THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN
The Royal Canadian Air Force was woefully underequipped. Hundreds of eager Canadians joined the ranks in 1939, but aircraft shortages resulted in so few openings that most young men who were anxious to fly went overseas to join Britain’s Royal Air Force. About 1,000 Canadians served in RAF formations or were undergoing aircrew training at the start of the war, and almost all were drawn to the dashing fighters, attempting to emulate their heroes from the Great War who had been portrayed as “knights of the sky.” The RAF’s Fighter Command soon held so many Canadians that the British authorities acceded to the King government’s request that they form an independent Canadian fighter formation. The No. 242 (Canadian) Squadron flew Hawker Hurricanes, a closed cockpit monoplane, part metal and part fabric, with a top speed of 530 kilometres per hour. It was well armed with eight Browning 303 machine guns, but outmatched by the Luftwaffe’s front-line fighter, the Messerschmitt Bf 109, which could out-dive and out-climb the Hurricanes and was equipped with 20mm cannons.
The original pilots of 242 came from all walks of Canadian life. The average age was about twenty-three, slightly older than fighter pilots later in the war. A sampling of prewar occupations reveals an RCMP special constable, an ex-salmon fisherman, a bank clerk, an employee in a hardware store, a semi-professional hockey player, a lifeguard, a gold miner, a dairyman, and a civil engineer.1 Most of the pilots had flying experience, having paid for private lessons, although some had simply enlisted in the RAF and gained flight time through training. The fighter pilots were bound together by service and country, and they proudly wore the “Canada” badges sewn onto their tunic shoulders.
Neither of the two Canadian overseas formations—No. 242 or No. 110 “City of Toronto” Squadron (which crossed to Britain with the 1st Canadian Infantry Division as a reconnaissance squadron flying slow Lysanders)—was ready for battle. While the two squadrons were kept in England, a number of the 242 Squadron Canadian flyers went to France to shore up depleted RAF formations. RAF squadrons—flying Hurricanes and Spitfires—fought relentlessly against the Luftwaffe in the swirling air battles and tried to slow or hinder the rapid armoured advance, even destroying key bridges behind the lines. But losses were heavy. Many airmen were killed, not having had the chance to learn their dangerous trade. Instinct and experience saved lives, and it also helped to know when to break and run. Canadian Hurricane pilot William McKnight scored his first kill on May 19; he would amass a total of fourteen by the end of the battle and be awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. The tough, diminutive McKnight, who unwound at night by listening to Bing Crosby records, wrote of his harrowing experiences during the relentless combat where he lost twenty-seven pounds from sheer stress and overwork: “We’ve only got five of the original twenty-two pilots in the squadron left now and those of us who are left aren’t quite the same blokes as before.”2 The aerial sharpshooter had been a medical student in Edmonton before the war and vowed to return to his studies. He was not able to keep the promise, being killed over France in January 1941.
R.H. Wiens, from Jansen, Saskatchewan, wrote of one offensive patrol in the Le Cateau quadrant:
I was shot down by a Messerschmitt 110 or rather by about four of them…. It wasn’t my first scrap but previous to that we never had such odds against us. We saw them first and went right in on their tail. I got one with my first burst and then followed a general melee. I was trying to manoeuvre for another one when a 110 nearly collided with me. The rear gunner and I had an argument, however. I gave him about 500 rounds and could see him fold up. I don’t know whether the plane crashed or not, but if it did I have three.3
In the confusing battle, Wiens’s engine was riddled with cannon fire and he was losing altitude rapidly. He considered bailing out, but the French army had a reputation for shooting at pilots descending in parachutes, fearing they were airborne enemy troops. He decided to ride it out and, despite crashing into some trees, brought his Hurricane down, surviving with a concussion, a bad leg contusion, and a gash to his face. Wiens eventually made it back to England, and then to Canada, where he died on May 21, 1941, at the controls of a burning Anson while training a new generation of flyers.
