Читать книгу Behind the Glory - Ted Barris - Страница 15
ОглавлениеON JUNE 5, 1940, the Canadian aviation fraternity—flyers and administrators from the air force, commercial aviation, and private flying clubs—gathered in Ottawa for a special meeting. The highlight of the Wednesday luncheon was the annual presentation of the McKee (or Trans-Canada) Trophy. The three-foot-high trophy in the form of a winged figure flying over the globe had been created to honour Captain James Dalzell McKee, who had completed the first seaplane flight across Canada in 1926. Each year following that flight, the trophy was awarded to the person “rendering the most meritorious service in the advancement of aviation in Canada.” At the 1940 luncheon, the minister of national defence, Charles Gavan “Chubby” Power, rose to address the gathering and to announce the winner—Murton A. Seymour, the president of the Canadian Flying Clubs Association.
Murton Seymour’s lifelong association with Canadian aviation began in 1915, when he helped organize Canada’s first flying club, the Aero Club of British Columbia, near his home in Vancouver. That summer he took flying lessons by sitting on the wing of an OX-powered Curtiss pusher airplane while his instructor, William Stark, conducted ground demonstration runs. Seymour then practised by taxiing along the ground and making short hops of three or four feet off the ground. In September he successfully soloed in the Curtiss, and in November he graduated.
By this time the First World War was a year old, and the Royal Flying Corps came to Canada to set up a training program. The Aero Club of British Columbia became a training school, and Seymour was recommended for a commission in the Special Reserve of the Royal Flying Corps. He proceeded to Central Flying School at Upavon, England, in 1916, flew single-seater fighters for No. 41 Royal Flying Corps Squadron, stationed at Abeele, Belgium, until early 1917, then returned to Canada and became major in charge of all flying and technical training for the RAF in Canada.
After the war he completed his studies in law and was admitted to the bar in both British Columbia and Ontario in 1919. He established his law practice in St. Catharines, Ontario, and helped the local flying enthusiasts set up the St. Catharines Flying Club in 1928. He was its first president.
This was a critical time for civilian flying in Canada. It was clear that air transport—private, commercial, and military—would be of increasing economic importance, and that trained pilots would be needed for peacetime aviation as well as a vital resource should any military need arise. To begin filling the need for trained pilots at the end of the 1920s, the Canadian government, following the British example, launched the Light Aeroplane Club Scheme. This scheme had three goals: to establish aerodromes across Canada, to create an awareness of air transport among Canadians, and to create a reserve of partially trained pilots for defence in the event of war.
Each aero club had to provide a flying field, hire an instructor, have ten qualified pilots in its membership, and find thirty members prepared to qualify as pilots. In return, the government would provide two airplanes and a $100 grant to each club for each member who qualified as an ab initio pilot. (It was this arrangement that had enticed Al Stirton to sign up at the Moose Jaw Flying Club in 1938.)
The combination of his wartime posting with the Royal Flying Corps, his postwar direction of flight training, and his experience in organizing civilian aero clubs put Murton Seymour at the centre of the scheme. By fall 1929, Seymour had helped to organize sixteen aero clubs across the country into the Canadian Flying Clubs Association. The association advertised for potential pilots and organized the Trans-Canada Air Pageant, involving twenty aircraft and a picked air crew from the RCAF, which staged twenty-six aviation performances from the Maritimes to Vancouver.
In the late 1930s, when hostilities were looming in Europe, Seymour, as the CFCA president, lobbied the government to expand the flying club activities in elementary flying training for defence purposes. In June 1939, Seymour and the Department of National Defence arranged for eight of the association’s twenty-two clubs to undertake the elementary flying training instruction of a number of provisional pilot officers (PPOs). Eight club instructors were put to work in dual cockpits to train the first thirty-two PPOs for the RCAF. Seymour didn’t stop there; he toured the country inspiring the rest of the member clubs to help carry out this training in the national interest.
