Читать книгу Behind the Glory - Ted Barris - Страница 14
ОглавлениеABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE
SIXTY-THREE MINUTES after the expiry of Britain’s ultimatum to Germany on September 3, 1939, a British Blenheim reconnaissance bomber flew from Wyton airfield to photograph German shipping north of Wilhelmshaven. It was the Allied Bomber Command’s first sortie of the Second World War.
The same day eighteen Hampden and nine Wellington aircraft searched for but found no German warships in the North Sea. That night Whitley bombers dropped 5.4 million propaganda leaflets over Hamburg, Bremen, and nine cities in the Ruhr valley. The next day, twenty-nine Blenheim and Wellington bombers returned to Wilhelmshaven to attack the battleship Admiral Von Scheer and the cruiser Emden. A quarter of the aircraft were lost, and Bomber Command recorded its first casualties of the war. It was nearly six weeks before German bombers made their first attack on British territory, damaging two cruisers in Scotland’s Firth of Forth.
The opening months of the war in western Europe were in stark contrast to the violent clashes of arms that had taken place twenty-five years before. In 1914 Anglo-French forces had faced an immediate German invasion, so they struck eastward with great force; they were repulsed with heavy casualties. In fall 1939 and early 1940 the French and English Allies moved cautiously up to the Westwall (the German border fortifications) and then retreated to the dubious safety of the Maginot Line. What followed were months of relative inactivity—a period dubbed by the Germans “Sitzkrieg” and by American journalists the “Phony War.”
On the ground, operational activity consisted of building defences from scratch between the end of the existing Maginot Line on the Belgian border, northwest towards the North Sea. This kept the Allied defenders busy, but out of combat, in the autumn and winter. However, there was one weapon with which the Allies could strike directly at Germany—the bomber.
During the Phony War between September 3, 1939, and April 8, 1940, RAF Bomber Command continued to conduct reconnaissance, dropped more leaflets and seventy-one tons of bombs, and attacked Germany’s North Sea shipping and a number of its seaplane bases. The pilots made 996 daylight sorties and 531 night sorties. Sixty-two aircraft were lost, which represented 4 percent of RAF Bomber Command’s engaging aircraft. However, that figure does not reflect the air crew casualties—pilots, navigators, wireless operators, and gunners. They numbered in the hundreds, in just seven months of hit-and-run air warfare.
One survivor of those first thousand Bomber Command sorties was a young Canadian RAF pilot officer. During the late 1930s, when the RCAF offered very few opportunities for aspiring military pilots, W.J. “Mike” Lewis, from Welcome, Ontario, managed to get to Britain via a program that offered short-service commissions for Canadians in the RAF. Just as the war broke out, Lewis completed his training as a bomber pilot and was immediately posted to No. 44 RAF Squadron at Waddington in Lincolnshire.
“I flew one of the first Hampden missions against German shipping,” Lewis recalled. “But it was extremely frustrating. The British government wouldn’t let us drop bombs on Germany, only targets at sea.”
Pilot Officer Lewis’s impatience to “get on with it” was shared by most RAF air crew. Along with the general excitement, Lewis recalled the tireless efforts of his commander early in the war. Newly appointed RAF Air Vice-Marshal Arthur Harris was a constant presence at No. 5 Group Bomber Command stations involved in the early action. The two met, and Mike Lewis, far from family and home in Canada, was invited to the Harrises’ home for Christmas dinner in 1939.
“It was a social occasion,” Lewis said. “Very little talk of the war. But the frustration was obvious to all of us.”
The orders not to bomb German land targets seemed all the more unreasonable when British Air Ministry officials assembled all the air crew at Lewis’s station for an announcement about the potential severity of the war. Lewis remembered the ministry representative saying that “if Britain went beyond the Phony War to a full war, [the ministry] expected that Bomber Command in strength would be wiped out twelve times during the first year of hostilities.” In other words, Lewis was told, “You’ve got a month to live.”
The escalation in the number of sorties, the rising fatality statistics, and the harsh realities recognized by the Air Ministry were further proof that as the air war intensified, qualified air crew would be desperately needed. And if seven months of bomber and air crew losses and a plea from British officials were not enough to strengthen the resolve of the BCATP organizers, then an incident in the skies over England certainly was.
At the time, Jack Meadows, an RAF flying instructor, was teaching prospective fighter pilots on North American-built Harvards. “At No. 15 Service Flying Training School at Kidlington, just outside Oxford,” Meadows said, “[we were] insulated from the battle and [knew] little more than we read in the papers. We had our own job to do, teaching the pilots to replace the casualties. We got on with it, vaguely aware that if an invasion ever happened we would be trying to strafe the beaches in our 150-mph Harvard advanced trainers, with one fixed forward .303 Browning gun and eight small bombs hung on external racks.
“A pupil in an Anson, on his first night solo from our satellite airfield, [was] shot at by an intruding Junkers 88 and, almost certainly accidentally, collided with it. The episode became worked up into a case of a gallant deliberate ramming by the unarmed RAF pilot. . . . Enemy activity often stopped night flying.”
