Thursday, June 25, 2020

BOOK REVIEW: The Creation of a National Air Force – the Official History of the Royal Canadian Air Force Volume II, by W.A.B. Douglas.



At the end of autumn in 1920, the senior officers of the new Canadian Air Force (“Royal” was not added for another four years) convened a meeting with their bureaucratic peers.

Invited were senior representatives from the federal departments of Agriculture, Interior (which oversaw surveys, parks, fighting forest fires and running Indian reserves), Fisheries, Mines, Marine & Fisheries, Justice (with oversight of the newly created RCMP), the Post Office and on and on. The armistice that ended the horrible First World War was only two years in the past and a great many Canadians felt there would never, could never, be another war of such intensity.

The airmen reasoned that if they wanted to keep their little air force intact in some way, they would have to find ways of serving their civilian peers and maybe even some commercial interests.

This book, covering the following 25 years of Canadian military aviation history, is heavy reading, all right. 797 pages including 200 pages of footnotes. It is part of a three-volume history of this subject. The first volume covered the First World War and the last one the exploits of Canadian airmen overseas from 1939-45, both those serving in the 45 Canadian fighter, bomber, patrol and transport squadrons sent abroad plus the even larger number of Canadians who served in Royal Air Force units, the RCAF and RAF having been designed to be virtually interchangeable.

Three major themes emerge in this book: the continuous fight to keep the Air Force intact with some semblance of military capability throughout the 1920s and 30s, the massive training establishment built up in Canada between 1939 and about 1941, only to be dismantled as the end of the war approached, and finally the Home War Establishment of combat aircraft created to defend Canada’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts from raids or even landings by hostile forces. We know now that these never came unrealistic, but that it the wisdom of hindsight. The very best sources of information in 1940, when Britain was on the brink of a Nazi invasion from across the channel, put things in different light. Canada had to build up a military infrastructure to protect the East Coast and shipping from attacks by German U-boats and surface raiders. 

Considerable ink is devoted in this book to the vicious little campaigns against German U-boats operating in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in the summer of 1942 (we lost) and again in the autumn of 1944 (we forced them out, but not without considerable losses).

The RCAF’s Eastern Air Command was perpetually starved of equipment, not because Ottawa was too cheap to pay, but because the Anglo-American councils that allocated new aircraft attached little significance to the threat to Canada. Only in the summer of 1943, when American military aircraft production hit its stride, was Canada able to obtain some very long-range Consolidated Liberators rigged for anti-submarine patrols and attacks. Problems in acquiring foreign aircraft were behind the push a decade later to design and build the CF-100 jet interceptor in Canada, and the horrifically expensive and complicated Avro Arrow project.

An unsung hero from those dark days was Squadron Leader N.E. “Molly” Small who was not only a pilot and unit commander in an Eastern Air Command antisubmarine squadron, but a sophisticated student of his craft, devouring the latest combat reports on how the larger and wealthier RAF Coastal Command was fighting the U-boat menace. One lesson was that aircraft should be freed up from having to escort plodding convoys and instead searching the waters where intelligence (gathered from code-breaking and radio direction-finding work) indicated U-boats would be operating. Small was also keen on the idea of giving Eastern Air Command aircraft a paint job that made them hard to see from the conning towers of German submarines: an off-white belly and fuselage sides mimicking the gulls that were so hard to discern above the ocean.

On the West Coast, things were equally frightening with small numbers of antique aircraft trying to patrol the B.C. seacoast after Pearl Harbour in late 1941. If the fall of France in 1940 was frightening, then the six months after Pearl Harbour was even worse as the Imperial Japanese Navy rampaged across the Pacific, easily capturing Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Borneo, the Dutch East Indies and even launching raids into northern Australia. (Personal note: I once met a woman who grew up in the northern reaches of Queensland in Australia when the Japanese were bombing Darwin and sinking ships along the coast. Her parents figured their Italian ancestry would bring no favours from the Japanese and thus had buried their valuables on their farm and kept a car fuelled and packed in case they had to flee.) 

This book also tells the story of the how the Department of National Defence in early 1942  turned down a request for money to build airfields in the Queen Charlotte Islands for fear they would be easily and quickly captured by the Japanese and used to launch air raids against Vancouver and Victoria.

The second part of this historical equation is about British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, the Canadian franchise of the world-wide Empire Air Training Scheme. Reduced to its basics, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King was leery indeed of taking Canada into a war that might create a conscription crisis like the one in 1917, which came close to tearing apart the country. His solution was to offer Canada as the place -- relatively close, but not too close, to embattled Britain, and conveniently near the American industrial powerhouse -- in which huge numbers of military aviators could be trained.

The national numbers of this project are staggering, so let us look at this a little differently. In the summer of 1940 alone, air training schools opened at Moose Jaw, Saskatoon, Regina and Prince Albert (two each). The next year, schools opened at Caron near Moose Jaw, Dafoe, Yorkton and North Battleford. 1942 saw schools open at Weyburn and then Estevan -- and in 1943 at Davidson, although in 1944 it began closing along with other schools, for the Axis powers clearly were on the defensive.
A little bit of estimating tells us that on any given day in, say, 1942, there were about 1,500 little airplanes carry trainees over Saskatchewan.

This air training plan was designed to evolve throughout the war. Around the middle of 1942, it was clear that multiengine training for bomber and transport pilots needed higher priority, and increasingly sophisticated navigational gear meant there would have to be specialized training for aviators. Thus, the two air observer schools in Saskatchewan, in Prince Albert and Regina, closed and freed up their hangars for pilot training. (Regina also was home to No 2 Initial Training School, where young airman were tested for their physical, psychological and physiological ability to fly and fight at high altitudes) and a large explosives depot on the western edge of the city.

Across Canada, these flying training schools graduated more than 131,000 aviators in different trades. Thousands more went through air force technical training schools. It was a remarkable feat for a country of only 14 million people.

Wednesday, June 24, 2020

Barney Vs. Hitler

Local Aviation Historian Will Chabun shared the following anecdote involving his daughter Rebecca:

"Rebecca had bought a CD from the HMV store that used to be in the Southland Mall. She brought it home, removed the plastic wrapping and discovered — horrors! — a CD by another pop star had been incorrectly inserted into the advertising jacket and plastic case.
No problem. Rebecca and I got in the car and drove over to the mall. It was quiet and the young guy at the till listened as I explained our problem and asked for a swap out. He was very courteous and full of apologies, which led me to ask if that sort of thing happened often.

Turned out it did, he said. It seems that when the big record companies are putting together CDs their assembly  line would have a certain number of pre-recorded CDs and a certain number of plastic containers with liner notes. Usually, things worked out, but every now and then the assembly line would be short one or even more items. But the assembly line couldn’t stop to sort these out, so they were fixed as customers brought them back.

The young guy behind the counter said the strangest such error  he ever handled revolved around a young mother who had bought her son a CD of the songs from Barney the Dinosaur.

Imagine her surprise when she opened up the CD — and it turned out to be “The Collected Speeches of Adolf Hitler.”


Indeed.

Thursday, June 11, 2020

Operation Exodus

From about 26 Apr 45 to about 12 May 45 the RAF and RCAF conducted “Op Exodus” which was to fly all liberated Commonwealth PW captured in NW Europe back to Britain. The operation was started by 5 Group of the RAF and the first RCAF crews involved were members of 405 Squadron later joined by other RCAF Squadrons as late as 08 May 45. Manifests were supposedly kept to account for all PW to prevent war criminals and other unwanted folks from getting into England.

If you have any information on OP Exodus, please contact me by email:

Warren James

wsjxxx@gmail.com

Cheers, Warren James