At eight o’clock on Sunday morning, September 3, 1939, the telephone rang at Murton Seymour’s home in St. Catharines. Wing Commander George Howsam of the RCAF in Ottawa was on the line. “The balloon’s up,” he said. “Come to Ottawa immediately.” Seymour spent the next twenty-four hours sending and receiving telegrams. By Monday morning, the remaining fourteen CFCA members were ready to assume responsibility for the elementary stage of flying training of pilots for the RCAF.
The training given by the clubs formed the basis of the Elementary Flying Training Schools of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. Before the official inauguration of the BCATP, civilian-run EFTSs had trained more than 500 provisional pilot officers and leading aircraftmen; by the end of the war the number totalled 41,000. That spring afternoon in Ottawa, when Chubby Power presented the McKee Trophy to Murton Seymour, Seymour’s brainchild—a nationwide system of elementary flying training schools—was already giving shape to the RCAF’s amorphous air training plan.
In the muddy fields on the outskirts of St. Catharines, Seymour’s own aero club hired its first manager and chief flying instructor. Until that spring, Fred Pattison had been working for $18 a week as a mechanic at Frank Murphy’s garage in downtown St. Catharines; when he took the manager’s job his salary jumped to $40 a week. Meanwhile, the club put the call out across southwestern Ontario for flying instructors to teach the first batch of RCAF provisional pilot officers. A twenty-seven-year-old commercial pilot named George Dunbar drove down from London and applied.
“Hell, I didn’t think I had enough experience,” Dunbar admitted, “I didn’t even know where St. Catharines was, and had a devil of a time finding it. But they hired me on the spot—$50 a week and $2 an hour for every hour I flew.”
Dunbar had logged many flying hours by spring 1940. As a kid growing up near London, he had wheedled his way into becoming a sort of roustabout at Lambeth airfield. He served an apprenticeship as an aircraft engineer and in the mid-1930s had learned to fly, earning his commercial pilot’s licence in less than two years. George’s mentor was the London Flying Club’s chief flying instructor, Captain Tom Williams, who, although he had started his career in the cavalry, claimed to have flown in 500 dogfights as a Royal Flying Corps fighter pilot during the First World War. As a bush pilot he took only the toughest contracts; he hauled nitroglycerin into northern mining camps (where even the ground crews would vacate the airstrip until Williams had safely landed and shut down his Waco freighter).
“Tommy had the same sort of cavalier approach to teaching,” Dunbar remembered. “I know I soloed before I ever did a spin in an airplane. People were talking about spinning, and I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. So he says ‘Okay, get your helmet and let’s go.’ And away we’d go. He’d spin to the left and spin to the right. And he’d say, ‘Now you do them.’ And I did them. And that was that. I guess that’s what I learned from him. It didn’t take me long to know exactly when [a student] was ready to do something in the air.”
As ready as George Dunbar was to instruct, as eager as Defence Minister Chubby Power was for success, as desperate as RCAF Wing Commander George Howsam was for pilots, and as confident as Murton Seymour was in the entire aero club plan, the scheme experienced early growing pains. The day before St. Catharines EFTS got its first manager, a windstorm blew in from the northwest and flipped two of the club’s aircraft on their backs, damaged the club hangars, and brought down another of the club’s aircraft in downtown St. Catharines, killing both the pilot and his passenger.
“The school just wasn’t ready,” George Dunbar said. “Where the airport was situated was quite low—it’s only a foot or two above the waterline of the lake so it was very difficult to fly. You’d smash airplanes up quite easily, because they’d get stuck in the mud and go over on their backs.” Even after the staff sent photographs of the muddy field to Ottawa, asking the government to macadamize the runways, there were problems. “Overnight the construction crews would dig a hole for a sewer and leave it unmarked. And next morning we’d be watching an aircraft coming in after a flight and all of a sudden it would fall into one of these holes, break a prop or a wingtip, and there’d be another airplane out of commission.”