It was tough enough for young trainees to keep their attention focused on cockpit instruments without having to scan the night sky for intruders looking for quarry. It was tougher still for an instructor to build student confidence in the air when his classes were constantly grounded by the threat of Luftwaffe attack. The death of the Anson pilot trainee and others like him underscored the need to get Canada’s fledgling air training plan and its nucleus of experienced instructors off the ground.
Canada was 3,000 miles from the front; instructors there could coax their novice students into the air without fear of enemy intrusion. Flying conditions were ideal. Canada was situated centrally in the Commonwealth and strategically close to the largest industrial power outside Europe—the United States. All the plan needed were updated facilities and aircraft and enough instructors qualified to operate them.
The first military experience of many Canadians who went on to become those much-needed instructors was Manning Depot (or Manning Pool). One of the recruits was Livingston Foster, who turned twenty a couple of weeks after Canada declared war on Germany. His first experience of flying had occurred on the Niagara escarpment west of his family’s farm near Grimsby, Ontario, in 1934. On a lazy afternoon late that spring, he and a bunch of his school chums saw an odd-looking contraption come down and land in a field. The pilot of this Pitcairn Autogiro—a forerunner of the helicopter—was barnstormer Walt Leavens, of the Leavens Brothers outfit at Barker Field in Toronto. Leavens was willing to offer rides. Foster and his chums were game, until the moment they entered the machine.
“Cap” Foster, as he was known (named after his godfather, Captain Livingston, a veteran of the First World War), didn’t want to appear frightened. “The apprehension inside me bordered on sheer terror,” Foster later wrote. “Even though I was shaking in my boots, I wasn’t going to let my friends see it. I was going up, come hell or high water. The strange part of it, though, was that once we got airborne, the most wonderful feeling came over me—sublime enjoyment—and it lingered long after my flight was over.” (Leavens later recorded in his makeshift log—a spiral notebook—that on “6 June 1934 . . . one little chap went up in the Giro. He had been weeding onions to pay for his ride—ten cents a long row. I gave him as long a ride as possible.”)
The other discovery Foster made that day was that “I would never back down or show my fear. I had managed to put on a credible display of casual but false bravado. And later I would use that same casual bravado for the benefit of student pilots assigned to me for instruction.”
When rumours of another war in Europe began buzzing around his community in 1939, Foster decided it was time to rekindle that feeling he’d had aboard the barnstormer’s autogiro. He and two close friends—Dave Heathcote and Bob Aldrick—had seen some Royal Air Force recruiting folders and had fallen in love with the look of a Supermarine Spitfire depicted on the cover. They immediately wrote away for RAF brochures and application forms.
Neither of Foster’s friends would ever fly a Spitfire. Dave Heathcote was killed in a Harvard crash during pilot training and Bob Aldrick became an air gunner, was shot down overseas, and became a prisoner of war. When Cap Foster finally slipped into the confined cockpit of his beloved Spitfire in early 1943, the fighter aircraft nearly killed him. What ultimately saved him was the experience of thousands of hours of instructional flying and the instincts and reflexes that instructing had developed. It all began when the RAF refused him, but recommended that he join the RCAF.
“I had two very strong and long-standing reasons for joining the air force,” Foster said. “First, I wanted to fulfil that dream I’d had ever since my ride in the autogiro. And second, I had a score to settle with the Germans. In the First World War, my father was gassed and taken prisoner at the Second Battle of Ypres. He spent thirty-eight months working eighteen hours a day in German salt mines at Bienrode, and during that time he was beaten and tortured by German prison guards.” Foster’s father was Mohawk, a full-blooded descendant of Chief Joseph Brant, and Foster maintained that the colour of his father’s skin had provoked the abuse he’d received as a POW at Bienrode. His introduction to air force life might well have suggested he was up against a similar prejudice.
“I reported to No. 1 RCAF Manning Pool, located on the Canadian National Exhibition grounds in Toronto,” Foster wrote. “My first few days there were spent shovelling out sheep pens and then sleeping beside the piles of manure.”
The 352 acres of the Canadian National Exhibition grounds had been the site of a yearly exhibition and fair. The Ex had always boasted one of the finest amusement parks in North America, one of the most popular grandstand shows on the entertainment circuit, and one of the biggest livestock competitions in the world. When war was declared, a week after the 1939 CNE closed, the grounds took on a brand new identity—No. 1 RCAF Manning Depot—and the space used for housing thousands of prized cattle, pigs, horses, and sheep became the new barracks for a mustering air force.
While Cap Foster cleaned sheep stalls, a young photographer from east-end Toronto managed to escape the clean-up because his medical revealed varicose veins. Ken Smith, who later instructed pilots in aerial photo reconnaissance, remembers the extraordinary renovations going on at the Coliseum, the main livestock quarters of the CNE.
“For several weeks,” Smith wrote in September 1939, “each morning [they were] hosing down the bullpen, where the cattle had been and where the [military] drilling would be, and scrubbing up the General Exhibits area, which was to be the bunkrooms. The upstairs had been the poultry show, and it meant pushing along the cracks in the wooden floor with a long stick with a nail on the end to push out the chicken lice, vacuuming the floor, and then washing it down. This took a number of mornings.