The battles over France were intense and frightening. Fighter pilots climbed and dove, searched for prey, and snapped off bursts of fire when they saw it, while always scanning the skies for more enemy aircraft that sought to “bounce” them—or surprise them by swooping out of the blinding sun. The intensity of combat was exhausting: most fighters engaged in three or four two-hour patrols a day, and several pilots testified to falling asleep while flying over enemy territory. Relentless combat dulled the edge. The RAF held its own against the more experienced Luftwaffe in the aerial battles over France, but had little impact on the losing ground war.4 Flying Officer Stan Turner of Toronto, who flew with No. 242 Squadron, wrote of the retreat from France after the battle was over, “We were a wild-looking bunch, unshaven, scruffily dressed, exhausted, grimed with dirt and smoke…. After weeks of fighting we were all keyed up…. As we headed for England we felt not so much relief as anger. We wanted to hit something…. But we knew that the real war had only just begun.”5
Hurricanes of No. 242 Squadron set to engage the enemy.
GERMANY OVERRAN WESTERN EUROPE in less than three months, and in the process drove France to her knees and forced back the British in a humiliating rout. The Battle for Western Europe had cost the Germans 43,000 killed and 117,000 wounded. France lost 50,000 dead but saw 1.5 million soldiers become prisoners and the nation fall under brutal occupation. The British had suffered 11,000 dead and its army was tattered in spirit; no one had any illusions that it could stand for long in a sustained ground war against the Nazis.6 The neutral Roosevelt administration in Washington privately gave Britain little hope of withstanding the Fascist onslaught, even with the pugnacious and charismatic Churchill at the helm, but if Britain was to have any chance of fighting on, it had to be supported with munitions and materiel. The Americans backed Britain, choosing democracy over fascism, although they were also driven by a healthy dose of self-serving pragmatism, for if Britain fell, Germany, with the potential for acquiring France’s navy, might soon swallow up the Royal Navy and bring the war to North America.7
Hitler’s general staff, meanwhile, was stymied by its own success. German military forces had won a lopsided and improbable victory over France, but their commanders had no plan for taking the war to Britain. The Führer, having gambled and won, rolled the dice again. When Churchill’s government ignored Hitler’s half-hearted peace offering—which required Britain’s acceptance of German dominion over Europe—the German senior air force, navy, and army staffs drew up invasion plans, hoping to set foot on English soil by September 16.8 Even as friction, discord, and rivalry existed among the German service arms, all agreed that while the British army was still punch-drunk from its recent defeat, the Royal Navy would have to be knocked out before an invasion could succeed, or the 2,000 slow, flat-bottomed river barges transporting the Werhmacht would be slaughtered in the English Channel by Britain’s warships.9 When Churchill ordered the ruthless but necessary attack on the French navy at Oran on July 3, he enraged his former allies by sinking the battleship Bretagne, damaging several other ships, and sending the rest to steam to safety, but he made sure that the German navy was not able to gather more ships under its flag. Without France’s navy to augment its own wasted fleet after the Norway disaster, the only way for the Germans to destroy the Royal Navy was to gain command of the air and rain bombs down on the warships, and so the first step to invasion was for the Luftwaffe to grind out the Royal Air Force in a series of battles that would eventually give them command of the skies.
The Battle of Britain was recognized at the time as a fight for Britain’s very survival. No one in London was confident of success. The destruction of 1,029 aircraft during the Battle of France left the RAF significantly weakened against the overwhelming German air force.10 Even though the Luftwaffe had lost about a quarter of its strength in the same battle, it still had more than 2,400 aircraft, including 864 Messerschmitt Bf 109s, their best single-engine fighter.11 The RAF was deeply outnumbered with only 226 Spitfires and 353 Hurricanes, but it had tactical advantages. The fighter pilots—including British and Canadian flyers, as well as those from the defeated nations of Poland and France—were defending Britain and well aware that their backs were to the wall. Britain would fall if they faltered. Because they were fighting over British territory, these same pilots knew that if their planes were shot down, they could parachute to safety, while the Germans would become prisoners of war. Most importantly, the British had invested during the interwar years in a sophisticated ground-based fighter control system. The triffid-like pylons that dotted the east and south coasts of England picked up the direction and range of incoming German bombers and fighters through advance radar, and the control system allowed the limited resources of the RAF to be vectored to the enemy. Though the integrated radar and control system reduced the likelihood of surprise and saved fuel and wear and tear on the fighter pilots, there would still be a battle royal above British soil.
