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.
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