“Double bunks were eventually installed . . . 1,000 bunks upstairs and 1,000 down. Soon, although my home was in Toronto, we all had to live in. The bunkrooms were not always quiet late at night. Along the end of each bunkroom was a row of washbasins and taps for morning ablutions, etc. I was in the lower bunkroom. And every once in a while one of the tin washbasins would come sailing over the railing to land with a satisfying (for those upstairs) crash on the cement floor, fairly close to our bunks. They put up chicken wire to forestall this habit.”
“I was in where they used to put feed for the pigs,” Harvey Timberlake said. At the outbreak of war, he had taken his six-foot-two, 110-pound frame to the recruiting office. They took one look at him and told him to “go home, drink beer and milk, and put some weight on.” When he was at last accepted, he was marched down Bay Street, straight to the CNE and “Manning Depot, where they put us into the pigpen. They had long troughs in the pens and that’s where you all stood up and urinated.
“As soon as we got there, it was, ‘Shirts up, pants down, peckers out.’ Imagine a couple of hundred men standing in the horse ring with their pants down, waiting to receive short arm inspection. I didn’t care; I’d been delivering groceries to prostitutes when I was ten. But most of the boys cried.”
Medical officers were anxious to prevent any outbreaks of disease. The air force doctors often assembled recruits in the drill hall and conducted elementary sex education (what an Edmonton recruit called “cock and ball lectures”), during which the medical officer would lecture on the consequences of failing to use condoms and show graphic pictures of genitalia covered with VD sores.
There were 1,400 RCAF Aircraftmen 2nd Class (AC2s or “Acey Deuceys”) in the converted pigpen barracks with Timberlake. Plenty of them joined up initially because of patriotism; there was still enough anti-German sentiment left over from the 1914–18 war to fuel a young man’s emotions and patriotic fervour. Many came from parts of Canada that had limped through ten years of depression; the air force offered the first potential paying job and regular meals in a decade. Some who enlisted were in search of adventure as far from Canada as they could get. Others responded to peer pressure to sign up, or joined to get away from girl troubles or tensions at home. But the new world they entered was daunting at first.
“All the stabbing of my arms, the endless series of vaccinations”: that’s Chuck McCausland’s memory of his first days at Manning Depot. Unable to enlist right away, because he worked with Ontario Hydro (considered an essential service), McCausland had finally been called up to Toronto; he remembers that “you went in one day and it would be a smallpox shot in the left arm, the next day German measles in the right arm. I don’t think there was anything they didn’t inoculate you for.”
Harold Lancaster, a farm boy from Elgin County, in southwestern Ontario, had had scarlet fever shots at school, but “when they checked me in the air force, I tested positive. A bunch of us tested positive, so they moved us to the Automotive Building and quarantined us there for three weeks. I’ll always remember one of those first mornings, when that old bugle went, I thought, ‘What in hell have you got yourself into, Lancaster?’”
The routine that Lancaster and thousands of his fellow recruits soon got used to was an indoctrination to air force life—a sort of boot camp—where you marched and cleaned animal pens, paraded and washed latrines, got vaccinations and learned to salute with your left arm while the right arm was sore from the vaccine, drilled in the horse arenas, and got your head shaved. The object was to reduce every volunteer to the lowest common denominator so that the air force could rebuild you in its own image. In most cases, the architect of that rebuilding was a foul-mouthed, raspy-voiced, unsympathetic senior drill sergeant. After a while the endless vaccinations and embarrassing crotch examinations seemed a picnic by comparison to a day “down on the parade square with the sergeant-major, who really thought he was J.C.,” as AC2 Timberlake remembered.
“From the first day, this was the guy who was going to make men out of us. He was out to break our spirit. He’d march us around for hours on end, put us all in a row, slap us between the shoulder blades, and yell ‘Stand up’ till some of the boys started to cry.”
“Our sergeant-major stood up on the mezzanine [of the cow palace],” Harold Lancaster said, “watching and pacing and shouting out commands. And he always said, ‘How in hell do you guys ever expect to fly aircraft in formation when you can’t even walk in a parade?’”
“Most of us hated his guts,” Timberlake agreed; but they soldiered on despite the insults, the blistered feet, and the exhaustion, because the reward for enduring the drill sergeant’s abuse was that first set of regulation boots and air force blues. That uniform, no matter how ill fitting, no matter how scratchy around the neck and down the legs, seemed to compensate for the weary muscles and bruised egos.
“When you were issued your uniform,” Chuck McCausland explained, “you immediately headed downtown to Adelaide Street, just east of Victoria. There was a little tailor shop there. With the big woollen socks that you were issued, when you pulled the pant leg down, it pushed the sock down. So, the tailor would put a gusset in there for $1.50 so your socks would fit under the pantleg of your uniform.” That modified uniform saw Chuck McCausland through training, overseas onto Spitfires, and back to Canada as a flying instructor until the end of the war.