Two Royal Canadian Air Force squadrons, plus No. 242 Squadron, were in England for the battle. The Westland Lysander—a two-seat, lightly armed and slow aircraft built for reconnaissance—was used by No. 110 Squadron but would play no more than a marginal role. However, the second RCAF formation, No. 1 Squadron (later renamed No. 401 Squadron), which arrived in August, was soon thrown into the defence of Britain with its sixteen Hawker Hurricanes. The Hurricanes were sturdy craft, but the Messerschmitt Bf 109s were faster and had a better rate of climb and deadlier weapons in the form of cannons. The Bf 109 was a high-performance day-fighter but it had a short range, with fuel enough for only about seventy-five minutes in the air. (For both German and British pilots, fuel-tank capacity shaped the nature of aerial combat during the war, now over England and later when the Allies took the battle to Germany.) The RAF’s Spitfire was similar to the Hurricane but faster and more nimble, and on par with the 109s. The Spitfires, with their eight Browning .303 machine guns, tended to seek out the Messerschmitts, while the heavier Hurricanes went screaming for the German bombers.
In a multi-pronged attack, the Luftwaffe hoped to both shoot down the RAF’s fighters and bomb critical strongpoints—from naval docks to air fields—which they targeted throughout July. But the Luftwaffe did not have an effective heavy bomber and so it relied on a handful of light and medium bombers, the Dornier 17, the Junkers 88, and the Heinkel 111, as well as the twin-engine fighter, the Messerschmitt Bf 110. The Bf 110 had a greater range than the Bf 109, but it was little more than fodder for fast-moving Hurricanes and Spitfires. The shoehorning of the German tactical bombers into a strategic bomber role that could target infrastructure, factories, and key logistical structures revealed that that the German Luftwaffe was ill prepared for the coming battle. German planners had conceived and forged their close tactical air support for ground forces, and not for depositing large bomb loads on cities.
The Battle of Britain raged from July 10 to October 31, 1940, with the most intense fighting in August and September. The Luftwaffe first tried to inflict as much damage as possible on the Admiralty’s capacity to wage war, targeting dockyards and ships. When this failed, the Luftwaffe switched its sights onto the RAF. This second aerial campaign was unleashed on August 13 against RAF fighter bases and airfields. Within days, the RAF had thrown back its opponents. On August 15, for instance, the Luftwaffe lost 76 planes, and the losses piled up, with another hundred more shot out of the sky over the next three days. Again and again, the Luftwaffe’s bombers proved to be ponderous targets for the agile Hurricanes and Spitfires. The bombers’ escorts, the independently effective Bf 109s, were ordered to stay close to the bomber stream and therefore were unable to manoeuvre for full opportunity.12 Against the desperate British and Allied flyers, who were fighting for national survival, a German victory would have been a triumph against the odds, but the balance hung in the Luftwaffe’s choice of targets.
