BOMBER COMMAND
Fighter Command had saved Britain from Hitler’s invasion, but even before that hard-won victory, Prime Minister Winston Churchill told his cabinet, “The fighters are our salvation, but the bombers alone provide the means of victory.”1 Churchill ached to strike back at Germany after its victory over Western Europe, and he wanted revenge for the Blitz. The British prime minister was a long-time proponent of air warfare, and he wrote to his friend and confidant Lord Beaverbrook in the summer of 1940, “There is one thing that will bring … [Hitler] down, and that is an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland.”2
The Royal Air Force had established Bomber Command as an independent arm on July 14, 1936, when it had created three other separate commands: Fighter, Coastal, and Training. Bomber Command’s motto was “Strike Hard, Strike Sure,” and the new command allowed for a specialization of bombing, with the strategic aim of knocking out the nerve centres of the enemy: command and control functions, logistical pathways, and essential war-related factories. This was an offensive force, and the more enthusiastic proponents of air power believed that massed aerial bombardment would destroy civilian morale and end wars in a matter of weeks.
In September 1939, Bomber Command went to war with 23 front-line bomber squadrons, totalling 280 planes. These were all twin-engine machines—Bristol Blenheims, Armstrong Whitworth Whitleys, Handley Page Hampdens, and Vickers Wellingtons—modern for the time, but dwarfed by the immense four-engine bombers of only a few years later. The two-engine planes were slow, could not fly far into Germany, had a low service ceiling, and were poorly equipped to defend themselves against enemy fighters. They also carried a small bomb load, boasted few navigational electronic aids, and had only primitive bombsights. At first, senior Bomber Command officers believed their planes could fly daylight precision bombing runs, despite prewar tests showing that bomber crews regularly missed their targets (even those without protective anti-aircraft fire, also known as flak). But early operations during the war revealed that aircraft were vulnerable to both ground fire and enemy fighters—unable to fly above the former or defend against the latter. Dozens of bombers were shot down in the first months of the war; additional crews were trained and factories built more planes, and then the new ones were shot down too.
“Bombing up” a Vickers Wellington to carry out a sortie against an enemy target.
The hundreds of Canadians serving in the RAF at the start of the war found themselves the first of their countrymen in battle.3 Flight Lieutenant T.C. Weir piloted a 44 Squadron Hampden on September 3 in an offensive sortie against German naval vessels—the first Canadian to engage in action during the Second World War. Two days later, Sergeant Albert Price from Vancouver was killed in a bombing run over Wilhelmshaven, Germany.4 Another Canadian, Alfred Thompson, was shot down on September 8, two days before Canada officially entered the war. He spent every day of Canada’s war as a prisoner.5
In September 1939, even as the Germans pounded the Polish cities from the air, the British bombing policy was tentative and restrained. Fearing reprisal attacks against British citizens and anxious to hold the moral high ground, Prime Minister Chamberlain limited the bomber attacks to useless propaganda leaflet raids and only marginally less useless strikes on enemy shipping or factories far from civilian centres.6 No matter the target, the bomber crews rarely hit their objectives and almost always took significant casualties.
Everything changed with the German offensive of May 1940. On May 13, the Luftwaffe bombed Rotterdam in the hope of smashing critical war industry, but those bombers, like the British ones, could barely hit a city let alone pinpoint specific buildings. Nonetheless, in the blaze of bombs, about 1,000 citizens were killed and the Dutch people surrendered rapidly. Hitler and his air marshals took note of how bombing could lead to a collapse of civilian morale and avoid the need for a costly land war.
The British also took note. Churchill sought ways to hurt the surging German forces, and with a new offensively minded chief of the air staff, Sir Charles Portal, the two war leaders moved towards a more aggressive stance in the bombing war. The forty-seven-year-old Portal was quiet but shrewd, and he well understood that his bombers were unable to pick off enemy targets from 15,000 feet when opposed by enemy flak and fighters, and were even more inaccurate when flying in darkness. He pushed the government towards using its only offensive weapon to target industry and factories in cities, aware that should his aircrews miss their primary targets they would still inflict damage on the enemy.7 The government remained wary of advocating a policy of bombing civilians, but the decision making was moving from black and white to grey, and soon the bombers were striking cities in the hope of damaging war industry. Few in the British high command, either civilian or military, believed that bombing could win the war on its own, especially after its own people withstood the sustained aerial blasting of their cities, but it was one of the few means of taking the battle to Germany.