Nevertheless, flyers from all parts of Canada, eager to fly in the RCAF, responded to the military emergency. Some accepted their provisional pilot officer status and went back to flying school. Flyers such as Frank Montgomery, who had hopped the train in Saskatoon when National Defence telegraphed him, and Wess McIntosh, whom fate had snatched from the RCN destroyer Fraser before she sank, got their PPO commissions and took preliminary training at Camp Borden and the main RCAF station at Trenton. PPO Russ Bannock from Edmonton went to the Aero Club of British Columbia, and PPO Fred Macdonell took elementary flying at the Halifax Flying Club. By the middle of 1940, all four of them were informed that they would not be sent to operational training units overseas; the system was so desperately short of flying instructors that they would be ploughed back into the program as the first crop of BCATP flying instructors.
Shortly after it began accepting its first trainees, St. Catharines welcomed ten former RCAF ground crewmen to their club hangar. At their home station, Trenton, the ten recruits had been standard tradesmen assigned to general duties, but when they heard about the flying club schools, they had requested permission to remuster as air crew and qualify as pilots. J. A. Sully, their commanding officer at Trenton, granted them ten days’ leave. They pooled what money they had; one of them contributed the money he’d made by auctioning off a car he’d won in a raffle. Dunbar remembered them “trickling in one Sunday afternoon after hitchhiking to St. Catharines. They didn’t have enough money for lodging . . . and the first night made arrangements to sleep in the hangar. Next day, Fred Pattison and some of the boys scrounged some tents and helped rig them up at a tourist camp a couple of miles from the field. We thought everything was okay, but a couple of days later, another instructor overheard that they were not all getting three squares a day because of insufficient funds. [Pattison] took the problem to local clubs, whose members immediately agreed to provide dinner for the group every day.
“They were an enthusiastic gang; they had to get through the course in so short a time. They were so enthusiastic that when they didn’t have any studying to do at night, they would come back and help the ground crew service the aircraft they were flying.” By the end of the course, seven of the ten had qualified for pilot licences.
Nearly all of those who graduated from the aero clubs’ elementary flying training advanced to become RCAF pilots or air crew and served under the RAF in the early days of the war, some in Operation Dynamo (the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk) or the Battle of Britain in the summer and fall of 1940. Of the seven Trenton tradesmen who qualified at St. Catharines, three were reported missing-in-action, one became a prisoner of war, and one won the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Meanwhile, events in Hitler’s Weser plan were accelerating. In February 1940, General von Falkenhorst had assumed command of the German expedition to invade Norway. In March, the French and British planned the mining of Norwegian waters. And on April 7, the RAF spotted German ships steaming north towards Narvik and Trondheim.
Thirty-seven-year-old Fridtjov Loberg was stationed at Trondheim air base with the Royal Norwegian Air Force. Loberg had joined the air force when he was twenty and had learned to fly in a Farman aircraft, which he remembered looking like “a scaffold with an engine sitting in the middle of it”; he and his fellow cadets were not issued parachutes because “the air force was afraid we might run out of them.” When the Germans invaded six of Norway’s seaports on April 9, 1940, Loberg and his colleagues at Trondheim were still ill equipped.
“We got a phone call at the airfield,” Loberg remembered, “that there was a four-engine plane coming in our direction. We had two eighteen-year-old Fokker aircraft and quickly sent them up. But when the German aircraft came over at about 6,000 metres altitude, our planes had only managed to reach 3,000 metres in all that time. I guess the Germans were laughing their heads off. They knew we didn’t have anything to fight back with.”
The Norwegians recognized that counterattack was futile. So Loberg and thirty-four other pilots of the RNAF were instructed to evacuate. They took to the sea and spent the next four weeks making their way to Britain by freighter and fishing boat, and were eventually escorted by a British coastal vessel to Lerwick in the Shetland Islands.
Norwegian land forces had had better luck on the first day of the invasion—a coastal battery sank the German heavy cruiser Blücher in the Oslo Fiord. On that day, April 9, twenty-two-year-old Harald Jensen was about to write his sergeant’s exam at the Oslo military school. He witnessed the thwarting of the first German assault.