With or without a gusset, ill fitting or not, the RCAF uniform could barely contain the pride of the Aircraftman 2nd Class inside. That too was something the air force (knowingly or unknowingly) counted on, because built into the blues that the recruits wore was a new-found sense of esprit de corps and responsibility.
Yet, as rigidly as air force regulations governed things and as busy as the blow-hard drill sergeant kept his recruits, there was bound to be trouble; as former lacrosse and football player Jeff Mellon painted it, “that’s where a kind of mob rule took over. People would steal wallets. And snipping wrist-watches was pretty common. But if a guy was ever caught stealing, he’d be taken into the shower and roughed up pretty good, with eight guys standing guard at the door.”
“I remember one night we found a guy lifting stuff out of a bunk,” Bob Hesketh recalled; he had joined the air force because it seemed the most glamorous of the services, but an introduction to barracks justice quickly changed his view. “Six or seven of us chased this guy all over the barracks. We finally caught him and kicked the shit out of him. It was never reported.”
“Everybody knew if you got caught, that’s what happened to you,” Bill Lennox confirmed. Employed before the war in the pulpwood camps outside Port Arthur, Ontario, Lennox was familiar with the severity of life and justice in a work camp. Manning Depot justice was the same, because “there were thousands of guys down there. If a guy got started stealing, well then, you couldn’t leave anything any place. The rule was, if you caught anybody stealing, just make sure he’s got one breath of life left in him when the medical officer got there.
“I saw one guy drummed out of the service at Manning Depot. Holy Jeez, it was impressive. He was paraded with the slow roll of the drums into the Coliseum. It was packed with airmen. And they led this fellow in and just stripped him of everything that was air force. They stripped his brass off. Stripped off everything he had. His buttons came off and everything else.”
Each day’s procedure and activity was carefully laid out for air force volunteers. When a recruit was officially inducted at Manning Depot, he was handed a sheet of paper that itemized seventy procedures, from procuring socks and shirts to getting X-rays and inoculations. Each procedure had to be completed, each item on the list initialled. (Somebody calculated that if each procedure were actually followed to the letter, it would have taken Manning Depot two years to process recruits.)
New acronyms entered the air recruits’ vocabulary. They learned KRs and ACIs—the King’s Regulations and Air Council Instructions. They had to pay close attention to DROs—the Daily Routine Orders—and specifically to the back pages of those orders, to discover which recruits would staff the kitchen, when they’d clean latrines, or where they’d conduct ground policing. There was an expression that very much summed up life in the air force in those early weeks at Manning Depot: “If it was on the ground, you picked it up. If you couldn’t pick it up, you painted it. If you couldn’t paint it, you saluted it.”
“I learned a valuable air force lesson one day,” Jack Harris recalled. He’d grown up in the west end of Toronto, not far from the CNE grounds. (In fact most of his air force career would be served within a hundred miles of his Humber Bay home as a service flying instructor.) “They had this French-Canadian corporal who had us all lined up. And he says, ‘How many of you fellas can drive trucks?’ Well, three of us put our hands up, because we figured we were going to get an interesting assignment. And he says, ‘There’s a pile of asphalt that’s got to be removed, so here’s the wheelbarrow and the picks. Get at it, guys!’ So I learned early in the game: Never volunteer.”
Of course, air force days weren’t all KP, PT, and BS. Within weeks of its opening, No. 1 RCAF Manning Depot had an auditorium with a stage run by Oscar Pearson of the Central Toronto YMCA, who supplied various types of entertainment. Soon a library was assembled, lounges arranged, and soccer teams organized for games in the CNE parking lots. From among those recruits who excelled at the rhythm and discipline of parade drill, the air force assembled precision drill teams to perform at the CNE grandstand and the annual Grey Cup football game at Varsity Stadium.
The moment that New Brunswick recruit Dick Ross remembered best was his introduction to a “wet canteen.”
“‘What the hell’s that?’ I asked.
“‘We can go there and get a drink,’ they said.
“‘You mean liquor?’
“‘Well, beer,’ they said.
“So we go in. You could cut the smoke, it’s so thick. And the rattle and smell of things, it’s incredible. Anyway, I got a bottle of beer and sat there and drank it. And the waiter came around and said, ‘Have another?’
“‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘I’m already feeling this.’
“‘How many have you had?’ the waiter asked. I held up one finger and he said, ‘How can just one bother you?’
“I said, ‘When I look up at the lights, they’re flickering.’
“And he asked, ‘Where you from?’
“‘Moncton.’
“And he laughed as he said, ‘That’s it. You’re used to sixty-cycle electric power. We’ve got twenty-five up here, twenty-five times a second. Your eyes aren’t accustomed to it. But they will. So you can have another beer all right.’”
There were many such discoveries at Manning Depot. Jim Coyne had experienced a lot in his nineteen years before joining up and coming to the CNE barracks. He had hunted and fished and thrived on backwoods cooking at his home at The Pas, Manitoba. Air force food, he discovered, would never be as good. John Clinton had been in the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry Reserve before he enlisted in the RCAF and came to Toronto, but he still couldn’t believe the sheer numbers of men, the confusion, or the twenty-four-hour-a-day poker games at the Coliseum barracks. And in the quiet of one evening at the Horse Palace at No. 1 Manning Depot, Herb Liebman was sitting on his bunk, when “a blond fellow from up North came up and sat down beside me.