While civilian casualties were still to be avoided, the new bombing strategy after the fall of France saw an emphasis on attacking German airfields, rail lines, and oil refineries. Damaging German industry, and thus hurting the war machine, became the bomber’s goal. The Germans, upon studying the bomb dispersal patterns, found the British bombs falling all over the countryside, far from cities—seemingly providing evidence of British bombers who were dead set on killing farmers’ animals and ploughing fields. These aimless strikes perplexed the Germans, sparking new fears that the British were embarking on some indecipherable strategy.8 In reality, the RAF’s bombers were targeting factories in urban areas, but they were so inaccurate that they were, quite literally, missing the cities, with their bombs off the mark by dozens and dozens of kilometres.
As evidence of the RAF bombers’ ineffectiveness accumulated, and as the losses mounted, the command had absolutely no other choice but to switch to night bombing. By the late summer of 1940, almost all of the bomber missions were carried out at night. Darkness provided some cover from enemy defences, but the crews now faced even greater difficulties in reaching the blacked-out cities and then hitting specific targets within them. As one distressed senior RAF commander wrote, “The constant struggle at night is to get light on the target.” He warned about “a never ending struggle to circumvent the law that we cannot see in the dark.”9 Yet even as the bombers struggled in their night battles, Churchill and the senior RAF staff insisted on their missions, viewing these operations as crucial to showing the United States that Britain was willing and able to hit back even as the government, people, and military pulled themselves up from the bloodied mat where they had been driven by relentless blows. The bombers became the vanguard of their attack.
RAF BOMBER COMMAND had little impact on the enemy’s ability to wage war in 1940 or 1941. When the RAF and RCAF bombers, usually numbering between 50 and a 100, found their targets, the bombing did surprisingly little damage. And each night, the bombers ran the gauntlet of fire, with aircrews watching their comrades getting hit by flak and disintegrating into fiery fragments both on their outward flight and on their return. The German night fighters were just as deadly as the British fighters had been, and often the bombers flew in small groups, with stragglers drifting off into the darkness. This lack of cohesion allowed individual bombers to become easier targets for the fighters, and also meant that the planes arrived over the target at different times. Those arriving late found the city’s defences prepared. Senior RAF officers naively believed that the bombers would be able to defend themselves against enemy fighters if they flew in tight formations with their gunners sending out a hail of bullets. But maintaining close formations was difficult, and the small calibre guns on the bombers—.303, the same as a rifle shell—lacked stopping power. Unless they were fired in concentration, with several gunners training on a single enemy craft, the machine guns were no match for the cannon fire from Luftwaffe fighters. Flight Sergeant Arthur Wahlroth of the RCAF’s No. 405 Squadron, who flew in the summer of 1941, wrote that “if the whole sky was not erupting around you,” then the fighters were coming. “Sometimes you could smell it, hear it, feel it” coming from above— and experienced pilots corkscrewed downward, seeking cover in clouds.10 The cost of attacking was cripplingly high. Mike Lewis, from Welcome, Ontario, enlisted in the RAF in 1938 and flew Hampden medium bombers with No. 44 Squadron. He survived sixty-one operations before his bomber was raked with fire, forcing the crew to ditch. Lewis was made a prisoner for the last three years and eight months of the war. When patriated home, he was informed that of the thirty-eight comrades with whom he went through training, only six had survived the war. Lewis, who went on to serve in the postwar RCAF, recounted that unlike later in the war, when there were limited operational tours, the airmen of the early war flew until they were shot down. “These determined men went unrewarded for their magnificent efforts.”11
The gradual switch from the ineffective bombing of specific targets to areabombing entire cities meant an acceptance of civilian deaths. In July 1941, a series of British government and air force documents advocated for the bombers to strike at German workers in the hope of wearing down morale and slowing work in support of the state.12 The British did not set out to kill women and children, but a rationale gradually emerged as it was understood that the bomber was more of a hammer than a scalpel. Was it right to target the enemy soldier or airman, but not the civilian who built his weapons or supported him through war work? The answer seemed clear to those fighting the Nazi regime, and, in any case, the enemy had already crossed that line by deliberately targeting British civilians. Looking back, RCAF Flight Lieutenant Joseph Deutscher declared, “The evil of Nazism had to be crushed and I’m glad I did my share in destroying it.” Deutscher became a priest after the war, but not because of his guilt over his actions in Bomber Command; in fact, this man of God assumed that in a total war the entire civilian sector of the war economy was a legitimate target. “If we killed German factory workers who worked in a shoe factory rather than a munitions plant, then we prevented shoes from reaching the German fighting forces.”13
British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill watches a Stirling four-engine bomber taking off.