Throughout the early part of the battle, the Germans attacked RAF airfields and radar sites, and in so doing, pushed the RAF to the brink of defeat. But the German high command never understood the importance of the radar chains. Had the Luftwaffe razed those sites, the outcome might have been different.13 The Luftwaffe’s lamentable intelligence section also overestimated the damage that their fighters were inflicting on the RAF and underestimated Britain’s ability to compensate, continually predicting that the RAF was on the verge of destruction and that one more assault might finally deliver the death blow. In fact, the British manufacturing sector’s ramped-up aircraft production, with its manufacturing of hundreds of new fighters per month, matched and then surpassed the withering rate at which Spitfires and Hurricanes were lost. But there was no easy method of replacing the pilots. Canadian Spitfire pilot Keith Ogilvie, who shot down four enemy aircraft during the Battle of Britain and flew 300 sorties before he was wounded in July 1941, recounted, “The Battle of Britain was a very intense time—people came and went…. You’d get to know a guy pretty well, then all of a sudden he wasn’t there anymore. You just sort of got used to it. We had some guys who came to the squadron and went missing on your first trip. You just didn’t know—if your luck ran out, it ran out.”14
In the end, the Luftwaffe required a victory to achieve its strategic goals. The RAF needed only a draw. The Luftwaffe’s failure to follow a coherent policy and apply its overwhelming strength to concentrated objectives meant that the field was more level than it might otherwise have been. But even allowing for the Luftwaffe’s missteps, the Allied flying forces—despite the steady production of aircraft and trained flyers—were still outnumbered. With every squadron needed to defend against the onslaught, the Canadians were ordered into the air.
THE RCAF’S NO. 1 SQUADRON appeared on the order of battle on August 17. The squadron’s first day of combat, August 24, was an embarrassing affair in which three four-plane sections were providing cover for Spitfires patrolling at lower heights. Near Portsmouth, the inexperienced Canadians spotted three twin-engine planes and gunned towards them. Squadron Leader Ernie McNab, who had joined the RCAF in 1928 and had cut his teeth on all manner of aircraft, recognized them as RAF Bristol Blenheim light bombers and called off the engagement, but in the excitement several of the Hurricanes misunderstood and swooped on their unsuspecting prey, even as the startled British flyers fired off recognition flares.15 In the ensuing melee, one of the Blenheims crash landed and another was shot down in flames. McNab later described the ghastly affair as the “the lowest point in my life.”16 A mortified yet gutsy McNab made a visit to No. 235 Squadron, which had lost the Blenheims, to make a personal apology and offer his condolences.17 The British flyers, who had seen their fair share of war and, like all experienced airmen, untold numbers of fatal accidents, accepted the apology and got on with the battle.
Hurricanes piloted by Canadians in battle over Britain.
The second combat operation on August 26 was more successful, as McNab led his twelve Hurricanes into the sun and then dived from 16,000 feet on a Luftwaffe bomber stream. The Canadians knifed through the German formation and McNab shot down a Dornier bomber. Fighter tactics usually involved getting the drop on your enemy by flying high, masking your approach through clouds, and having the sun at your back. In most air battles, the experienced leader took charge, with his wingman keeping close, guarding both of their flanks. The leader engaged the “bandit,” firing short bursts slightly ahead of the target (unless he was approaching from directly behind or below). This was known as deflection shooting, aiming fire so that the enemy aircraft flew into the bullet stream. On that day, the Canadians took down three bombers, damaged four more, and lost one RCAF pilot, R.L. Edwards, in return.
From the ground, the white vapour trails scarred the sky in lazy criss-crossing designs, but the middle of a dogfight was fast and deadly. With blood pumping and adrenaline coursing through their veins, the Canadians learned quickly how to survive or face death. Blair Russel of Montreal, nicknamed “Deadeye Dick” in the squadron, described the chaos of an early September battle when he and his comrades in No. 1 Squadron intercepted a German bomber stream:
As we attacked, we were harried by Me 109s from starboard and above, and as I broke away, I came up under three 109s flying line astern. I gave the last 109 a 3-second burst at about 70 yards, noting strikes on his belly, and he soon bailed out. His leader and No. 2 took violent evasive action and I eventually lost them. Shortly after I climbed to attack a gaggle of Me 110s, and fired from above and behind at the last fighter. I gave him a 10-sec burst which set his starboard engine on fire, and he rolled over, one parachute came out and he crashed just south of Biggin Hill. Still above the 110s, I attacked another and saw strikes on his cockpit before my ammo ran out. The 110 went into a lazy spiral and crashed several miles from the first.18
Russel survived his first tour of seventy-eight sorties in Hurricanes and would rise to become a multi-decorated wing commander, serving in seven RCAF squadrons. He ended the war commanding No. 126 Wing, although he grieved the loss of his younger brother, who was killed in a dogfight over France in June 1944.