“‘Are you Jewish?’ he asked.
“I said, ‘Yes, I am.’
“And he said, ‘I’ve never seen a Jew before. My father warned me before I left home. He told me to be careful of the Jews.’
“I talked with him a long while. It was a totally innocent question. There was nothing malicious about it. He was a nice fellow, and we were quite friendly after that. Things like that happened in those days.”
Tolerance had its limits, however. George Bain had already begun his career in journalism as a stringer for the Toronto Telegram. He remembered Manning Depot in the dying moments of one of those first event-filled days, when, as thousands of physically drained recruits were near sleep, someone would yell into the silence: “Anybody here from the West?”
“Yes, sir,” would come back some lone, naive voice.
And everyone in the place would yell back, “Fuck the West!”
Wherever he was from, the day a civilian arrived at Manning Depot, his life changed permanently. However, for Cap Foster, the self-proclaimed master of “casual bravado,” things didn’t change completely until the day after he arrived at the CNE.
“I had been a boxer all the way through high school,” Foster recalled, “and I used to spar with Harry McLean, the welterweight champion at Queen’s University. The day I joined the air force, I was on the card at Maple Leaf Gardens. So I went to ask permission to fight that night. They didn’t give it to me. But I snuck out anyway and won my fight by a first-round knock-out.
“Next morning, I was called in and asked about it. Fortunately, the newspaper had misprinted the name of the winner of the fight the night before. They wrote that ‘Jack’ Foster had won the bout. But the officer told me straight, then, ‘Son, from now on, all your fighting is going to be done in the air force.’”
During those first weeks in the air force, nearly everybody was assigned to guard duty at some point. RCAF aircraftmen were dispatched from Manning Depot to act as sentries at air force installations across Canada. Whether or not those installations were actually at risk, guarding an aircraft, a hangar, or a runway (four hours on, four hours off) was itself an extension of air force discipline. At the very least, these temporary postings gave a military organization that was swamped with bodies and a backlog of paper time to clear the pipeline.
For Willy Clymer, who had just quit a job at Canada Wire in Toronto to answer his call-up, guard duty was actually a substitute for the livestock stables at the CNE Coliseum, because “they had a diphtheria epidemic down there at Manning Depot, so they couldn’t take us.
“We went straight on to Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, for guard duty. God, it was awful. Two and a half months standing out at the end of Runway No. 2, out in the boonies at night, all night. From two till six in the morning. You’d almost think the Germans were going to come over the end of the runway.”
At the other end of Nova Scotia, the air force stored its fleet of coastal patrol aircraft—Northrop Deltas, Westland Lysanders, and Lockheed Hudsons. An RCAF recruit posted to guard duty at Sydney admitted: “We never knew what we were doing. Nobody ever told us what we were supposed to be guarding. We marched around the airport carrying old [Enfield] rifles that nobody had showed us how to fire.” Yet the thrill of seeing these bush planes, sub-chasers, and bombers up close for the first time in his life made up for the boredom of sentry work.
Aircraftman Harold Lancaster got more than a look. After surviving both scarlet fever and the quarantine quarters at the CNE Manning Depot, he was posted to guard duty at Fingal, Ontario, “where an aerodrome was going up. They didn’t have the personnel for security police, so we just walked around at night with a gun in our hands. But that’s where I had my first flight in the air force. A fellow was testing [a Fairey Battle] after an engine overhaul. He offered me a flight around the countryside while he tested everything, so I just rode along in the back gun turret.”
Jeff Mellon got his first flight while on guard duty too, but he had to earn it. When he was a kid, growing up in east-end Hamilton, he had won the right to hang around the air club’s Gipsy Moth by running errands. Tarmac duty at No. 5 Service Flying Training School in Brantford worked pretty much the same way. “They were flying Anson [Is] there. We had to [supply the aircraft with] high-pressure air, which was the power for operating the flaps and brakes. Our job was to run in between the propellers, keeping your head down, jam in this tube from a dolly where the pressure was generated, and fill the Anson’s tanks with the air. Then you’d back out and hope you weren’t close to the props. We did this day and night, but it was especially fun on ice. We used to get a lot of flights that way. You could fit one or two extra bodies in the back of an Anson and the instructors were good about giving us a free flight.”
As dangerous as dodging props might seem, at least Mellon and his AC2 buddies had some of the comforts of home at the Brantford station. When a former employee of the Coca-Cola Company named Pat McLean arrived for guard duty at Portage la Prairie, at what was to be No. 14 Elementary Flying Training School, “the station was still under construction. There was a barracks block being built, but beds weren’t up. We had to scramble around and unpack the bunkbeds and put them together. No electricity in the building. No running water. We ate our meals with the construction crew. The black, black soil there was either blowing dust or mucky gumbo. We had rifles. They weren’t loaded. And we walked around on 3-hour shifts all night.