Churchill and his fellow civilian and military leaders had their reasons for striking back with the bombers, and they were supported by a large proportion of the British people. While early public opinion polls indicated that the British people were not overwhelmingly anxious to kill German women and children, over time, as the British witnessed European and British cities targeted by German bombers, they demanded retribution.14 The bombing of enemy cities was gradually accepted, first as an appropriate response to the Blitz, and then as an accepted strategy for taking the war to the German economy.
RCAF Navigator Ron Peel, who served with RAF No. 9 Squadron and flew in the twin-engine Wellingtons, wrote that he had no misgivings in taking part in bombing Germany by night. Daylight operations were suicide, particularly by late 1941 when Peel had begun to fly. “On all my earlier operational sorties I was given a very specific military target to attack. This I did even though fully aware that to do so would surely result in civilian casualties.” With limited targeting systems and the need to fly at night, the only solution was to blanket the cities in bombs, “using much the same brutal tactics as the Luftwaffe had initiated in their destruction of much of London, Coventry, Liverpool, Hull and numerous other cities in England and the rest of Europe.” Peel acknowledged, “We killed a lot of civilians.”15
THERE WAS NO SHORTAGE OF CANADIAN VOLUNTEERS for the air force, both to serve in the established RAF and the steadily expanding RCAF. The grim memories of fathers and uncles who had survived the rat-infested trenches of the Great War, and who were traumatized by such experiences, kept many from enlisting in the infantry. John Weir of Toronto remembered being offered a commission in the Governor General’s Horse Guards. He turned it down, saying, “I’m not fighting in some mud ditch.”16 He enlisted in the RCAF and flew Spitfires before being shot down in late 1941 and becoming a prisoner of war. The navy had few Great War heroics to which it could point in order to draw recruits, and for many Canadians the air force was a more attractive option. Arthur Wahlroth was born in Truro, Nova Scotia, and enlisted in the RCAF in 1940 at the ancient age of twenty-five. Most of his fellow flyers were eighteen or nineteen. He did not want to enlist in the army: “When I was a young kid, we had neighbours who had been in World War One, who had legs off and arms off and burnt faces, who had respiratory problems.” He was afraid of sharks and so that ruled out the navy, in his mind. “I had been brought up on Chums books, which were full of stories, fiction mostly, about airplanes and daring stunts that were done in-between the war period and that sided me towards the air force…. When the air force gave me the opportunity to join, I jumped right in as soon as I could.”17 Donald Cheney enlisted on his eighteenth birthday in 1940, for reasons that paralleled those of Wahlroth and numerous others: “I had always wanted to fly. I dreamed about flying since I was a youngster.”18 He was bombing Germany by age twenty. Douglas Humphreys had turned nineteen only a few months before the declaration of war in September 1939. The Scottish-born Humphreys wrote, “I found the prospect of war exciting and given what had been happening in Europe over the past few years, neither I nor my friends were taken by surprise.”19 Humphreys gave up a good job and enlisted in the RCAF because, like so many others, he was “entranced by flying and like my friends I knew all about Sopwith Camels, Spads, Fokkers and other First World War aircraft. Billy Bishop was one of our heroes.”20 Tens of thousands of young Canadians were enamoured with the romance of flight. They had all been enraptured, too, by the Battle of Britain, and how the fighters saved the British people. How could square-bashing and sea-sickness compare to that?
There was no shortage of volunteers for the Royal Canadian Air Force. Inspired by the heroics of the last war and of the Battle of Britain, Canadians enlisted in large numbers in the RCAF. This poster reads: “Well done, Son! Fly and Fight with the R.C.A.F.”