“Next morning, we got out on the parade ground and planes were circling overhead. One came down quite low—it looked like a Heinkel. I was on my way to a machinegun post. I had been ordered out to a railway station. I commandeered a car to get to the station, and when we arrived at the machinegun post, it was already manned and there were three German planes coming down in perfect formation. But the whole thing was completely silly. They landed at Fornebu airport and captured Oslo within a few hours.”
Jensen was allowed to go home to Larvik, but he decided to search out resistance forces. With the equivalent of about five dollars in his pocket he trekked through Sweden trying to get into the fighting. He made his way to Stockholm, where he remained for eight months before he managed to get hired on board the Taurus, one of five ships planning to run the gauntlet from Sweden, past Denmark, and up the Skagerrak to the North Sea and England.
The morning the ships weighed anchor, “it was supposed to be snowing. . . . We were steaming along the Norwegian coast past Sola, the biggest air base the Germans had in northern Europe at that time, and the weather started to clear. Next thing we know there’s a warship bearing down on us. We all ran up on deck. We could see the ship’s bow drawing closer and closer. The captain was going to [open] the sea-cocks and sink our ship, when the warship swung broadside, and we saw she was flying the British navy flag. She was a light cruiser.”
Jensen and all the crewmen of the Taurus became instant celebrities in the British press. They received the Norwegian War Medal for bravery. Five modern freighters had broken the German blockade of Norway and Denmark at a time when Britain had a dwindling number of ships in its merchant marine and even fewer successes against the German invasion of Europe.
It took the Germans sixty-two days to complete the seizure of Norway. In the course of those two months there were 2,600 German and 7,000 Allied casualties. However, the government of Norway survived. Almost the last to leave the country was King Haakon, who immediately formed a government-in-exile in London, England.
Fridtjov Loberg and Harald Jensen had become expatriates too. Yet they and thousands of their countrymen would return to emancipate their homeland five years later. Their route to victory would begin 3,000 miles away, at a military flying training station in Canada as part of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan.
From April through June 1940, the flow of Norwegian military personnel aboard planes, pleasure boats, fishing vessels, and merchant marine ships to Britain was constant. They were a people without a home and a military force without a place to regroup. In Britain, the RAF had its hands full. Europe was falling and British authorities could offer no surplus planes, equipment, instructors, or training fields to help rebuild a Norwegian air force.
The commanding officer of the Norwegian army air arm, Captain Bjarne Oen, had fled to England aboard the same Norwegian fishing vessel as airman Loberg. From the moment he arrived on May 12 he began a campaign to reorganize Norwegian flyers. At first he negotiated them into the RAF Volunteer Reserve. But when Norway capitulated on June 7, Britain cancelled all plans to train Norwegians, since the RAF needed all its pilots, aircraft, and aerodromes for combat flying, not training. Oen approached the French for training facilities, but they were in disarray. However, diplomatic contacts in Washington and Montreal were already working to solve the problem of the homeless Royal Norwegian Air Force.
Canada and the RCAF had just launched the BCATP. The Canadian government agreed to provide the airfield on the Toronto Islands as a potential training facility for the RNAF. The Toronto Harbour Commission offered land adjacent to the airport rent-free for any required buildings to house the Norwegians. Aircraft, purchased by Norway before the outbreak of war and on order from American factories, would be sent to Toronto. In Britain, the Norwegian government-in-exile made plans to train both naval and army flyers at the Toronto Island Airport. The British government agreed to accept graduates as reserve flyers in the RAF.
The first 120 naval and army flyers of the RNAF-in-exile crossed the Atlantic aboard two former Norwegian coastal steamships—the 800-ton Iris and the 1,200-ton Lyra—in August 1940. Fridtjov, or, as he became known in Canada, Fred Loberg, was with the first contingent sent to establish a pilot training station for the RNAF in Toronto. Organizers of the Norwegian training camp were first headquartered at the Royal York Hotel, while the Norwegian army and naval servicemen were temporarily barracked at Lakeside Home, a Toronto Island summer home for the patients of the Sick Children’s Hospital, and aboard the Iris, which had managed to navigate the St. Lawrence Seaway up to Toronto harbour.