“We got to the point where we thought we saw things too. This was near a German settlement. One night we saw a light flashing across the airport. We thought, ‘Uh-oh, could be sabotage here.’ So we called out the Mounted Police. They came out and investigated. They found a man walking to his barn with a lantern, and the light was flashing between his legs.”
While the German threat to airman Pat McLean and the muddy airstrip at Portage la Prairie was imagined, the one in Europe was real. On January 10, 1940, Adolf Hitler informed his commanders that his plan to attack the Allies would begin within the week. The same day, a German light aircraft made a forced landing at Malines in Belgium; the plane’s occupants carried details of the proposed attack. The danger to Holland and Belgium was real. On January 27, Hitler tabled Operation Weser, the plan to invade Norway. The Phony War was becoming less so.
In the early months of 1940, the RCAF raced to keep pace. By then its strength had doubled from 4,000 officers and airmen to 8,000. The first RCAF Overseas Headquarters were established in London, England, in January. In February, No. 110 Army Co-operation “City of Toronto” Squadron sailed from Halifax, the first of forty-eight RCAF squadrons to serve overseas during the war.
To implement the BCATP, the air force organized four Training Command regions: No. 1 TC headquarters was in Toronto, No. 2 TC headquarters in Winnipeg, No. 3 TC headquarters in Montreal, and No. 4 TC headquarters in Regina. And in mid-April, two weeks before Zero Day, when the BCATP was to be officially christened, the RCAF opened its first Initial Training School (ITS) in Toronto and soon after that, its second in Regina. Each one used borrowed premises for accommodation—an equestrian facility (the Eglinton Hunt Club) in Toronto and a teachers’ college in Regina. Later on, a Catholic convent in Victoriaville, Quebec, and a school for the deaf in Belleville, Ontario, became ITS facilities.
After a month in the mud of southwestern Manitoba, Pat McLean and the rest of his course arrived at No. 2 ITS Regina to begin preflight training. This was a critical time and place for the RCAF volunteer. It was here that AC2s were promoted to LACs (Leading Aircraftmen) with a pay increase from $1.70 a day to $2.00 a day (plus 75 cents a day flying pay). Here, the ranks were culled and the best recruits streamed into one of three air crew careers: pilots, observers (navigators), or wireless operator/air gunners. For most, no other designation but “pilot” mattered. Four weeks at ITS would determine which it would be.
When the BCATP began, only applicants with junior matriculation— those who had completed high school—were considered. ITS specialty training took on the atmosphere of a postsecondary or university education. Aircraftmen left the business of cleaning livestock pens behind them and attended their first lectures. The content and tone of these sessions immediately reflected the serious nature of the commitment they’d made at the recruiting centre.
With lectures and textbooks, instructors introduced them to the science of aerial navigation and the business of determining “reliable fix”—the location of an aircraft at any moment. Given a compass, a divider, and a Dalton computer (a manual calculator that a pilot strapped to his leg), they dealt with longitude, latitude, and vectors, and their instructors gave them rhymes to help convert magnetic compass bearings to true compass bearings: “Variation east, magnetic least. Variation west, magnetic best. Deviation west, compass best. Deviation east, compass least.”
Any Morse code they may have learned as boy scouts was dredged up from their memories, as ground instructors had them practise on table buzzers and Aldis lamps to a rate of at least eight words per minute. The manual Meteorology for Pilots and Navigators put out by the Department of Transport gave them a basic knowledge of meteorology, from cloud formation and ice accretion to wind variation, line squalls, and vertical currents. There were official presentations on LDAO (Law, Discipline, Administration, and Organization in the RCAF). Leading Aircraftmen also took classes in armament, aircraft recognition, aerodynamics, and airmanship. Between classes, the school disciplinary officer led them through daily physical training (PT) and, of course, parade drill.
All this training was designed to determine if the recruit was “air crew material.” In fact, the opening line of Pitman’s Flying Simply Explained read: “Will I make a pilot?” The syllabus was demanding, but the new official Leading Aircraftman status did wonders for the confidence and the ego.
“At ITS we received the coveted ‘flash’ to wear in the front of our field service cap,” Don Suthers wrote. He had graduated from McMaster in Hamilton and had worked as a clerk with Westinghouse for four years, but, up to that point in his life, nothing equalled the prestige of that simple little triangle of white cloth, which was inserted into the front of the cap to signify air crew in training. “Some of the more jealous non-air crew types bruited it about that the white flash indicated that the man was under treatment for syphilis.”
The white flash meant a lot to ex-infantryman John Clinton. “It indicated you were air crew. That was important. You were on your way. . . . We took advantage of it with the ladies.”
It was also the first time LAC Clinton felt completely inspired by what he was doing. He came from a family of United Empire Loyalists and had just scraped through high school with a “50.1 percent average. I had no motivation at all. But suddenly at ITS, this was sort of it,” Clinton said. “I enjoyed everything about ground school. We learned meteorology, math, principles of flight. I’m not sure what my marks were, but somewhere in the high 70s or low 80s.”
High marks strengthened a Leading Aircraftman’s hand for the coming selection process, yet there was still one other stiff challenge to meet at ITS—the Link trainer. “It was just like an airplane,” Clinton remembered. “The Link trainer had a fuselage, wings, and an open cockpit with all the normal controls,” but it was a simulator that never left the ground.