RCAF posters highlighted the glory of flying, and the exclusivity of being one of the “few.” Colourful images labelled flyers as “men with a purpose.” The tagline on some posters was “Join the team,” while others offered the chance to “Fly and fight with the RCAF.” There was even a poster of a proud mother cheering her dapper boy, in his RCAF slate-blue uniform, as he set off to war: “Well done, Son!” In theatres, the film Target for Tonight came out in the summer of 1941, which documented real airmen engaged in the bombing campaign. A camera team followed the crew of a Wellington, and the hero was the unperturbed and pipe-smoking pilot Charles Pickard. Authentic flying scenes “filmed under fire,” as one theatre poster exclaimed, were interspersed with studio-shot drama segments. A critical and commercial success, the film spread the message of plucky Britain and its Bomber Command striking back.21 Like so many young men who served in the bombers, Pickard was killed later in the war, suffering from battle stress but refusing to quit flying. Early the next year, in 1942, Captains of the Clouds, starring James Cagney and featuring a cameo by Air Vice-Marshal Billy Bishop, thrilled viewers and potential recruits.22
The advertising, posters, and movies suggested that flyers were a unique breed of warrior. In a sense they were. The air war required intense training, and the RCAF prided itself on maintaining the highest educational standards of the three services. By mid-1940, the new recruits were funnelled into the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan (BCATP), one of the marvels of the war. The plan saw training stations, schools, and airfields across Canada organized to turn out a steady stream of pilots and aircrews. The senior dominion was close enough to Britain to train airmen from throughout the British Empire and the United States, and its skies were not threatened by the Luftwaffe.
Negotiations to set up the BCATP were conducted between October and December 1939. They were sticky: Britain tried to bully the Canadians and other dominions into accepting the lion’s share of the expenses. Prime Minister King was having none of that, and he pushed back forcefully, refusing to commit to the plan— which the British were desperate to get started. While King liked the idea of becoming a trainer of the Empire’s airmen, he also hoped that it might be Canada’s major contribution to the war, along with the supply of munitions and war materiel, all of which was in line with his policy of limited liability. The British refused to accept that notion, as they desperately needed Canada’s fighting forces in the line, but the two sides edged closer to a deal that had more in common with a canny business transaction than the coming together of allies at war against a superior military foe.23 After Canada’s share of the costs was reduced (although, ironically, later in the war Canada would agree to pay almost all of the plan’s $2.2 billion), King and his cabinet demanded that the Canadian airmen serve on identifiable RCAF squadrons.24 The British balked at this but eventually gave ground. Still, for much of the war, the RAF senior brass ran interference against the agreement, and more Canadians served in the RAF than in Canadian squadrons.
While similar training plans were developed in Australia, New Zealand, and Britain, the Canadian one was the largest. The first BCATP graduates went overseas in November 1940, with legions following them. Ultimately 131,500 airmen graduated from the BCATP. More than half of them were Canadian, including 26,000 pilots, 13,000 navigators, 6,000 bomb aimers, 26,000 wireless operators and air gunners, and 2,000 flight engineers.25 The majority of these airmen would eventually serve in the bombers, and Canadians contributed the second highest numbers to Bomber Command, forming about a quarter of the command in 1944 and a third of the force by the end of the war. Roosevelt was right to characterize Canada as the “aerodrome of democracy.”26
“WE CAME FROM ALL OVER CANADA, from cities, small towns and farms,” recounted W.H. Clever.27 The new recruits, anxious to fly and take the war to Germany, were a little frustrated that they were first sent to one of the Manning Depots to begin basic training. The vast majority of new flyers also wanted to pilot Spitfires like the heroes overseas; instead, almost all went into Bomber Command. The disappointment was soon shed, although there would be other harsh realities to face during the long period of flying instruction. Bill McRae had roughed it before the war, but he was in “shock” when he viewed the temporary quarters at Manning Depot No. 2 in Brandon, Manitoba: “It was a former equestrian exhibition hall about the size of a hockey rink, the floor of which was now covered by at least 500 double-bunk beds…. The ablutions consisted of a long trough of galvanized metal which was the communal wash basin.”28 McRae, a future Spitfire pilot, was unimpressed by the line of toilet cubicles that had no doors. Robert Collins, 125 pounds and with a face of acne that betrayed his youth—he was twenty—was more taken with the experience, and wrote of being surrounded by hundreds of men: fat and thin, brooders to be avoided and friendly men who attracted crowds. They told crass jokes, broke wind playfully, and shouted insults. “Milling around in the buff in a room packed with other naked men, you wondered what to do with your hands.… Whatever was left of my native modesty went down the drain.”29 Collins learned, as did every recruit to the army, navy, or air force, that privacy disappeared after enlistment.