“The ideal age for a fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain was nineteen years,” wrote Paul Pitcher of No. 1 RCAF Squadron. “After that, you had more sense.”19 Bold leaders were needed to guide these aggressive fighters, and the Canadians were lucky to have McNab. No. 242 Squadron also had a charismatic commander in British ace Douglas Bader, who had lost his legs in a crash before the war. Bader epitomized the relentless spirit of the elite airman by continuing to fly after his terrible injury, although his heroic status, ratified by his twenty-two and a half confirmed victories (with the half being a shared kill), made him a difficult subordinate. But in 1940, Bader and other veterans of the Battle of France passed on the lessons of those aerial battles, and the Canadians learned quickly. Over time, however, the remorseless grind of combat killed or wounded so many Canadians flyers, most of whom were replaced by Brits, that 242 lost its distinctly Canadian character.
The enemy raids continued into September. On the 15th, known subsequently as Battle of Britain Sunday, the Luftwaffe attacked London with 123 bombers and 650 fighters; they lost a crippling 61 aircraft. However, the red-letter day for the RCAF’s No. 1 Squadron was September 27, which saw the Luftwaffe’s last daylight attack. Along with No. 303 Squadron, the Canadians “scrambled” rapidly and were in the vanguard to intercept the raiders. The RAF and RCAF pilots sawed through the bomber stream, sending seven smoking into the dirt and damaging seven more. They won that day; other days they lost. Of the 21 pilots in No. 1 Squadron, 3 were killed and 10 were wounded. One of the wounded, thirty-two-year-old Hartland Molson, a member of the famous Montreal brewing family, remembered being shot down on October 5. He had been, in the flyer’s phrase, “fucked by the five fickle fingers of fate, dashed by the deadly digits of destiny, screwed, blued, and tattooed, all in one go.”20 Canada’s No. 1 Squadron claimed 30 enemy aircraft, 8 more “probable” destructions, and 35 damaged. From August 8 to September 6, the most intense period of battle, the RAF and RCAF suffered 186 men killed and another 163 wounded, but the Luftwaffe lost even more with 1,367 killed and 281 wounded.21 The Luftwaffe was handed a decisive defeat, the first for the Germans in the war.
The battle for supremacy in the air continued into late October, but the Canadians of No. 1 Squadron were rotated out of the line to recuperate in Scotland. Of the 3,000 or so combat flyers who served with the RAF, some 105 Canadians qualified to attach the coveted Battle of Britain clasp to their Air Crew Europe Star.22 “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,” intoned Churchill in one of his most famous speeches. While the radar technicians, the Royal Navy, Bomber Command (which kept up steady raids on German airfields and paid a steep price), and multiple other arms helped to win the Battle of Britain, it remained the “few” who were lionized by the desperate British people in need of heroes.23
The Battle of Britain lumbered to an official conclusion on October 31. By then the Luftwaffe had realized that its daylight raids were too costly and had turned more aggressively to the night bombing of British cities—particularly London. Before this, a frustrated Hitler had postponed the invasion of Britain and turned his eyes to the east and the Soviet Union. An invasion of Russia had always been part of Hitler’s strategy, both to annihilate the threat of Communism and to expand his Germanic empire into the rich, agricultural lands of the east. Nonetheless, to keep Britain occupied and to mask his planned invasion, the Nazi aerial onslaught against Britain’s cities continued well into 1941. It would be known as the Blitz.
