopardizing American neutrality. While in Halifax, McIntosh got permission to transfer to the air force.
“The air force said they’d take me on as a sergeant pilot, if I got released. (I didn’t know it at the time, but they’d already sent a pilot’s commission to my home.) So, I got paraded before my Navy CO, who said, ‘We need you here. Why do you want to leave for the air force?’ I showed him my logbooks and explained that I’d get an air force commission if I joined, and he said, ‘Permission granted.’
“I was discharged from the navy on the twenty-ninth of September, 1939. And it’s a good thing, because if I had shipped out on the destroyer Fraser, I wouldn’t be here.” (On that trip, the Fraser was rammed and sunk.)
Within two weeks, instead of being at the bottom of the Atlantic, Wess McIntosh was 5,000 feet in the air—a student again—flying as many training aircraft as the air force could scrape together—Fleet Finches, Harvards, and Airspeed Oxfords.
In the instructors’ cockpits, at the second set of controls, were the best civilian and military flying instructors the RCAF could find. During those first weeks at the Borden and Trenton air force stations, McIntosh took instruction from Canadian bush pilot Johnny Fauquier (later decorated for his “pathfinder” operational flights over targets in Europe) and then from a Royal Air Force flight lieutenant named Dick Waterhouse.
“Dick was an Englishman,” McIntosh said. “He’d been in the RAF quite a while and he was just good, that’s all. In theory, we were flying with an officer. But after the first salute in the morning, that was it. He was the instructor, I was the student. But we didn’t have to salute and stand at attention all the time. He treated me well. Dick had a dog called Pluto, a beautiful black lab. This dog could come into the mess and pick up a glass of beer in its mouth and take it to Waterhouse.”
For McIntosh’s course of civilian students, unnecessary saluting was a waste of effort, and time for beer in the mess was limited. Zero Day was fast approaching, and the quota of fully trained flying instructors seemed unattainable. When McIntosh completed the elementary program at Borden there was no ceremony to mark the beginning of his advanced flying at Trenton. The RCAF wartime agenda overlooked the graduation of his class and McIntosh’s Category C instructor’s designation.
“They realized we hadn’t had our wings [graduation],” McIntosh said. “I think they had actually forgotten. So they had a quick wings parade. There weren’t many of us. They just lined us up in a hurry in a hangar and sort of said, ‘Here, you’re a military pilot now.’”
On March 18, 1940, McIntosh conducted a familiarization, or introductory, flight with his first student, a pilot officer named Rhodes. Rhodes was the first of more than 500 students McIntosh would teach in the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. His official blue RCAF Pilot’s Flying Log Book eventually recorded more than 3,000 hours of instruction flying.
“The strange part,” McIntosh remembered, “was that I was still a sergeant pilot. Here I’m an instructor. Here’s my first student— a pilot officer. We had been in the air force before them, but we were junior to them. They were all provisional pilot officers. But there wasn’t time to worry about it.
“I had six students at a time. I used to fly six times a day, day in and day out [because] the big push was on. It looked like they would need every pilot they could get their hands on in England.”
It would be another eight months before the first BCATP graduates arrived in Liverpool, England, for posting to operational units. A great deal more planning needed to be done. There were aerodrome sites to be selected, as the RCAF had only five of its own at the beginning of the war. Barracks, hangars, and other station buildings had to be designed and built. Supply systems to support the operation of more than a hundred planned air training stations—everything from hot and cold running water to parachute packing to mail delivery and laundry facilities—had to be organized.
Because the air force owned only a few dozen of the projected 3,500 training aircraft it would need, Tiger Moths, Fleet Finches, North American Harvards, Avro Ansons, and Fairey Battles had to be procured for the millions of instructional hours that lay ahead. The recruiting system itself had to be streamlined; indeed, in November 1939, recruiting had to be suspended to allow overworked officers at the recruiting centres to take stock. And more qualified instructors were always needed. Fortunately, though, for Wess McIntosh, his fellow instructors, and the RCAF, an accident of history gave the BCATP—newborn in December 1939—time to mature and deliver its first offspring to the war effort before it was too late.
* Because much of the BCATP training would be done in winter, there was also a sudden demand for aircraft skis on elementary training aircraft. Coincidentally, in Sioux Lookout, Ontario, boat builders Warner and Carmen Elliott had perfected a wood lamination process in the manufacture of aircraft skis for legendary bush pilot Harold “Doc” Oaks and for Admiral Richard Byrd’s three Antarctic expeditions in the 1930s. When BCATP authorities found out about their work, the Elliott brothers were astonished to receive orders from de Havilland for 400 sets of skis; local service station operator, Bill Fuller, converted his service bays into an assembly line and the ski orders were met.