But the young men adapted well and learned to live with one another, despite coming from different regions and social classes, and having varying expectations. Among the “Acey-Deuceys,” or Aircraftmen 2nd Class, much masculine jostling took place, and never-ending pranks. Nat Levitin, a future RCAF squadron leader, was waiting to go overseas at the Y Depot at Halifax when he and his mates were instructed to undergo a final medical exam. In an open room, they were told to drop their drawers for a genital examination. As they waited awkwardly for a doctor, an unknown assistant came by and swabbed each of the man’s genitals with dark, brown iodine. They were then instructed to remain where they were. When the doctor arrived later, he looked rather surprised, “‘What the hell’s going on here?’ he exclaimed, ‘what are you guys doin’?’ ‘Well, Sir,’ one of the men explained, ‘your assistant has prepared us for your inspection.’ After a pause, the doctor smiled, ‘There’s only one problem here—I don’t have an assistant.’”30
As part of the laddish culture, nearly everyone had a nickname. Longer Christian names were abbreviated: Hal, Pete, Al. For some, surnames replaced Christian names: Woodman became Woody, Smitherson was soon Smithy, and Miller was automatically Dusty. Any Scottish name reverted to “Mac” or “Scotty.” Physical features might be reflected in a name, such as Shorty or Lefty, and the linguistic innovations went on and on. New recruits were being remade into warriors, but first they had to be renamed by one another.
The Acey-Deuceys moved through a series of schools across the country, with most located in towns like Virden, Manitoba; Goderich, Ontario; and dozens of other spots that provided basic training and then more advanced skills. Alan Avant, who came from Hughton, Saskatchewan, where his family farmed, would be bombing Berlin at age twenty, but before that, he remembered, “We managed to make the transition from farm lads to fledgling pilots in a few short weeks….We were anxious to learn.”31 Indeed they were, but they were also weeded out ruthlessly. “I feel tough about washing out but I have lots of company,” wrote a disappointed Miller Brittain after failing as a pilot.32 He later served overseas as a bomb aimer, and then as an official war artist.
Usual sequence of pilot training in the BCATP.
The 94 training schools at 231 sites across Canada required new airfields and thousands of military instructors and ground crews.33 There were specialist schools for pilots, air observers, bombers, gunners, wireless operators, and navigators, although all instruction was in English, forcing French Canadians to adapt. Some of the trainers were prewar civilian pilots, while others had fully embraced the flying profession’s daring myths. Thomas Reid observed that some of his instructors at Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, “are awful daredevils … flying under telegraph wires, landing on top of trains, chasing cars down the highway, scaring horses to death in the fields … one did the impossible [and] flew under a bridge … no stunts for me, you can bet. I have too much to live for.”34 He survived his training and received the Distinguished Flying Cross for operations over Germany, but was shot down and went missing on August 10, 1943.
Across the Prairies, yellow-painted Harvards, Tiger Moths, Fleet Finches, and Avro Ansons flew over towns, and occasionally came down near them. These undersized planes—about the size and appearance of the fighters from the previous war—were a far cry from the two- and four-engine bombers overseas, but they were a sufficient introduction to the basics of flight. Nonetheless, the Canadian weather played havoc with inexperienced pilots, and many crashed when a storm blew in suddenly or when they tried to land on shimmering snow-covered terrain, where distance was hard to judge. In winter, machines froze up. In spring, everything around the base was reduced to a bog, and Kiwis, Brits, Aussies, and all the other airmen soon learned the horror of black fly season. Airmen and trainers died in accidents of all kinds. “One of our chaps had walked into a propeller and was decapitated right before our eyes,” wrote one dismayed flyer.35 Approximately 3,000 training deaths occurred in the BCATP schools.36 They were quickly forgotten in the hurly burly of training, although mourned by their families.