Beside the airport “was mostly vacant land,” Loberg remembered, “so we immediately started building the camp there. We had to build a barracks, mess hall, and equipment depot” before the pilot training could begin. There was training of another sort going on in the vicinity— no sooner was Loberg’s office up “next to the Maple Leaf Baseball Stadium, than I found baseballs breaking through the windows of my office.” The baseball players had the jump on the airmen in another respect too. They had uniforms. Procuring RNAF uniforms was Loberg’s next assignment.
“How many men can I count on?” Loberg asked the chief officer.
“You can guess just as well as I can,” was the reply.
So Loberg threw what little commercial experience he had at the problem. The Norwegian air force colour was green; their uniforms were also tailored much like German military uniforms, and that would never do. So, first Loberg sought permission from the RAF to use their air force blue for RNAF officers’ uniforms.* Then he assembled a uniform that would fit a man of his stature; it was a battle-dress uniform with a bloused top that was buttoned to the pants.
By fall 1940, the Loberg-styled uniforms had been manufactured and distributed, and elementary flying training had begun at Camp “Little Norway.” Trainees studied at the ground school and later in the wireless school (known popularly as “Radio City”), while they upgraded their physical training in the station’s new gymnasium-sauna facility (later named Haraldshallen because it was christened by Prince Harald). The first pilot trainees took one of the world’s shortest ferry rides, across the narrow channel to the island airport, for their elementary flying sessions in Moth and Fleet biplanes borrowed from the Toronto Flying Club.
The Battle of Britain was in its sixth week when Little Norway took delivery of its first American-built Fairchild PT-19 Cornells. Soon after, the first three Douglas light bombers arrived, and then a freighter full of Curtiss Hawk fighters. Still later, patrol bombers on pontoons arrived for the naval branch. In all, about $20 million worth of aircraft (financed by gold spirited out of Norway when the Germans invaded) got RNAF instructors and students off the ground. Training was well under way by November 10, 1940, when the Norwegian and RAF flags were raised at the official opening of the Royal Norwegian Air Force Training Centre.
During the months that followed, a steady parade of new aircraft and Norwegian royalty made their way to the island airport to bolster the training fleet and the morale. Whenever royalty showed up, so did the bevy of newsreel cinematographers, ready to document the unveiling of each new blue-and-yellow Fairchild Cornell. For propaganda purposes the RNAF hired a film crew and renowned American journalist Lowell Thomas to narrate how “Crown Princess Martha opens the christening ceremony for a number of gift airplanes,” while pointing to the fuselage inscriptions that read “Fra Nordmenn— Argentina” and “Fra Nordes Venner—Minnesota.” As the paper was ripped away to reveal more inscriptions on Cornells, Thomas said, “And five-year-old Prince Harald performs his first official act . . . unveiling more planes bought with funds contributed by Norwegians or friends of Norway in South America and the United States.”
High on the list of the friends of Norway was the citizenry of Toronto. By the time the camp was fully operational, around Christmas 1940, training flights of blue-and-yellow Cornells and all-green Hawks were a common sight across the Toronto skyline. Although some officials in the city warned of “the risks of aviation over the bay,” on most pleasant, sunny days Torontonians congregated along the waterfront to watch the bombing and strafing manoeuvres. So did many RCAF recruits, newly inducted at the main Toronto Manning Depot nearby. Navigation recruit Al Rutherford remembered several drill parades disintegrating into total chaos as recruits craned their necks to see the Norwegian flyers instead of paying attention to their marching steps. In fact, around Toronto, some air force recruiting posters that read “Join the Royal Canadian Air Force” had been chalked with the addition “and watch the Norwegians fly.”