The Link trainer and its inventor, Edwin Albert Link, might never have enjoyed the prominence they did had it not been for the near desperate need of the BCATP in late 1939. Edwin Link had grown up during the 1920s in Binghamton, New York. Half the time he worked in his father’s organ and piano factory, the other half he learned how to fly. But flying lessons were very expensive at the time—$25 an hour. So, in 1929, Link patented a cockpit-like contraption with a simulated instrument panel and control stick, all of which floated on a set of organ bellows he had borrowed from his father’s factory. The result simulated the movement of an aircraft in flight.
In the 1930s Edwin sold six simulators to Casey Jones at the Curtiss-Wright aircraft company. Then he took a prototype to Washington with an idea that the United States Army Air Corps might be interested. When that venture fell through, he decided to raise the Link’s profile by installing one in the Long Island town of Rye, as an amusement ride for a quarter a flight.
One of Link’s contemporaries, New York test pilot and instructor Jack Charleson, contended that “if you could fly this unstable little monster, you could fly a stable airplane in straight and level flight.” In January 1940, that notion captured the imagination of Air Vice-Marshal Robert Leckie, on loan from the RAF as the director of training for the BCATP. Leckie decided to buy 200 Link trainers, “an unheard-of order at the time.” The first fifty were made in the United States and subsequent ones in Ontario at a factory near Gananoque.
Leckie’s order proved to be a turning point for the Link trainer, which is credited with training more than two million military and commercial pilots. And for the infant BCATP, without a large supply of training aircraft at its disposal, the Link trainer became an essential training tool for determining potential pilots and for honing basic instrument skills—that is, flying with only a turn-and-bank indicator, a magnetic compass, and an air speed indicator.
“They had a cyclorama—a circle of boards about ten feet high and about forty feet in diameter,” John Clinton said, remembering the Link trainer room. “It had painted scenery and a horizon on it, as if you were looking out over the landscape. They would start up the motor. If you pressed the rudder control it would turn in that direction. [When you manipulated the control column] it would bank, and the nose would come up or go down, just like an airplane. It was amazing.
“The instructor would sit over to one side with a recording device hooked up. One session took about twenty or thirty minutes. It really could give you the idea of coordinating the controls of an airplane. The first time [though], I was just all over the place. I couldn’t coordinate the turning and the nose. I came out soaking wet, I had been trying so hard. I remember telling myself I had blown it, that I would probably be washed out [of the course].” *
Clinton eventually mastered the Link as well as a score of other training and operational aircraft. He served three years as a flying instructor in Training Command and then flew missions for the South Atlantic Ferry Command and Transport Command.
“The Link was extremely sensitive, as sensitive as any aircraft,” said Link instructor Dick Tarshis. “It did everything that the aircraft would do. If you made a mistake in the air, it was serious; if you made a mistake and crashed the Link, it was only on paper.”
Tarshis’s job as Link instructor kept him close to the airplanes he loved but could not fly. As a boy he had spent his summers at a cottage on Hanlan’s Point on the Toronto Islands, where he watched aircraft of all shapes and sizes taking off and landing at the Island Airport. After high school he worked with Regal Films, the Canadian outlet for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, booking Hollywood movies into Toronto theatres. This job helped pay for flying lessons, and by 1938 Tarshis had his private pilot’s licence. When he enlisted, the RCAF put him on a train to Brandon, Manitoba, for Manning Depot, to Carberry, Manitoba, for guard duty, and on to ITS at Regina. The Link was never a problem. It was Tarshis’s incurable air sickness at Elementary Flying Training School that did him in.
“I tried everything, triple bromides, everything,” Tarshis said. “But the medical officer at EFTS said that my system just couldn’t stand it. And eventually, I was washed out. I felt very badly when I realized I wasn’t going to be a military pilot. So I took my discharge out of the air force, but I came back a year later as a Link trainer instructor.” By the war’s end he had instructed for about 2,700 hours and worked with nearly 2,000 RCAF students on the Link.
“There were probably twelve Link trainers in a room,” Tarshis explained. “The student would report to me, then walk up the steps into the Link. I’d start up the motor for the bellows, go back to my desk, communicate with the student by headphones, tell him to demonstrate level flight, climbing, gliding, and basic turn and banking moves. Then I would record his manoeuvres at my desk.
“Inside the Link was an exact replica of an aircraft [cockpit], with an instrument panel that lit up, a regular stick, and rudder pedals. If the student moved the stick, it would let out air on one side and so it would bank. The student also knew that if he made a turn, the outer wing would go faster than the inner wing, and he could stall and spin to the ground. The Link would actually rotate and spin, so the student had to get control, do the right things and bring it out of the spin. It was just like really stalling an aircraft. It really created all the hazards of flying, without leaving the ground.”