Towns throughout the Dominion were soon overrun by airmen stationed at the newly built bases. Great gobs of money were to be made by supplying the bases. At the same time, the competition between the locals and the dashing young airmen could reach dangerous heights. Alcohol-fuelled, testosterone-driven bar fights were not uncommon. Howard Hewer, a nineteen-year-old BCATP recruit from Toronto, remembered how he and his mates overran Calgary. They found the locals friendly but the regional militia unit was not keen to see airmen encroaching on their territory, especially at the Saturday night dances. Hewer remembered, “By now we were wearing a white flash in our wedge caps, a piece of flannel inserted into the front fold of the cap to show that we were under training for aircrew.”37 The fledging airmen proudly wore their uniforms and wedge caps to dances, and then wondered why the women recoiled from them in horror. Only later did they discover that the local militia soldiers had spread a story that the white flash was a signal that the wearer had contracted a venereal disease.
The Canadian-run British Commonwealth Air Training Plan was a major contribution to winning the Second World War. But numerous accidents occurred and some 3,000 aircrew died during the course of the war.
At the end of their training, the BCATP airmen received their “wings.” They were pinned on by senior RCAF officials and, sometimes, by Great War aces, among them Billy Bishop, now an air vice-marshal. The wings were worn with pride and Martin Cybulski-Ross spoke for many when he enthused, “We god damned well earned them!”38
THE BCATP FLYERS CROSSED THE U-BOAT-INFESTED ATLANTIC to Britain and were sent to Bournemouth on the south coast. Before the war, Bournemouth was a resort town that catered to the middle-aged and elderly who sought to escape to picturesque beaches and lush parks. Now, the beaches were mined and barbed-wired kill zones cordoned off in anticipation of an amphibious invasion. Bournemouth was also occasionally raided by German fighters that slipped across the Channel, flying low and fast, to shoot up the town before returning home. Known as “tip and run” raids, these encounters reminded airmen that there was a war on.
The once elegant hotels were increasingly run down, but were still occupied cheerfully by Canadians attached to the RCAF Personnel Receiving Centre, which would send flyers off to Advanced Flying Units for further training. The airmen received new battle dress, clothing, food coupons, and pay. Canadians overran the town, moving freely and in groups, visiting the pubs, cinemas, and dance halls. The training was not arduous, and Harlo Jones, a future RCAF bomber pilot, noted, “Most of our days in Bournemouth were spent killing time.” However, Jones wrote of one memorable occasion: “Once we were paraded to a movie theatre where we were shown some real horror movies, about VD. That did leave an impression!” But some of the effect was lost when the last VD film included a beautiful young starlet who was supposedly the carrier of VD. The young men in the audience began to whistle and cheer, with shouts and catcalls, including “I’d take a chance on her any day.”39 The air force, like the other services, attempted to limit the ravages of VD, but its approach was clumsy. Young men who sought to live in the moment and contemplated the prospect of sudden death daily would have been a tough audience in any event.
After Bournemouth, finally the airmen would be introduced to two- and four-engine bombers. At the Advanced Flying Unit (AFU), the airmen met instructors who were tour-expired veterans of active combat operations. Most carried themselves with a quiet air of authority and many wore gallantry awards. Some of the new recruits were brassy and anxious to fly, but the smart ones also realized that the instructors had much to share with them, having beaten the long odds in the air war.
But there were also long-service RAF NCOs and officers who delighted in belittling the Canadians, and many of the Dominion’s airmen felt that they were singled out for prejudice. The new flyers, who were soon to pole-vault in rank over the hardscrabble NCOs, did not readily accept the harsh words and general degradation. Flight Sergeant Joseph Harrison wrote of the friction in No. 1 AFU, where the RAF “personnel who greeted us obviously resented our presence if not our very existence. They appeared to consist entirely of bitter disgruntled permanent force NCOs who weren’t about to take any insubordination from these young ‘instant NCO’ colonials.”40 Pilot Officer George Brown, who had enlisted in November 1941 from Brandon, Manitoba, wrote of his advanced flying training at No. 3 AFU at Bobbington, Worcestershire, “The Commanding officer was very anti-colonial and did not hesitate to vent his feelings on us Canadians. No wonder so many of the Canadians took a violent dislike to the English military.”41
So many complaints were made that the RCAF conducted a study in 1942 to determine the effects of this conflict on morale. The report concluded that while tension existed at the training bases, few accounts of disunity were found in the operational units, where airmen of all nationalities flew together and relied on each other for survival. Moreover, the report concluded that the Canadians were not blameless and liked to play up their supposed unique national characteristics: “There seems to be a certain degree of truth in allegations made both by RAF and RCAF officers that Canadian airmen are harder to discipline than other airmen of the RAF. This surprised us.” The report’s authors felt that there were some Canadians who saw themselves as “tough guys” and got into trouble: “Canadians have no veneration for spit-and-polish” discipline, such as saluting crisply and keeping uniforms along uniform regulations.42 At the same time, many imperials betrayed their own prejudices, believing, “The New World—the Americans and Canadians alike—is impetuous, enthusiastic, sometimes childish, often self-assured and usually not a little boastful. It likes to seem ‘tough,’ and it likes to show off.”43