THE RAF’S VALIANT STAND during the Battle of Britain had shown the British people, their empire, and the pessimistic Roosevelt administration in Washington that Britain would not easily surrender to German aggression.24 The Americans love an underdog, and the RAF victory shifted opinion in the United States from isolationism towards increased support for Britain with more war supplies.25
Yet even as the victory’s impact was being felt across the Atlantic, the Luftwaffe made the island people pay for their refusal to bend a knee. The superiority of the Luftwaffe was in evidence from September 1940 until May 1941, as night after night the bombers pounded Britain’s urban centres. This looked like the Armageddon many had imagined in the interwar years, in which bombers carrying high explosives and lethal gas bombs had been prophesized to break the will of terrified citydwellers. The vision became a grim reality when the Germans bombed Rotterdam in May 1940, killing a thousand civilians and leading the Dutch to concede defeat. With such grisly foreshadowing, some believed that the British would fold rapidly under the fiery bombardment.26 But the British people proved they were made of sterner stuff. They had been emboldened by the “few” fighter pilots who had faced long odds and won; now it was time for the “many” to make a stand.
The Luftwaffe initially tried to strike at factories or industrial sites, as they recognized these were higher-value targets and their damage or destruction was more likely to hurt the British war effort. But, like the Allied bombers later in the war, the German air force had little success at precisely targeting structures on the ground from darkened skies. The Luftwaffe rapidly changed its tactics from precision to carpet bombing, with the hope of hitting factories and everything else beneath the rain of their bombs. Hitler and his air marshals had few qualms about unleashing terror bombing: they viewed it as method of breaking the will of the British and so ending the war more rapidly. In London, from mid-August, and then growing in intensity after September 7, the bombs hit churches and schools, theatres and zoos, palaces and workers’ flats. Civilians clutched the respirators they had been issued, hoping that they recalled how to identify deadly gases and could put on their masks before they were asphyxiated. The chemical agents were never sprayed—for lack of an effective delivery system and fear of retaliation rather than for humane reasons— but the fear remained. Air raid wardens kept watch and alerted the always anxious citizens to run to their reinforced shelters or the safety of the deep subway lines. Even with these precautions, lives were ended by the hundreds.
The German Blitz of 1940–1941 against the British people killed more than 43,000 in an unceasing aerial assault. The British people were tested but not found wanting.
The Blitz was later overshadowed by the Allied bombing campaign against German cities, but it was, at the time, a total assault intended to kill as many British civilians as possible. The 17 attacks on Coventry, a city of 240,000, were a graphic reminder that Hitler planned to take the war to all cities within reach of his Luftwaffe. A big raid on November 14 saw more than 500 bombers blitz Coventry. The air raid sirens howled in advance, providing about ten minutes warning before the bombs and incendiaries rained down. High explosives burst water lines, the fire hoses ran dry, and then thousands of tiny fires ignited by the incendiaries burned unchecked. The majestic cathedral and old city centre were still ablaze when the survivors stumbled out of the fire-proof shelters to look at the twisted metal and rubble that were once their schools, apartments, and factories. Streets were left with gaping holes, blocks of houses burned uncontrollably, landmarks were gutted. The homeless looked for the lifeless. Mass burial sites were dug for the 550 dead. The 863 injured—many hideously burned and suffering compression fractures—were cared for, although two hospitals had been hit in the raid.
The Luftwaffe was not able to replicate the terror of Coventry on massive London, which spanned dozens of square kilometres and was able to absorb the avalanche of bombs. While London was too big to be entirely destroyed by aerial bombardment, for fifty-seven consecutive nights, Londoners were blasted into unrecognizably shattered corpses, buried under buildings, and burned to charred remains. The great city was last struck on May 10, 1941, by more than 500 German bombers; their payload killed and wounded some 3,200. After this horrendous night, Hitler called off the long assault and diverted most of his air force to the soon-to-be-opened Eastern Front.
The aerial attacks on Britain in 1940 and 1941 killed more than 43,000 people, nearly half of them in London. Another 137,000 were wounded and three quarters of a million left homeless.27 If Hitler had not been diverted by his new war against the Soviets, he would have continued the relentless attacks. Not all civilians who faced the aerial bloodbath had been heroic or steeped themselves in glory, but most stood up to the terror without breaking. They would soon face another test: starvation by the U-boat blockade. But before that, the British Empire would be attacked in the Far East.