Flying capability, as the instructor viewed it, was partly a product of instinct and partly a matter of hand-eye-foot coordination. For LACs such as Chuck McCausland, who had played half-back for the Queen’s University Golden Gaels in the 1930s, or Jeff Mellon, who had played semi-professional lacrosse with the Hamilton Tigers, the Link trainer was “a piece of cake.” Nor was the manipulation of the control column and rudders a problem for young airmen such as Harvey Timberlake, who had driven a car from the age of twelve.
Later on in the life of the BCATP, Link training took on a new dimension when instructors installed a hood over the cockpit so that the pilot had to fly by instruments only, as he would in bad weather or at night. Decorated fighter pilot Jackie Rae recalled a day of training in the Link, when “I was doing my exercises with the coupe-top closed, so that I was flying absolutely blind. I was doing everything well, I thought, until [in my headphones] I heard this horrible crash. My instructor had taken a strawberry box, held it up to his microphone, and squashed it. It made the most terrible noise. I jumped a foot inside the Link. Then he said, ‘You have just landed 300 feet under the ground.’ I guess I had taken my eyes off the altimeter . . .”
The struggles of airmen coping with this peculiar craft moved one Link student to record his observations in poetic form in spring 1940. Having been a newspaper editor in Val d’Or in northern Quebec, airman Carrol McLeod described the antics of the Link and its students in an exaggerated Habitant accent. The result was a poem entitled “Dat Goddam Bird de Link,” and included the lines:
For two t’ree mont’ my brudder Pierre,
Take course on “Link” to fly de h’air
Dat “Link” she’s plane of speciale make,
On first solo your nerves he’s shake,
You take him off wit’ nose to sky—
But dat goddam t’ing to floor she’s tie.
McLeod mastered the Link, but never gave up the pen; his cockeyed poetry continued to appear in the RCAF Wings magazine. Later, when he became a flying instructor himself, his observations of the air force and its massive training scheme became the subject of a book called Dat H’ampire H’air Train Plan.
“At the end of the flight,” Dick Tarshis summed up, “I would go over what [the student] did right and wrong. You had a chart that had recorded all his moves. We tried to impress upon them that this was going to help them greatly in their flying, that they’d be a hell of a lot better flyer. But students were not that excited about flying the Link trainer. What they wanted was to really fly.”
After four weeks of facts and figures, lectures and Link flights, meteorology and Morse code, fitness and hygiene, studying and saluting, or, as Fred Lundell put it, “learning your A-B-C’s and minding your P’s and Q’s,” an airman’s future in the RCAF depended on an interview on his last day at ITS. LAC Fred Lundell, from Revelstoke, British Columbia, figured he was ready. His father had flown in the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War, and Lundell had devoured his stories as well as books about air aces Billy Bishop, Ray Collishaw, and Don MacLaren. When war came again in 1939, most of Lundell’s graduating class at Revelstoke High School joined the services; he enlisted in the RCAF. Manning Depot set him back with scarlet fever and the measles. Finally, he seemed to be getting airborne at ITS. But all his ambitions to be a military pilot like his father and his storybook heroes depended on how he fared at his “Selection Day” interview. There, in a few short minutes before a panel of instructors, officers, and the CO, his fate would be decided. Would he go on to become an observer? A gunner? Or, best of all, a pilot?
“Hours were spent polishing shoes, adjusting ties, and achieving an appropriate cap angle,” Lundell remembered. “Then the solid oak doors opened. There sat the panel—grey-haired, bald-headed, more ribbons and wings than one could imagine—and somewhere a voice announced: ‘LAC Lundell, Frederick W.’
“Good God, I thought. If I were able, I should cross myself. It’s like Brandon’s funeral parlour, on which we painted ‘Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.’ I smiled and stopped shaking.
“There were stern faces. Searching questions. ‘Did quite well in your courses, Lundell.’
“‘I think I was second or third in the course.’
“‘Want to be a pilot?’
“‘Everyone wants to be a pilot.’
“‘What special abilities do you have for a pilot, Lundell? Can you drive a car?’
“‘No, sir.’
“‘Why not?’
“‘We didn’t have a car, sir.’
“‘Hmmm. No proven abilities.’
“‘Oh, but sir, I can hit the front door of a house with the Vancouver Province from fifty feet, riding my bicycle, no hands.’
“A couple of suppressed grins . . . I saluted smartly and was dismissed . . . [I stood] outside those massive doors for what seemed the proverbial eternity, trying to kick myself—‘riding a bicycle, no hands’ . . . you made a real ass of yourself.
“Suddenly the doors opened.
“‘LAC Lundell. . . . We don’t think you will make pilot, or navigator, but perhaps bomb-aimer . . .’
“I knew I shouldn’t have mentioned hitting a door at fifty feet . . . “‘. . . but we have decided to give you a go at pilot training anyway.’”
LAC Fred Lundell, like the thousands before and after him, collected his ITS rewards—his navigation, mathematics, and aerodynamics marks, as well as his RCAF-issue two-piece fire-resistant flying suit, flying gloves, fleece-lined flying boots, goggles, and helmet— and then “began the repetitive ritual of completing another giant step towards gaining my wings and an eventual ops posting, and of saying goodbye to friends acquired during this phase of training.”
* Washing out was officially known as CT or “ceased training.”