Instructors tried to put crews into the air for eighty hours of flying, with much of this being, in airmen’s parlance, “circuits and bumps” (takeoff and landing) and “stooging” around England. The “heavies”—Lancasters, Halifaxes, and Stirlings— were needed for front-line action, so the training schools used the outdated and battle-scarred two-engine bombers from the early years of the war. Mechanical failures were frequent and hundreds of crews were killed as the old beasts crapped out in mid-air and plummeted to earth. But more deaths occurred through pilot error. Sergeant pilot Arthur Wahlroth recounted his experience of training on Whitley bombers in early 1941:
These things were big, bigger than any aircraft ever seen before. They were definitely prewar. They were heavy to fly, although they did fly very nicely. It took two of us to fly the things. They gave us circuits and bumps at first, of course. And then they took us to places where we had to drop bombs and eventually we got into the turret and shoot out drogues [aerial targets] for the other craft there. So we had a rounded out education. The Whitley had one idiosyncrasy that we didn’t like very well. Because the tail was so far up behind you, you trimmed the machine tail heavy so you didn’t have to carry the weight on the control column. And if you were in a hurry when you took off and you just ducked down to trim and you didn’t take it a turn and a quarter all the way to neutral, but only took it a quarter of a turn, when you took off, you sped down the runway. When you gained flying speed, the aircraft would rear up in the air and fall up on one wing and drop to a conclusion. I lost several friends this way.44
RCAF navigator Robert Kensett wrote that the Whitley was known as the “flying coffin” at his training unit. There were “twenty-nine crews, each with seven men, in our course,” he reported, “and by the time the course ended nine aircraft had crashed, killing sixty-three airmen.”45
AS HEAVIER BOMBERS WERE MANUFACTURED and rushed into service, the number of crew members per plane changed, as did their responsibilities. At the start of the war, most of the bombers carried two pilots. The other crew members were tasked with a number of roles: the navigator was also the bomb aimer, and the wireless operator was also the mid-upper gunner (who studied the skies for enemy aircraft and fired from the top of the bomber). In 1941, the second pilot was removed and a flight engineer was added to the crew. Most of these engineers had been ground crew members who understood the technical challenges of the machine. They were responsible for the plane in flight and for assisting the pilot. As one Canadian remarked, “it was almost a given that on every operation something would malfunction.”46 The wireless operator monitored the Allied and enemy air waves. And then a second air gunner was added, and because the navigator’s job was found to be full-time, a bomb aimer now became a part of the crew. With the tail-gunner isolated in the rear, that made a crew of seven in the big, four-engine planes.
The new flyers were formed into flying crews at the RAF Operational Training Units. The approach of action brought with it an initiation into the culture and mores of their unique trade. The airmen’s uniforms, insignia, and rank structure all served to distinguish them from the other services. “Almost every air force officer removed the stiffener from his hat, whereupon the hat soon lost its shape and looked like it might belong to a veteran of the Battle of London,” wrote Flying Officer Charlie Hancock. “The floppy hat remained the mark of experience.”47 The slate-blue uniform was much prized, the flying badge worn above the right upper jacket pocket and the wings above the left. The fighter pilots embraced a culture of bravado and dash, and one of these signs was the seemingly nonchalant leaving of the top button of their tunics undone in “fighter boy style”; in contrast, the bomber boys left the bottom one undone. But both pilots and bombers took great pride in their uniforms and, as one British flyer remarked, “Air Force Blue, at that time the most famous colour in the world.”48
The airmen developed their own idiosyncratic language for their specialized work. RCAF Flight Lieutenant Ron Peel wrote of his slow adoption of flyers’ slang: “I learned that aircraft were ‘kites’ and that if somebody got killed they ‘Got the chop,’ ‘Came a cropper,’ or ‘went for a Burton,’ a popular dark ale. A hazardous event was a ‘Shaky do’ and a crash was a ‘prang.’ Violent evasive action was ‘jinking.’ … Sound information was ‘Gen’ and its opposite ‘Duff Gen.’”49 Anything that was good was “wizard.” A “wizard prang” was slightly different—an exciting or risky operation, either in the air or in the bars pursuing drink or women. Planes were also known as “crates” or “birds,” but each type had an affectionate name: Halifaxes were “Hally Bag,” Typhoons were “Tiffies,” the Wellington was a “Wimpey.”
Once they looked and sounded the part, the airmen finally were forged into a flying team. “Crewing up” was brilliant in its simplicity and worked against everything in the hierarchical military forces, where a superior was always giving orders or barking at a junior. Herded into a hangar, loosened up with a bit of beer, the men were left to decide their own crews, and their own fate. The navigators, wireless operators, gunners, bomb aimers, flight engineers, and pilots all milled around. “Nobody told us anything about how to form a crew,” remembered Stan Coldridge, who would pilot Halifaxes. “You just sorted it out yourself.”50 Canadian pilot Harlo Jones wrote of the bewildering affair. “I was at somewhat of a loss how to proceed but upon looking around the room I spotted a man wearing a navigator’s wing sitting quietly amid the turmoil…. I approached him and asked if he would like to crew up with me.” The man agreed and they exchanged names. “We chatted for a moment before being approached by a bomb-aimer, a rather nice looking man who appeared to be twenty-one or twenty-two years old, and we accepted his offer to join us. Within a few minutes we had acquired a wireless operator, Don Howard, from Renfrew, Ontario, and as we stood chatting two rather diminutive but sturdy men approached us…. They were to become our two air gunners, Harold Sharpe from Calgary, and Ralph Syer of Hamilton…. Meanwhile, the other fifty or so types in the room had similarly sorted themselves out. It was a strange experience but it seemed to work out well for most of us.”51
New families were born and old ones were lost. Walter Irwin came through the BCATP system as a pilot who would later be commissioned as a navigator, and he made good friends throughout the various training schools. But after crewing up, he lost touch with the other flyers, who were sent off to their new squadrons. He regretted that he never “found out who survived the war and who did not.”52 Flight Sergeant George King wrote in a letter to his loved ones in Canada that his fellow bomber crew members “are sure a fine bunch of fellows.” The five Canadians and two British airmen were, King felt, “just like brothers.”53 Crews formed a close-knit family, and were further welded together over time by their sharing of danger and reliance upon one another for survival. Like all families, they were not without strife or conflict, but generally their bond allowed for an airman to cope with the relentless stress of combat. Parents, family, girls, community, and national identity were all important—critically so at times—but it was the relationship among the crew that mattered most.
After crewing up, the finishing school was the Heavy Conversion Unit. It was here where the crews were allowed to fly the precious four-engine bombers, Lancasters and Halifaxes. As one awed new Canadian remarked of the Lancaster, “this was an aircraft worthy of one’s respect.”54 Pilot Officer Andy Carswell joined the RCAF at eighteen and was overseas the next year. His final training session, which lasted for a month or so, was on the big bombers at a conversion unit. In his words, the other members of the aircrew “sat in the airplane, scared to death while I learned to fly the Lancaster.”55 They survived, although Carswell and his crew were shot down on their fourth operation. There was no easy way to learn how to fly the bombers. Even after months of theoretical lessons and dozens of hours in the air, the training crews suffered a litany of disasters, crashes, and deaths. By the end of the war, Bomber Command lost 47,268 who were flying on operations, while another 8,305 were killed in training or by accident.56
Most Canadians who trained in the BCATP and later in England put in at least a year, and some as many as two, before reaching a front-line operation squadron. Sergeant Erle “Dusty” Miller, who had enlisted from the Ottawa Valley in May 1940, wrote after nearly twelve months of instruction with no end in sight, “this place is more like college life than war life.”57 It was estimated that each airman cost about 10,000 British pounds to train, or about two million Canadian dollars today—which made it all the more depressing that many aircrews were killed during their first operation.58 While one could scarcely imagine better prepared warriors, there was a quantum difference between training and combat. Nothing could prepare the Canadian airmen for the deadly skies over Europe.